Interesting that so many people like Picasso so much. I'm not one of them.
I think to better appreciate Picasso, he needs to be situated in a historical context.
The invention of photography in the 19th century, and its gradual improvement, along with the coming of motion pictures, greatly obviated the need to paint realistically, especially realistic portraits to flatter the wealthy and the vain, which is how many great artists made their living over the centuries.
After the arrival of photography, we got the Impressionists and Van Gogh, who were breaking new ground in depicting people, places and things not so much realistically and descriptively, but interpretively. The impressionists broke up light into little dots of unmixed color with the goal not just of painting a scene, but painting light itself.
Van Gogh, who began his career painting labored, realistic portraits of peasants and the poor, encountered the impressionists in 1886 in Paris, absorbed their techniques, and then went far beyond them. He used color as no one ever had before, expressively, like sticks of dynamite. He is associated with the school that came to be called post-impressionism and influenced many 20th-century artists, especially the Fauves and also Matisse and Picasso.
Also painting at the time was Cezanne, who told Van Gogh on his sole meeting with Vincent that he “painted like a madman.”
Cezanne was taking a different avenue, exploring not breaking up color or using color expressively, but breaking up and examining form and the implications of seeing not just from a single perspective adhering to three-point perspective, but from many different perspectives at once. His late paintings, especially of a certain mountain, were perhaps the first examples of non-representational or abstract art, which would dominate the 20th century.
Picasso and his confederate Braques were mainly influenced by Cezanne and took his work to a whole new level. This was the birth of Cubism. Picasso would be unthinkable without the others who paved his way. Like they say of scientists, he stood on the shoulder of giants, not just Cezanne but also Van Gogh, Gauguin and a number of others, though he was never known as a color innovator like Vincent. But his early Blue Period paintings were heavily influenced by Gauguin.
There are those who still say stuff like “Picasso couldn’t draw,” or “my child could do what he did,” but this is quite false. By the time he was a teenager, Picasso, as one observer said, “could draw like an angel.” His teenage oil paintings are as good, and as realistic, perhaps as anything ever put on canvas.
The greatness of Picasso for me lies in his protean nature. Most artists, even the great ones, are identified with a signature style. Picasso transcended all that. All his life he was using and then discarding styles like snake skins. After his experiments in analytic Cubism, he pivoted to painting in an exaggerated classical style, with massive, stylized and simplified forms, mostly of women. But then he turned to synthetic Cubism and later other inventions, including in sculpture, although curiously he never went the full-blown abstract route that was the dominant theme of the 20th century.
Picasso’s masterwork, Guernica, is a combination of analytic and synthetic Cubism, and is perhaps the most powerful anti-war visual statement ever made, IMO. I also believe it inspired graffiti art that was to arrive decades later, and especially graffiti murals, with which New York is splendidly graced, including wonderful stuff right across the street from where I live. I drew my avatar to reinterpret the horse that was at the center of Guernica as an orange-eyed, demonic poodle — The Pood.
I think Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman did amazing in that film.
