I’d like to begin by thanking the team at Tate Modern for the invitation, and Wu Tsang—friend and collaborator—for inviting me to be part of this project. And, of course, thank you to all of you here today for offering not only your gaze, but also your ears.

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This reading belongs to a series of talks titled Slow Looking. Today we will look together again at a painting that I consider particularly singular within Pablo Picasso’s work: The Three Dancers (1925). Before we do, I’d like to start by thinking about the title of the series itself: “Slow Looking”. I take this idea as an invitation to rethink how we look today. If we speak of looking slowly—at least, as I understand it—it is because we want to rethink the way we see things without being swept along by the speed of our world.
In a time defined by the saturation of images that assault us, returning attention to images becomes a form of resistance: resisting what, through speed and repetition, turns them opaque to us.
To speak about this painting, we have to speak, of course, about dance. In recent years I’ve been fortunate to witness the making of many collective dance works and other forms of performative movement. There, my task is to look slowly—just as it is here. Over time I’ve noticed that the dancers I’m lucky enough to work with know very well that, if we want to think and feel together, one of the best ways to begin is to breathe—not only slowly, but in time with one another. This makes it possible to conspire in the etymological sense of the term: to breathe together, to do so with and against what is in front of us. I’m saying this because slow looking should involve stopping, rebelling against something, waiting for something to be revealed.
But if we gather in company to look at a work, the least we can do is provide the work we are going to look at slowly with the company of other images that can dialogue with it and expand its readings. Thinking about this, it occurred to me: what better way than to surround The Three Dancers with other paintings that accompany it and re-signify it within Tate Modern’s collection and within the exhibition Theatre Picasso, so as to avoid its solitude. And so we will visit a series of images, while returning again and again to our dancers.
But every dance—even the kind practised in the silence of the body itself—implies not only a gaze, but also a form of listening. And so I want to introduce a first question right away: when we speak about painting, why do we think only about looking? Shouldn’t we also learn to listen to it?
In Spanish, the verbs cantar (to sing) and encantar (to enchant) come from the same root, incantare. The “song” of paintings is a siren song that draws us in and calls to us; and slow looking—that is, surrendering to the work’s time—also requires letting ourselves be enchanted by it. Following this first line of thought, I’m reminded of the words of someone who has been one of our guides in approaching this work. I’m referring to the poet, thinker, musician—and why not, dancer in his own way—Fred Moten.
It won’t be surprising to recognise his enormous influence on our approach even though he hasn’t written directly about Picasso. And yet his thinking allows us to read—without hiding them—the contradictions that traverse the artist, and to shift our position of listening. Moten once wrote: “Sound gives us back the visuality that ocularcentrism had repressed.” And so, following his lead, I want to give central importance in this reading to the relation between eye and ear, seeking our responses in the blurry space that joins them, because I believe eye and ear are more a continuation than an insurmountable distance.
We are looking, then, for a way of approaching this painting that is both sensitive and political. This theoretical re-assembly of ear and eye was also one of the main ideas of our exhibition. Those of you who have visited it will have seen that we wanted the soundtrack of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s film The Mystery of Picasso to influence how we position ourselves before the work, and for the echoes of its different musics to reverberate around the painting.
I can say that for us, listening to jazz, flamenco—and let’s call it that—avant-garde music, while spending hour after hour beneath The Three Dancers, was a very special experience. And throughout this lecture I hope to convey something of those sensations. I won’t play the music here for reasons of time, but I encourage you to visit the exhibition, where you can listen to it while observing in person most of the works I will show today.
If I began with this reflection, it’s because it serves to announce what I’ll try to do here: to begin with an analysis of some of the many interpretations that have been made of the work at the visual level, and then to triangulate these three kinds of music around it, trying to understand how—by doing so—fields open up that intersect with some of the central issues of our time: those that have to do with gender, social class, or what we might call the “subaltern gazes” that run through Picasso’s work.
Let us begin by formulating a question that perhaps has no answer, and yet will accompany us throughout the talk: what are those three dancers in Picasso’s painting dancing?

