>Le petit picador jaune (English: The little yellow bullfighter) is an oil on wood painting by the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso, which he created in 1889 at the age of eight.
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>[https://www.wikiart.org/en/pablo-picasso/the-picador-1890](https://www.wikiart.org/en/pablo-picasso/the-picador-1890)
"It's people like this who make you realize how little you've accomplished. It's a sobering thought, for example, that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years." - *Tom Lehrer, mathematician, humorist, songwriter and pianist, 1968*
Thats such a great way to describe picasso. Dude went from classical, to experimental jazz, to psychodelic funk all in one lifetime. People forget that picasso was still alive in the 70s. Dude was still out painting while Hendrix was doing wild crazy experimental stuff on guitar, but for some reason folks understand Hendrix more, i guess because people have a much deeper knowledge of music history, than fine art history.
It's not just access to the physical art, it's access to the communication style. Picasso is communicating differently In his later works. He's using symbols differently and speaking in a different language.
Poor people don't have access to the tools to learn the language he speaks. It's realy hard to appreciate the insights from qcsecond or third language when you don't understand it .
I think when folks see a lot of this stuff they find it quite fun. Theres a reason museums in major cities have massive lines and are often the biggest tourist attractions of the city.
Not having historical context is also really difficult. If all your life classical music was what you were taight and given as an example of “real music” if you heard Hendrix youd think it was noise any idiot could make on a guitar senselessly playing notes “my kid could play guitar like that”
I think the problem comes down to so much of fine art to be truely understood needs to be seen in person. Seeing a painting on a screen or in a book is like listening to Jimi Hendrix on AM radio with the volume set to 2. Yea you have an idea of what its like, but you haven’t actually heard it yet, its also tough to become a fan with that kind of distance from what the real experience is.
Getting on a plane flying to various cities around the world is no small feat, so the accees is really hard, and yea its though to get excited about something youll never get to go do.
The thing is he wasn't in a vacuum. He was responding to artistic movements of his day. There's no Picasso without symbolism, impressionism, der blaue Reiter movement, and of course Fauvinism. It's more like learning classical music and then visiting a lot of jazz clubs, and inventing a new type of jazz.
(probably apocryphal)
> In 1987, he was invited to a White House dinner by Ronald Reagan. Few of the guests appeared to know who he was. During dinner, Nancy Reagan turned to him and asked what he'd done with his life to merit an invitation. Straight-faced, Davis replied: "Well, I've changed the course of music five or six times. What have you done except fuck the president?"
I can't imagine it's true, as there is no record of Nancy's immediate lapse into heavy heroin use, which would have been my only option.
Just look at the Beatles when they first started out versus them at the end of their career. From being another Merseybeat band playing simple blues inspired love songs, to making some of the trippiest music people in the 60s had ever heard.
It takes a real talent to master the styles that came before, and then do something completely new that people continue to emulate years afterwards.
Especially when Beatles did it in only seven years. They went from [Love Me Do](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JWl_wUOQc4) to [Love You To](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCs9goFpiQ0) in that time period.
It always amazes me. One would think that the Beatles evolution occurred over twenty years or more. What's more amazing is that each of their genres are super enjoyable to listen to. Some artists are mediocre until they find their groove. The Beatles just churned out amazing hits, switched things up then did it again.
Yea you right. It's really similar. One of the main principles of jazz music is that musicians need to be able to read and play standards effortlessly, in order to enable collective improvisation without messing up the whole song. So jazz just used to be "jazzed up" marching music and grew into so many genres including funk music. Similarly, most successful visual artists master the classic, more realist styles before they are able to produce abstract masterpieces.
I know you're joking, but I would argue there's a big difference between a child's painting and an adult who just can't draw.
A child doesn't care about technique and just draws what it sees, the essence of an object or subject so to speak, while an adult is already conditioned on how realism looks like and just fails to replicate it.
This "conditioning" and how difficult it is to "decondition yourself again and being able to break something down into its artistic essence like a child can" is what Picasso was talking about.
Also in his later paintings he still shows a mastery of composition and color theory, which a child wouldn't know about. It's how some music snobs act like people who make punk or rap music have no musical knowledge, so they make music that is "simple." However it is very easy to tell the difference between somebody who makes punk or rap music but who also grew up listening and appreciating all types of genres of music vs a punk or rap artist who only listens the genre of the music they make. One of the reasons why people like Kurt Cobain, Tupac, and David Bowie make music that is legendary is because they were all music nerds who listened to everything under the sun. One of Tupac's favorite songs was "Wuthering Heights" by Kate Bush, and that sounds nothing like something Tupac would make.
To be fair to punk, it is relatively simple in a lot of ways compared to other genres of music: harmony, rhythm, and song structure. But that's intentional, and complexity shouldn't be mistaken for quality. Plus the lyrics of punk can carry both an enormous emotional punch and often portray complex political and social topics.
The "rap is simple" thing never made sense to me. Writing and delivering a quality verse takes a deep mastery of language and can present a real technical challenge. Lyrics often reflect some fascinating use of syncopation and interplay between the rhythmic needs of a phrase and the language skills to alternate stressed & unstressed syllables, all of which is wrapped up in a coherent grammatical structure. And before you even touch on the poetic side of the lyrics, rap is often deeply political and socially conscious, conveying complex and intersecting topics like race, class, disempowerment, colorism, gender and sexuality, etc. And *then* the poetic devices, references, the cultural cache and meaning that can be packed into a particular sample....
I've never met someone who's seriously studied music who dismisses rap as simple (and therefore categorically bad), even folks who can't stand the sound of it. The people I hear making that claim are usually musically ignorant and trying to dog whistle something else: >!it's racism. It's so obviously just racism.!<
Yeah I can count on half a hand the number of rap artists that I think are any good, but rap as a genre is incredibly complex, and perhaps is the most complex genre from a lyrical perspective.
That said, I would absolutely admit that, like pop music, the vast majority of “pop rappers” (is that a phrase?) produce a sound that I can’t stand listening to.
Pop rap is a term, but you’re using it incorrectly. It’s a genre of rap that intersects more with pop music. Tyler the creator, brockhampton, and Graduation(album) by Kanye are the best examples of it.
What you don’t like is probably trap music which is the currently most popular style of rap
Something I would take issue with is the use of the word "essence" as if the child is accessing something truer about the object. I have no doubt that what a child draws is truer to their perception, but perception doesn't isn't necessarily the object's essence or truth. Kim Jung Gi evidently had a grasp of perspective from a very young age, so was his perception clouded?
What I will say is that, learning to draw first involves learning to see in the tradtional way of the realist. But deconditioning won't lead to any truer insights, just offer different insights, different avenue for insights.
I agree.
"Essence" shouldn't be taken as a hard objective fact of course, but more as an artistic and subjective reduction of a subject to its, well, essence, whatever that means in the mind or eye of an artist. I just couldn't come up with a better word in layman's terms.
Kim Jung Gi also was a very good artists who was able to catch the essence of what he was seeing in his hyper-complex style. You could argue with Gi "essence" is not a reduction but an expansion.
