Picasso's Woman with a Tambourine

Picasso's Woman with a Tambourine dates from the mid-1920s, painted as he returned to Cubism after a stretch of Neoclassical work. The figure has the pieced-together look of fragments assembled into one form, set off by a vivid, eye-catching palette.

The woman's languid pose recalls the odalisques that Picasso's contemporary Henri Matisse loved to paint — the odalisque being a woman in attendance in a sultan's harem, a subject Matisse returned to again and again, and one the Musée de l'Orangerie holds in several versions. Picasso took up the same theme here, but handled it in a manner entirely his own.

Look closely at the fruit in the lower right and you'll see form and color pulling apart from one another, a deliberate split between the two. Picasso even scraped away wet paint in places to expose the bare canvas underneath — a bold technique that adds to the painting's fractured feel.