The Three Dancers has generated a constellation of canonical readings that attend to different interpretations and epistemologies. The most formalist readings have focused on the rhythmic violence of the composition, the metamorphic as a stylistic exercise, and Picasso’s abandonment of classicism after the cubist experiments. Other, biographical readings link it to the love triangle formed by Casagemas, Germaine, and Ramón Pichot, giving the work a tragic component. From there, psychoanalytic approaches insist on its spectral or traumatic dimension. More recently, feminist and critical readings have interrogated the apparatus of the gaze and the relation between body, model, and authorship through this painting.
Other interpretations—perhaps the ones closest to my own work—have granted this painting a philosophical character. The best known is surely T. J. Clark’s, for whom this work represents the decisive shift from cubism’s ascetic programme and its search for pure geometry toward the bacchanalian ambience of Nietzschean philosophy. He thus establishes a comparison in which this painting functions as a hinge, parallel to the movement by which Nietzsche confronts the Wagnerian project with Bizet’s Mediterranean Carmen and its inversion of moral values inherited from Christianity.
That thesis perhaps best illuminates my own approach, in which I try to go one step further by amplifying the reading toward what is at stake in the tension between musics and dances of the so-called “high culture” and others coming from popular styles such as jazz and flamenco.
However, among these interpretations, the most repeated—and perhaps the one that has most conditioned the critical reception of the work—is the biographical one. Canonical reception tells us that while Picasso was painting The Three Dancers in 1925, he received news of the death of his childhood friend Ramón Pichot. In 1901, Casagemas committed suicide after missing a shot aimed at Germaine. Later, Picasso had a love affair with her, though she would end up marrying Pichot.
If Casagemas’s death is known to have been decisive in the painter’s biography, Pichot’s death brings that story back to the foreground while the canvas is still in process. And so the central figure—rigid, cruciform, whose position can recall the Christ in Picasso’s The Crucifixion (1930)—is commonly identified as an allusion to Casagemas; the figure on the left, “more unstable and disturbing,” as Germaine; the figure on the right, intermittent and almost on the threshold of disappearance, as Pichot.
According to this scheme, what we see would not be a specific dance, but the friction between three biographies that touch at a critical point. What interests me most about this reading is that it suggests the painting therefore has two uncanny components: Germaine’s problematic volatility, and Pichot’s silhouette, hiding in the room’s shadow. This hypermasculinised reading brings us back to Picasso’s possessive relation to the woman, and to the theme of the painter and the model.

 

However, I’d like to step away from this for a moment in order to approach the work with a different gaze. In due time, the biographical component will return. For now, let’s look slowly and see what we find in the work at first sight—which may require unfolding some of the formalist readings.
We could begin by saying the painting is composed of three main figures, but to assert this would already fall into a first reductionism. As often happens in Picasso’s work, each figure tends to branch out or contain others that blur their limits: form appears and disappears, leaving traces of what was there in the birth of a new image, and doing so, as Georges Didi-Huberman writes in his text Économie Picasso, “without taking possession of anything.” This is what many careful readers have recognised as a fundamental feature for understanding Picasso’s painting as a pathos of constant transformation.
In our painting, this play of bifurcations and confusions, of veiled traces sinuously insinuated, makes the three dancers at moments seem like a multitude agitating in frenetic dances. On the left, we glimpse a figure on the verge of coming undone, mimicking the room’s background and the balcony before which it stands. A metamorphosing silhouette that could recall both Loïe Fuller’s fabric dances and a strange demon returning our gaze. One might say that when you try to grasp its contour, the figure it forms has already escaped.
The use of colour reinforces this feeling of confusion. The bacchanalian character of the painting also appears in the chromatic saturation and its free disposition. To lay down the blue sky behind the window, Picasso uses three different tonalities, placing us before a landscape that is deliberately inexplicable. White and brown alternate to produce discontinuity in the figure on the right, which at moments becomes elusive to our eyes. But this, more than a purely formal game, also serves to induce in us a certain sensation of loss.
After Picasso’s trip to Rome in 1917, the tension between a deep gaze toward the classical world and the iconoclastic, illusionistic character of the Ballets Russes would be decisively accentuated in his work. If Clark understood this painting as a wager on the Mediterranean spirit against Wagnerianism, The Three Dancers has also often been considered the work that best represents the tipping of the balance from neoclassicism toward Picasso’s more surrealist period, following the account Pierre Cabanne gives of this time in his exhaustive biography.
Beyond the often-failed descriptions or labels used to periodise Picasso’s work, it seems a significant choice that Cabanne titled “The Metamorphoses” the volume of his biography that covers the period from 1912 to 1937. Indeed, the metamorphic gesture—understood as the passage from one form to another—does not only pre-eminently affect that period; it is undoubtedly one of Picasso’s most relevant concepts. And it is well known that metamorphosis appears recurrently as one of the themes that obsessed him throughout his life.
In this regard, it is especially interesting how the Greek mythology of rape intertwines with another of Picasso’s most recurrent themes we have already mentioned: the painter and the model. This crossing appears with particular clarity in the celebrated Vollard Suite. Often, this transformative gesture presents itself as the space of greatest intensity within a tragic scene. I pause here to advance a premise I consider important for understanding this painting: through metamorphosis, Picasso links the tragic element to the inability to capture the image he pursues—whether that is illustrated through the theme of rape in Greek myth, through the “philosophical brothel” (as Guillaume Apollinaire dubbed Les Demoiselles d’Avignon), through the motif of painter and model, or through scenes of popular music and dance, understood at once as bacchanals and as an intellectual gesture.