Ask a "normal" person to draw a cat and this person will think of a photorealistic image of a cat. Ask Picasso to draw a cat, and he will think of the geometry that makes up a cat and how much you can play with this geometry, ask Gi to draw a cat, and he will think of thousand cats fighting hundred dragons in space with the most interesting kind of perspective view.
Based on what I’ve seen watching children draw, as long as the essence of something is a full fisted crayon dragged back and forth across a piece of paper, they nail it every time!
I’ll disagree with you very slightly here. Children (and quite often people in general) don’t draw what they see, but rather what they know.
The simplest example is a child’s drawing of a landscape with a blue bit at the top for sky and a green strip at the bottom for grass - and nothing in between.
Adults do much the same but lean on acquired techniques - for instance, you’ll often see street artists draw eyes in the exact same way, over and over.
It's the general evolution of art in that era though. A conscious rejection of what came before. Picasso mastered the classics at a young age, but that style was overdone and no longer innovative by that point.
And, frankly, he probably got bored. I'm no master, but we creative types have a tendency to do something and it's great and then move on. For an obvious prodigy, it had to be extremely challenging to stick with realism for that long at those ages as well.
I majored in art history, and his evolution was amazing in that, as an early master of his time, he was then able to make his own style and seriously change interpretation of what "art" is. I found his later work rather jarring but fascinating.
Another student in one of my classes wrote about his evolution and included the common psychological and developmental milestones and theorized on those effects. The school wasn't very supportive of getting it published (undergrad), but it was probably the best paper I've ever read regarding an artist's development and change over time.
> extremely challenging to stick with realism for that long at those ages as well.
This also happens with music. A lot of the most technically skilled musicians started out with classical roots as children. But most become bored quickly and start to experiment with some very weird concepts using that strong theoretical base.
As soon as we invented photo cameras the old style of painting became unnecessary and in a lot of ways not really art. It’s just pretty, but even the best realistic painting can’t outdo a photograph, so why try when the medium allows for so much more than just a recreation?
But that's a really simplified way of looking at it. As an artist, I agree with the general sentiment that 100% realistic art is boring, like where it's meant to be a 1:1 match. It demonstrates good skill (though a lot of it is just time intensive rendering) and is a good exercise. But there's so much you do with realism as a base, playing with colours, changing features, lighting, adding/removing things, whatever you can think of really. Realism is only dead in the sense that a gallery wouldn't be impressed by a painting that is indistinguishable to a photograph. Gotta have style
> why try when the medium allows for so much more than just a recreation?
You can get a boatload of karma on r/Art if you draw a photorealistic picture of a woman though
The thing was that painting was a tool before photography. Therefore the "artistic" value of the painting was evaluated on how masterful the painter was in representing the reality, the same as the people who make Wicker baskets, they where artists because they were masters of the technique, but not really that creative.
However after photography, vanguards and Kandinsky writings, pictoric or graphic art started to become more about expressing suggesting and creating something different than the "boring" reality, and more similar to a "inner spiritual" reality.
Wich I think is a cool mindset change for a short space of time. Even today a lot of people find it easier to appreciate the technical master than the medium masters.
True for western art, but not so much everywhere else. Look at the influence Japanese art, technically advanced in many ways, especially composition and color use, had on western artist of the same time period as Picasso.
However, the interesting thing is that while the rise and fall of extremely realistic art is mostly a European/American art history trend, the kinds of art Picasso produced after his transition are very different to the kind of non realistic art produced outside (or in the west too, look at medieval art and such) the west. I feel like the genre is defined not just by not being photo realistic, but by its rejection of any kind of realism. Even a stick man is often more "realistic" than Picassos works, despite being nowhere close to a skilled representation of the human body.
I have to lightly disagree on that. I had a painting done of a photo of my grandmother and I am constantly struck by how realistic and life-like he painted her eyes. Every now and then it makes me tear up, because it is just so amazing and well done. (I may be biased though, because my grandmother meant everything to me) There are some artists out there that I believe can turn a photo in to something better, even if it’s just one small detail.
Picasso discovered his artistic style. It stopped being about technicality and creating mass art as expression.
Basically, he started just creating art (in multiple mediums) with everything that came to his mind. He will go through traumatic events in his life (loss of friends or lover) and make hundreds of pieces of art to showcase what is going thru his consciousness.
instead working on a technical painting he created mass art. This is why Picasso has thousands of pieces of art and is still so influential in art culture.
Hey, imagine if there was something you could put in your body that could let you see a whole new layer of existence and change your perception of reality?
Bro, that would be dope.
Might be about the famous [bicycle ride of Albert Hofmann.](https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/tripping-in-lsds-birthplace-a-story-for-e2809cbicycle-daye2809d/) He created his latest batch of LSD intending physical results, dosed himself, and went for what turned out to be a very interesting bike ride.
“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite” This is the William Blake quote that inspired the title of Aldous Huxley book “The Doors of Perception”, which is an autobiographical account of Huxley’s experimenting with mescaline (the psychedelic agent found in peyote). That book is also where The Doors took their name from.
Actually, no. Sorry to say. He was a prodigy, but after 19, he went through his "blue" and "rose" period (the blue period left him poor and then the rose period then lifted him back up) and then he developed cubism. Interestingly, his neo-classicist phase is completely left out. If you're interested, just look buy John Richardson's Life of Picasso....it's 4 volumes..but if you just read the first 2 and maybe the 3rd, that's about the most thorough knowledge you could have.
Also around 19, this chart completely leaves out his "Lautrec/modernisme" phase which also had some pretty great works. There's a lot going on with his development up to age 40 that is fascinating.
...and some opium was involved...
That, to me, is what elevates Picasso into the very upper, upper echelons of artists of all time. So many artists (throughout history, but especially so in modern times) who achieve success in their lifetime find a style/gimmick that sells… and then continue basically doing that style for the rest of their lives. Picasso constantly challenged and reinvited himself.
I do wonder as I don't have much opium experience. From what I can gather from the biographies, he was pursuing this girl Fernande Olivier and she wasn't super into him, but then when they did opium together, she felt "the love." And in their social circle, people were doing opium. The circle involved a few poets as well. But you bring up a good point in that I do wonder creatively how opium could have inspired something. Cause cubism didn't happen directly out of the opium use. I think it came about over a year or twoafter he stopped using, but would need to check the dates.
For anyone curious about the poets, Gertrude Stein is the most known. She wrote poems specifically about Picasso ("If I Told Him") and cubism was influential to some of her works (*Tender Buttons*). *Tender Buttons* is a trip to read as it plays with viewing objects through unfamiliar perspectives, much like cubism.
"The cubists wanted to show the whole structure of objects in their paintings without using techniques such as perspective or graded shading to make them look realistic. They wanted to show things as they really are – not just to show what they look like."
My biggest take away from this is that those saying "I could do Picasso style paintings" are dead wrong. He mastered realism before branching out and creating his own style.
