Guitar player 1910

This is Picasso’s Guitar Player, an oil on canvas work. Look at this image with open eyes, and notice how Picasso is breaking down the picture. The whole surface is a tight grid of marks, made with thin paint that is not quite transparent. I love the earthiness and the tonal relationships here, where everything is about the same value. Picasso is using a limited range of browns and ochres, a palette that feels almost like sepia photographs, or memory. There are no lines describing the figure, but rather facets of light and shadow. He builds up the image like a bricklayer. Notice, for example, how the sharp triangular facets near the top of the image appear to emerge out of the background. We know that Picasso went on to pursue this language of abstraction with color, which makes this an interesting, but subtle moment of transition, like looking at a painting by Braque. Ultimately, painting is a conversation across time, and in Picasso’s work, ambiguity is the point.