We spoke earlier of the Vollard Suite. Let us pause over one of the pieces present in Tate Modern’s collection: Faun Revealing a Sleeping Woman (Jupiter and Antiope, after Rembrandt), made in the crucial year 1936. We see a faun lift the veil covering a model. As he does so, light touches her and her figure clarifies. Yet it is striking that the lines defining her barely sketch her in, compared to the surprising definition of the rest of the composition. Here is the mystery: what light reveals to the artist rebels at the moment it is about to be caught. “There is no model for one who wants to say what has never been seen,” writes Paul Éluard.
And it is precisely here that critical readings from a gender perspective can help us read a fundamental feature of Picasso’s painting: the way figures do not settle, but move through states. It is less a closed sum of planes observable in a single instant than bodies traversed by transformations. Metamorphosis thus appears not only as theme but as gesture, condensing something of the pathosformel of the classical world.
Here one of Picasso’s central tensions is activated: the relation between desire, vision, and capture. Feminist criticism—and we are still anchored in the plane of ocularcentrism—has given us tools to read this scene. Laura Mulvey describes an economy of the gaze in which to see is also to dispose of what is seen, which is indispensable for rethinking how the gaze operates in Picasso. Against this, in his work it is frequent to observe how that tension appears again and again: the desired figure enters the image, but is never fixed entirely. The more one pursues it, the more it transforms. The title itself suggests this: it does not insist on the act of undressing, but on revealing what is veiled.

Let us now observe how this logic of transformation affects another painting present in Tate Modern’s collection: Weeping Woman. Let us look at this canvas paying special attention to what happens in the hands. They are disproportionately large. If we follow the lines that sketch them, it begins to seem that they are not only the hands of the woman who weeps: between them another pair of hands is concealed—those of someone who comes to stop those tears through an impulsive, violent gesture, barely containable.
In a new gesture of metamorphosis, the eye sockets have become two spoons collecting her tears—or her very eyes. It is a terrifying image: the body’s own becoming the body of another. That is uncanny in the Freudian sense: the familiar (Heimlich) that becomes strange (Unheimlich), disturbing, other. The weeping woman thus speaks to us of a double being, a split being. And we also know that this image—which is none other than Dora Maar—forms part of Picasso’s response to the bombing of Guernica by Nazi aviation. If we let our imagination be contaminated by the noise of a bombing, the painting seems to speak of war’s brutal character and of the way violence enters the image as a tear.
But the fact that this is Dora Maar also places us in another scene: that of passionate love and its violences. Eros appears as something that divides, and thus operates in Picasso’s work through binary structures: the bull and the horse, the faun and the man, life and death.
Think, through this prism, of the hands that come violently to a woman’s face. It may be a desperate attempt to console her, or to cover the source of her tears in a seized, abrupt gesture. Perhaps it is also a way of smudging the painting itself. For those of us who have read—today—texts about Picasso’s hypermasculine and violent personality, that scene inevitably recalls the most terrible aspect of his biography: his possessive relationships with the women who were his partners, so well recounted by Françoise Gilot, among others, in Life with Picasso.
As with the biographical interpretation that identifies Germaine as one of the figures in The Three Dancers, Picasso’s affective partners were also his models: women often in a position of vulnerability before the painter. And yet Picasso does not tend to show that vulnerability.
If we make this detour into biography, it is because the biographical component has been decisive for the reception of The Three Dancers. We know that while Picasso was painting this work he received news of Ramón Pichot’s death, and that Germaine is identified in most manuals with the figure on the left. But in 1925 Picasso shared his life with the Russian ballerina Olga Khokhlova, whom he had met in 1917 during the making of the ballet Parade. His relationship with Khokhlova was decisive in his work—not only because of what is often said about his “return” to neoclassicism, but because it brings, into the very centre of his life and painting, the scene of dance and the figure of the model.