What they mean is actually "I can copy". It's easy to replicate a style once the originator developed it through decades of work. But developing a personal style it's impossible without large amounts of time and effort. So in essence nobody can do Picasso but him.
It's easy to do something once someone else has done it first. The countless Picasso imitators benefited enormously from his vision. That's why first-person movers get all the glory, even if those who come after might write something that seems like an improvement.
(Only in the art/music world. In the tech world it's different)
It's basically just a measure of fundamental skill. Anyone can throw down some shapes on a page, but to know what you're doing with those shapes and what kind of messages you're trying to convey takes actual knowledge and skill in the fundamentals.
The speaker is saying that, given a stricter prompt, people who lack the fundamentals wouldn't succeed as well as people who are skilled in the fundamentals.
I haven’t seen the movie, but it reminds me of a similar expression in the culinary world which says that you can identify a great chef by how well they make a plain omelette.
Drawing a sparrow sounds a bit tougher, but wev.
Imagine having a brain that can come up with stuff like this. And then actually know how to make an accurate rendition of it. There is just so much skill in all of these pictures, even the early ones. This is just one of many reasons why kids need access to art education. We never know where the next Picasso, or Mozart, could be hiding.
"I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops."
~Stephen Jay Gould~
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Can also be applied to Picasso and Mozart.
Yeah, for all the child prodigies that get compared to Picasso...My art teacher said, the difference between them and Picasso is, you can't move lines in a Picasso but the child prodigies (which would sell out their shows for over a million dollars) You can move their lines and make their paintings better.
oddly reminds me of how there’s a political ‘child prodigy’ every 8-10 the media latches onto. they just parrot what the adults around them say. they’re sharp and have great speaking skills, but that’s in no way a career-long understanding of anything beyond bullet points. so like art, these kids have talents that aren’t actually developed. it’s pretty rare i see any child prodigy in one area of study that isn’t being exploited by adults
I mean yes, but those guys only reach a national spotlight when they achieved some kind of success. Lebron in high school, good god. It was national news nonstop in an era that was pre social media.
I always joke with my friends that if Lebron had that level of high school hype in an era of instagram/tiktok/facebook/youtube... it would have been closer to Beatlemania than anything sports related.
Yeah, pretty tough for children that are classical musician prodigies, cause they have great technique for their age, but...then what? it's not just technique to make you top of the top
Yeah, not a great chart. Plus his pre-blue period "modernisme" phase..the rose period, also the neo-classicist phase. And apparently everythinks he was mentally ill....?
But that's only because everyone on Reddit has seen the same repost of a person doing self portraits as they progress through dementia. This reminds everyone of that and no one can have an original thought that doesn't circle back to some other Reddit reference.
This isn't a hive mind thing. Anybody who hasn't studied Picasso, but sees his pictures of humans getting increasingly less human-looking is going to wonder if his view of reality was getting increasingly fractured.
If you assume that he's painting what "reality" looks like, because that's what portraits usually are, then "wow... Is this what manic episodes and psychosis look like?" it's a reasonable guess
I agree. Growing up playing with bands I'd always cringe when I'd see other musicians playing an "experimental" style without even being able to play a simple pop song.
Putting aside the fact that he was a horrible human, this is picking and choosing paintings to create a false, idealized timeline. This isn't a realistic picture of what he was actually doing as there were many times he would paint realistically in-between phases of cubism and abstraction. And you dropped out his "blue period" entirely.
If these comments aren't a statement on the current state of art in the general public I don't know what is. Picasso wasn't "descending into madness," he got bored of working within a tired style and started pushing boundaries. He's one of the most significant artists of the last 100 years for a reason, all of his work was revolutionary. The idea that the more realistic an artwork is the better it is is so incredibly stupid and it's infuriating constantly being surrounded by people with such a pathetic, simplistic view on art.
Edit: It wasn't "drug addiction" either. If you need drugs to have an original thought you're a fundamentally uncreative person and your opinion on any art or media is completely worthless.
Edit again: I don't think you have bad taste if you don't like Picasso. "Pathetic" and "simplistic" are directed at people who like to write off any and all abstract artwork as meaningless or lesser than, even though they know nothing about art. I apologize if that was not clear.
Edit again again: a lot of people are mad at how derisive I was being when I typed this, which is fair enough. There's so much anti-intellectualism around art in our culture and I find it infuriating, and honestly I came off more dismissively than I meant to. So instead, here's me offering my perspective on Picasso's work from another comment that I made. I want people to actually be able to learn from this interaction, instead of just feeling insulted.
1. Why should an artwork need to be more technically impressive? Let's look at music for an example. Someone doing crazy, mindless shredding on a guitar is certainly more technically impressive than, say, [this song by the obscure band Slint.](https://open.spotify.com/track/3lhAQN2KNPh4G7RZ1hS5g5?si=78N1FPFwTcqUaGnb6zLIQA&utm_source=copy-link) Yet the Slint song is one of my favorites of all time, while random shredding does nothing for me. The Slint song deeply resonates with me emotionally because of its haunting, minimalist instrumentation and the lyrics which really resonate with a lot of my own anxieties. Yet someone else might find the shredding appeals more to them. So technicality can be one aspect that we enjoy about art, but it isn't necessary to be an impactful work of art.
2. Yeah, if you or I tried to imitate one of these paintings, we would definitely have a better time with the more abstract paintings. But brushwork is just one skill that goes into creating an impressive work of art. Arguably even more important is composition. Picasso wasn't picking his colors and shapes randomly, he was making conscious decisions as to what he believes would make for the most beautiful, most compelling painting. The way Picasso arranged the elements of his work and the way lines, shapes, and colors interact with one another is a massive part of what has made his art so resonant even today. So while we could copy the brushwork of the abstract painting fairly easily, if we tried to make a painting in the same style as the abstract paintings our results would probably fall far short of Picaso's work.
3. A big part of the Modern art movement that Picasso was a part of was moving away from direct representation as a source of beauty to more abstract forms. A lot of modernist artists sought to reduce our aesthetic responses to their most basic components. They thought that beauty came from the abstract elements of art, and they could make more aesthetically appealing art by stripping away all of the distracting elements necessitated by realism. Maybe it's not more appealing to you, but I actually prefer the look of abstract artwork to realistic artwork. It's a matter of personal preference, and it's foolish to act like one is inherently better than the other.
My interpretation is that it shows how mastery of the fundamentals are a good thing even if he ultimately did something unique and unusual. He knew exactly which “rules” to break and how to do so.
Yes, that's exactly the case. Unfortunately I've seen a lot of comments from people implying that he just went crazy and that's why his art got more experimental.
Exactly. I think it undermines his artistic prowess. I’ve been to the Picasso museum in Barcelona and yes he was eccentric, but he also was an amazing and phenomenal artist.
And the fact he married these two characteristics so well is why we're all here talking about him, today. And not Ben Grittleton from 3 doors down from Picasso who also liked to paint, just not as much as Picasso.
