THREE WOMEN AT THE SPRING
PABLO PICASSO, 1921
Right near this, there's a loud, busy Picasso. All bright color and costumes. Same guy painted both, same summer even. Now look at this one. Three women, sitting by a spring. Huge. Heavy. Built like Roman statues somebody rolled in off a temple. Stone-gray, slow, calm. Their hands and feet are enormous, like each one weighs a ton. Where the other one was flat and chopped-up and shouting, these three are solid and silent and old as marble. Same guy. Same summer. Picasso's just spent fifteen years blowing painting to pieces, and here he turns around and makes something that looks like it predates the Renaissance. On purpose. While he's still cranking out Cubism a few feet away. Everybody wanted him to pick a lane. Are you the wild one or the classical one? Pick. And his answer was basically, both. Today this, tomorrow that, sometimes both before lunch. He refused to be one kind of painter, and he was good enough to make every lane look like home. So if these heavy, quiet women feel like a contradiction after all that color, good. That's the whole thing about him. There was never one Picasso. There was a guy who could be three different painters in one summer and never once felt like he owed anybody an explanation.