 

After the birth of their son Paulo, and as the relationship becomes more violent, Khokhlova’s image begins to appear progressively disfigured in his painting. After the arrival of Marie-Thérèse Walter—then seventeen—Khokhlova is displaced from that space of representation and intimacy. “My painting is a sum of destructions,” Picasso said; “he killed everything he loved,” says Khokhlova. We will return shortly to this parallel between the pictorial exercise and the amorous one.

For Picasso, the matter of painter and model intersects with Honoré Balzac’s The Unknown Masterpiece (1831), one of his major reference texts, which he would even illustrate. It tells the story of the old master Frenhofer, obsessed with painting a masterpiece he believes he has achieved after years of tireless work. When he shows it to a group of young painters, one can barely make out a tangle of lines and colours in which only a foot appears. The model’s figure has disappeared from the canvas: in trying to achieve the perfect work, Frenhofer has lost the figure in the very excess of painting.
For Picasso, the painter-and-model motif thus becomes a proxy for formal experimentation: a trace of the continuous effort to make visible what resists being fixed. The creative act becomes necessity, constant reinvention that paradoxically seeks its origin in the archaic—hence his incursions into what those painters understood as “primitive art”. The painter’s search follows the wake of a kind of arché: that originating principle or force underlying the pictorial drive.
It is no coincidence that The Unknown Masterpiece resonated so deeply with Picasso, who found in the idea of the unreachable not only artistic inspiration, but a metaphor for the endless tension between vision and representation. In those series and paintings, a narrative proxy unfolds that obsesses the artist: the painter strives to catch something alive and, in trying to do so, ends up putting the vitality of what he represents at risk, entering a spiral whose end constantly escapes us.
This idea of the artist who kills what he wants to capture has been thought about beautifully by Georges Didi-Huberman. He speaks of the butterfly collector who understands that, to grasp the liveliness of what he pursues, he ends up pinning it with a needle. The nature of the image has to do with its elusiveness, and the artist who tries to capture it in its dynamism can barely content himself with the patterns on its wings in the fugacity of its existence. Does this not bring us back, once more, to the idea of Picasso as a tragic painter?
It is precisely this question—how our own gaze has been shaped by that of the painter—that interests me. This detour does not aim to be novel; it aims to place us at a point of departure. In The Three Dancers, three fundamental elements of Picasso’s work collapse, especially concentrated in the figure of Germaine: the dramatic disturbance of the represented theme; that of the desiring subject and the object of sexual desire in the triangle formed by Casagemas, Pichot, and Picasso himself; and the disturbance of a gaze unable to seize what it pursues.
T. J. Clark argues for a view of Picasso as the Nietzschean painter of the transfiguration of values and, consequently, the disturber of a morality that collapses in his painting. That is why, for Clark, our society tends to trivialise what Picasso shows us by reducing it to biography. Yet I would suggest that it is precisely the biographical component—through the dramatic event—that establishes a bridge between what is painted and the philosophical character of his painting. Entering the psychology underlying these readings is not to banalise the work; it is to understand how our way of looking has been constructed.
Even so, I agree with Clark that those interpretations often end up reducing what Picasso shows us. But we know that, as Gilles Deleuze writes with regard to Francis Bacon, what is truly difficult in facing a canvas is not its blankness, but the way the artist tries to cut through layer upon layer of paint that obscures every attempt at approach—something that also happens with interpretations. Perhaps this is the moment to return to The Three Dancers from that break: where it becomes opaque, it becomes possible to seek, with Moten, what the eye has repressed.
Let us now return to the painting from the ear. We began by saying we wanted the film’s soundtrack to tell us something about these dances. The music for The Mystery of Picasso was composed by Georges Auric, a member of Les Six and a frequent collaborator of Jean Cocteau. Auric allows us to traverse another common place through which Picasso is often read: the question of political commitment and the way that commitment enters—or does not enter—a work.
Auric was not only a composer; he also adopted an explicit political position, affiliated with the French Communist Party, and argued for a music that would not separate itself from social reality. That is why his interest in the popular does not pass through the idea of a pure or atavistic origin, but through an active conception of the vernacular as contemporary material—available, in use. In his case, the popular does not function as essence: it functions as a field of work.
Here an important contrast emerges. In the same period in which Picasso was painting The Three Dancers, other uses of the vernacular—think of Manuel de Falla’s milieu and the 1922 Concurso de Cante Jondo, alongside Lorca—tended to fix the popular as a deposit of authenticity, sometimes tied to ideas of origin, race, blood, or nation. This is not to simplify that complex scene, nor to reduce Falla or Lorca to a single position. What matters here is that the popular does not name one thing: it can be thought of as a political subject; as a conflictual remainder that exceeds the category of class; or as a material fixed by narratives of national identity.