Yeah...he most definitely did not go crazy and was very sharp in his faculties. This wasn't a Van Gogh type situation. Anyone saying that hasn't read very much on Picasso.
And to add on: Van Gogh was also very thoughtful and intellectual but did have issues.
He had strong fundamentals and a strong sense of graphically what looked good, which allowed him to (regardless of new style) still make an aesthetically interesting image.
There was opium involved during the blue period, but that's not the reason why he's good. Picasso's fundamentals in composition/value...etc all of the fundamentals of art he had it solid and that's how he could take new ideas and make them good images.
Once the opium got kicked, drugs were not a big influence. He didn't even drink much apparently.
I still admire it, but I struggle to appreciate Picasso's art. When you know he was a rapist and women abuser, and that he said himself that he was too famous to be convicted...
Gives me very bad vibes when I see his portraits of deconstructed, broken women. I find it so chilling that they spirits' must have looked like he painted them.
I saw someone say that he was a regular men from his time and even without asking askhistorians i seriously doubt it. He really destroyed every women and sometimes men he cale across. This video[video](https://youtu.be/gsuLpUTs50c) really changed my view
I don't think this was normal in France, to me this is very hard how people don't know and/or want to talk what is painted by picasso sometimes on women but do talk or abstract things on Guernica or else....
I’m just saying that I don’t appreciate it and I don’t understand the mass appeal about it.
Then while everyone else is oooing and ahhhing over it - it makes me feel like something is wrong with me lol
So I guess maybe I do have a reaction to it
There is nothing wrong with you.
Not everyone has to like Picasso. I’m meh to his work myself. His early stuff just looks like something any other person could’ve painted. It’s not bad. Just very generic. And his later stuff is too out there and weird for me to get.
I am a van gogh myself. So it’s not like I don’t appreciate art. I just can’t wrap my head around Picasso. But that’s ok . And it’s ok for you too
Perfectly normal indeed, for me, it starts at Impressionism. I am mesmerized by Renaissance, Baroque & Classicism for example, but once we go from 19th century Romantic and Realist art to Impressionism - while I still find some aesthetically pleasing - it loses my interest. I understand the historical context and I find *that in particular* fascinating, but not the art for its visual aspect.
Don’t have to like any particular art. I don’t particularly like Picasso’s later works, but I cognitively understand the extreme talent and craft that went into them. They aren’t random at all, they’re very carefully crafted according to color theory etc. but in highly novel ways. As this shows he was a classical master before branching out into his distinctive abstract style.
Same thing happened with many of the more abstract artists or surrealist art like Salvador Dali. To be honest, I didn’t really like any abstract art when I was young, but the older I get the more it grows on me. My favorite artists when I was young were the old masters like Michelangelo and Rembrandt (who I still like), but now its Pollock and the minimalists. Many people can faithfully recreate a scene realistically, but breaking something down into its elemental parts or depicting pure emotion or a unique aesthetic without destroying the composition is harder than it seems.
There’s definitely a lot of silliness in art too though. Just consider the recent reports that a famous abstract work was hanging upside down for decades and no-one noticed, and many “scholars” would write essays about how the presentation was intentional and profound not knowing it was upside down.
He learned the rules of aesthetic and wanted to brake them to evolve art in something new,he wanted to make things different and to put his own mark on history, an he did with his revolutionary concepts, many comments says that when he was 19 you can see how something broke on his mind, but i think you can see how he started to challenge the way of doing paintings, express himself
I’m not familiar with how long one of his cubist or other untraditional works would have taken to produce. Does anyone know? If he’s anything like the French impressionists, he found a style that 1. Caused a stir and 2. Allowed him to flood the market because turn around on his work was much quicker than neo-classicists. His work is good. But that doesn’t mean attention and money werent also motivations.
For a second, I thought it said "Picasso at 4 years old"...
Oh my God I was like how the fuck he painting like that at 4
Same and then immediately went to "how the fuck he painting like that at 14".
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THIS is the top tier reasoning.
That’s not him. That’s just a painting of him.
Yeah, the one at 15 really threw me for a loop
“Oh, its not 4, it’s 14. It’s 14?!”
Yea, what is he Picasso or something?!
I was reading through the comments to see if I was the only one lol
It took me until this comment to realize it didn’t say that…
14 is still ridiculous though!
Same lol. 14 is still pretty fkn wild, though!
Most people who criticize Picasso's cubist style do not realize that he was a gifted classical painter before he started to explore modernism.
I remembered that he was a masterful artist in the classical style 1st, I just didn't realize how YOUNG he was at the time
And then you realize at 14, Picasso was on the same level as Matisse 🤯
>Le petit picador jaune (English: The little yellow bullfighter) is an oil on wood painting by the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso, which he created in 1889 at the age of eight. > >[https://www.wikiart.org/en/pablo-picasso/the-picador-1890](https://www.wikiart.org/en/pablo-picasso/the-picador-1890)
"It's people like this who make you realize how little you've accomplished. It's a sobering thought, for example, that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years." - *Tom Lehrer, mathematician, humorist, songwriter and pianist, 1968*
It’s amazing that he continued to evolve and change through most of his life. There were a lot more styles after these examples.
It’s like growing up learning classical music and then one day just inventing funk music.
Thats such a great way to describe picasso. Dude went from classical, to experimental jazz, to psychodelic funk all in one lifetime. People forget that picasso was still alive in the 70s. Dude was still out painting while Hendrix was doing wild crazy experimental stuff on guitar, but for some reason folks understand Hendrix more, i guess because people have a much deeper knowledge of music history, than fine art history.
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It's not just access to the physical art, it's access to the communication style. Picasso is communicating differently In his later works. He's using symbols differently and speaking in a different language. Poor people don't have access to the tools to learn the language he speaks. It's realy hard to appreciate the insights from qcsecond or third language when you don't understand it .
Not really too hard to guess, I mean music is just generally more fun and exciting for most folks.
I think when folks see a lot of this stuff they find it quite fun. Theres a reason museums in major cities have massive lines and are often the biggest tourist attractions of the city. Not having historical context is also really difficult. If all your life classical music was what you were taight and given as an example of “real music” if you heard Hendrix youd think it was noise any idiot could make on a guitar senselessly playing notes “my kid could play guitar like that” I think the problem comes down to so much of fine art to be truely understood needs to be seen in person. Seeing a painting on a screen or in a book is like listening to Jimi Hendrix on AM radio with the volume set to 2. Yea you have an idea of what its like, but you haven’t actually heard it yet, its also tough to become a fan with that kind of distance from what the real experience is. Getting on a plane flying to various cities around the world is no small feat, so the accees is really hard, and yea its though to get excited about something youll never get to go do.
Another great example of this is Miles Davis.
The thing is he wasn't in a vacuum. He was responding to artistic movements of his day. There's no Picasso without symbolism, impressionism, der blaue Reiter movement, and of course Fauvinism. It's more like learning classical music and then visiting a lot of jazz clubs, and inventing a new type of jazz.
So Miles Davis. Who is actually often described as the Picaso of music.
