Bust of a Man

Pablo Picasso

1908 · Oil on canvas · Modern and Contemporary Art

In his early experiments with Cubism, Picasso incorporated non-Western pictorial elements into his work. He looked in particular at Iberian and African sculpture, which he saw on frequent visits to Paris’s ethnographic museum, the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro. Here, the artist used a deep orange, rust, and brown color palette characteristic of African wood masks. The simplified yet haunting forms of the figure’s face, with its long nose and large lozenge-shaped eyes and mouth, recall the masks of the Dan people in northeastern Liberia and Côte d’Ivoire.

Artist

Pablo Picasso

Date

1908

Medium

Oil on canvas

Department

Modern and Contemporary Art

Credit line

Bequest of Florene M. Schoenborn, 1995