That tension becomes even more visible if we attend to how vernacular musics circulated in those decades: contests, lectures, press, travel, and also the spread of shellac records, which turns listening into archive and archive into criterion. The popular ceases to be only a situated practice and becomes an object of classification, preservation, and dispute that informs national spirits. And that matters here because it forces us to ask what kind of “popular” is at stake when a music enters a film about Picasso.
That is why, when resonances of jazz or flamenco appear in Clouzot’s soundtrack, they are not there as local colour nor as simple “Spanish flavour”. In Auric, that mixture between popular materials and modern writing produces a politics of the ear: the music does not simply accompany the painting; it relocates it, affects its rhythm, and forces us to look differently. It acts as a dramatic component. Here Auric becomes a key piece for understanding the theatricality with which Picasso invests his work and his conception of the world: it does not illustrate him; it participates in staging him.
But we must open a third strand, because Picasso does not fit entirely into Auric’s model nor into Falla’s. In Picasso, the popular does not appear only as emancipatory material nor as a deposit of authenticity; above all, it appears as a field of reappropriation and transfiguration. Picasso works with popular signs—the circus, the harlequin, the bull, flamenco, Spanish imagery, the stage—subjecting them to a process of formal displacement that also puts cultural hierarchy into crisis, comparable to what the painters of the immediately preceding French bohemia produced. And, as with Francis Picabia—author of many paintings of flamencas and the work La noche española—when Picasso speaks “Spanishness” he does not cite it; he makes it operate within a modern machine of metamorphosis.
In that sense, the popular in Picasso belongs to a larger dispute, very visible in the first decades of the twentieth century: the dispute over who can claim the force of dance, body, excess, against models of monumentality and cultural purity. If we want to say it with T. J. Clark, it is a tension already present—differently—in Nietzsche’s preference for Carmen over Wagner: not a simple opposition between lightness and depth, but between different regimes of body, representation, morality, and truth.
That tension sharpens in the interwar period, when fascisms also claim “the popular”—either to fix it as national essence, purity, or destiny, or to declass it into the field of the degenerate. And that is where I want to go next: how that dispute passes through the war, reappears in jazz, and opens again in flamenco. Because along that path the popular ceases to be an innocent repertoire and becomes, fully, a field of political and symbolic conflict.
John Mauceri notes in his book The War and Music that mid-twentieth-century film composition in the United States was deeply influenced by European avant-gardes. He suggests this is because many of its composers were exiled Jewish musicians. For them, the use of avant-garde musics and tools such as the twelve-tone technique theorised by Arnold Schoenberg—considered Entartete Musik (“degenerate music”) by the Nazis—was one way of marking their distance from the regime and the persecution they faced, something that was important, according to Mauceri, in facilitating their path into exile.
The Nazi regime classified as degenerate various musics associated with the Jewish, the African-American, and certain avant-gardes. In that climate, vernacular and diasporic forms such as jazz—or flamenco, associated with Spanish Roma—were especially marked. In fact, bibliographic sources and commercial uses abound in which the word “jazz” encompasses many other vernacular musics from different parts of the world, including flamenco. But Picasso’s art itself operated as a grand sign of artistic “degeneracy” because of its attack on the canons of classical perspective and its rupture with ideals of beauty.
Here we can sense that Picasso’s approach to the popular was far more than merely thematic. The artist and thinker Pedro G. Romero has devoted much of his work to exploring the notion of “the popular” in its broad sense. For him—and attentive to the Spanish connotations of popular—it is a field that runs beneath subaltern human groups lacking political representation, even as their symbolic representation is hypertrophied by the identity-building of nation-states—think of flamenco or jazz, for instance.
If we think the popular from that place, we can shed light on the historical avant-gardes’ interest—especially Picasso’s—in those subjects, highly represented in his drawings and paintings, on whom this symbolic substratum is built. We are speaking of the fact that flamenco, jazz, or the musics of cinematic avant-gardes emerge from diasporic and marginal human movements that were often associated with ways of life that exceed those of industrialised proletarian classes. The bohemian or the flamenco artist—like the bullfighters, dancers, prostitutes, or circus performers that obsessed them—belonged to what Karl Marx called the lumpenproletariat, and this was closely tied to Picasso’s own way of life in his youth.