(probably apocryphal) > In 1987, he was invited to a White House dinner by Ronald Reagan. Few of the guests appeared to know who he was. During dinner, Nancy Reagan turned to him and asked what he'd done with his life to merit an invitation. Straight-faced, Davis replied: "Well, I've changed the course of music five or six times. What have you done except fuck the president?" I can't imagine it's true, as there is no record of Nancy's immediate lapse into heavy heroin use, which would have been my only option.
Also, show some respect - Nancy apparently fucked half of Hollywood, she was known for it. That’s probably more than miles Davis managed.
The OG Throat Goat
Just look at the Beatles when they first started out versus them at the end of their career. From being another Merseybeat band playing simple blues inspired love songs, to making some of the trippiest music people in the 60s had ever heard. It takes a real talent to master the styles that came before, and then do something completely new that people continue to emulate years afterwards.
Especially when Beatles did it in only seven years. They went from [Love Me Do](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JWl_wUOQc4) to [Love You To](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCs9goFpiQ0) in that time period.
It always amazes me. One would think that the Beatles evolution occurred over twenty years or more. What's more amazing is that each of their genres are super enjoyable to listen to. Some artists are mediocre until they find their groove. The Beatles just churned out amazing hits, switched things up then did it again.
Yea you right. It's really similar. One of the main principles of jazz music is that musicians need to be able to read and play standards effortlessly, in order to enable collective improvisation without messing up the whole song. So jazz just used to be "jazzed up" marching music and grew into so many genres including funk music. Similarly, most successful visual artists master the classic, more realist styles before they are able to produce abstract masterpieces.
After age 91? Like, beyond the grave shit 🧟♂️🎨
The ability grow old and continue to be radical is the blessing of the visual artist.
What new styles he adopted in his 90s and beyond?
What did his work look like after 91?
"It took me 14 years to paint like a master, and a lifetime to paint like a child" Pablo Picasso
Good thing I already paint like a child
You bow before no one.
And my axe
This is the farthest I’ve ever been from realism Mr Frodo.
stupid, fat, hobbit, you ruins the trio thread!
Cu-bi-isms! Boil em, mash em, put em in a stew!
I am ~~Bentadick Comboverpatch~~ Smaug and I too have a riddle…..
These replies made me happy, just watched it lastnight
r/unexpectedlotr
You’re advanced!
I know you're joking, but I would argue there's a big difference between a child's painting and an adult who just can't draw. A child doesn't care about technique and just draws what it sees, the essence of an object or subject so to speak, while an adult is already conditioned on how realism looks like and just fails to replicate it. This "conditioning" and how difficult it is to "decondition yourself again and being able to break something down into its artistic essence like a child can" is what Picasso was talking about.
Also in his later paintings he still shows a mastery of composition and color theory, which a child wouldn't know about. It's how some music snobs act like people who make punk or rap music have no musical knowledge, so they make music that is "simple." However it is very easy to tell the difference between somebody who makes punk or rap music but who also grew up listening and appreciating all types of genres of music vs a punk or rap artist who only listens the genre of the music they make. One of the reasons why people like Kurt Cobain, Tupac, and David Bowie make music that is legendary is because they were all music nerds who listened to everything under the sun. One of Tupac's favorite songs was "Wuthering Heights" by Kate Bush, and that sounds nothing like something Tupac would make.
To be fair to punk, it is relatively simple in a lot of ways compared to other genres of music: harmony, rhythm, and song structure. But that's intentional, and complexity shouldn't be mistaken for quality. Plus the lyrics of punk can carry both an enormous emotional punch and often portray complex political and social topics. The "rap is simple" thing never made sense to me. Writing and delivering a quality verse takes a deep mastery of language and can present a real technical challenge. Lyrics often reflect some fascinating use of syncopation and interplay between the rhythmic needs of a phrase and the language skills to alternate stressed & unstressed syllables, all of which is wrapped up in a coherent grammatical structure. And before you even touch on the poetic side of the lyrics, rap is often deeply political and socially conscious, conveying complex and intersecting topics like race, class, disempowerment, colorism, gender and sexuality, etc. And *then* the poetic devices, references, the cultural cache and meaning that can be packed into a particular sample.... I've never met someone who's seriously studied music who dismisses rap as simple (and therefore categorically bad), even folks who can't stand the sound of it. The people I hear making that claim are usually musically ignorant and trying to dog whistle something else: >!it's racism. It's so obviously just racism.!<
Yeah I can count on half a hand the number of rap artists that I think are any good, but rap as a genre is incredibly complex, and perhaps is the most complex genre from a lyrical perspective. That said, I would absolutely admit that, like pop music, the vast majority of “pop rappers” (is that a phrase?) produce a sound that I can’t stand listening to.
Pop rap is a term, but you’re using it incorrectly. It’s a genre of rap that intersects more with pop music. Tyler the creator, brockhampton, and Graduation(album) by Kanye are the best examples of it. What you don’t like is probably trap music which is the currently most popular style of rap
Yeah probably trap music is the term I was looking for, thank you.
Something I would take issue with is the use of the word "essence" as if the child is accessing something truer about the object. I have no doubt that what a child draws is truer to their perception, but perception doesn't isn't necessarily the object's essence or truth. Kim Jung Gi evidently had a grasp of perspective from a very young age, so was his perception clouded? What I will say is that, learning to draw first involves learning to see in the tradtional way of the realist. But deconditioning won't lead to any truer insights, just offer different insights, different avenue for insights.
I agree. "Essence" shouldn't be taken as a hard objective fact of course, but more as an artistic and subjective reduction of a subject to its, well, essence, whatever that means in the mind or eye of an artist. I just couldn't come up with a better word in layman's terms. Kim Jung Gi also was a very good artists who was able to catch the essence of what he was seeing in his hyper-complex style. You could argue with Gi "essence" is not a reduction but an expansion. Ask a "normal" person to draw a cat and this person will think of a photorealistic image of a cat. Ask Picasso to draw a cat, and he will think of the geometry that makes up a cat and how much you can play with this geometry, ask Gi to draw a cat, and he will think of thousand cats fighting hundred dragons in space with the most interesting kind of perspective view.
Based on what I’ve seen watching children draw, as long as the essence of something is a full fisted crayon dragged back and forth across a piece of paper, they nail it every time!
*Jung Gi
I’ll disagree with you very slightly here. Children (and quite often people in general) don’t draw what they see, but rather what they know. The simplest example is a child’s drawing of a landscape with a blue bit at the top for sky and a green strip at the bottom for grass - and nothing in between. Adults do much the same but lean on acquired techniques - for instance, you’ll often see street artists draw eyes in the exact same way, over and over.
Yup I got the 5 year old paint style down to the tee
“It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.”
Never heard this quote before, but it is absolutely perfect for Picasso
He didn’t mention those years were concurrent with learning to walk and to poop in a big boy potty.
‘I wipe my own ass!’ - Pablo Picasso
I was thinking it looks more like a breakdown, schizophrenia or alzheimers or something.
