For me? of course not. I’m clear that such claims are merely one person’s opinion and hold no intrinsic worth.
I stressed it in this case because you responded to criticism of Guernica by saying
And I thought that was unnecessarily snippy and condescending. Hence my own response.
I don’t claim that it is but I do say that “greatest artwork” would be a meaningless term, not useful at all.
I didn’t use capital letters as I wasn’t aware that “Modern Art” existed as a proper noun.
and therefore not precise at all
well, we could all guess but clarity from you would be nicer for everyone. We get it, you know more then us about art history, you win. It would be better if you just state what that cut-off is and why you chose it.
Sleep is sweet! Either I’ve never seen it before, or it’s never registered. The way the necklace changes color is like a slow guitar solo where the musician holds a note for few beats and then hits the perfect note to break your heart.
The necklace couldn’t have stayed red without cutting off the head, and the simple unapologetic color change is the perfect note.
And while Picasso made a living cutting heads in half, in Sleep it makes perfect metaphorical sense. The top of the head is half gone; the bottom of the head intact. Whether or not it was intentional, it works.
Yeah, but there’s ways to do that which don’t involve placing an ear where an eye should be.
I still haven’t seen a Picasso piece I’ve liked: the early jobs are “postcards” (and not particularly well-drawn if you ask me, I sort of need a piece to be well-drawn before I’ll even consider whether it’s well painted), then he went monochromatic and many of his works from these eras remind me of Greco disciples (that is, the distortion without either the strength or the superb drawing skills), then he started putting body parts in the wrong places, eventually he reached Cubism.
Mind you: the only cubist whose work I like is Juan Gris; Picasso’s work and me just don’t match.
“Introduction to Drawing” was compulsory in 9th grade. We studied some color theory, learned how to use different shapes, drew things from reality and copied lots of pictures from the book. There was a piece which was optional, copying a Picasso drawing with one eye thereabouts of a cheekbone’s crest and the ear almost underneath. About half the class hated it and wasn’t able to hand it in; our drawings would be more anatomically-correct than the original no matter how hard we tried. The other half of the class did hand the drawing in, having copied it with one eye thereabouts of a cheekbone’s crest and the ear almost underneath.
The first day of 10th grade’s optional “Drawing”, we realized that piece had been a test. The students who had not handed in the Picasso were the same ones to sign up for Drawing.
There is a terrific British Series from a few years back called This Is Modern Art narrated by a likeable chap named Matthew Collings. He is wry, witty and knowledgeable without being precious.
In the first of the 6 episodes he talks about the appeal of Picasso, Pollock and Warhol and to my utter surprise he quite convinced me that he was right.
I don’t think they are available on DVD but fortunately there are good copies on Youtube. Episode One is in 5 parts and starts here.
I promise you it’s great viewing even if it is 12 years old.
Maybe I’ll unknowingly bump into the OP at the AG when I go to see the Picasso exhibition.
A raised eyebrow and dismissal at someone calling one of Picassos’ world-renowned masterpieces “spinning his wheels” is hardly “unnecessarily snippy”. It might be read as condescending, didn’t intend it to be. Incredulous, yes, but that’s not the same thing
Of course it’s useful - it could serve as a nucleus for debate or as a shibboleth for dismissal, at the least. That’s still hardly “meaningless”.
…but you’re still going to lecture me on it, aren’t you…
Precise enough to know where Guernica sits in it, at any rate. And what, “From 1863 to 1973” isn’t precise enough for you?
I don’t know, I’m not sure I want to tell you, now…
On a board that has people like capybara in it? Hardly.
Why 1973? Because Picasso died in 1973.
Because it’s still possible for one’s opinion to be wrong.
I may have been hyperbolic with the “Greatest work of Modern Art bar none” statement, but to call any work as outright significant as Guernica just “spinning the wheels” is not hyperbole, it’s something else entirely.
Picasso may have entered a wheel-spinning phase late in life (I don’t think so). But 1937 was not it.
Perhaps my opinion is based on the gap between Guernica and Guernica. It’s not about ‘art,” but Guernica is fair game for criticism beyond its artistic merit due to the context of it’s creation. Picasso did not simply paint it with the title “Nightmare,” or whatever.
