Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler

A real man — Picasso’s own dealer — dissolved into a shimmer of brown-and-gray facets you have to decode.

1. 1
   The wave of hair

   Start at the top: that patch of fine diagonal hatching is Kahnweiler’s neatly combed, wavy hair — one of the few passages Picasso leaves almost describable, a foothold before the rest dissolves.
2. 2
   His eyes, looking out

   Below the hair, two dark almond eyes and the ridge of a nose surface out of the facets. Find the face looking back and the whole gray scaffold suddenly reads as a seated man.
3. 3
   The clasped hands

   At the very bottom, a cluster of pale interlocking blocks resolves into his hands, folded in his lap. Picasso pins the figure down with hair and hands — top and bottom — and lets everything between them break apart.
4. 4
   A still-life corner

   Down in the lower left (to the sitter’s right) sit the faceted shards of a small still life — a bottle, and probably a glass beside it. The everyday tabletop motif Picasso and Braque were faceting over and over in these years, tucked into the corner of a portrait.