Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler

A real man, Picasso’s own dealer, dissolved into a shimmer of brown-and-gray facets you have to decode.

1. 1
   The wave of hair

   Start at the top: that patch of fine diagonal hatching is Kahnweiler’s neatly combed, wavy hair, one of the few passages Picasso leaves almost describable, a foothold before the rest dissolves.
2. 2
   His eyes, looking out

   Below the hair, two dark almond eyes and the ridge of a nose surface out of the facets. Find the face looking back and the whole gray scaffold suddenly reads as a seated man.
3. 3
   The clasped hands

   At the very bottom, a cluster of pale interlocking blocks resolves into his hands, folded in his lap. Picasso pins the figure down with hair and hands, top and bottom, and lets everything between them break apart.