 

As Annie Cohen-Solal has exhaustively shown in Picasso the Foreigner, the painter’s early Paris years were marked by his identity: a young Spanish immigrant who appears frequently in police archives, whose social activity is associated with anarchist meetings. For Cohen-Solal, it is less a political question than a mark of class—or rather, of déclassement. His condition of foreignness, and his life as a young hustler among other foreigners and anarchists, stamped his gaze with a fascination for déclassé forms of life—one that persisted even when he was already a celebrated (and bourgeois) artist widely recognised as a master of painting, a moment that, incidentally, coincides with the making of this painting, before his way of life would be interrupted by war.
This déclassé way of life in Paris, the bohemian way of life, found strong parallels in Spain with that of the flamencos—a world Picasso knew well, less from his childhood in Málaga than from his youth in Barcelona around the café Els Quatre Gats. It was an environment of flamencos—though not the idea of flamenco many have today, shaped by the export of a commercial form heavily marked by an exoticising, touristic gaze.
That is why the very artist we have been taught to see as leading pictorial modernity always kept one eye on the popular—as a form of radical otherness with respect to the image of the intellectual separated from the world. Beyond mere fetish, he seems to have found in these artistic forms something that escaped the totalising strategies of the museum or gallery institution—his own condition at the margins of what he himself came to represent.
Consider that in Spanish, the word dance can be translated as baile or danza. If danza has the status of art and points toward the intellect, baile, enclosed within the field of the popular, points toward the body. This insurmountable distance between body and intellect, between art as legitimising status and the popular, is embodied in The Three Dancers, whose figures—halfway between danza and baile, between flamenco and modern dance—allow us to illuminate the way Picasso articulates his own condition as a bohemian artist.
Picasso’s connection to flamenco, then, is not a merely thematic or mannerist question, but a parallel in the way flamenco functions as popular and modern art and the way the “Picasso apparatus” functions—implying a much deeper understanding of how he operates. Both share a repertoire of gestural codes. Flamenco is at once an extremely codified genre and a game of precise imprecisions, effects, breaks, and stage performativity—an iconoclastic character we might formulate as a tension between concert and disconcert.

