Bather 1908

This is Picasso’s ‘Bather’, a large oil painting done at no specific date. There’s something almost sculptural about it, the way he's built up the form with these chunky, geometric shapes. It’s all about angles and facets, like he's carving her out of the canvas. And look at the colours! It's a muted palette, mostly browns and creams, but then you get these pops of blue in the background that just zing. I am really drawn to the rendering of the head, which is like an angular mask, with this sweeping arm that leads the eye. There’s a tension between abstraction and representation. I think Picasso plays with that a lot, in ways that later artists such as Georg Baselitz picked up on. But what does it all mean? Well, that’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it? And maybe, just maybe, it’s a question that doesn’t need an answer.