| The horse is one of three figures in the painting that evolve from Picasso's first compositional study; the other two are the bull and the arm of the lamp-bearing woman. Unlike the other two, the horse began without a function or a place. He was dead, as Arnheim writes, on his back and in the background. This first study does not greet us with the horse, as the final canvas does, but rather with the hand holding the lamp out of the window - the first figure we can grasp in space. If we can discern a foreground in this drawing, a line, not a figure, occupies it - a large, semicircular curve. In Rudolph Arnheim's account, this curve is "too big" for the final canvas, and a separate idea from "classical pictorial tradition" happening in the background. This line, he writes, is "obviously designed to pull the vertical and horizontal dimensions together in order to produce a more tightly unified whole" (31). Arnheim is correct, but the line accomplishes even more. If our entry into the depiction is the hand, then the line splits; read as foreground, the line recedes, unifying itself and the background to the foreground. This tells us that Picasso knows how he wants his picture plane to gestate, but he doesn't know yet how he will make figures do that work. He thus starts them off as icons, safely back. Arnheim oddly fails to notice that this line will become the horse - first its neck, then finally its chest. But Picasso might not know this yet, either. |
