Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol [104]
Picasso, “Guernica,” 1937, Reina Sofía Art Center, Madrid.
“NEGRO” PERIOD. Picasso discovered the power of abstracted African masks around 1907, incorporating their motifs into his art. In the same year he produced the breakthrough painting “Desmoiselles d‘Avignon,” one of the few works that singlehandedly altered the course of art.
HARBINGER OF CUBISM: “LES DESMOISELLES D’AVIGNON.”
Called the first truly twentieth-century painting, “Desmoiselles” (see p. 22) effectively ended the nearly 500-year reign of Renaissance-ruled Western art. The most radical shift since works by Giotto and Masaccio, it shattered every precept of artistic convention. Picasso’s five nudes are hazy on anatomy, with lop-sided eyes, deformed ears, and dislocated limbs. Picasso also fractured the laws of perspective, breaking up space into jagged planes without orderly recession — even presenting the eye of one figure from a frontal view and face in profile. Picasso smashed bodies to bits and reassembled them as faceted planes that one critic compared to a “field of broken glass.”
The aggressive ugliness of the women repelled visitors to Picasso’s studio. Matisse thought the painting a hoax and Braque, shaken, said, “It is like drinking kerosene in order to spit fire.” The modern writer Gertrude Stein, Picasso’s friend and patron (whose own portrait by Picasso was less than flattering, although she admitted, “For me, it is I”) defended his daring: “Every masterpiece has come into the world with a dose of ugliness in it. This ugliness is a sign of the creator’s struggle to say something new.”
“I paint what I know,” Picasso said, “not what I see.” Inspired by Cézanne’s geometric patterns, Picasso broke reality into shards representing multiple views of an object seen from front, rear, and back simultaneously.
SCULPTURE. Picasso shook up sculpture as thoroughly as he did painting. In 1912 his “Guitar” sheet metal assemblage completely broke with traditional methods of carving or modeling marble or clay. One of the first to use found objects, Picasso transformed the unlikeliest materials into sculpture, as in his “Head of a Bull” composed of a bicycle seat and handlebars.
DIVERSITY. After World War I, Picasso experimented with widely differing styles, drawing faithful likenesses one day and violently distorted figures the next. “To copy others is necessary,” Picasso believed, “but to copy oneself is pathetic.” With such miscellaneous talents and interests, there could be no smooth sequence of “early,” “middle,” and “late” styles.
A restless explorer constantly re-inventing the shape of art, Picasso summed up his career in the words: “I love discovering things.” As his friend Gertrude Stein put it, “He alone among painters did not set himself the problem of expressing truths which all the world can see, but the truth which only he can see.”
CUBISM
One of the major turning points in twentieth-century art, Cubism lasted in pure form only from 1908 to 1914. The style got its name from Matisse’s dismissal of a Cubist landscape by Georges Braque as nothing but “little cubes.” Although the four “true” Cubists — Picasso, Braque, Gris, and Léger — broke objects into a multitude of pieces that were not actually cubes, the name stuck. Cubism liberated art by establishing, in Cubist painter Fernand Léger’s words, that “art consists of inventing and not copying.”
ANALYTIC CUBISM. The first of two phases of Cubism was called “Analytic” because it analyzed the form of objects by shattering them into fragments spread out on the canvas. Picasso’s “Ambroise Vollard” (see p. 136) is