Just what exactly am I supposed to appreciate about this artist?
To my “untrained” eye, Picassos’ work looks like gibberish and doesn’t really look like anything anyone else couldnt do with a margarita in hand…
So what is it that made him so “sought after” ?
inquirifully yours,
nuthinboutnuthin
nuthinboutnuthin - it’s a long story. Not one I am prepared to go into at this time - too much.
Bottom line? Picasso started painting right when a few rules were being broken about what could be considered “Painting” and “Art” (Impressionist and Post Impressionists) and he bent and broke a few more rules, play a lead or following role in the creation of a lot of the major art movements of the 20th century. I suspect it is his willingness to break rules - not paint faces that look exactly like faces, etc. - that you may think is “gibberish.”
Picasso is one of those guys who is really as good as his hype - if you genuinely like art, it is worth learning about it and seeing the progression from Renaissance Masters (and before) up through modern art. Picasso will be waiting for you when you get there and you will dig him.
Here is a huge collection of his works in cronological order:
http://www.abcgallery.com/P/picasso/picasso.html
Have a look at it and you will notice that only a part of it is “gibberish” and that everything he’s done was very well thought out and constructed, even what you call “gibberish”.
nbn, your perspective is from *this * side of the artistic divide that Picasso helped bring about. Before he and some of his contemporaries came along, the art of painting was a bit old and fusty. The Impressionists had come along and freed it up a bit, but they mostly only pushed the envelope within the limits of “pretty.” Picasso was part of a movement that looked at painting in a whole new way, and gave people “permission” to think of art in an entirely different way. It may not look too exciting to you now, but that’s because you’ve grown up saturated with its aftereffects; it’s pretty oldhat by now. But Picasso’s shakeup of the art “establishment” was a pretty violent one; analogous to Joyce’s upending of the literary establishment. (Some say that literature has still not quite recovered from Joyce’s forced paradigm shift.)
So there is some historical context necessary to understand Picasso’s full impact.
Picasso’s oeuvre isn’t “gibberish”–llike a radio broadcast in a foreign language, it only seems like gibberish until you get the skills to understand it. Picasso, along with George Braques, pioneered a painting technique that depicted an object from multiple perspectives simultaneously. This art movement became known as Cubism. The Cubist school didn’t last long, but it built on the revolution wrought by the Impressionists, who were the first painting movement to break from purely representational art, and led to the explosion of avant-garde art in the 20th century.
You should also check out the Expressionists, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Egon Schiele, who were working at the same time as Picasso and who built on the advances in perspective and space that he pioneered.
Picasso had a lot of dfferent styles but I guess the hardest to fathom for many is the early Analytical Cubism period. To see it in context and make sense of , You have to be aware of what went before.
Whether artist were conscious of it or not, photography stated to do the job of simply recording a likeness of an object or person. So painters were so much competing with it but saying “this is what photography cannot do” Before Picasso, Cezanne started to flatten the image and make the viewer more aware of the painting as an object that was constructed out of paint rather than a kind of window that you look into with a deep space with conventional perspective.
Also Picasso/Braque started to show objects or portraits from several different angles and represent the actual act of seeing in the way the eye moves from one one point to another very quickly but make a very different kind of image.Its less a pretty picture , more the record of a kind of process of visual research.
I can’t explain Picsasso (see original thread title), but Picasso is a great artist, IMHO. It’s kind of like explaining why ice cream tastes so good, you know?
(Hey, no hard feelings about the spelling thing - I can barely scribble my own name and get it right half the time :eek: )
I’d recommend hunting down some of Picasso’s sketches - this one from the gallery already linked to is the kind of thing. This lets you see his (fairly abrupt) movement towards more unusual ways of thinking about subjects…you can almost follow his thought processes across the drawings.
It’s always interesting to hit the Picasso button in people’s minds and see what pops out.
His dad specialized in paintings of doves, so Picasso named his daughter Paloma
I like to point out that Picasso was strongly influenced by Puvis de Chavennes, since he was a pretty good artist in his own right:
If Picasso ever did anything that was gibberish, he would have known it and destroyed it. Remember- this was a guy who could throw a dinner party at an expensive restaurant and pay the bill with just his autograph. He didn’t need to flood the market with substandard work .
He ran out of new ideas in the mid-1930’s. He still did some great stuff like [i[Guernica,* but nothing new in theme or form.
And he had a lot of sex: although art historians insist he drove a Hispano Sussa and not an El Dorado, the girls would turn the color of an avacado.
[QUOTE=Patr100]
So painters were so much competing with it but saying “this is what photography cannot do” QUOTE]
I meant to say "painters were NOT so much competing with it but saying “this is what photography cannot do”
There is a very lucid point made by Francis Bacon, who said that Painters before photography, thought they were simply recording but in fact were doing something else and in a way, i might add, in the 20th century they were at liberty to take that “something else” to the extreme.
These are the replys I was hoping for…
I only KNOW what I personally like and have just recently begun to develop an interest in
the whys and wherefores into artists and their work…
How they do what they do and what they were/are thinking.
I have found myself almost “nose to painting” trying to see how they painted…
there are so many things I need/want to learn… and I appreciate your answers.
I also know there are things I will NEVER like even though I’m sure I can learn to appreciate it.
“very well thought out”
This is another one of those things I don’t understand…
so please bear with me…
How do people KNOW when a painting is “very well thought out” ??
How can you tell???
