My favorite Picasso anecdote involves Guernica. Picasso was living in Paris when the Germans occupied the city. A Gestapo officer came to Picasso’s studio. He saw a reproduction of Guernica and asked Picasso, “Did you do that?”
Picasso answered, “No, you did.”
Picasso had his bad moments but he gets points for that exchange (assuming it really happened).
Yes I’ve seen Guernica when it was still in NYC. I think much, much less of Dali as an artist than Picasso, and have posted often that he had no vision, just a crafty business model. But Premonition of Civil War is a better take than Guernica.
(and as I’ve also posted repeatedly, neither of them could carry Goya’s jockstrap)
He could do two coats in one morning.
Dunno about the poetry–my guess is Sayers was just using the trendy buzz word of the day–but I see cubism as something a little different, like looking at a round globe on a flat Mercator map and noticing that Greenland is freakin’ distorted! (David Byrne’s alum cover for More Songs About Buildings & Food by Talking Heads kind of touches on this.)
I saw an exhibition in Vienna in about, hmm, 1999 or 2000, that had a lot of Picasso’s “outtakes” in it, for lack of better description, and was marketed as that.
It was fascinating to see all the rejects and, at the same time, I realized how much utter crap he did produce. But it was heartening to see an artist I respect and admire going through such an explorative process in his work and not worrying about everything he made being perfection.
Thanks for the input, everyone. I think I’ll go and take a look; you’ve managed to pique my interest. You may be right that his body of work will resonate more with me when taken as a whole and contextualised. If I don’t like it, I’ll just pop over to the 17-19th century galleries. Although seeing Guernica is still on bucket list.
Baal Houtham, I really appreciate your thought processes and I do see what you’re saying. The elements you point out are indeed very interesting. Would I be correct in saying, though, that your appreciation of Picasso is more of an intellectual engagement rather than a visceral aesthetic enjoyment?
Okay, Krokodil, you got me. I’ve not seen Sleep before and you’re right. It is hard not to like. Who knew Picasso had the touch of whimsy in him
Picasso was famous and prolific enough that there were numerous forgeries of his work made in his lifetime. Some people would take a questionable work to him to have him authenticate it or not.
But people gradually found that this was a bad idea. If Picasso liked a work, he’d say it was his, regardless of whether or not he had actually made it. And if he didn’t like a work, he’d say it was a forgery even if he had actually made it.
In your opinion.
It may be your favourite and no-one doubts its “importance” but making distinctions such as “greatest” is meaningless in the context of art. (plus you have the problem defining what counts as modern art and what time period you are discussing)
FTR, I haven’t seen the piece in person so can’t give a personal opinion though I am a fan of his works of that period.
I get aesthetic enjoyment out of the individual elements more often than the overall image. It usually takes an intellectual effort to focus on the parts rather than the whole, but once I’m focused, the rewards are there in (unrivalled?) profusion.
A revisit to the paintingthis morning has the blue hand being even more interesting than before. The face has some things going on that I hadn’t noticed:
The profile eye and mouth are almost the same shape.
The nice hat ribbon forms a unit with the white band going through the eye.
The trick that makes the right angle bend in the chair look flat, is that it aligns with the lines of the curtain. Not a profound idea, except that Picasso sort of pioneered that notion.
The hair is (I think) a stock Picasso motif, but it’s simple and effective.
In reference to the bolded part: that’s a good point about how it can be difficult to approach modern art in a fair way. I started to write a post wondering how much of that people put on themselves, and to what extent a fan of say, Picasso, might actually think someone is a figurative Neanderthal…but then after some thought I may have answered my own question.
The answer (I think) is that most people I know who appreciate abstract art probably went through a period of self-congratulation when they started to ‘get’ it, particularly if it happened during teen and college years. And I think if you’ve been around that self-congratulatory person, it colors how you think of modern art, and may even make you suspicious (as we’ve seen in Dope threads) that it’s all a put-on.
And the underlying problem is that modern art is often an exercise in puzzle-solving: what is the painter trying to depict here? What’s being evoked? And the more explanation that’s needed, the more hocus-pocus it sounds, and the more it takes on the appearance of mass hypnosis. And of course, not everyone is interested in puzzle-solving.
Some of us are, however. My first exposure to any of this was a hippy-dippy 1970s PBS daytime college show where a guy spent half an hour deconstructing Girl Before a Mirror. I think I was around 12, and I went from thinking it was a goofy-looking picture to thinking it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen. Was that my first taste of Modern-Art Flavored Kool-Aid? I’m open to that. Was I self-congratulatory? No, that would come in college when I was led to Cezanne.
