Anna Norling

Picasso was 15 years old when he painted this. It looks nothing like a Picasso, and the reason why is one of the most beautiful things he ever said... It's called First Communion, made in 1896, and it was the first large canvas he ever completed. There are no strange angles here, no fractured faces, none of the wild reinvention his name now brings to mind. It is a stunning and technically flawless scene: a young girl kneeling at the altar in a white dress, about to take her first communion, the moment a child is meant to step toward adulthood. The translucence of the girl's veil, the altar boy's surplice, the light falling from a source outside the frame, all of it revealing a command of paint startling for his age. He built the whole picture around whiteness, linking the white of Lola's dress to the white of the altar cloth and the candlelight, so the eye reads the whole scene as a passage from one life into another. He was only 15, and he understood that... It was shown at a major exhibition in Barcelona, where the local press marveled that a boy not yet old enough to shave had painted like a master of the academy. At fifteen Picasso could already do this, the thing that thousands of trained artists spend their entire lives trying and failing to do. He had it as a boy. And he would spend the rest of his life trying to get back the one thing this perfect painting does not have: the freedom of a child, who paints without fear, without rules, and without yet knowing what is supposed to be impossible... He said it himself: "It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child."