To be completely honest, I don’t know that I really “get” his cubist stuff. I have no doubt that Picasso had more than enough ability to paint realistically, and chose to go beyond that. I understand the explanation that it is supposedly showing the object from several different perspectives simultaneously, but that’s not what I see when I look at the paintings. I don’t really get an impression of “Oh yeah, there’s the part that a camera doesn’t see”; it’s more like “one eye is larger and off center, the nose is on the wrong side of the head, and the breasts are misshapen” or whatever. It’s certainly interesting to look at, but I really don’t get any deeper meaning as far as the choices he made as to which elements of the painting to distort. Anyone care to pick a specific cubist painting and give an in depth explanation? I think that would be really cool.
nuthinboutnuthin,
you might also find it interesting to see how Picasso struggled to execute one of these gibberish-type paintings. There is a book entitled “Picasso Paints A Portrait.” It is a photographic record of him painting a picture of his mistress at the time (and future wife) Jacquelyn. The photos are in B&W and were taken in 1956 by a Life magazine photographer who was also a friend of Picasso’s. You’ll probably only find it in a library. The photos also show in the background quite a bit of other works in progress and give you a good idea of his studio and work environment at the time.
I would also suggest you do a Google search for quotations by Picasso. You will gain some interesting insight into his philosophies and work ethic.
Sorry, blowero, I can’t help you much there. I’m a huge admirer of Picasso and his talent and energy, but most of the work he did that I like are his line drawings, particularly the more realistic ones, and his more realistic paintings. (My favorite Picasso painting is “The Lovers” as well. I have an [inexpensive] print hanging in my bedroom.) To tell you the truth, I’m not a particular fan of cubism. The only cubist painting I genuinely like, and I like it a lot, is “Nude Descending A Staircase” by Marcel Duchamp. I would think that a Google search would probably turn up quite a bit in the way of information on how to appreciate cubist art.
And depending on how much you might want to know about Picasso himself, I would recommend a couple of huge (and hugely well-written) biographies written by a man by the name of John Richardson, a renowned art historian and writer who was also a friend of Picasso’s and travelled in his circle for many years.
The best way into Picasso is chronologically.
For the big sweep of Western Art and how he fits into it all, then you probably want to start with Ernst Gombrich’s The Story of Art. The original of this is very old, but Gombrich continued to update the work up until his death a few years ago. Personally, I don’t agree with all of his opinions, particularly when it comes to 20th century art, but he’s an important art historian who tried to tell a coherent story of the whole enterprise over several millennia. He regarded Picasso as important, so, if nothing else, you’ll have read an influential account of Western Art werein he’s crucial.
For a specific account of Picasso’s career, I highly recommend the Tim Hilton volume Picasso in the Thames&Hudson World of Art series. A fairly crisp run-though his career, concentrating on the early good stuff.
All the painting are there to enjoy, whether you take to them or not.
I can’t explain Picasso, but I can tell you who explained him to me: Chaim Potok. Read My Name is Asher Lev and The Gift of Asher Lev. They’re about a observant Hasidic Jew who is an artistic prodigy of Picasso’s calibre, and Picasso is a constant prescense in the books, although he never makes an actual appearance. The scene in the second book, where Asher is explaining his art to his daughter’s yeshiva class, is easily the best explanation of modern art I’ve ever read.
Plus, they’re simply incredible novels in their own right.
PLEASE forgive my spelling of Picasso…
I JUST noticed it… and knowing it is posted like that for the WHOLE ENTIRE WORLD to see forever and ever…made my stomach hurt…
my heart hurt… and even my knees… :o :o :o :o :o :o
Not to worry, nuthinboutnuthin. We here on the Straight Dope, as our fingers fly over our keyboards, quite frequently hit the wrong key or misuse a word or misplace a space. Nobody (usually) 
pays it any attention. You haven’t done anything the rest of us haven’t done many times over. 
O.K., I’m feeling strangely unsatisfied so far. I take it the OP was talking about Picasso’s cubist stuff, not his conventional stuff. Is there nobody here who understands the cubist stuff, or even likes it? It’s all well and good to say “He could have painted traditional stuff expertly if he wanted to”, and that’s obviously true, but it still doesn’t explain what the cubist stuff is all about. I can look at a Monet or a Van Gogh, and even though it’s not a photographically realistic rendition of the subject, I can understand what the artist was trying to convey, and why he made the choices he did. Perhaps there is more to “get” in Picasso’s paintings, but can’t anyone explain what that more is, without simply saying “do a web search” or “read a book”?
The paintings aren’t famous just because they’re different, there’s got to be some sort of truth about the human experience that is revealed through these paintings, right?
I want to know how you guys “get” Picasso, not how a lot of experts say he’s great; I don’t doubt that.