The Spanish Republic commissioned the most famous Modern artist in the world to do a painting for their pavilion at the Paris International Exposition, which was a few steps from Nazi Germany’s Fascist-Classicism monstrosity of a pavilion. The Republicans needed Picasso, and Picasso needed the Republicans. It was an example of a common occurrence: cynical, self-serving deals done ostensibly in the name of a good cause. Why not use the International Exposition to expose what the Nazis really were?
Guernica recycled ideas seen in drawings by Picasso done long before the bombing. (this is: hack work, aka “spinning his wheels”) It is set at night; the bombs fell in the afternoon. The Spanish Republic lasted a few more months, yet Picasso dined out on Guernica for the rest of his life. Picasso was the wealthiest as well as the most famous artist of the first half of the 20th C., but he never sent a single peseta to the town of Guernica.
Was Picasso the greatest artist of all time? He was certainly the most famous, and, by golly, that’s one and the same for most good folks. But he was not a Modern great war artist like Otto Dix.
**(disturbing images warning)**The great war art of Picasso’s era was done with cameras. this and this are more powerful that Guernica. Certainly has had more propagana effect.
So - Slithy Tove, you don’t dispute the powerful impact the painting had at the time as a commentary and spotlight at the Paris International Exposition (which I must refer to as the P.I.E. ;))? Instead, you are saying that it doesn’t work as art because it used old Picasso tropes, is not as good as the emerging “you are there” war photography and because Picasso didn’t walk his talk by actually supporting Guernica the town?
I can’t speak for Slithy Tove. But I think he’s making the same point that has been made about Holocaust movies. Just because a work of art is based on a serious subject doesn’t automatically make it a serious work of art.
Totally fair concept - but Guernica was lauded as great art both at its introduction and more or less since then. I get that, oh, a movie like **Life is Beautiful **can generate a buzz at the time as a new look at the Holocaust, garner an Oscar or two, but in hindsight, maybe not be all that great - but that is not what Guernica’s history has been, has it?
I am another who isn’t really into what Picasso did. His very early stuff (the realistic stuff) is very well done and I like it a lot more… In general there is very little abstract art that I actively enjoy, aesthetically. Some, but not much. And not Picasso.
What, you mean the all of four days between the bombing and Picasso starting the preliminary sketches? Or the fact that he was commisioned to do a painting before the bombing happened?
Is your complaint that the link between the painting and the specific bombing is only happenstance?
Picasso hardly “needed” the Republicans. If he’d never painted Guernica, he’d still be one of the great Modern Artists. Plus he went on to other great things afterwards. Guernica may be his greatest work, but it was hardly the making of him.
Picasso didn’t work like that. He obsessed about one and/or other theme for years on end - harlequins, minotaurs, bulls, African masks - and the repeated imagery crops up in his works from that time period. But that’s not “spinning wheels”, that’s “thematic continuity”. Also cultural influence. Guernica is linked to the *Dream and Lie **of *Franco series, is linked to the Bulls series, is linked to the Minotauromachy
That’s why it’s a work of art, not a documentary photograph.
Because it was a fucking masterpiece!
Cite?
I do know he gave plenty to the Republican cause as a whole, anyway.
Got something to say to me, that you can’t say out straight?
And no-one here has claimed he was. Guernica is a great work of anti-war art. That doesn’t make Picasso the greatest anti-war artist.
For one thing, he was never so limited.
Those are certainly both horrible photos (I’d hesitate to call the second one “art”, though). But neither move me the way Guernica does. I’ve seen both bomb-burned people and people shot dead by army bullets, in the flesh, before I ever saw Guernica or those photos. The photos are just documentary. Good documentary, but then, so’s Triumph of the Will.
Guernica was something else. Transcendent.
Which of those photographs hangs as a repro in the lobby of the UN? Which do they sell T-shirts and posters of worldwide?
Sounds to me like your issue isn’t really with Guernica, the work of art, so much as it is with Picasso, the dick.
In which case, I have no quibble. Dude could be a dick.
Some opposing points of view are valid - “It’s not even in the top 5 of Picasso’s best work” would be valid. “I personally prefer realist works” might be, too. “Why isn’t it in colour” would not be. I’m afraid “Just spinning his wheels” falls on the latter side of validity for me, when you look at how Picasso worked. It’s not like the creation of Guernica wasn’t very well documented by Maar.
