Three Women

The year after the Demoiselles, Picasso fused three nudes into a single carved, rust-red mass — and quietly worked out what the explosion had been for.

1. 1
   A monumental head

   The central figure’s head, tipped back with raised arms: heavy almond eyes, a blunt nose, the whole face simplified into a few carved planes. There is no expression to read — Picasso wants a mask, not a person, a head you could imagine cut from wood.
2. 2
   A mask for a face

   The right-hand figure’s face is the clearest mask of the three — gouged, frontal, deliberately “other,” lifted from the carved African sculpture Picasso had been staring at. A beautiful nude is given the face of a carved mask.
3. 3
   Carved from one block

   Where the three bodies meet, you can barely tell whose limb is whose: thighs, shoulders and arms lock into a single faceted mass of rust and ochre. The picture reads less like three figures than one solid thing chiselled into shape.
4. 4
   A breath of green

   At the edges, slivers of cool green press in against all that fired-clay red — nearly the only color in the picture that isn’t earth. It is the one note of air around a group otherwise packed as tight as masonry.