I am real serious here, and hopefully will receive a patient response and not belittle my interest and or stupidity.
PS, Yes, I would love to take an art appreciation course etc. but money is never around for things like this…
I have read books on The Impressionist and thoroughly enjoyed them, it’s mainly Picasso and Abstract art I dont “get”…
Thanks
A painting style has a “history” both in terms of the painintgs that went before it that were made by other artists and what an individual painter produced leading up to a particular work. Artists are either being postively influenced by the art they see or they are reacting against it. and going in the opposite direction. They didn’t work in a vacuum. If the critics or dealers recognised a pattern or style then you got a “movement”. Terms like impressionism, fauvism (wild beasts) and Cubism were orignally unflatterring terms used by critics.
The artist Lawrence Gowing who also wrote on other artists once said, If I rememeber correctly , that in order for painting to progress, each generation must misunderstand the previous one. So for example, the POP art of the 60s was a reaction to the almost psuedo- religious art of the abstract expressionsts in the 50s. The conceptual art of the 70s was a reaction to POP art.The “New image” painting of the 80s was a reaction to conceptual art. So they were often seen to be reacting and doing the opposite of what had gone before. trying to make the familiar appear new and exciting.
Sometimes they would want to reduce the picture down to it’s most basic components, like ascientist trying to decode a genetic sequence, to try to achieve a kind of purity of form such as Malevich’s paintings of squares. Then they might start to rebuild it gradually in a controlled way,
This “progress” doesn’t necessarily make “nicer to look at” paintings - just different. You don’t have to “like” all of them of course.
I had trouble “getting” Picasso until I was in Paris, and spent an afternoon at the Picasso Museum. Something about seeing that much of his work in person reached me. I’m no art student, but I have since developed a great appreciation of his work.
I’m a guitarist, and Hendrix is thought by many guitarists to be the greatest ever, but a lot of people who aren’t guitarists don’t get him either. My dad said it sounded like gibberish 
nuthinboutnuthin, run, do not walk, to the following web site:
http://www.tamu.edu/mocl/picasso/tour/thome.html
Additionally, many people don’t know what an excellent realistic painter Picasso was, and at a very early age. If often helps to get past the “gibberish” impression if you know that he could paint realistically if he wanted to. I would also refer you to the following, started by Picasso at the age of 14 years old and finished when he was 15:
OH MY GOD!!! I HAD NO IDEA!!!
Hard to believe those paintings came out of the same man…
The painting “First Communion” is beautiful…
I thank all of you so much!
My ignorance is slowly slipping away…
I used to think Picasso was gibberish, too, but I’ve since changed my perspective on him. The fact that he could paint realistically proves that those cubist paintings were doing what he wanted them to. And once you realize that, you begin to see just what it was that he was doing. He was trying to capture dynamic, three-dimensional scenes on a static, two-dimensional canvas, and to the extent that that’s possible, I think he succeeded. Now, I still don’t particularly like Picasso’s works, but I can’t deny that they’re art, and art of great value at that.
May I share with you my favorite Picasso?
This happens to be an “in-between” piece. It’s realistic enough to be readily accessible but it also shows Picasso’s use of shape and color, moving from the representation of actual individuals to an abstracted view of them based on primary forms and colors.
I like it because the solidity of the shapes and the colors match up with the deep basic emotions of newly committed lovers.
That’s the thing. Most of the modern artists who some people dismiss as drawing “gibberish” were excellent draftsmen as well. Pollack, who many seem to simply think of the guy as splashes paint around a canvas, could make real life portraits with the best of them. I saw a collection of his realistic sketches that he made once when he was holed up in a hospital and they looked spectacular.
As for how can you tell whether a work is well-thought out. Well, I dunno, just look at it? I mean, I look at Picasso or Kandinski or even Pollack, and I see reason to the rhyme. Nothing is haphazard about their work (and argument can be against this for Pollack, but even there there is a strong sense of composition, rhythm, and form.) Look at the way the forms interact with each other; look at the compositional sense, look at the colors, the exactness of the brush strokes. When I look at these artists, I cannot even begin to comprehend how one goes creating such a work.
Even though Picasso’s work is abstract, he still holds on to pretty conventional ideas of graphic composition. Perhaps his use of perspective is unusual, and his colors, and his abstracted manner, but the way his elements are placed within the frame look fairly conventional to my eye.
And Picasso did produce substandard work. He was extremely prolific, and I happened to have the good luck to be in Vienna when they had an exhibition of his lesser-known (some even compeltely unknown) works. There’s a reason they’re rarely shown. Picasso was human – not everything he created was genius, and this exhibition was an interesting insight into this. There were all pretty much sub-standard works, some you could tell straight off were sloppily or hastily finished – or that he had lost interest in his work mid-way. The exhibition wasn’t billed this way, but this is what it amounted to. It was only interesting if you already had a strong familiarity in his work. For a “beginner”? Not the best introduction.
People forget that Picasso mastered traditional painting at a young age, and went on to more challenging art. While realistic renderings require skill, they lack the intellect and creativity required of his later work.
He was an absolute genius, on par with Mozart, Shakespeare, and da Vinci. Every medium he touched - drawing, lithograph, painting, sculpture - he dominated. Perhaps the last truly great artist to walk the earth. No one since has come close.
There was an exhibit at the MoMA featuring Picasso and Matisse (another true master), and I couldn’t get over how much Picasso towered over his friend and peer. And as for his buddy Braque, well, there’s just no comparison.