The point to all this is that we do give people reasons to believe we think them Neanderthals. First by patting ourselves on the backs…but also by getting all excited about something that’s sometimes so difficult to explain that it sounds made-up.
Oh, and by saying Mark Rothko is good. Just sayin’. 
Of course in my opinion. There’s nothing else when it comes to subjectivity.
Not meaningless. “Up for debate”, sure. But hardly meaningless
ETA: and it’s not my favourite. I prefer Starry Night, Nighthawks, I & The Village, just to name some.
I didn’t say “modern art” - I very deliberately said “Modern Art”, and I have no problem defining it if you like.
The impression I got, from visiting the Picasso Museum in Barcelona, was that Picasso could paint “proper paintings”* absolutely perfectly by his mid-teens, so he spent the rest of his life experimenting, trying to take his art in various different directions, and creating a number of distinct styles.
I can appreciate his motivations (no-one would want to spend 70 years doing something they already perfected at age 15) and his imagination and creativity, but I don’t like a single thing he painted after he started to use a more abstract style. Guernica is often referred to as one of the greatest pieces of art ever, but to me it just looks like a child’s graffiti. I can’t see any skill in it at all.
I’m not trying to say that Picasso’s work is crap, just that I don’t like it. But I haven’t found any artist more recent than Manet who I do like.
(* I can’t think of a better way to word this, but you know what I mean.)
Picasso has some good stuff but yes most of it is not.
I dislike when people respond to his technique negatively in regards to how skilled or unskilled it looked. You can train any idiot to do realistic art in any medium. copying reality is easy. Manipulating mediums to communicate in interesting, beautiful and unexpected ways is what is good about art.The rest is mostly craft. Like the guy who learned to juggle or palm objects, seems amazing. It took hard work to learn, but it is not amazing. If your taste demands those skills be incorporated in art for you to appreciate it that’s fine. But don’t imply that cherry soda is inferior because it doesn’t taste like root beer.
Picasso doesn’t really hit me in the right places so I could go the rest of my life without looking at his stuff again, though I like some of his prostitute cubist stuff, but that’s cause I’m an odd perv, so whatever lol. (Also I like the human body and the faces on some of those works are actually pretty eerie and otherwise intriguing.)
But you put forward your judgement as if it were a fact, not so.
My point was that apply the label “the greatest” to any work is meaningless and I stand by that.
OK.
I’m not sure what you meant to type here, can you clarify? and feel free to post a definition of whatever it is you do mean.
That movie was made when Picasso was in his seventies.
Natasha Staller’s book Sum of All Destructions starts with the scene from that film where Picasso is starting with a drawing of flowers, then some more lines and it becomes fish, and in couple of more strokes and it is a turkey and then on for drawing to transform into horned head.
Apparently the key to Picasso from early days is a stream of constant metamorphoses and it is central to invention of Cubism.
I’m still reading that book and it takes a while b/c it is dense you need to go off on tangent and explore something that is only referenced to understand how and why it might be incorporated in Picasso’s world.
At this point I’m just fascinated but still trying to figure out why. The exhibition that OP is referring will be the richest Picasso showing in Toronto ever and it’s scheduled for sometime in spring of 2012.
Hi Mr. Bubble. McDibble has already responded to this point, but I wanted to add a bit. Your point is one I seen made many time, and it’s usually not worth making (IMO).
When someone comments on the quality of art, the default assumption should be that it is their opinion. It shouldn’t be assumed that they believe there is a way to objectively compare the quality of various works of art.
I vaguely remember a college teacher (maybe it was in an art criticism class…) saying that you should never use the expressions,* I believe* or in my opinion because those disclaimers aren’t needed. That’s a little hardnose for my taste, and I like to occasionally acknowledge my fallibility, but McDibble’s casual use of “greatest” did not need an “IMHO”.
The scene starts at 1:20 - YouTube
Not so. Are you twelve, that every statement about art has to be prefaced by “IMHO” for you?
Subjective =/= meaningless.
“Modern Art” is a specific period and collection of styles of art but “modern art” is just art that is modern.The precise boundaries of Modern Art i.e. The specific start and end points are slightly debatable but generally understood. Not all modern art is Modern Art. Modern Art is art that has Modernist styling.
Art that dates from the Salon des Refusés in 1863 to 1973 (my personal cut-off, guess why?), but it really starts dying with the post-War rise of the Post-Modernists and Process and Concept. So you could make a case for anywhere from the fourties onwards.
I recall a story where an art dealer friend of Picasso’s asked him to separate some forgeries from his actual work. When he put one of his own paintings among the fakes, his friend protested that he had actually seen Picasso painting the picture in question. The painter replied that he could fake a Picasso as well as any other shady artist.
