Thirty afternoons in a studio
Picture the room. Autumn 1910, Picasso’s cluttered Paris studio, paint and canvases stacked against every wall. Kahnweiler comes by after the gallery closes and settles into a chair — tie knotted, watch chain across the waistcoat, hands folded in his lap — and holds still while his painter stares at him and works. Then he comes back and does it again. By his own later count he sat something like thirty times for this one picture. That is a lot of afternoons to give a man who is steadily making you disappear.
Because that is the joke at the center of the whole thing: the longer Kahnweiler sat, the less the canvas looked like him. Most portrait painters work toward likeness — each sitting sharpens the nose, fixes the mouth, narrows the gap between paint and person. Picasso ran the engine in reverse. Each sitting he took the face further apart, prying the man into the flat planes of Analytic Cubism, trading the resemblance for structure. More looking, less likeness.
Likeness by other means
And yet — this is the strange part — people who actually knew Kahnweiler swore the thing caught him. A Cubist portrait doesn’t record a face the way a camera does. It builds a stand-in for a person out of his attributes and rhythms: the set of the shoulders, the clasped hands, the swag of the watch chain, the bottle on the shelf, the wave of carefully combed hair. Assemble enough of a man’s particulars and the man is somehow there, even with the face dismantled. Kahnweiler himself kept faith with the painting for the rest of his life — which mattered, because a war and a government auction would shortly try very hard to part him from it.