In Lady with a Fan Picasso is
visibly moving away from the
preoccupation with African
sculpture and primitivism
which had dominated Les
Demoiselles d'Avignon
and Three Women. The
picture is still notable for its
monumental, three-dimensional quality, but its
entire feeling is different, and
the 'African' figures have been
replaced by a female who is
discernably dressed in elegant
early 20th-century fashion.
The
geometric elements in the
composition derive in part from
Paul Cezanne, perhaps the
greatest of all the 19th-century
forerunners of modern art.
Cezanne's death in 1906 had
led to a flurry of retrospective
exhibitions, and
Picasso made a
study of the older
master's work
as part of his own quest for a
new direction. He may well
have found inspiration not
only in Cezanne's paintings but
also in his now-celebrated
dictum that it was necessary 'to
render nature after the
cylinder, the sphere and the
cone', which might almost be
the formula for Cubism.
Original Painting: The Pushkin Museum of Fine Art, Moscow, Russia
