Girl with a Mandolin

In the painting Girl with a Mandolin, Picasso uses muted colors to depict a nude woman playing a mandolin. Light, creamy shades make up her skin, and smoky gray shadows lurk behind the woman’s silhouette. Picasso darkens the creamy color to paint her hair, eyelid, and the shadows on her face and hands to show dimension. No one color stands out from the others, however, the right side of her face and neck are lighter than the rest of the painting; it shows where the light was being cast as Picasso was painting her. The girl’s face is shown in profile and one eye is visible, yet her torso is faced to the front. She is painted from the thighs up and stands holding a mandolin, her rectangular fingers stretch over the neck and over the sound hole of the instrument as if she is playing. The lines of the painting are much less than fluid, Picasso paints the girl using different shapes: ovals, rectangles, cubes, many three dimensional objects. The shapes are different in size and are not made up of perfectly straight lines. The cubist look that Picasso presents is not realistic, the woman is misshapen. Her right arm connects to a large, boxy shoulder and her right breast seems to hang off of her body. The shape of the girl’s body is defined by the darker colors surrounding her with shadows, but there is not an obvious line where her body is compared to the background of the piece. Behind the girl are rectangular shapes painted in the same dull colors of her body which make her blend in with the background; it seems that Picasso only cared about painting the woman in front of him; he had little interest in what was going on beyond her.