Nude woman with turkish bonnet 1955

Here, we see Picasso's 'Nude woman with Turkish bonnet', painted in oil on canvas. The color palette is so distinctive, isn’t it? That blue! It’s a wild choice. It feels like he was painting a mood as much as a figure. Look at how the brushstrokes are so visible, creating texture. It's not about smoothness, it’s about the gesture, the action of painting. The face is fascinating – it’s like two faces in one. The surface is built up, you can see where he’s gone back and reworked areas. The way he’s treated the background is almost sculptural. There's a kind of energy, where the figure seems to emerge from the background. It feels less like a portrait and more like an experiment. It puts me in mind of Matisse, who Picasso was very familiar with – that same interest in the interplay between color and form.