Le faune à moustache 1946

Pablo Picasso made "Le faune à moustache", most likely with paint and maybe some charcoal or ink for those linear details. I love how Picasso’s paintings feel like he’s wrestling with an idea, reshaping it until it’s just right, or perfectly imperfect. In this painting, the colors are subdued, but those black lines do a lot of heavy lifting. Can you see how they confidently define the planes of the face? I wonder if he chose the muted palette to keep the focus on the form, or if it was just what he had lying around that day? It’s amazing how much expression he gets out of just a few strokes of paint. I'm kind of jealous! Picasso’s always in conversation with other artists, and you can see how he's challenging ideas about representation. It’s like he's saying, “Here’s a face, but it’s also a bunch of shapes and lines, and it’s all happening at once.” Painting is an ongoing dialogue and exchange, with each artist building on what came before, and messing with it too.