Paris, 1906
Pablo Picasso is working on something in his studio on the Rue Ravignan that no one who has seen it knows how to respond to. I was brought by a collector I know from the salon circuit, and I stood in front of the large canvas for an uncomfortable amount of time without saying anything useful. The collector was similarly at a loss. Picasso watched us with the cheerful territorial confidence of someone who has already decided he is right and is merely waiting for the world to catch up.
I have witnessed every major artistic rupture since Giotto. I know what they look like from the inside: a small group of people seeing something that the culture does not yet have the language for, producing work that looks wrong because the available criteria for rightness were built for a different set of problems. The wrongness is the evidence. The violence done to the established visual language is not a failure. It is the point.
What Picasso is doing to the human face is violent in exactly this way. He is not depicting faces. He is interrogating them: what are you, really, stripped of the conventions that make you legible? What does a face contain when released from the obligation to present itself in the single perspective that one eye from one angle at one moment could perceive?
It is terrifying. It is also correct. I have known that a face contains more rooms than any single portrait can show since the night in 1535 when Titian looked at my eyes for a long time and described them in a letter as containing too many rooms. He was right. Picasso is right. The rooms are real.