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Bust of a Man

1908
Not on view
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.

Artwork Details

Object Information
  • Title: Bust of a Man
  • Artist: Pablo Picasso (Spanish, Malaga 1881–1973 Mougins, France)
  • Date: 1908
  • Medium: Oil on canvas
  • Dimensions: 24 3/8 in. × 17 in. (61.9 × 43.2 cm)
  • Classification: Paintings
  • Credit Line: Bequest of Florene M. Schoenborn, 1995
  • Object Number: 1996.403.5
  • Rights and Reproduction: © 2025 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
  • Curatorial Department: Modern and Contemporary Art

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