Have you ever had foie gras de canard on toast with a bit of fig jam? It’s an unctuous pâté with a deep, savory richness — a dish of ultimate indulgence. But you can take this experience one tease further by pairing it with sorbet au citron, its complete opposite. The sorbet is cold, sharp, and acidic — a “palate cleanser” in the purest sense.
The shock of this pairing lies in its deliberate contrast. The bright chill of the sorbet slices through the heavy fat of the foie gras, wiping the slate clean and refreshing your senses for the next bite. It’s a classic French technique: heighten each flavor by letting its opposite sharpen it.
That’s exactly what I experienced at a restaurant (plus a few more courses) after saying my farewells to Rodin’s The Thinker. My stomach was satisfied, but my appetite for art still unquenched. So, borrowing that French gastronomic strategy of contrast, I decided that after Rodin’s museum, I should head for Picasso’s. I hopped on the train, still ruminating on the bookends of human experience — eroticism and death — stirred by Rodin’s sculptures, while watching my fellow passengers, most of them glued to their phones. Without a backward glance, I stepped off at Filles du Calvaire.
On my way to the Picasso Museum, I came across two jazz musicians. The melody began as a low, velvet hum — a quiet conspiracy between a saxophone and the ghost of a walking bass. It moved through me like a warm, cognac-hued river, carrying the weight of a thousand sorrows and the defiant hope of a single improvised note.
Yes — between Eros and death, there’s jazz.
Jazz acknowledges the finite nature of things — a solo, a life — and embraces the urgency of expression in the fleeting moment. It’s a negotiation between the impulse to discover, to love, to create, and the quiet knowledge of decay.
With the music still in my ears and a small ache in my chest, I entered the Picasso Museum. The rooms unfolded like shattered mirrors. Triangles for eyes, semicircles for mouths, sharp lines bridging noses seen from two angles at once. These figures didn’t seem broken — they seemed exploded. Picasso took the comfortable singularity of perspective and blasted it apart.
Looking at them was a dance between confusion and revelation. A face shown from all directions at once; a hand reaching and still; time collapsed into a single image. The rhythm of forms echoed jazz’s syncopation — disjointed, unpredictable, maps of multiple truths. A body wasn’t just a body, and a face wasn’t just a face — it was a memory, a movement, a geometry of emotion.
It’s not hard to see where Picasso’s inspiration began. Just as jazz draws from the Black American tradition, Cubism owes its debt to the powerful aesthetics of African masks. European art had long chased proportion and realism; African masks distilled pure emotion and spiritual force. They used abstraction — elongated forms, asymmetry, bold shapes — to speak beyond the physical and connect with unseen realms. Picasso found in them a new language for vision, even if he never openly credited it.
As jazz shattered the formal structures of classical music, Cubism fractured the old rules of perspective. One face, many angles — like a single chord struck and refracted into a thousand voices.
I stopped before Head of a Woman, one of Picasso’s many depictions of Fernande Olivier. She was his muse and his lover, and their tempestuous romance lasted for seven years. They were both possessive and unfaithful. Knowing this, the bust of Fernande to me looked more like a demon of jealousy. Pablo was notorious for locking her in their apartment during his absences. And yet, jealousy was not the worst of his follies.
It’s hard to separate an artist’s brilliance from their shadow — and perhaps the two are inseparable. Nothing in life has just one face or a single truth; like Picasso’s portraits — or his personality — it must be viewed from multiple perspectives. This way of seeing — and of being — stirs a multitude of reactions and emotions, which, if not the mind, then the human heart has the capacity to embrace. Jazz and Cubism speak to that capacity. They uncover it, nurture it, and transcend realism, pointing toward a deeper, more spiritual truth — one that, like the last note of a saxophone solo, lingers after the sound has gone:
🖤
— Vibe & Verse
From page to thread — a story you can wear
