PICASSO

Tempted to vote Cubism just for the snail

Oh wait that was Matisse. Keyboard cat, play him off

i thought about breaking up the different cubist period but i think that would split the vote. didn't want to nader it.

john berger's writings on cubism are some of my favorite art writing. i will dig some of this out later on.

Studio series from the mid-20s is great, as are the Las Meninas riffs from the mid-50s.
I guess beyond that I enjoy the beach figures and that's about it. His ceramics still look pretty fresh these days too, but who knows, maybe it's just because it was this lesser known avenue of his work. The reality is he had such a long career full of so much work that as one's eye changes, there will be new stuff to encounter pretty much always.

I'm all about the Neo-Classical stuff he did.,

each period includes magnificent work.

the blue and rose periods probably have the most direct impact on me. his close identification with figures on the margins of society is moving and kind of disorienting, given how he would come to be, like, THE artist of the 20th century.

cubism is compelling too because it seems to have emerged as a "necessity" rather than a choice to change his style. he was a visionary, but in this phase he was giving himself over to the dialectic of art, which is why his early cubist paintings are almost indistinguishable from gris's

i will probably vote for one of these earlier periods. but that doesn't mean i don't value the later stuff. i wrote a term paper on his update of matisse's joie de vivre in college. a consistently fascinating artist.

i used to be really into picasso, enough that i own a dvd of "the mystery of picasso", a film that has always delighted me, but as i learned more and more about how he treated the people around him i had less and less time for picasso, though i still rewatch the film about once a year

i voted cubism because i like his simplest work the best

https://rockphotographers.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/light-painting-picasso.jpg

I used to date a wonderful person whose parents owned a few ceramics. Most were intact, but there was also a container of fragments of his ceramics. I sort of associate late picasso with her now, which makes me forget that he was actually personally awful.

The work isn’t as toxic as he was though. Even the stuff that’s been called misogynistic is more about him confronting his fear of the feminine than it is him perpetuating misogny, imo. I always found him startlingly honest for an artist of his reputation—the work is an open window into his preoccupations.

I used to date a wonderful person

treesh, treesh, treesh

?

Too much braggin

oh I meant it much more sympathetically than that

i like the blue period stuff best -- there's something very raw and unfiltered and even slightly scary about those paintings. i've always found his cubist stuff hard to love, for some reason. when i finally saw les demoiselles in person i was disappointed by how little it affected me.

The Las meninas series are some of the only Picasso's I've seen irl and I find them hilarious

https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/1996.403.4/

I find this painting reallt funny. A lot of his later works seem—if not a parody—then like a sly piss take on the idea of Cubist portraiture

those blocky legs, like podiums, are somehow just deeply hilarious

how does the neo-classical period not follow the rose period? i mean, logically. anyway, for me its rose for the win.

I used to have a print of "The Old Guitarist" over my bed because I was sentimental in my youth about the treatment of artists in a Cold Society.

I'm not a big Picasso fan (of any era really) but wouldn't go controppy enough to deny that he was an absolute creative force, but perhaps that he had the subtlety and sensitivity of operation barbarossa at times is part of what troubles me about him.

I know very little and feel almost no kind of way about Picasso. Could’ve been funnier.

The song > the artist

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sl8sWnUZVL4

jim i saw those too, two summers ago and i agree! i the little dog, always gettin squashed!!

i love the gallery of bird paintings he did, just off to the side of those rooms, as a kind of palate cleanser between his endless meninas variations. of course they too end up being meninas variations themselves, compositionally

that whole museum is great. i had never seen all his wonderfully, intricately (often pornographically) bonkers ink sketches before, for instance. and all his silly drawings of his agent.

