Word: picassos
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...these portraits, the thin, careful application of color lyrically suggests the vulnerability and distance of his subject. Here, unlike in his early self-portraits where style and expression seemed at odds, Picasso seamlessly reconciles his painterly means with the work's emotional content and atmosphere...
...second link among the paintings before 1901 is the developing tension between the projected space of the image and the actual surface of the canvas or picture plane. Like the Impressionists before him, Picasso applies paint thickly on the canvas, drawing attention to the fact that a painting is more a thing, a surface, than a mysterious window onto another world...
Ironically, Picasso doesn't really nail painting until he starts using a lot less paint. As we move into his more well-known work of the Blue and Rose Periods, we find that the surfaces become far more controlled, flatter and less overtly "painterly." Only when Picasso retreats from the heavily textured impasto of his earlier canvases do we feel his work becoming more assured and less self-conscious. Somewhere along the way he realizes that he doesn't need to prove he's a painter by giving the viewer countless energetic strokes and layers of thick paint...
...portraits of his mistress Madeleine serve as elegant examples of this newfound painterly restraint. In "Woman in a Chemise (Madeleine)," Picasso sets his subject's creamy profile against a blue-green background. Yet the layering of the image is so delicate and transparent that body slips into background and chemise slips into body. In "Seated Nude (Madeleine)," Picasso goes even further, playing with both line and plane to describe form. He uses thin black lines to distinguish her rust legs from a background of the same color, while only a mottled cream plane indicates the surface of her chest...
From this period forward, it becomes clear that even if Picasso had died at 25, he would have made a few paintings worth remembering. This point is bolstered by the energy and innovation found in the exhibition's last room, which takes the viewer through 1906, Picasso's twenty-fifth year. Here one recognizes the familiar distillation of planes, clarity of line, and sculptural forms which will become important in his later paintings. At the far end of the gallery, we see Picasso's spectacular, iconic "Portrait of Gertrude Stein" and his well-known self-Portrait with Palette...