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Sometimes I'm afraid anything that's not cartooned is beyond my ken . . . |
Hopefully these theives did something useful with Picasso's work, like lining a birdcage.
Maya and the Doll. What a laugh!
Here's some real art.
They're up on my 'frigerator.
My kid would get a C on that in her art class, and she's in ninth grade.
You know nothing of Picasso.
I had the same feelings until I went to the Picasso Museum in Paris and discovered the depth and scope of his work. The guy knew his craft, inside and out. He lived his art.
I'm not a fan of Picasso's either, but I don't think theft should be condoned, even considering the quality of the work.
Just my 2 cents.
You want bad art?
I got your bad art right here!
http://www.museumofbadart.org/
Anyone know where Sandy Berger was?
Picasso was clearly insane if he thought his paintings represented reality.
Only a satantically diseased mind could could so so distort and disfigure humanity in "art".
With any luck they will never be returned.
Picasso was inspired by looking at the paper at the bottom of his bird's cage - which he didn't change often.
Wasn't me.
. . . who is demanding a ransom of $66 million before she'll take them back.
Here we go again.
The back and forth between those who find representative art the height of artistic achievement and those with an eye for the abstract.
But of course, we cannot like what we like without denigrating someone else's body of work, apparently.
I prefer art that challenges me.
For a little perspective ... my mother is a painter of the abstract sort ... and my daughter went to a magnet middle school for the fine arts. I have spent my fair share of time (and a few other's share as well) in museums and galleries by virtue of their talents and interests.
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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
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.
.