Painting Detail
Dance of the VeilsArtist: Pablo Picasso
Medium: Painting, Oil on canvas, 150x100 cm
Date: 1907
Genre: Abstract Art
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.
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.