 

As we see in Clouzot’s film, Picasso uses illusionistic techniques and the theatrical spectacle to present himself. This makes sense if we recall that he frequented all kinds of shows, leaving their imprint in his painting, especially in his work as a set designer for the Ballets Russes. It is very notable what he did to transform the stage design of Cuadro flamenco, originally designed for Pulcinella. For Cuadro flamenco, Picasso inverts the backdrop to create a stage within the stage, a theatre within the theatre: the mark of an illusory game that teaches us flamenco performativity applied to painting.
This is also Picasso’s philosophical exercise: to make the pillars on which categories—moral or aesthetic—are presented, begin to wobble, to show their illusory nature. And perhaps this is precisely what Picasso finds in dances that play at effect, in what—against the antiseptic order of classical forms—appears on the verge of collapse, deformity, always on the tightrope or at the peak moment of risk. Picasso often seems not only to want to paint, but to shock; and to do so, like a comedian who also knows tragedy intimately, he launched attacks against everything. He tried—if not to destroy—at least to disturb whatever he touched, including what he loved most: painting itself.
If we return to our painting thinking through flamenco, the figure on the left stops looking like a Loïe Fuller and becomes a guitarist. The hands of the crucified Casagemas become a kind of guitar headstock, and his hieratic posture acquires a solemnity more flamenco than Christian. You may tell me this is pure fantasy. Sound—the demonic figure par excellence—induces deception, as happens to Doktor Faustus in Thomas Mann. What the eye has repressed gives back the image of a ghost dancing in ecstasy, an agitation that unsettles many of the interpretations made so far.
In this regard, I’ll repeat an anecdote Pedro G. Romero recounts in the exhibition catalogue, which will allow us to move from flamenco to Afro-American diasporic musics. In his chronicles Primavera de España, Francis Carco places us in the studio of Maestro Otero in Seville around 1922. At that time the Charleston was fashionable. Before Otero arrived—he had a reputation as a severe teacher—the young bailaoras had been entertaining themselves by frenetically dancing a Charleston while one of them kept watch to make sure the maestro did not arrive. When Otero arrived they were all exhausted and panting. Carco concludes the anecdote by writing: “In fact, variations in flamenco dances are born from those frictions between dances of the country and dances in fashion—up to, for example, the arrival of the tango, the garrotín or the farruca, fashionable dances of Cuban origin that were fully incorporated into flamenco at the beginning of the twentieth century.”
What interests us about this anecdote is that today we know both dances—despite the purity narratives each carried—were coeval, almost contiguous. The labels that differentiate them conceal relations of fluidity, of categorical destabilisation. It happens as it does with the confusion of forms in Picasso’s painted figures, or in our own confusion as we try to figure out what dance this is.
Let us approach one final aesthetic key from a common place between jazz and flamenco. At the beginning of this reading we mentioned Federico García Lorca, who also appeared when we spoke of the 1922 Concurso de Cante Jondo organised with Manuel de Falla. We will mention him once more through the words of the poet, thinker, and jazzman Nathaniel Mackey, who devotes an essay titled Cante moro to Lorca’s concept of duende.
This concept was popularised by Lorca in his 1933 lecture “Play and Theory of the Duende,” and became definitively inscribed in flamenco’s vocabulary. Mackey interprets it as a destabilising element that appears in music or poetry, especially in arts with a performative component such as oratory or flamenco.
For Mackey—who distances himself from more academic readings of Lorca’s text—duende is a troubling element that serves as an aesthetic nexus in a popular way of making present both in flamenco and in blues and jazz, connected to the diasporic tradition of “Black sounds.” In this way he links flamencos, especially Spanish Roma, with Moorish song, cante jondo, Blackness within Spain, and other Afro-diasporic traditions, such as Yoruba-Catholic song in Cuba (lucumí).

