WOMAN DRESSING HER HAIR
PABLO PICASSO, 1940
Look at her. She doesn't fit. Room's too small. Arms too long. Ribs poking through where ribs don't go. Her face pointing two directions at once. Now, a woman doing her hair is the oldest, gentlest scene in art. Painters did it for three hundred years. Peaceful. A little sexy. A whole cozy genre. Picasso even painted one like that himself, years back. A woman braiding her hair in the warm light, calm, still as a statue. It's hanging somewhere in this same building. Same scene. Look what happened to it. It's June 1940. He's hiding out in a little seaside town called Royan, German troops pouring across France, painting in a borrowed back room. The week he finishes this, Paris falls. And the gentlest subject he knows comes out cornered. Twisted. Trapped in a room too small for her. He kept it. Seventeen years. Wouldn't sell it, wouldn't let it go. Most paintings go out the door, bills to pay, dealers calling. Not this one. You don't sit on a painting for seventeen years unless it's evidence of something. He never said what. The grotesque thing here isn't her body. It's the idea that you could sit in a back room in June 1940 and paint a nice calm lady fixing her hair, like nothing's happening outside. He couldn't do it. This is what came out instead.