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Sometimes I'm afraid anything that's not cartooned is beyond my ken . . . |
Posted on 02/28/2007 6:55:38 AM PST by Aquinasfan
I don't like Picasso either. I think you meant 'rubbish', though.
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Sometimes I'm afraid anything that's not cartooned is beyond my ken . . . |
artrenewal.com rules! Glad to see others know of it.
I think viewing a Picasso is akin to listening to Stravinsky. I know that he is considered a "master", but it just doesn't appeal to me.
Picasso's only surviving real-life work is in the custody of NBC News. Just look at the way the head, nose, and jaw are all disjointed. Classic Picasso work!
Art Ping
More info here:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/02/28/npicasso128.xml
Thanks for the ping, woofie. I confess to not being much of a fan of Picasso, though he unquestionably understood the crafts of drawing and painting. I'm not sure how seriesly even he took his stuff.
I went to the Met in NYC last week and saw some of it in person there along with some Matisse's and Kandinsky's. Mainly I liked the 2 Hopper paintings out of that collection.
OTOH, the industrial stuff and utensils, etc. that are in the Met are beautiful.
Of course, I agree with you.
Maya and the Doll is a wonderful little piece. It is more discernible than many of his works and has character as well as a wonderful use of shape and color.
For those that simply dismiss Cubism as crazy modernism, if you really want to learn something about why modern art is so abstract and how it developed, you can check my homepage for several online "lectures" to this end.
Essentially, once the camera was invented, artists were freed to do more inventive work. Yes, some realism is still fine work; but personally I think that edge between abstraction and realism is a fun and personal area to explore. And Picasso did some ground-breaking work in this area. Not all of his pieces are top notch, but I do like this Maya work, and I wonder who she was and under what circumstances he painted her.
No artist has seemed more of a sham to me than Picasso. Sure, he could paint, but so can lots of people.
With him, it was all about self promotion and "cult of personality".
His whole purpuse in painting was to meet chicks.
Intrigued by this post, I did a google search and found this fascinating article about Picasso and children that he painted, some of them his own. Maya was a child of his, and that may be a self-portrait of himself in her lap. Here is the article from 1995 in full.
When Picasso Painted Children
By Michael Lawton International Herald Tribune
Saturday, October 14, 1995
Picasso learned much from his children: as he got older, his drawings became more and more like theirs; he once told Henry Read at an exhibition of children's drawings: "When I was as old as these children, I could draw like Raphael. It's taken me many years to learn how to draw like these children."
.
Picasso had been virtually forced by his parents to go to art school, and the earliest piece in the exhibition "Picasso's World of Children," which consists of nearly 200 paintings, drawings and other works, is an 1895 drawing of a classical relief with lots of slightly bad-tempered cherubs. It is a masterly achievement for a 14-year-old, with perfect understanding of perspective, so that the figures almost jump out at you. But it's certainly more Raphael than Picasso.
.
At the other end of his career, in one of the most recent pictures, "Painter and Child" of 1969, he returns to the image of the child as cherub, with a mischievous little cupid-like figure snatching a brush from the old painter's palette and holding it up as if it were one of love's arrows. In between, the child has taken on many forms, but over the 76 years between the two works, Picasso has learned to let the child trick the artist into seeing the world with his eyes.
.
According to Werner Spies, the Picasso expert who wrote a book on the subject in 1994, and who has realized this "show of the book," there are thousands of works by Picasso that deal with childhood. Only in two periods do children almost disappear from his work. In one case, the reason is fairly clear — how do you identify a child in a Cubist painting? One attempt shown here, "Girl with Hoop" of 1919, is fairly mild Cubism, but still needs the prop and the title to let us know she's not a woman.
.
In addition, Cubism was a break with the sentimentality of the works of the blue and pink periods. In those wistful, melancholy pictures of the poor and the marginal, the child had often featured as an emblem focussing the contrast between the security of the family and the flighty world of circus artists to which the family belonged. Cubism had to be harder.
.
Picasso also avoided painting children at the end of the '20s, when his work became monstrous and Surrealistic. Perhaps the confrontation with his own first child, Paulo, born in 1921, made him feel some inhibitions about subjecting the figure of the child to the extreme distortion of his works of that period. Even in the work of other periods where distortion is typical, the children are largely spared.
.