I, personally, am not trying to saying anything at this point. I am trying to clarify something it appears **Slithy Tove **is saying. I was trying to understand if s/he is looking to assert:
That Guernica was never a big deal - but the noise around its showing at the time and its reputation today would argue otherwise.
Or
That Guernica was lauded at the time because it was a hot artist painting on a hot topic during a hot time, but now that we have decades of perspective, it is not really “all that” as a work of art. But it’s current reputation suggests otherwise - or maybe that we are just perpetuating a foolish point of view that got established back in the heat of the time.
Or
The folks that liked it back then and still hold it up today as a great work of art on its own merits, a great political work of art and a masterpiece of Picasso’s just don’t get art.
Geepers, I haven’t been in such a swell art fight since undergrad days.
I don’t see any use in repeating my points, in that Picasso painted Guernica with pigments mixed with crocodile tears.
At roughly the same time that Picasso bestrode the art world, Lee Krasner recalled Jackson Pollock throwing down a book about Picasso in despair, crying “Dammit, this guy already’s done everything!” Everybody felt like that, but then they still went on to new things; leaving Picasso to, ahem, spin his wheels, to the delight of millionaires and government panels and dealers and all the rest of the value-inflators.
If an art historian in the publish-or-perish world of academia were to proper a big coffee table book “Picasso: the Mature Vision. Works from 1938-1973,” he or she would probably find a publisher. A blockbuster museum tour would do land office business. But…if that same historian proposed to compromise much of what was happening in the art world in 1938-1973 so as to give the last three decades of
Picasso’s life its due, his or her department chairman would come down on it like the payload from the Condor Legion.
Now that you brought back my undergrad memories, I recall those critique classes; where an art student with low self-esteem and bad skin would have to stand next to his or her work while it was verbally torn to shreds by the rest of the class. The instructor only offered protection in steering the criticism away from the ad hominem.
If, in painful defense, the student played the Wounded Faun in the Forest and said “Well, that’s just your opinion,” then the instuctor would pounce:
“You mean that’s just his personal opinion?”
“Yes!”
“Which is to say that you took it personally. Which is to say that if you only take criticism personally, you’ll never be able to take it constuctively, Mr. Tove.”
Unfortunately the world of art has been plagued by the "Emperors New Clothes " syndrome for most of the modern era.
If someone says that if you don’t understand/appreciate a certain genre/artist then you don’t understand art; then those who genuinlly don’t understand art but would like to, and those who maybe DO understand art but are scared of being left out in the cultural wilderness; will enthusiastically endorse and promote said artist/genre even though it/he has no real esthetic merit.
Picassos REAL expertise lay in being an accomplished self publicist.
He used to spread stories about himself that promoted his supposed genius, creativety and rebelliousness.
(I would not be stunned with amazement if the famous Guernica story was complete and utter B.S. as in reality he was not a very brave man, and indeed was very much the sycophant when speaking to people who could do him, or his artistic reputation real harm)
And he had plenty of willing collaborators who wanted to be seen in the “In” crowd, and receive some of the overflow adulation from the equally ignorant.
Yes Picasso could craft a workmanlike realistic depictional work, though he was anything but gifted in this discipline, but he turned to non depictional art as a way of disguising the fact that his artistic talent was never anything exceptional.
Lacking genuine creativety he turned to the bizarre, the experimental again and again in a desperate efort to gain (successfully as it turned out) notoriety.
The idea being if challenged that he could fall back on either, “You don’t understand the art”, or as a last resort, “It was an experiment that failed”.
After all nobody can be criticised for trying.
The fact is that he was a phony and true he started to believe his own B.S. after a while,
(he wasn’t exactly a strong character)
As an artist he was certainly no Van Goch, or for that matter, no Dali.
And yes I have seen his work in the real.
But with many, many millions invested in his work by big business today even the biggest heretic in the professional art world would be loathe to utter my sentiments if he wanted to keep his job.
As an individual Picasso was a liar, coward, sycophant and hypocrite.
Like his art weak and shallow, all image and no substance.
