71: The Picasso Room

Dance of the Veils

1907

Picasso, Pablo

Picasso was so taken with the idea of the nude figure draped with revealing fabrics that he produced a whole series of works on the subject, the most important of which is this early Cubist work, painted in the spring of 1907.

The idea of the world's mystery - that the world can never be known or understood to the full - was characteristic of Spanish visual traditions and central to Picasso's view of the world. Deforming the structure of the human body, Picasso recreated it from separate movable surfaces covered with energetic hatching. Mixing them, twisting them, he made visible the tense, exciting spinning of the dancer. Like a medium, she seems to be listening to some mysterious music, her closed eyes evidence of her total immersion in its rhythms. Drapery and background too seem to be caught up in the revolving movement. Surfaces intersect one another, break up and shatter, while the black lines which cover them unite space and figure into a single whole.