With the portraits of Paulo, Picasso began to deal with the child as individual. But it seems not to have been easy for him. After Paulo's birth in 1921, there are a number of large-scale pictures of mother and child; the bodies are fleshy and sensuous, but the faces are surprisingly cool and are not those of Paulo and his mother Olga Koklova. Once he dares to approach the subject, his portraits of Paulo are awkward; they bring together the rigid bourgeois world into which Olga had dragged the somewhat resistant Picasso, and the exaggerated expectations Picasso forced onto his firstborn — just as his own father had done to him. The portraits are formal, as if they were those of a prince due to inherit his father's crown. Paulo is always alone, often posed, a bit sad, a very adult two- or three-year-old.
.
PAULO disappears when he's four. When Picasso returns to the child in 1934, it is in a substantial series of paintings, in which a young girl leads a blinded artist-minotaur, bringing a new innocence to the dulled vision of the "aged" painter. The works were prophetic. With his next child, Maya, everything was different. Olga and Paulo had been abandoned, and Maya, born in 1935, was the daughter of Picasso's model Marie-Thérèse Walter. Affectionately, he made realistic drawings of her as a baby, as other parents take snapshots. But his oil paintings of Maya mark a liberation, and co-exist with very different works with which he is concerned at the time. In the '30s, the decade of fascism, mothers with dead children appear in response to the Spanish Civil War, most notably in "Guernica." Meanwhile, his portraits of Maya are full of a childlike pleasure. The child is seen from a child's viewpoint, with bright primary colors, clear outlines and a healthy disregard for proportions.
.
Then, in 1947 and 1949, come Claude and Paloma, the children of Françoise Gilot. Again and again, Picasso paints their pleasure at the world about them: they play with toys, Paloma explores the world of tadpoles, Claude leads his wooden horse. It's a picture of happy and secure family life— from which Picasso himself is absent.
.
Picasso was always absent from his family portraits. The nearest he comes to depicting himself is as a doll in the arms of Maya. In fact, he was an unreliable father, but he was not absent; he was, say his three younger children, a father with whom one could have a lot of fun. He dressed up for them, he made them toys and played with them. But they had better not dare to grow up. Picasso didn't paint his own children once they reached puberty, as if he were shy of the confrontation with their growing sexuality, and they disappeared from his life when they or their mothers crossed him. After he broke with them, the children were never allowed to see him again.
.
There are children in Picasso's late paintings, but they are once more symbolic — cherubs and cupids who have little function of their own, but complement a Venus or provide an allegorical contrast with the artist's old age.
.
"Picasso's Welt der Kinder" is at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf until Dec. 3, and at the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart Dec. 16-March 10. - Michael Lawton is a free-lance writer based in Germany.
Picasso learned much from his children: as he got older, his drawings became more and more like theirs; he once told Henry Read at an exhibition of children's drawings: "When I was as old as these children, I could draw like Raphael. It's taken me many years to learn how to draw like these children."
.
Picasso had been virtually forced by his parents to go to art school, and the earliest piece in the exhibition "Picasso's World of Children," which consists of nearly 200 paintings, drawings and other works, is an 1895 drawing of a classical relief with lots of slightly bad-tempered cherubs. It is a masterly achievement for a 14-year-old, with perfect understanding of perspective, so that the figures almost jump out at you. But it's certainly more Raphael than Picasso.
.
At the other end of his career, in one of the most recent pictures, "Painter and Child" of 1969, he returns to the image of the child as cherub, with a mischievous little cupid-like figure snatching a brush from the old painter's palette and holding it up as if it were one of love's arrows. In between, the child has taken on many forms, but over the 76 years between the two works, Picasso has learned to let the child trick the artist into seeing the world with his eyes.
.
According to Werner Spies, the Picasso expert who wrote a book on the subject in 1994, and who has realized this "show of the book," there are thousands of works by Picasso that deal with childhood. Only in two periods do children almost disappear from his work. In one case, the reason is fairly clear — how do you identify a child in a Cubist painting? One attempt shown here, "Girl with Hoop" of 1919, is fairly mild Cubism, but still needs the prop and the title to let us know she's not a woman.
.
In addition, Cubism was a break with the sentimentality of the works of the blue and pink periods. In those wistful, melancholy pictures of the poor and the marginal, the child had often featured as an emblem focussing the contrast between the security of the family and the flighty world of circus artists to which the family belonged. Cubism had to be harder.
.
Picasso also avoided painting children at the end of the '20s, when his work became monstrous and Surrealistic. Perhaps the confrontation with his own first child, Paulo, born in 1921, made him feel some inhibitions about subjecting the figure of the child to the extreme distortion of his works of that period. Even in the work of other periods where distortion is typical, the children are largely spared.
.
