{"id":617,"date":"2017-12-26T12:06:23","date_gmt":"2017-12-26T06:36:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theasifkamal.com\/blog\/?p=617"},"modified":"2017-12-26T12:07:07","modified_gmt":"2017-12-26T06:37:07","slug":"picassos-virtual-invention-abstract-painting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theasifkamal.com\/blog\/2017\/12\/26\/picassos-virtual-invention-abstract-painting\/","title":{"rendered":"Picasso\u2019s Virtual invention of Abstract Painting"},"content":{"rendered":"

It took four hours by train and seven hours by covered wagon to reach Cadaqu\u00e9s from Barcelona. The group of travelers\u2014including a 28-year-old Pablo Picasso and his then lover, Fernande Olivier\u2014arrived in the small Spanish beach town after nightfall on July 1, 1910.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Picasso would produce just a handful of works that summer, 10 of which are extant today. For the famously prolific artist, whose total output is estimated at 50,000 works, this was an aberration. Just the summer before, in the Spanish village of Horta de San Joan, Picasso produced what biographer John Richardson calls an \u201cavalanche of paintings.\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s always interesting to note when he actually slows down,\u201d said Yve-Alain Bois, a professor of art history at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. In this case, he noted, \u201cI think Picasso knew that his work had pushed him into a corner.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

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The preceding years had been wildly productive for Picasso. In 1907, together with French painter Georges Braque, he began to lay the foundation for Cubism. The pair collaborated more intensively in 1909, a back-and-forth that led to the development of \u201cAnalytic Cubism\u201d\u2014characterized by fragmented, overlapping planes and a monochromatic palette.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Pablo Picasso, Portrait of woman, 1910 Museum<\/p><\/div>\n

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In his beach-side studio in Cadaqu\u00e9s, Picasso continued to pare down his mark-making. Eventually, he settled on a structure of gridded perpendicular lines that would serve as the basis for each new work. He also began to shade each plane of the fragmented picture separately, rather than maintaining a single light source\u2014an approach that created a sense of depth without the illusion of a solid form.<\/span><\/p>\n

These developments were driving him closer and closer towards pure abstraction. Even Picasso, Richardson notes, had a difficult time identifying the original subject matter for the Cadaqu\u00e9s paintings. Beyond their titles, Femme \u00e0 la mandoline (Woman with a mandolin) (1910) and Glass and Lemon (1910) are difficult to parse as anything other than a series of interlocking geometric planes in shades of brown and grey. \u201cThese works seem abstract in all but name,\u201d wrote Museum of Modern Art curator Leah Dickerman in a catalogue essay for the museum\u2019s 2012\u201313 exhibitions \u201cInventing Abstraction.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

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And if Picasso had embraced this direction in his art, this would have been among the first Western paintings to be truly abstract. While this accolade is, and likely will always be, contested, Wassily Kandinsky\u2014often hailed as the \u201cfather of abstract painting\u201d\u2014didn\u2019t display his first non-representational painting until December 1911.<\/span><\/p>\n

But pure abstraction remained, as Richardson puts it, \u201ca Rubicon [Picasso] would never cross.\u201d When the Spanish painter returned to Paris in late August, he changed course. \u201cIt\u2019s true that whatever Picasso felt about those works, he decided to stop this vein, to amend it shortly afterwards,\u201d Bois explained.<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u00a0Pablo Picasso, Portrait of Art Dealer<\/p><\/div>\n

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The artist may have been influenced by his primary dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, who evidently declined to purchase all but one of the works he\u2019d made that summer. A 1910 portrait of Kahnweiler, begun before Picasso\u2019s trip to Cadaqu\u00e9s and completed after he\u2019d returned to France, reveals the new direction Picasso\u2019s art would take. He began to add \u201cattributes\u201d to his paintings\u2014a tie, a pipe, an earlobe\u2014small signs that indicated what object was being represented.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Later, in the 1920s, Picasso began to publicly decry abstraction. Bois notes that, as far as he knows, Picasso had made no comment on the style before that point. The comments came \u201cprecisely when abstract art was making some kind of noise and he felt a bit of a threat,\u201d he explained. \u201cThe threat being: I\u2019m no longer the most avant-garde there is.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

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In a 1928 interview, Picasso declared: \u201cI have a horror of so-called abstract painting.\u2026When one sticks colours next to each other and traces lines in space that don\u2019t correspond to anything, the result is decoration.\u201d The floodgates had opened; in 1935, the painter opined: \u201cThere is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterwards, you can remove all trace of reality. There\u2019s no danger then\u2026because the idea of the object left an indelible mark.\u201d A third argument, which came later, held that it was impossible to entirely eliminate a painting\u2019s subject. \u201cEven if the canvas is green\u2014so what? In that case, the subject matter is greenness!\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

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Pablo Picasso, Nature Morte au Bougeoir<\/p><\/div>\n

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But despite these outward rejections of abstraction, Picasso would revisit the style in sketches periodically throughout his life\u2014often corresponding to a particular exhibition or artist\u2019s work that he\u2019d just seen. \u201cEach time, it\u2019s almost to reassure himself,\u201d said Bois. \u201cLike, \u2018Oh, I can make the same stuff as these people.\u2019 You can sense there\u2019s some kind of anxiety.\u201d Although Picasso himself may never have gone fully abstract, Cubism certainly inspired a generation of painters like Kazimir Severinovich Malevich and Piet Mondrian (although not the \u201cexpressionist\u201d wing of abstraction, represented by Kandinsky). Mondrian spoke publicly about that influence, saying once that \u201cCubism did not accept the logical consequences of its own discoveries.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

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Maybe the most important lesson from Picasso\u2019s summer in Cadaqu\u00e9s, however, is that breaking the boundary between figuration and abstraction was no easy feat. \u201cI thought that it was a very interesting thing,\u201d Bois mused. \u201cIf someone as fearless as Picasso could recoil in front of the possibility of abstraction, how much more difficult would that have been for everyone else?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

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