Ricciotto Canudo

Ricciotto Canudo is a masterful pencil on paper drawing executed by Pablo Picasso in 1918. This precise, highly finished drawing exemplifies the profound shift in the artist’s style during the late 1910s, moving away from the geometric deconstruction of Cubism toward a Neoclassical figurative tradition.

The subject of the portrait is Ricciotto Canudo (1877-1923), an influential Italian intellectual and film theorist credited with defining cinema as "The Seventh Art." Picasso captures the sitter with intense realism, demonstrating a renewed commitment to academic draftsmanship. The choice of medium, simple pencil on paper, forces the viewer to focus entirely on the quality of line and the subtle rendering of volume. The technique eschews dramatic shading, instead relying on controlled hatching and contour lines to define the subject’s face and the formal structure of his suit.

This period of Picasso’s career, coinciding with the end of World War I, saw the Spanish artist engaged in set design for the Ballets Russes, which brought him into contact with numerous influential cultural figures like Canudo. Many portraits from 1918 reflect this interaction, capturing intellectual and artistic elites with a sobriety and monumentality that harkens back to Renaissance masters. This restrained classicism provided a visual stability following the upheaval of the war years and the radical experimentation of the Cubist movement.

The work is a significant testament to Picasso’s ability to assimilate and master disparate artistic vocabularies. It represents his early synthesis of modern awareness and classical technique. This drawing resides in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), where it remains an important reference point for studying the development of figurative art in the twentieth century. Given the historical significance of the subject and the importance of the artist, prints and high-quality reproductions of this powerful portrait continue to be widely accessible and studied.