although still associated with the Blue and Rose Period, Picasso breaks decisively with the pure emotional melancholy of
his earlier work. The forms grow more geometric, the lines more austere, and the woman’s face takes on the rigid, mask-
like stillness of an Egyptian relief – a clear harbinger of his later engagement with primitive art and the path that would lead
toward Cubism. Ghenie subjects that composed severity to radical pressure: the raised arm survives the translation, but
little else does – the figure’s head becomes a baroque enclosure of scrambled features, its seated body drifting into the
churning grey atmosphere around it, the fan dissolved into the tangle of limbs and chair. Ghenie cited Picasso among his
forbears in “the breaking down and reconstruction of the human form,” and here that inheritance is both acknowledged
and overturned – Picasso’s stillness dismantled into something provisional, brittle, and unresolved.