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The Art of Picasso
I don’t know art. I’m not even sure I know what I like. But the simple fact that I don’t understand it is reason enough to study the matter. This past month I had the opportunity to visit Barcelona. While I was there I went through the Picasso museum. If you’re looking for the elusive dividing line between art and supercilious nonsense Picasso is a good man to study.
Man in a Beret
This was painted by Picasso at age 14. This? This is clearly art, and good art too. A photograph tells you what a guy looks like. A portrait does that, but (if it’s executed well) it tells you something about the subject’s character. This guy has had a hard life. He’s not to impressed with anything anymore, or anyone, especially this punk kid painting his picture.
At fourteen Picasso was painting pretty much what people told him to paint. Much like a teenager with political opinions, he hasn’t latched onto that style because it’s how he wants to paint, it’s just all he knows. These next two paintings are done in the impressionist style.
Margot
The Dwarf
Again, these are clearly art. There’s something complex about beauty going on here. On the top is Margot. She’s clearly beautiful, but I look at her and my instincts scream “DANGER!”. She’s the kind of girl who will snap your soul in half and suck out the marrow. Now look at the dwarf on the bottom. By the rouge on her cheeks she’s trying to be beautiful. By her stance and her expression she knows it’s not working. Even so, I’d rather talk with her than Margot.
Once Picasso discovered cubism he never looked back. This is a painting of his balcony. In the museum they had a photograph of that balcony; even a dullard like myself could look at it and say “I understand!”. He kept pigeons in hutches, you can see them on the left side of the picture. The view is out to the sea.
This is another painting of that scene, and another. In all there are nine of them.
Imagen 019
He painted that balcony nine times over about a week. What can we tell from those pigeons? Start with the obvious; they look like inflated hospital gloves. Evidently he doesn’t much care to make them look realistic, just enough to say “there’s a pigeon here”. Even so, you can always tell what the pigeons are doing. If you’ve spent any time watching pigeons you recognize the motions even with the hand turkey drawing quality. The shape of the balcony doesn’t change. Look at the curve of the arch; it’s remarkably consistent considering the other elements.
I think what’s going on here — and I’d like to remind you of that statement from the start where I don’t know art — I think that Picasso is trying to convey the essense of the picture and discard the inessentials. In a sense that happens in all of art; go back to the man in the beret; his clothes (aside from the eponymous hat) are shapeless and void. The light clearly shows his expression but doesn’t tell us a thing about what he’s wearing, or the background, or anything else. I think cubist Picasso has determined the form of the pigeon to be superfluous, that the essential ‘pigeonness’ is what he needs to convey. You get that quite a bit more from the motions of the bird than the physical form; it looks much like any other bird but moves differently. Take another look at that arch; the shape of the curve is much the same, but little care is taken for where it stops and starts. The pigeon hutches are scrawled in there like variables in a computer program. Dimension roost. Set contents of roost = pigeon.
I think, what happened, Picasso went mad. I understand the psych boys don’t like the general terms for these things, but I think the human mind is far too complex to specify like they want. I think when Picasso went to cubism his brain snapped in such a way that he saw a different perspective on reality. Some things are important, other things are not. He’s depicting what he really things is important. The pigeonness of the pigeons. The ugliness inherent in cubism acts as a caustic to scrape away anything that’s not important.
So what are we to say about cubism or modern art in general? You and I, we can pass judgment on it without muttering the shibboleths about how creative these people are because we don’t know art. Art, any art, any medium, is attempting to communicate truth. In that sense I’m willing to concede that cubism is art. But modern art is bad at conveying truth precisely because it doesn’t make sense to schlubs like me. You can argue that the puzzle it inherently presents demands attention, that solving the puzzle teaches you more than just a surface meaning. It’s a very powerful strategy when it works; I found contemplating those pigeons rewarding. However, the simple truth is I don’t respect most people enough to wade through their malarkey to see if there’s a pearl of wisdom buried in there. I’ll take the time to study Picasso because I’m convinced that he’s a genius. I’ve got no reason to believe that everyone else trying this is a con artist.
