Pablo PICASSO (1881-1973)

Deux figures nues (Two Nude Figures)

1909
Drypoint on paper
13.0 X 11.0 cm

In 1909, Picasso began to see the creative potential of the human form. A group of works concentrated in this year document his struggle to find original ways of depicting the body. We can only imagine what exactly provided Picasso, the greatest artist of the early twentieth century, with his inspiration. Perhaps his search was fueled by his encounter with the image of bathers in the 1907 retrospective of Cezanne. Perhaps it was the shock of encountering the art of other cultures, such as the masks of western and central Africa, which drove him to experiment with form.

The results of his experiments, which include this print, show that he had succeeded in reducing the body to purely geometric shapes. The head, arms, legs, and other body parts are represented by independent shapes that do not necessarily correspond to the dimensions of the parts they represent. Picasso has added shading to them, and sometimes, the shading spills out of the outlines. He has also purposefully mixed up the sequence of the shapes, putting things that should be in back in front, and vice versa. Amazingly however, this mode of representation does not diminish the presence of this collection of shapes. Picasso has instead constructed a sense of bodily presence through his skillful interplay of lines of different thicknesses.

Picasso's painting from 1907, Les demoiselles d'Avignon, now housed in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, shocked the world and marked the inception of the movement known as cubism. On one hand, "cubism" is a label that describes an artistic development. On the other hand, it also refers to a more profound search for a new kind of image that could stand independently as a work of art. Cubism challenges us viewers to consider the possibilities inherent in the two-dimensional media of drawing and painting. Of course, there is no clear way of knowing what all these possibilities might be, but throughout his long career, Picasso would never abandon his search for new artistic possibilities.

-- Ikuta Yuki