 

Perhaps, then, it is now time to return to our initial question: what are these three figures dancing? Undoubtedly, they dance a dance that contains something of joy and something of pain. A group of three figures that is also a multitude, dancing agitatedly in a room whose surroundings we cannot fully discern. We can say that, against the Ballets Russes left behind in time, the intertwining of hands recalls a more frenetic dance proper to popular dances. Charleston or cancan—interrupted, as we’ve said, by the posture of the central figure, which has something of a flamenco gesture, but a flamenco gesture that can also be avant-garde. And perhaps it is all of that: a Charleston, a cancan, a flamenco dance, and what came to be called modern dance. Everything we have been able to say about the work seems to converge in a place where categories blur and disorder themselves in an exercise of transfiguration. Why wouldn’t we be facing precisely that situation?
Inspired by Mackey’s words, if this is so, we can think that, in observing these dancers, we find not only a set of popular dances, but we also follow through them the remnants of an archive of shared pain. These dances share in their gesturality a common and collective tragedy exorcised in a frenetic ritual—joyous and terrible at once. Perhaps it is the pain contained in the musical and choreographic archive of diasporic communities—Roma, Jewish, African-American—or perhaps it is that of the obsessive painter trying to portray something that continually escapes.
If the biographical reading speaks of a toxic love triangle ending in tragic destiny, what interests me especially is that, starting from Mackey’s concept of duende, it becomes possible to appeal to a universal pain linked to the political question of class and foreignness, racialisation and diaspora. A personal pain inscribes itself and reflects itself in a form of collective longing. This is not to associate Picasso with those marks, but to highlight the way he explored them incisively and insistently.
In his poem “Insofar Regress,” Nathaniel Mackey writes about Terremoto. Terremoto was a flamenco singer, a Roma cantaor. With his characteristic expressive, telluric style, he used to sing:
“when you have no remedy,
let a surgeon cut your uvula and your tongue.”
Mackey says that “having no remedy” is connected to duende, which links intimate suffering to collective suffering: “Duende often has to do with a kind of longing that has no remedy, not simply loss, unrequited love and so forth, but what Lorca calls a longing without object.” Mackey writes, in recognising this universal suffering that we also find in The Three Dancers—a recognition perhaps similar to the one Picasso experienced when he heard the news of Ramón Pichot’s death while painting the canvas—“Terremoto and I died on the same day.”
But this union of the collective tragic and the individual tragic may also act as a kind of consolation before the pain of the tragic, split, desiring being—such as Picasso appeared to us in the first readings of his work. A consolation, a kind of prayer traversed by the popular.
Picasso says this is what interested him in the fetishes he spoke about after visiting the Trocadéro museum. According to André Malraux, Picasso spoke of African masks in the following way: “They were against everything—against unknown and threatening spirits. I too am against everything. I too believe everything is unknown, everything is an enemy… women, children… everything. I understood why the Blacks used their sculptures… All the fetishes… were weapons. To help people not to fall under the influence of spirits, to help them be independent. Spirits, the unconscious… it’s the same thing. I understood why I am a painter.” I cite this passage not to validate it, but because it condenses, almost brutally, the way European modernism narrated its relation to an expropriated colonial archive.
Picasso presents himself once again as an artist of destruction, and then we ask: whom could he want to ward off if not himself? Who is that monster that appears in his paintings and returns the gaze to the one who looks, again and again? It is Casagemas’s horizontal and vertical gaze, Germaine’s disturbing gaze, Pichot’s skewed gaze. A gaze that destroys—the scopic gaze before the mirror, the terrible gaze, the gaze of what we do not want to be. The faun’s gaze, who, like Marsyas, is flayed by his own arrogance—or rather, the Minotaur’s gaze, looking at us from the end of the labyrinth inside ourselves.

To close, I return to The Three Dancers by offering an open answer to the initial questions. I return as one returns to a musical bar one had to step away from—not to “fix” it once and for all, but to let it measure us before we play again near its limits.
Each time I return to this painting, my feeling is that it must not only be looked at, but also listened to. There is in it a rhythm of cuts and returns, a syncope that dislocates form and makes something else appear—something that does not settle into figure, nor story, nor identity. If the act of looking has so often been a desire to capture, here the image insists on the opposite: on the impossibility of closing the meaning of what we see. And in that impossibility—in that tremor vibrating between body, scene, and archive—its arché appears: not a pure origin, but a principle in motion. Perhaps that is why this painting still resonates so strongly: because it forces us to enter its theatre as listeners, to accept that vision also has an ear, and that what we listen to can always listen back to us.