The Musée National Picasso has been closed for renovation and a part of their collection has been touring. I’m thinking of going to one of the exhibitions (in Sydney now) as I am of the belief that paintings must be seen in person to truly appreciate them. One small problem: I don’t really get Picasso at all and his place in the art pantheon confounds me.
I like art in a layman way. I like the stories of the Renaissance paintings, the drama of the Baroque, the romance of Romanticism, have a soft spot for Claude Lorraine’s bucolic landscapes, adore Kandinsky (not so much his Bauhaus period). But Picasso? Picasso has always been just one huge WTF to me. Some of his early Cubist stuff looks interesting enough, and I’m keen on seeing them, but once it gets to his more lauded late-Cubist and Surrealist phase I’m bored and lost. Granted I’ve only seen reprints but nothing has worked for me emotionally. I’m not compelled to keep looking. I understand seeing Guernica, of which the reprints are unimpressive to me, in person is usually the Road to Damascus moment for people when it comes to Picasso. That’s not going to be happening any time soon, so I’ll have to make do with this sampling of some of his “lesser” works.
So, art Dopers, help enlighten me about Picasso. What is big deal? What is up with those damn ugly Surrealist paintings? Do the smaller, lesser know works have much more impact in person? Do you enjoy them on an aesthetic level or just appreciate them on an intellectual/historical level? Articles and links are welcome but please assume I know absolutely nothing about art history. For the record, Wikipedia has not been terribly edifying. It feels like I keep getting told he is important but not why.
My opinion is that Picasso was trying to incorporate movement into a static work. In life, you don’t look at a stationary object from a stationary vantage point. Viewers and the subjects of their view are both moving which means you’re constantly seeing something from different angles and focusing on different aspects of it in turn. Picasso was trying to combine all of these different views of something into a single image.
I am not any kind of an art historian but there is a 1956 film called “The mystery of Picasso” that has him creating art on camera. Worth checking out.
I am not going to get into the whole “what is and isn’t art” debate, but will tell you Picasso rolls off *my *knife, too. I like some of his earliest stuff, but anything after World War One you can keep.
And I don’t hate *all *modern art–that Modigliani fellow has done some nice stuff, and I can stomach Magritte and Miro, too.
Don’t try to overanalyze it. Just take it in, and see how you respond. No big deal if id doesn’t do anything for you, but I’d be surprised if you don’t find something to like in a large collection.
I was too lazy to get up to SF when it was in town, and I really regret it. That was a real opportunity (Picasso and Matisse).
(thank you everyone who has resisted posting the lyrics to that John Cale song)
Blue & Rose periods: wonderful. Picasso really took the lead set by Puvis de Chavannes and ran with it. Paintings of human beings, painted by a human being.
Cubism: Picasso and Braque worked out how to simultaneously show all the angles of a 3D object on a flat surface. Over on the other side of town, two sculptors were working on flattening out statues. Their names are lost to posterity.
The African masks and ancient Iberian influences were interesting, but Like The Rolling Stones or Led Zeppelin re-working Delta Blues, did it really improve on the original?
After the mid-1930’s, just spinning his wheels. That includes Guernica. “Oh shit, we better pull back on the Fascism, or Picasso’s going to go all painterly on our ass!”
Picasso. It took me a long time to appreciate the guy, but in the last ten years have come to understand that he deserves his reputation.
Oddly enough the turning point was reading a review of Prince that compared him to Picasso. The writer said (approximately) that every song had some fantastic stroke that was pretty much brilliant.
Picasso had more style variations than other famous artists. A Monet looks like a Monet, a Dali like a Dali. And Picasso’s work is often not pretty. To me a Van Gogh is lovely; a Rembrandt is lovely. But Picasso just pumped out tons of work, day after day for 60 years and when I look at a piece I can almost always see some idea in it that kicks me in the head.
The face and hat don’t do much for me, but the curtains are neat. Textured, alternating greens and then switch to orange. And now that I look at the hat again, it seems to have a band tying it around the head. Its a nice shape. Is this a clown?
The purple rounded shape cuts into the curtain in a good way, and cuts through the chair in a good way. The blue hand touching the blue stick and the orange stick is close to fascinating. The flat right-angle bend of the chair (?) on the left side is charming.
The painting is really just full of interesting touches… but I do have some trouble getting into it, because the subject’s face is off-putting.
But Picasso churned out images on this level (filled with fascinating touches, both bold and subtle) by the thousands.
I think this is kinda the point: Picasso was pretty much at the forefront of challenging many of the rules of “what is art?” when it comes to painting throughout the 20th century, or certainly up through the 50’s or so. Nowadays, after Soup Cans, preserved Cows in formaldehyde and crumpled paper in plastic cubes, the rules Picasso challenged may seem tame, but at the time challenging what colors to use, what perspectives to present (Cubism = “all of them” ;)), how should humans be rendered, how symbolism should be used, etc. - Picasso’s works challenged all of that. And, for the most part, his examples stand as quality artistic statements along with functioning as simple, provocative challenges…
There is nothing more hellish than trying to appreciate the work of someone who nearly everyone says is a genius, and is important, and if you don’t get it you’re a Neanderthal. Step one is to try to forget all that. Look at the art and see if anything about it speaks to you. If it does, you get it. If it doesn’t, you still get it, it just doesn’t float your boat.
My personal opinion is about the same as Slithy_Tove’s, except I maybe think a bit more highly of “Guernica” than he(?) does.
The traveling Picasso exhibit? I saw it last March in Richmond, VA. Do not hesitate to see it in person, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. If you have any (understandable) doubts about whether Picasso was worth his salt, viewing this exhibit will certainly answer it for you one way or the other. I think he was.
Was he all he’s hyped up to being? Yeah, but not every painting from every period does it for me. How could it? He wasn’t afraid to go down the occasional dead end path just to see where it would take him. If that harmed his batting average now and then, well, we must wean ourselves off statistics to enjoy each ball game.
I’m pretty partial to the Synthetic Cubism period. He wasn’t part of the Dada movement, but I get a sense he was feeling a little competitive with them, and Three Musicians really blows most of their stuff out of the water.
I’m not wild about a lot of the Classicism and Surrealism stuff–if the Dora Maar portraits tell us anything, it’s that he had some deep-rooted hostility towards the woman–but how can you not like Girl Before the Mirror or Sleep?
I’m not crazy about Cubist paining, but, OK, it’s a style of paining in which you show blocky outlines of three-dimensional shapes. Got it. But, I was reading Dorothy L. Sayers’ short story The Man With the Copper Fingers (published in 1928), and there is a reference to “Masterman, the Cubist poet”. How in hell do you write poetry using blocky shapes?
Wordman is right when he says “Picasso was pretty much at the forefront of challenging many of the rules of ‘what is art?’ when it comes to painting throughout the 20th century.” As such, he is probably the best single representative of what had become a highly diversified art movement in the 20th century (no dominant style, and not even a dominant competition of styles like the French 19th century painters Delacroix vs. Ingres).
IMO his work–more than any previous artist–must be appreciated in the context of his own career and the art world at that time. He suffers because he doesn’t have many “standalone” masterpieces–paintings you can just look at and recognize the brilliance. Three Musicians, for example, is interesting in its own right but only becomes a masterpiece when you see it as the culmination of his earlier cubist work. And it’s difficult to see the complex genius of Guernica unless you are somewhat familiar with the surrealism of the time–and even they you may be less than impressed.
