art-Picasso.com
Pablo Picasso 1881-1973
©Pablo Picasso - 1910 Portrait of a Woman
 Portrait of a Woman |
From Museum of Fine Arts, Boston:
Cubism, the watershed style invented by Picasso and Georges Braque, created a new and ambiguous relationship between three-dimensional form and the flat surface of the canvas. In austere, monochrome paintings, Picasso dissolved the language of pictorial representation into its basic elements of line, light, and shade, creating a subtly shifting grid that animates the entire canvas. The figure merges with the ground, but never entirely vanishes. Such clues as the hair at top left and the long face identify this portrait, while the right angles rising up in the background may represent paintings stacked against the studio wall.