It is difficult to imagine from this historical distance to what extent the modernist painting of Pablo Picasso in 1907 by Pablo Picasso The Demoiselles d'Avignon was at the Parisian company at its beginnings. On his 100th anniversary, Tutor Jonathan Jones review described it as “the rift, the break that divides the past and the future”. The painting caused an uproar, even among the peers of the artist. It was a moment of culture shock, notes Pbs. Its five naked figures, broken in proto-cubist aircraft and angles with painted faces like African masks, encountered “with a shock, disgust and an almost unanimous outrage”.
Henri Matisse, himself being often credited with having inaugurated a modernist painting with his flat-colored fields, “is angry by the work, which he considers as a hoax, an attempt to paint the fourth dimension”. A large part of the indignation was to come from moral scruples of the middle class on the subject of painting: “sexual freedom represented in a brothel.”
It's a bit difficult to believe. Naked women in brothels, “odalisques”, have long been a favorite subject of some of the most revered European painters. But where the women of these paintings always seem passive, if not submissive, the nudes of Picasso put in a suggestive way and meet the view of the spectator, actively without shame.
What probably disrupted these first viewers is the violence perceived for tradition. Although we cannot recover the tender sensitivity of Parisian criticisms of the beginning of the 20th century, we can, I think, live a similar shock by looking at the work that Picasso had done ten years earlier, like the 1896 First communionhigher and 1897 study Science and Charity At the top, conservative gender paintings in an academic style, beautifully rendered with skills exquisite by a 15 -year -old artist. See a previous drawing, Study for a torsoAbove, completed in 1892 when Picasso was only 11 years old.
Given its incredible precocity, it may not be surprising that Picasso has scandalously innovated new ways to use the line, color and composition. He was a prodigious master of technique at an age when many artists are still years of a formal study. Where could his agitated talent go? He painted a favorite subject in 1900, in the coward, impressionist BullfightAbove, a return to his first oil painting, PicadorBelow, made when he was 8 years old. Further on, see a drawing of the following year in its early development, “bull and pigeons”.
This piece, with its realistic realistic birds, carefully designed at the top of a loose sketch of a bullfight, appeared in a 2006 show at the Phillips collection in Washington, DC with childhood works by Picasso and Paul Klee. Contrary, perhaps, to our expectations, conservative Notes by Jonathan Fineberg From this drawing that “the confident and playful scribble of 9 -year -old Picasso” gives us more indication of his talent than the finely drawn birds.
“It is not only that Picasso could well make because you could teach anyone to do it,” explains Fineberg. Maybe no one, but the point stands – technology can be taught, creative vision cannot. “It is not about competence. These are unique qualities to see. This is what makes Picasso a better artist than andrew Wyeth. Art concerns a new way of looking at the world. ” You may prefer Wyeth, or think of the unfair downward comparison, but it is undeniable that Picasso had a very “way of seeing Roman”, from his first sketches to his most revolutionary modernist masterpieces. See several others The first very accomplished works of Picasso here.
Note: a previous version of this article appeared on our site in 2018.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him to @jdmagness
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