And frankly, I’ve only got so much time for Picasso either. One artist isn’t the world. The classical paintings, the stuff that looks like stuff, works precisely because it is beautiful. Beautiful isn’t the right word. Accessible? Sounds too patronizing. It works because the painting is interesting to look at even before you’re sussing out the deep meanings. Maybe you never get there consciously. Maybe the conscious understanding isn’t so important. In the end I still can’t see how cubism is a patch on the classical styles.
You and I are also capitalists. Measured on that scale, when I went though the gift shop I bought a post card of the Man in the Beret, and none of the others.
Published in Culture
Communicate truth? I’d rather say “express truth,” and some of those expressions communicate more effectively than do others.
BTW, wonderful post!
I’ll quibble a bit and say that they don’t “make” cosmos. They expose it.
This sentence goes on just a bit too long, but I think you’ve identified the problem with what is called modern art (I’d call it post-modern non-art). It isn’t that it’s ugly. I’ve heard some people claim that art has to have some kind of elevating effect on the soul, or call the mind to higher things, or some-such, and that’s not my beef with modern art, either. As you suggest, art is a form of communication, and much of modern art refuses to communicate. We’re told it has meaning, but it usually turns out to be the kind of meaning we’re told is there, if only we could see the pattern in the Emperor’s new clothes.
So you’re not a schlub. You’re just not gullible.
I should add I’m not talking about Picasso, really. I’m talking about the Jackson Pollock paint splatter stuff, or Rothco.
Disagreement on this doesn’t seem urgent to me, because if they expose it, it still means, everyone else cannot do it & is needy in an existential way. The question endures: Who really believes this?
The wife and I went to a Picasso exhibit in Toronto a few years ago. After a while, and especially after looking at a weird, distorted figure that the program described as a “beautiful woman,” I decided I hated it all. It was just relentlessly ugly. I was ready to leave. So I guess I have to admit that art has an effect on me!
Art exists so that artists can feel superior to graphic designers, who actually work for a living. It is also good for modern aristocrats to feel superior to the mortals who live around them.
In all seriousness, most modern art feels like virtue signalling.
My husband’s test is whether the piece looks like it took some time and the artist thought about it first. And had to be a good craftsman to execute. Seems to work for writing too.
I had never heard about Picasso and African art. Good tip. For me, that explains lots.
Apparently he had gone to the Trocadero Museum which housed anthropological items. He said that it changed him. But that museum was demolished in the 1930’s so I don’t know what he might have seen on his visit.
Great post, Dr. Rock. My take on art/music/humor is pretty much summed up in one sentence: If you have to explain it, it isn’t.
Hey! I took Art Appreciation in college. (I had two more hours to go for my Humanities requirement.) I may be a Philistine, but I’m an educated Philistine, thank you very much!
The wheels started to come off of the trolley with the Post-Impressionists. Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain” was supposed to be a joke. It became his most famous piece, and he had to spend the rest of his life defending it. Probably made him a little crazy. Or maybe just a little crazier.
I used to feel this way about Mondiran, but I took a class where they showed the evolution of his art. While I still don’t find it to be remarkable or of merit, it was interesting to see the style develop over time and what he refined it into.
Crudely put, what technique in representational art is about is how to fool the eye so that the brain interprets a flat image in a sufficiently similar manner to the way it would respond to a three dimensional subject to “recognize” the subject.
Further input for European and American artists in Picasso’s era:
• Anthropologists and collectors of primitive art were providing proof that the European conventions were not the only possibilities of how to map a human being onto a page or carve an object to represent aspects of him that seemed important to the artist
• Sophisticated Asian art traditions did likewise; minimalist techniques explored the lower limit of “how much detail does it take to depict (to use Picasso as an example) “pigeonness.” Impressionists began to mine these lodes.
• Cubism can be understood as a very low tech exploration of aspects of how the human brain perceives objects; mostly it also divorces “recognition” and the subjective experience we label as “that’s beautiful.”
• The Mondrians of the world went at it from the other direction: can we elicit the “that’s beautiful” or “that pleases me/lightens my heart”/etc. response to geometric shapes and patterns of color that are as far as possible from tickling our pattern recognition engines so as to allow us to say “that’s a…” Say, for example, a pigeon.