(Sorry, that came out much bitchier than I intended, so if you could just pretend I said it in a nicer way, I’d appreciate it;))
Well, I like Picasso’s cubist work a lot, but it’s on a complete gut level, so I’m not going to be much help on why I think it’s good. Frankly I prefer it to his earlier, more conventional work. Why I like it is an emotional response. I find it deeply satisfying. There’s a sort of ordered chaos that speaks to me more visually than purely representational art. The way form and space interact in his cubist work is really strong to me. His paintings seem to convey emotion with an exuberant energy sometimes absent from more traditional representational art. It’s not always or even mostly happy emotion, just strong emotion. As I said, they work for me on a gut level, and I do credit having lots of prints of early twentieth century art around as a kid for my taste in it, rather than some technical understanding of his genius.
Notice that Picasso was fourteen when he started on “the first communion”. Fourteen.
I LOVE the cubist stuff on a purely aesthetic level. I’m not a fan of realism, and I get bored very easily (unfortunately) at works of the great artists. I know this may sound weird, and I feel really bad for saying this, but Picasso and Kandinsky and their ilk hit me on a more visceral level than Michaelangelo and DiVinci. While I do see the beauty of that art, it doesn’t appeal to me like abstraction does.
I don’t even consider Picasso to be particularly modern or that his work is incomprehensible. I look at his work, and I love the colors, the shapes, the arrangements and I like the ideas, the skewed/multiple perspectives, the reduction of form, etc. I could intellectualize Picasso, but I don’t need to. To me, it simply looks beautiful, much better than that damn “first communiun”-type Picasso painting linked to earlier.
I guess my philosophy is, hey, I know what the world looks like. Show me something completely different. I don’t want realism.
blowero, I’m no expert, so what yu’re getting is a very uninformed opinion, but I’ll give it a go anyway.
Firstly, I should say that I’m somewhat like pulykamell. When I see something like a Picasso, I mostly like it simply for aesthetic reasons. Like, ‘hey, that’s cool, he makes stuff look like what it isn’t.’
But I’ve chosen a Picasso I’m familiar with, and I’ll try and explain what I see in it beyond that.
Here is Picasso’s Weeping Woman.
Now, obviously this is a painting of a woman crying. Just as obviously, it isn’t a realistic portrayal of a woman crying. But we still understand the emotion in the image, and I think this is a result of the way he’s painted the picture. Look at the eyes for a start. If this was a photograph, we would be unable to see the eye on the right of the picture. But he’s shown us both eyes, which, to me, makes it feel like we’re looking the woman right in the face. She seems to be staring right at us, and those eyes have seen something ghastly. She’s completely distraught. The way she’s looking at us almost makes me feel like she’s asking us to do something about whatever it that has upset her. Of course, we can’t, which intensifies the emotion. We’re just as helpless as she is.
Now look at her hands. They aren’t in any spot in particular, but are represented by fingery type things all over her face. Sometimes it looks like she’s praying, at other times she looks like she’s covering her mouth to mute her sobs. Maybe she’s just clutching the air out of grief. That he’s painted her doing all of these things seems to further emphasise her sorrow and her helplessness. She doesn’t know what to do, and it’s like she’s doing all of these things at once, or maybe in quick succession.
Then there’s the blue spiky area below her eyes - with the points of the spikes coming from her eyes. These seem less like individual tears, but rather a whole flood of tears. The blueness emphasises this. And the spikiness makes it seem really uncomfortable - maybe even painful. And those spikes even turn into her facial features - becoming her nose, shaping her mouth, like the pain of the situation has literally contorted her face.
Like I said, I’m not at all trained in art, and I don’t know a whole lot about Picasso or cubism. That’s just what I get from that painting. I feel like he’s not painting what he sees, but what the subject is feeling. And in this case, I think that’s pretty powerful.
I’ll join in and do Weeping Woman too. Nothing wrong with gex gex’s take on it, but everyone sees differently, right?
What I think is cool is that the woman is well-dressed/coifed/made-up, with a stylish hat and a suit jacket with those big shoulder pads they used to wear. But, underneath the elegant, artificial surface, what is revealed? The monochrome ghastly blue/grey of a bony skull and corpse teeth. Grief strips away our put-on face and reveals the elemental, the reality of death and despair, the bleak colorless cold of comfortless wailing that doesn’t care about appearances, even though maybe the woman still does, half-way.
The ability to put that thought into a separate, jarring element of the painting (the grey “spiky” part) gives us the emotional divide in a way a more conventional painting would not.
Regarding the posts of **gex gex ** and Humble Servant, excellent posts both.
I think this illustrates why Picasso himself declined to explain his artwork. He has been quoted as saying that he never tried to get people to understand it, that they either understood it or they didn’t according to their capacity.
I think he was smart enough to realize that different people will read different things into it if left to their own devices, rather than everyone having the same take on it, which they would if he had explained it.