Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler

This is an oil painting on canvas, about a hundred centimeters tall, so a little over three feet. It shows a seated man, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, but you may not see him at first. The picture seems to be built from many small, angled pieces, almost like shards of glass. The colors are mostly brown, gray, black, and white, and they flicker across the surface. Look for the overall shape of a figure sitting upright in the middle of the canvas. Slowly, a person emerges from the broken surfaces around him.

Even though the painting is highly abstract, Picasso left a few clear clues to guide your eye. Start near the top of the figure and look for a wave of hair. Then move down the middle of the canvas to find the knot of a tie. Keep going and you can pick out a watch chain. Finally, look near the bottom for the man's hands, clasped together in his lap. Once you find these small signs, the shimmering shapes around them begin to feel like a body.

Picasso painted this portrait in the autumn of 1910. Kahnweiler sat for it as many as thirty times, which is a great many sessions for one picture. Picasso was no longer trying to make a convincing illusion of how a person looks. Instead he broke down the forms he saw and put them back together. This style is called Cubism. Shapes are split into flat planes and facets, and shown from several points of view at once, as if the painter had moved around the sitter while working.

Kahnweiler was a German-born art dealer, writer, and publisher. He opened a gallery in Paris in 1907 and began representing Picasso in 1908. He introduced Picasso to Georges Braque, and he bought most of their paintings between 1908 and 1915. In 1920 he wrote The Rise of Cubism, an important book explaining the movement. So this is a portrait of one of Cubism's great champions. Look once more at the whole figure: the surfaces are semitransparent and seem to merge with the air around him, yet his pose, seated with hands clasped, is quite traditional.