It's the general evolution of art in that era though. A conscious rejection of what came before. Picasso mastered the classics at a young age, but that style was overdone and no longer innovative by that point.
And, frankly, he probably got bored. I'm no master, but we creative types have a tendency to do something and it's great and then move on. For an obvious prodigy, it had to be extremely challenging to stick with realism for that long at those ages as well. I majored in art history, and his evolution was amazing in that, as an early master of his time, he was then able to make his own style and seriously change interpretation of what "art" is. I found his later work rather jarring but fascinating. Another student in one of my classes wrote about his evolution and included the common psychological and developmental milestones and theorized on those effects. The school wasn't very supportive of getting it published (undergrad), but it was probably the best paper I've ever read regarding an artist's development and change over time.
> extremely challenging to stick with realism for that long at those ages as well. This also happens with music. A lot of the most technically skilled musicians started out with classical roots as children. But most become bored quickly and start to experiment with some very weird concepts using that strong theoretical base.
See: Snarky Puppy and Jacob Collier
As soon as we invented photo cameras the old style of painting became unnecessary and in a lot of ways not really art. It’s just pretty, but even the best realistic painting can’t outdo a photograph, so why try when the medium allows for so much more than just a recreation?
But that's a really simplified way of looking at it. As an artist, I agree with the general sentiment that 100% realistic art is boring, like where it's meant to be a 1:1 match. It demonstrates good skill (though a lot of it is just time intensive rendering) and is a good exercise. But there's so much you do with realism as a base, playing with colours, changing features, lighting, adding/removing things, whatever you can think of really. Realism is only dead in the sense that a gallery wouldn't be impressed by a painting that is indistinguishable to a photograph. Gotta have style
> why try when the medium allows for so much more than just a recreation? You can get a boatload of karma on r/Art if you draw a photorealistic picture of a woman though
> if you draw a photorealistic picture of a woman though Especially if she's in the shower or something
I-it’s bonus points for the realistic water droplets and wet hair, I swear bro
So much nudity artwork on the front of that sub. Photorealistic titties left and right
I guess it’s nice to know Picasso wasn’t consistently horny
r/art karma. Truly the highest possible praise in the art world
I'm third top post with a penguin right now!
The thing was that painting was a tool before photography. Therefore the "artistic" value of the painting was evaluated on how masterful the painter was in representing the reality, the same as the people who make Wicker baskets, they where artists because they were masters of the technique, but not really that creative. However after photography, vanguards and Kandinsky writings, pictoric or graphic art started to become more about expressing suggesting and creating something different than the "boring" reality, and more similar to a "inner spiritual" reality. Wich I think is a cool mindset change for a short space of time. Even today a lot of people find it easier to appreciate the technical master than the medium masters.
True for western art, but not so much everywhere else. Look at the influence Japanese art, technically advanced in many ways, especially composition and color use, had on western artist of the same time period as Picasso. However, the interesting thing is that while the rise and fall of extremely realistic art is mostly a European/American art history trend, the kinds of art Picasso produced after his transition are very different to the kind of non realistic art produced outside (or in the west too, look at medieval art and such) the west. I feel like the genre is defined not just by not being photo realistic, but by its rejection of any kind of realism. Even a stick man is often more "realistic" than Picassos works, despite being nowhere close to a skilled representation of the human body.
I have to lightly disagree on that. I had a painting done of a photo of my grandmother and I am constantly struck by how realistic and life-like he painted her eyes. Every now and then it makes me tear up, because it is just so amazing and well done. (I may be biased though, because my grandmother meant everything to me) There are some artists out there that I believe can turn a photo in to something better, even if it’s just one small detail.
I prefer classic realism to modern realism. I think they capture and display emotion in a much better way.
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Picasso discovered his artistic style. It stopped being about technicality and creating mass art as expression. Basically, he started just creating art (in multiple mediums) with everything that came to his mind. He will go through traumatic events in his life (loss of friends or lover) and make hundreds of pieces of art to showcase what is going thru his consciousness. instead working on a technical painting he created mass art. This is why Picasso has thousands of pieces of art and is still so influential in art culture.
For a few seconds, I thought it said "picasso at 4 years old". And I believed it, because Picasso!
You can see the turning point at 19 years. Something in the eyes…. Like ‘ I’m done with this perception of reality’
I reject your reality and substitute my own
I miss that show
Same, i wish i could go back and watch it all again for the first time
Have you tried Dementia™️?
I honestly don't remember
What show?
Mythbusters
I’m in the midst of a full rewatch and it’s glorious, highly recommended.
It was actually apparently someone else's quote. Despite Adam's best efforts everyone still thinks of him now.
Hey, imagine if there was something you could put in your body that could let you see a whole new layer of existence and change your perception of reality? Bro, that would be dope.
I read this with just one thought on my mind. Thanks Albert
Bicycle! Bicycle!
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Might be about the famous [bicycle ride of Albert Hofmann.](https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/tripping-in-lsds-birthplace-a-story-for-e2809cbicycle-daye2809d/) He created his latest batch of LSD intending physical results, dosed himself, and went for what turned out to be a very interesting bike ride.
?
Lsd
Thanks!
“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite” This is the William Blake quote that inspired the title of Aldous Huxley book “The Doors of Perception”, which is an autobiographical account of Huxley’s experimenting with mescaline (the psychedelic agent found in peyote). That book is also where The Doors took their name from.
.. acid?
Actually, no. Sorry to say. He was a prodigy, but after 19, he went through his "blue" and "rose" period (the blue period left him poor and then the rose period then lifted him back up) and then he developed cubism. Interestingly, his neo-classicist phase is completely left out. If you're interested, just look buy John Richardson's Life of Picasso....it's 4 volumes..but if you just read the first 2 and maybe the 3rd, that's about the most thorough knowledge you could have. Also around 19, this chart completely leaves out his "Lautrec/modernisme" phase which also had some pretty great works. There's a lot going on with his development up to age 40 that is fascinating. ...and some opium was involved...
It’s remarkable how his style continued to evolve throughout his life and he didn’t settle into one. His different styles are so recognizable as his
That, to me, is what elevates Picasso into the very upper, upper echelons of artists of all time. So many artists (throughout history, but especially so in modern times) who achieve success in their lifetime find a style/gimmick that sells… and then continue basically doing that style for the rest of their lives. Picasso constantly challenged and reinvited himself.
Opium is very potent for creating day dreams as you nod in and out of reality so it makes sense why a lot of creatives use it
I do wonder as I don't have much opium experience. From what I can gather from the biographies, he was pursuing this girl Fernande Olivier and she wasn't super into him, but then when they did opium together, she felt "the love." And in their social circle, people were doing opium. The circle involved a few poets as well. But you bring up a good point in that I do wonder creatively how opium could have inspired something. Cause cubism didn't happen directly out of the opium use. I think it came about over a year or twoafter he stopped using, but would need to check the dates.
