The oil painting, named “Ma Jolie”, was created by Pablo Picasso in 1911-12, belonging to the category of his Cubist style by employing faceted forms, simplified geometric forms, interlocking planes and spacial ambiguity. The main purpose of the Cubism arts is to depict three-dimensional objects on 2-D surface. In this painting, Picasso, like what he did in his another art piece named “Woman with Pears”, challenged the convention of representation and the orthodoxy in paintings.
The composition of the woman strumming the guitar defines the space of the whole painting by being placed in the center. The silhouette and detailed structure of the woman, at the first sight, was confused and puzzled to me, but as the curiosity to know further about the artwork motivated me to step back at a certain distance from the artwork and ultimately identify the artwork through the clues contained in the painting, including lines constructing the fingers that was strumming on the strings of the guitar, a simplified representation of eyes, nose and mouth and a few parts of her body silhouettes formed by hard and heavy-weighted lines. The painting is patterned with colors such as brown, beige, grey, and white, which again characterized the typical manifestation of Cubist style. In addition, the color patterns help construct the values on the geometric shapes to provide a tilting and lighting direction for every 2-D shape and achieve the idea of compressed space.
What’s important, the painting is an avatar, as an embodiment of love, of Picasso’s lover Marcelle Humbert whose nickname is Ma Jolie, ‘the refrain of a popular song performance at a Parisian music hall Picasso frequented’ and being embellished and emphasized in stencil letters at the bottom of the painting. As I first looked at the color pattern that is overall dull, it was hard for me to make connections between love and the theme of the painting. Nevertheless, it could be Picasso’s way that approached the romantics in an extraordinary way through Cubist style, which is also what I like about the painting afterwards.
MoMA Photos Documentations:
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- Ma Jolie in its entirety
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- Detail 1: Facial representation of the women in lines and values
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- Detail 2: “Ma Jolie” located at the bottom of the artwork and in stenciled letters highlighted; a treble clef situated
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- Detail 3: The woman’s hand strums the guitar’s strings.
Sketchbook:
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- Sketchbook on drawing for exploration of the artwork
Formal Response:
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- Formal response to the artwork
