Borrowed from the carvers
Those mask-faces did not come from Picasso’s imagination. They came from African sculpture — Fang and Kota and other carvings he had seen, crammed without labels, in the ethnographic museum at the Trocadéro, and a few of which he owned. What he took was a way of building a face: not a soft, naturalistic likeness but a hard arrangement of frontal planes, the face treated as a constructed sign rather than a portrait — exactly the gouged, frontal mask you found a moment ago on the right-hand woman and on the central tipped-back head. African carvers had solved “a face made of geometry” centuries before any Paris painter went looking for it.
Taking without crediting
It is worth saying plainly, because the older textbooks usually don’t. The carvers were unnamed to Picasso, their work torn from its meaning and its place by the colonial trade — the looting and forced commerce of Europe’s African empires — that filled those museum cases, and he took the form without the context, the credit or the belief that gave it power. The borrowing produced extraordinary art; it also has a cost that art history is still working through, and the honest thing is to hold both facts at once. Three Women is a masterpiece, and it is built on a debt to people whose names no one wrote down.