• Renaissance and Enlightenment experiments with prisms and cameras obscura reinforced one mode of thinking about light
• In the early 20th century, along comes quantum mechanics. People who ran in academic/intellectual circles began to get the idea that light and time weren’t what we had long assumed they were. They mostly couldn’t do the math, but the ideas were widely discussed.
I suspect that those of us who don’t paint don’t sufficiently appreciate the extent to which paintings which challenge an artist’s way of perceiving the world can get under his skin. Here’s a painting by a man trained from early childhood in Chinese calligraphy and classical painting (ink on paper) who, after half a century of working in this mode, went to Paris and saw the impressionists. My apologies for the distorted photo, I didn’t want to break the back of the book this is in. Note the size at the bottom, by the way. Does anybody else think he was, among other things, thinking of some water lilies?
It has happened in classical Chinese painting that a copy is considered to be better than the original.
Most “modern art” museums merit a spittoon in every room. It’s particularly grating that tax dollars are devoted to such nonsense and ugliness.
But there is actually a lot of excellent art being produced in the modern era. It just isn’t being made for museums or decoration. Rather, it is being made for cinema and video games; or sold as trinkets by online vendors and country stores. Like the great art of ancient times, it is crafted to suit tastes and interests other than only the artists’ own.
Speaking as an artist, artists need that influence. They need to be drawn out of themselves and challenged, like any human being. Devotion/service — not to just anything, but to something worthy of that devotion — pushes art beyond the mundane to quality and innovation.
In commercial fields, modern art takes many forms.
The designers of Assassin’s Creed: Origins chose romantic realism for their portrayal of ancient Egypt.
Sea of Thieves artists chose a detailed cartoon style in hope that, like World of Warcraft, the environments will continue to impress years after graphical processing exceeds the limitations of hardware at the time of the game’s launch.
Whole cities and towns are being crafted from the imaginations of modern artists with balanced attention to beauty, function, implied history, future expansion, and production costs. Here is just one of more than a dozen “maps” in For Honor.
Keep an eye out for great modern art. But don’t look in museums. Look in screen captures and collections of concept art.
I am particularly excited about modern art this week because I was viscerally introduced to the emerging possibilities of virtual reality (VR). Since buying a Gear VR device that employs my phone for rudimentary VR, I have been able to explore 3-dimensional experiences of both real and imaginary environments. Imagine standing in any of the settings shown above. Today, that is possible. VR tour experiences can be crafted in mere hours from games such as these.
Very good point. Different patrons these days.
Where were you going?
The same thing can be said of Picasso and many, many artists as they begin to study art seriously and then gradually refine what is to become their own particular style. Believe it or not, there was a time when Rembrandt was considered controversial!
My favorite Epic Rap Battle (love when he gives his full name):
I was on this staircase that never seemed to be going anywhere. No wait, that was the Escher museum.
Barcelona for a week, then a cruise on the Meditteraean. Liviorno, Rome, Naples, Dubrovnik (Croatia; surprisingly one of the highlights of the trip), Corfu (Greece), Messina, then back to Barcelona.
I find modern art to be lacking in at least two of these in any one instance. Here’s Barron on Beauty (iconography) as a means of evangelization (hope this works…):
👍
I mentioned VR as an emerging setting for artistic photography. Here is a 360-degree screenshot I made of the Library of Alexandria as imaginatively recreated by Ubisoft in Assassin’s Creed: Origins. In VR, this can be viewed from ground level as if you were a person on the street.
kuula.co/post/7ltZy
Here is another I made of the history-inspired viking longhouse called Dragonsreach in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim by Bethesda Game Studios. It’s an older game, but it has aged well.
kuula.co/post/7ltZR
I’ve come to suspect that that is a white lie oft told to people who are objectively ugly. It’s something we wish were true; it seems more befitting our ideals of meritocracy and equality than to admit the harsh truth that some people are gifted with natural beauty while others, well, not so much…
The Roger Scruton Vimeo video is THE BEST! I watch it every couple of months just to remind myself how good it is.
“I’m dropping bombs like this is Guernica”
That’s me, being a patron of the arts and all.
Love me some fine arts. ty, OP.