Girl on a Ball

Pablo Picasso, 1905

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About This Work

Girl on a Ball, also presented as Acrobat on a Ball, is built around a deliberate contrast between a young acrobat balancing on a sphere and a seated male figure whose cubic pose appears immovable. The Prado identifies the work as an oil on canvas of 1905, measuring 147 × 95 cm. Its pink, gray, and earth-toned setting gives the paired figures a quiet, open stage on which movement and stillness, fragility and weight, are held in tension.

The Prado’s 2011 presentation of this Pushkin Museum work places it within Picasso’s Rose Period interest in circus figures and in the visual problems of precise line, closed form, and volume. Its account records that Picasso frequented the Cirque Medrano near the Bateau-Lavoir and describes the circus motif as a way to reflect on artistic life as well as painting itself. The painting passed through Gertrude Stein and Kahnweiler’s gallery before Ivan Morozov acquired it in 1913; it later entered the State collections in Moscow. The record now avoids displaying an unverified reproduction and links to the institutional evidence instead.

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