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/03/ac/e9/03ace9844ed7c1165ca57e82378cb818.jpg

something about these blue and rose paintings are entrancing

https://interiorizarte.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/periodo-rosa-picasso.jpg

i see cezanne here in his handling of color. something about the texture, a brittleness. that's the only hint at where he would go next -- cubism -- which grew from cezanne's deconstruction of the picture plane

https://www.pablopicasso.org/images/paintings/family-of-acrobats-with-monkey.jpg

the harlequins are such a strange, specific motif

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/03/Boy_Leading_a_Horse.jpg

saw this in a museum and the docent pointed out something i hadn't noticed -- the boy ins't holding a bridle

harlequin is a pretty common motif in southern european art from 17c on, no?

hm, i think so. i don't know another painter who took it as his or her major theme for a while.

cezanne has a great one.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/93/Cezanne_Harlequin.JPG/800px-Cezanne_Harlequin.JPG

it seems an interesting topic to learn more about, like how they factored into painting. picasso's harlequins (sometimes he calls them "acrobats" it seems) always seem really vulnerable

i see cezanne here in his handling of color. something about the texture, a brittleness.

yes -- also the density of form

for sure. and the must discussed move toward "flatness."

i really love painting. i should try to take some lessons

Cezanne is the fulcrum upon which painting turns.

so what do y'all think about Berger's book? I read it about fifteen years ago and it had insights.

the success and failure of picasso? i also read it a while ago -- 9 years ago -- and thought it was captivating at the time. i remember his discussion of cubism, and also the proto-cubist experiments of cezanne esp wrt the "bathers" at the philly museum, blew my mind

his ultimate argument, iirc, is that over time picasso became too in love with his own whims and came to a position where he was only interested in the artistic process, not any specific resulting work. he took seriously the idea that he was a genius but he saw his "genius" separately from himself, as a thing he could channel but not wield

Yeah, Berger relied on his Marxism to come to that conclusion.

yeah and i think he said that it was connected to the absurd market for his work, where even random, tossed off things he did in an afternoon would go for millions at auction. almost like he was midas.

i liked that berger could provide a frank analysis like that but also admire cubism. i didn't "get" cubism--and i definitely didn't get cezanne--until i read this book. berger's fantastic.

have you read his last collection, "portraits"?

No. I read most of his books, novels excluded in the early '00s. They're in my closet. I've wanted to revisit Success and Failure though.

i recommend it. the first chapter is about the fayum mummy portraits--really fascinating and insightful

Cezanne was obviously a massive influence on 20th c movements like cubism/the fauves/and probs some others I can't remember. His sculptural approach to painting is something Picasso is almost like a tribute band to in his early work.

I went to that Tate "1936" show last year and the degree of invention and variation convinced me that that was his "best" period. Completing wildly different colour schemes and designs like within a single week, or even day sometimes, totally superhuman.

i wish i went to that glumdalclitch! i read about it. seemed incredible

i want some more discussion here folks. participation is part of your grade

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

https://www.anothermag.com/design-living/1901/picassos-sausage-dog

Stolen painting valued at 16.5 million euros recovered in Greece & then just put on a ledge where it drops to the floor

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/picasso-painting-stolen-recovered-greek-police-drop-113717779.html

The backlash is in full effect:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/01/arts/design/hannah-gadsby-brooklyn-museum-picasso.html

Saw JBRL posting about this elsewhere.

I love the famous "Weeping Woman" and hoped to paint-by-numbers recreate it on wood, varnish it, and hang it in a surprising spot in the back garden

I'm not a big Picasso fan (of any era really) but wouldn't go controppy enough to deny that he was an absolute creative force, but perhaps that he had the subtlety and sensitivity of operation barbarossa at times is part of what troubles me about him.

Yes, I'm not a big fan either but I've just been to the Picasso Museum in Paris and found it completely overwhelming, the guy was like a machine.

Earlier this summer I read Life with Picasso, the memoir by the artist Francoise Gilot who became his mistress and was mother to two of his children. It roughly covers the period from about 1946 well into the 1950s when Picasso was mostly in his 60s. Worth reading if you have an interest in him. His intelligence was undeniable, but he was often a terrible human being.