From the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City:
In his early experiments with Cubism, Picasso incorporated non-Western pictorial elements into his work, looking in particular at Iberian and African sculpture, which he saw on his frequent visits to Paris’s ethnographic museum, the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro. In Bust of a Man, Picasso uses a deep orange, rust, and brown color palette common to African wood masks. The simplified yet haunting forms of the figure’s face, with its long nose and large lozenge-shaped eyes and mouth, recall those of the Dan mask photographed by Charles Sheeler.