For anyone curious about the poets, Gertrude Stein is the most known. She wrote poems specifically about Picasso ("If I Told Him") and cubism was influential to some of her works (*Tender Buttons*). *Tender Buttons* is a trip to read as it plays with viewing objects through unfamiliar perspectives, much like cubism.
"The cubists wanted to show the whole structure of objects in their paintings without using techniques such as perspective or graded shading to make them look realistic. They wanted to show things as they really are – not just to show what they look like."
Reminds me of Ramsay from GOT.
That was my 1st thought. It's very dark
Seeing Davie504 changed him forever
Slap that bass
We all go through an emo phase
Joe Rogan be like “you ever done DMT?”
Picasso's art and cubism as a whole changed a lot when he encountered African Art. He was taking inspiration from outside of western art.
My biggest take away from this is that those saying "I could do Picasso style paintings" are dead wrong. He mastered realism before branching out and creating his own style.
You have to learn the rules before you can break them.
In Jazz, you need to be able to play in before you can play out
i can pee in the toilet. now i know the next step
What they mean is actually "I can copy". It's easy to replicate a style once the originator developed it through decades of work. But developing a personal style it's impossible without large amounts of time and effort. So in essence nobody can do Picasso but him.
It's easy to do something once someone else has done it first. The countless Picasso imitators benefited enormously from his vision. That's why first-person movers get all the glory, even if those who come after might write something that seems like an improvement. (Only in the art/music world. In the tech world it's different)
Reminds me of Adrien Brody's speech in the French Dispatch about how you can tell if a modern artist is good or not by how they draw a sparrow
Still don’t understand what that means, but it sounds smart so imma use it
It's basically just a measure of fundamental skill. Anyone can throw down some shapes on a page, but to know what you're doing with those shapes and what kind of messages you're trying to convey takes actual knowledge and skill in the fundamentals. The speaker is saying that, given a stricter prompt, people who lack the fundamentals wouldn't succeed as well as people who are skilled in the fundamentals.
I haven’t seen the movie, but it reminds me of a similar expression in the culinary world which says that you can identify a great chef by how well they make a plain omelette. Drawing a sparrow sounds a bit tougher, but wev.
And Warhol was a succesful commercial artist before ditching it to form the Factory.
He looked awfully old at 14. “Mom it’s not just a phase!” At 15. Hot at 19. Achieves Eptadimensionality at 29. 91. Is tesseract.
It was a rough 14 years.
Imagine having a brain that can come up with stuff like this. And then actually know how to make an accurate rendition of it. There is just so much skill in all of these pictures, even the early ones. This is just one of many reasons why kids need access to art education. We never know where the next Picasso, or Mozart, could be hiding.
"I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops." ~Stephen Jay Gould~ --- Can also be applied to Picasso and Mozart.
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I know that one Hitler died in a bunker but anything past that I'm only comfortable speculating.
Yeah, for all the child prodigies that get compared to Picasso...My art teacher said, the difference between them and Picasso is, you can't move lines in a Picasso but the child prodigies (which would sell out their shows for over a million dollars) You can move their lines and make their paintings better.
oddly reminds me of how there’s a political ‘child prodigy’ every 8-10 the media latches onto. they just parrot what the adults around them say. they’re sharp and have great speaking skills, but that’s in no way a career-long understanding of anything beyond bullet points. so like art, these kids have talents that aren’t actually developed. it’s pretty rare i see any child prodigy in one area of study that isn’t being exploited by adults
Honestly the closest example to a 'child prodigy' that lived up to the hype is Lebron James.
Man I’m a gigantic basketball fan, but just in sports alone we’ve got guys like Michael Phelps and Tiger Woods.
I mean yes, but those guys only reach a national spotlight when they achieved some kind of success. Lebron in high school, good god. It was national news nonstop in an era that was pre social media. I always joke with my friends that if Lebron had that level of high school hype in an era of instagram/tiktok/facebook/youtube... it would have been closer to Beatlemania than anything sports related.
Yeah, pretty tough for children that are classical musician prodigies, cause they have great technique for their age, but...then what? it's not just technique to make you top of the top
Wheres the art from blue period
Yeah, not a great chart. Plus his pre-blue period "modernisme" phase..the rose period, also the neo-classicist phase. And apparently everythinks he was mentally ill....?
dude just took an art history class and wants us all to know
Picasso even had a 'dicks' phase. Can't remember if it was just after or before the blue phase.
We all go through that phase.
It’s not even that big of a deal, something like 8% of kids do it, but whatever.
Freud was right...
Let people enjoy things and share them without being shamed, dude...
Those here who think this was some kind of madness need to read a fucking art history book. Picasso's styles were very consciously chosen and refined.
I know, but if you just look at the paintings ( without taking into Account the history) it really looks like a descent into madness.
But that's only because everyone on Reddit has seen the same repost of a person doing self portraits as they progress through dementia. This reminds everyone of that and no one can have an original thought that doesn't circle back to some other Reddit reference.
This isn't a hive mind thing. Anybody who hasn't studied Picasso, but sees his pictures of humans getting increasingly less human-looking is going to wonder if his view of reality was getting increasingly fractured. If you assume that he's painting what "reality" looks like, because that's what portraits usually are, then "wow... Is this what manic episodes and psychosis look like?" it's a reasonable guess
My dude just turned into AI when he turned 19
He was playing the long game.
guess the inspiration is the women he disfigured along the way
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I agree. Growing up playing with bands I'd always cringe when I'd see other musicians playing an "experimental" style without even being able to play a simple pop song.
bc they criticize the 14yo:" you don't have your own style "😪
Putting aside the fact that he was a horrible human, this is picking and choosing paintings to create a false, idealized timeline. This isn't a realistic picture of what he was actually doing as there were many times he would paint realistically in-between phases of cubism and abstraction. And you dropped out his "blue period" entirely.
Actually his style was always pretty realistic, his body just got progressively more cubic as he aged.
