Head of a Woman
Pablo Picasso
PABLO PICASSO, 1907. OIL ON CANVAS.
‘The masks weren’t like other kinds of sculptures’, said Picasso when talking about the African art that influenced and inspired him, ‘they were magical things’. It was this implacable power that most informed him, above any sense of visual order or identity, it was the way in which the masks pointed to a higher level of existence and seemed to understand the totality of humanity in all of its contradictions. So much of the earth-shaking revolution that Picasso would bring to the art world started out of this aspirational influence. As he further developed Cubism alongside Braque, for this is a particularly early work of the movement, the multiplicity of perspectives would get larger, more overt and more severe, but they all strove for the same goal that the African masks did almost effortlessly – capture the truth that life can never be truly seen from one perspective.