I have always despised cubism for as long as I can remember, and especially when people argue that Picasso's works are some of the greatest pieces of art created (I'm only talking about his cubism stuff, I actually like his blue and rose period works). Take Guernica, for example. The only way I could tell that it was something 'bad' is the man in the right apparently screaming, other than that I could tell you nothing of what it is about, represents, or anything else about it. The entire piece is supposed to be symbolic, but I can't view the symbolism by looking at it! Someone had to tell me that it was a reference to a town that was bombed, and even then I couldn't see it. I have always preferred realism to most other forms of art; give me a Michelangelo painting over Picasso any day.
Hey, you're talking about Picasso -- my hero way back when in my art school days. One of the more interesting aspects of Picasso's work is that he brought a new design language to visual art, and created a broad path for other artists to explore images that were, in many instances, visual metaphors or even puns. Much of what we understand about art today is deeply indebted to Picasso's "fracturing" of visual reality in order to get at the stuff inside. However, Picasso was aware that in many ways this was something of a circus act. He once said, somewhere, in some source I can't find, that "real" art ended somewhere before Michelangelo and the High Renaissance, probably 50 or 100 years before, in the late 1300s. Then, Picasso said, artists still deeply believed that their work really mattered to people as a matter of life-and-death, heaven-or-hell, that art could, indeed, provide a bridge to true spiritual experience. In comparison, Picasso suggested, all the great aritsts that came after that time, including Michelangelo and himself, were more or less brilliant acrobats and technical wizards -- but in the final analysis, able to speak only of their own personal knowledge of life, and incapable of speaking for the rest of humanity's spiritual aspirations.
ReplyDeleteAn interesting idea -- sorry I can't find the original quote.
S. Mannheimer