Seated Woman

In Picasso’s paintings of summer 1910, the figure dissolves into an arrangement of free-floating lines and planes (figs. 42, 43). As Kahnweiler wrote, this was...

In spring 1912 a journalist visited Picasso’s dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler. Kahnweiler’s first impulse was to send him away. He did not want his artists held up to mockery in the popular press. The journalist, Jacques de Gachons, persisted. He was writing an article about “The Art of the Future.” It would begin with Cézanne, Gauguin, and Van Gogh and follow the...

Some time in late summer 1912 Picasso took a photograph (fig. 94) at the front door of the villa he had rented for the season at Sorgues. We know that Braque had brought down the “machine à photographie” specially from Paris a week or so before. The picture records the main paintings Picasso had done over the previous two months. On the doorstep, from left to right, are perched the imposing Portrait of a Man, which in time got called the Aficionado (fig. 95), the equally grand …