With the portraits of Paulo, Picasso began to deal with the child as individual. But it seems not to have been easy for him. After Paulo's birth in 1921, there are a number of large-scale pictures of mother and child; the bodies are fleshy and sensuous, but the faces are surprisingly cool and are not those of Paulo and his mother Olga Koklova. Once he dares to approach the subject, his portraits of Paulo are awkward; they bring together the rigid bourgeois world into which Olga had dragged the somewhat resistant Picasso, and the exaggerated expectations Picasso forced onto his firstborn — just as his own father had done to him. The portraits are formal, as if they were those of a prince due to inherit his father's crown. Paulo is always alone, often posed, a bit sad, a very adult two- or three-year-old.
.
PAULO disappears when he's four. When Picasso returns to the child in 1934, it is in a substantial series of paintings, in which a young girl leads a blinded artist-minotaur, bringing a new innocence to the dulled vision of the "aged" painter. The works were prophetic. With his next child, Maya, everything was different. Olga and Paulo had been abandoned, and Maya, born in 1935, was the daughter of Picasso's model Marie-Thérèse Walter. Affectionately, he made realistic drawings of her as a baby, as other parents take snapshots. But his oil paintings of Maya mark a liberation, and co-exist with very different works with which he is concerned at the time. In the '30s, the decade of fascism, mothers with dead children appear in response to the Spanish Civil War, most notably in "Guernica." Meanwhile, his portraits of Maya are full of a childlike pleasure. The child is seen from a child's viewpoint, with bright primary colors, clear outlines and a healthy disregard for proportions.
.
Then, in 1947 and 1949, come Claude and Paloma, the children of Françoise Gilot. Again and again, Picasso paints their pleasure at the world about them: they play with toys, Paloma explores the world of tadpoles, Claude leads his wooden horse. It's a picture of happy and secure family life— from which Picasso himself is absent.
.
Picasso was always absent from his family portraits. The nearest he comes to depicting himself is as a doll in the arms of Maya. In fact, he was an unreliable father, but he was not absent; he was, say his three younger children, a father with whom one could have a lot of fun. He dressed up for them, he made them toys and played with them. But they had better not dare to grow up. Picasso didn't paint his own children once they reached puberty, as if he were shy of the confrontation with their growing sexuality, and they disappeared from his life when they or their mothers crossed him. After he broke with them, the children were never allowed to see him again.
.
There are children in Picasso's late paintings, but they are once more symbolic — cherubs and cupids who have little function of their own, but complement a Venus or provide an allegorical contrast with the artist's old age.
.
"Picasso's Welt der Kinder" is at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf until Dec. 3, and at the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart Dec. 16-March 10. - Michael Lawton is a free-lance writer based in Germany.
.
This says that Maya was his daughter. It makes me wonder about the family, or at least someone who knew Picasso and his daughter. Someone who knows where this painting was. Of course, there are art afficionados out there who would set up such a robbery for their private collections, but I'm intriqued by the fact that this is Picasso's gdaughter and this painting was her mother.
art n. 1. ... imitative or imaginative skill applied to design, as in paintings ... (Concise Oxford Dictionary).
Representative art is an oxymoron, because art by definition imitates actual reality or the imaginative/idealized reality. Distortions of reality, like Picasso's rubbish, are not art. They are either doodles or trash.
doodle v.i. & n. 1. v.i. scrawl or draw, absentmindedly ... 2. n. scrawl or drawing so made ... (Concise Oxford Dictionary)
That is why they and other such paintings are compared to the skilless works of children, and are often indistinguishable from them.
You are allowing Liberals to redefine terms on you, and thus allow them to change your reality into theirs. One cannot be simultaneously a Conservative and a Dadaist.
I prefer art that challenges me.
Challenges your sanity?
art n. 1. ... imitative or imaginative skill applied to design, as in paintings ...
Art need not be imitative as the definition you provided clearly indicates.
But, wait, it gets better ... now we have the art litmus test of conservatism. "One cannot be simultaneously a Conservative and a Dadaist." You are hilarious.
And BTW, Picasso was not a Dadaist, he was a cubist (among other things).
You are entitled to your opinions, but please consider that the world of thought and creation can include the distortion of reality, not just its accurate depiction.
There are universes inside a man's mind that are otherworldly. An artist's brain can associate feelings with color and form, in a way that is different from the average person's brain.
Of course you don't have to like this, but trashing one of the greatest minds in the history of the Western Civilization is not constructive to conservatism.
I wish he had made some statues of budda so we could destroy them bro right?
Holy cow!
I just realized my 4 year old is a prodigy!
Thanks for being the voice of reason.
I cannot believe people are still arguing about Picasso
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