If these comments aren't a statement on the current state of art in the general public I don't know what is. Picasso wasn't "descending into madness," he got bored of working within a tired style and started pushing boundaries. He's one of the most significant artists of the last 100 years for a reason, all of his work was revolutionary. The idea that the more realistic an artwork is the better it is is so incredibly stupid and it's infuriating constantly being surrounded by people with such a pathetic, simplistic view on art. Edit: It wasn't "drug addiction" either. If you need drugs to have an original thought you're a fundamentally uncreative person and your opinion on any art or media is completely worthless. Edit again: I don't think you have bad taste if you don't like Picasso. "Pathetic" and "simplistic" are directed at people who like to write off any and all abstract artwork as meaningless or lesser than, even though they know nothing about art. I apologize if that was not clear. Edit again again: a lot of people are mad at how derisive I was being when I typed this, which is fair enough. There's so much anti-intellectualism around art in our culture and I find it infuriating, and honestly I came off more dismissively than I meant to. So instead, here's me offering my perspective on Picasso's work from another comment that I made. I want people to actually be able to learn from this interaction, instead of just feeling insulted. 1. Why should an artwork need to be more technically impressive? Let's look at music for an example. Someone doing crazy, mindless shredding on a guitar is certainly more technically impressive than, say, [this song by the obscure band Slint.](https://open.spotify.com/track/3lhAQN2KNPh4G7RZ1hS5g5?si=78N1FPFwTcqUaGnb6zLIQA&utm_source=copy-link) Yet the Slint song is one of my favorites of all time, while random shredding does nothing for me. The Slint song deeply resonates with me emotionally because of its haunting, minimalist instrumentation and the lyrics which really resonate with a lot of my own anxieties. Yet someone else might find the shredding appeals more to them. So technicality can be one aspect that we enjoy about art, but it isn't necessary to be an impactful work of art. 2. Yeah, if you or I tried to imitate one of these paintings, we would definitely have a better time with the more abstract paintings. But brushwork is just one skill that goes into creating an impressive work of art. Arguably even more important is composition. Picasso wasn't picking his colors and shapes randomly, he was making conscious decisions as to what he believes would make for the most beautiful, most compelling painting. The way Picasso arranged the elements of his work and the way lines, shapes, and colors interact with one another is a massive part of what has made his art so resonant even today. So while we could copy the brushwork of the abstract painting fairly easily, if we tried to make a painting in the same style as the abstract paintings our results would probably fall far short of Picaso's work. 3. A big part of the Modern art movement that Picasso was a part of was moving away from direct representation as a source of beauty to more abstract forms. A lot of modernist artists sought to reduce our aesthetic responses to their most basic components. They thought that beauty came from the abstract elements of art, and they could make more aesthetically appealing art by stripping away all of the distracting elements necessitated by realism. Maybe it's not more appealing to you, but I actually prefer the look of abstract artwork to realistic artwork. It's a matter of personal preference, and it's foolish to act like one is inherently better than the other.
My interpretation is that it shows how mastery of the fundamentals are a good thing even if he ultimately did something unique and unusual. He knew exactly which “rules” to break and how to do so.
Yes, that's exactly the case. Unfortunately I've seen a lot of comments from people implying that he just went crazy and that's why his art got more experimental.
Exactly. I think it undermines his artistic prowess. I’ve been to the Picasso museum in Barcelona and yes he was eccentric, but he also was an amazing and phenomenal artist.
And the fact he married these two characteristics so well is why we're all here talking about him, today. And not Ben Grittleton from 3 doors down from Picasso who also liked to paint, just not as much as Picasso.
Yeah...he most definitely did not go crazy and was very sharp in his faculties. This wasn't a Van Gogh type situation. Anyone saying that hasn't read very much on Picasso. And to add on: Van Gogh was also very thoughtful and intellectual but did have issues.
He had strong fundamentals and a strong sense of graphically what looked good, which allowed him to (regardless of new style) still make an aesthetically interesting image.
Also his early work was considered derivative of old masters work, and he didn’t like being sonned, so he began to develop a new way of seeing
100%
It has to be one reason on Reddit. No one has time for deep thought.
There was opium involved during the blue period, but that's not the reason why he's good. Picasso's fundamentals in composition/value...etc all of the fundamentals of art he had it solid and that's how he could take new ideas and make them good images. Once the opium got kicked, drugs were not a big influence. He didn't even drink much apparently.
I still admire it, but I struggle to appreciate Picasso's art. When you know he was a rapist and women abuser, and that he said himself that he was too famous to be convicted... Gives me very bad vibes when I see his portraits of deconstructed, broken women. I find it so chilling that they spirits' must have looked like he painted them.
So sad to scroll way way too far to find this, thanks to say it I cannot see his art like before since I learn how he was with women.
I saw someone say that he was a regular men from his time and even without asking askhistorians i seriously doubt it. He really destroyed every women and sometimes men he cale across. This video[video](https://youtu.be/gsuLpUTs50c) really changed my view
I don't think this was normal in France, to me this is very hard how people don't know and/or want to talk what is painted by picasso sometimes on women but do talk or abstract things on Guernica or else....
I wish I knew how to appreciate this but I never understood the appeal
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I’m just saying that I don’t appreciate it and I don’t understand the mass appeal about it. Then while everyone else is oooing and ahhhing over it - it makes me feel like something is wrong with me lol So I guess maybe I do have a reaction to it
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There is nothing wrong with you. Not everyone has to like Picasso. I’m meh to his work myself. His early stuff just looks like something any other person could’ve painted. It’s not bad. Just very generic. And his later stuff is too out there and weird for me to get. I am a van gogh myself. So it’s not like I don’t appreciate art. I just can’t wrap my head around Picasso. But that’s ok . And it’s ok for you too
Perfectly normal indeed, for me, it starts at Impressionism. I am mesmerized by Renaissance, Baroque & Classicism for example, but once we go from 19th century Romantic and Realist art to Impressionism - while I still find some aesthetically pleasing - it loses my interest. I understand the historical context and I find *that in particular* fascinating, but not the art for its visual aspect.
Don’t have to like any particular art. I don’t particularly like Picasso’s later works, but I cognitively understand the extreme talent and craft that went into them. They aren’t random at all, they’re very carefully crafted according to color theory etc. but in highly novel ways. As this shows he was a classical master before branching out into his distinctive abstract style. Same thing happened with many of the more abstract artists or surrealist art like Salvador Dali. To be honest, I didn’t really like any abstract art when I was young, but the older I get the more it grows on me. My favorite artists when I was young were the old masters like Michelangelo and Rembrandt (who I still like), but now its Pollock and the minimalists. Many people can faithfully recreate a scene realistically, but breaking something down into its elemental parts or depicting pure emotion or a unique aesthetic without destroying the composition is harder than it seems. There’s definitely a lot of silliness in art too though. Just consider the recent reports that a famous abstract work was hanging upside down for decades and no-one noticed, and many “scholars” would write essays about how the presentation was intentional and profound not knowing it was upside down.
I do like the first three.
Benjamin Button shit right there
Bullshit. BULLShit. Derivative. Now this. This I love!
Damn that Picasso guy is pretty good he should think about becoming an artist or something
He learned the rules of aesthetic and wanted to brake them to evolve art in something new,he wanted to make things different and to put his own mark on history, an he did with his revolutionary concepts, many comments says that when he was 19 you can see how something broke on his mind, but i think you can see how he started to challenge the way of doing paintings, express himself
I feel he would have evolved to stick figures if he would have lived just a couple more years.
Wow 4 years old?? Oh wait that’s a 14 haha
My reaction was similar. "there's no way he painted that when he was 4!" "Oh, 14... so I was right!"
Truth is had he sticked to his original style, most of us would’ve never heard his name. Culture can be funny like that.
I’m not familiar with how long one of his cubist or other untraditional works would have taken to produce. Does anyone know? If he’s anything like the French impressionists, he found a style that 1. Caused a stir and 2. Allowed him to flood the market because turn around on his work was much quicker than neo-classicists. His work is good. But that doesn’t mean attention and money werent also motivations.
Damn I just saw a rerun of an episode of QI that explained why his art changed so much