You, too, can..... Paint Like Picasso!

Caption:" The Mandolin And Guitarist"

• "The Mandolin And Guitarist" is a study in curving lines, movement, and brilliant color. Picasso repeats the colors in the same way , and for the same reason. This piece of artwork was made in 1924.It is a oil and sand painting.

"Three Musicians."

•  The Three Musicians are a Harlequin, a Pierrot, and a Monk.The Harlequin and the Pierrot are French clowns who never speak while they perform. The Monk is a quiet religious man.   

• After Cubism, the world never looked the same again: it was one of the most influential and revolutionary movements in art. The Spaniard Pablo Picasso and the Frenchman Georges Braque splintered the visual world not wantonly, but sensuously and beautifully with their new art. Provided what we could almost call a God’s-eye view of reality: every aspect of the whole subject, seen simultaneously in a single dimension.

• The Cubist movement in painting was developed by Picasso and Braque around 1907 and became a major influence on Western art.

   The artists chose to break down the subjects they were painting into a number of facets, showing several different aspects of one object simultaneously. 

  • The work up to 1912 is known as Analytical Cubism, concentrating on geometrical forms using subdued colors. 
  • The second phase, known as Synthetic Cubism, used more decorative shapes, stenciling, collage, and brighter colors. It was then artists such as Picasso and Braque started to use pieces of cut-up newspaper in their paintings.   
•   Picasso and Braque worked together closely during the next few years (1909-12)—the only time Picasso ever worked with another painter in this way—and they developed what came to be known as Analytical Cubism. Early Cubist paintings were often misunderstood by critics and viewers because they were thought to be merely geometric art. Yet the painters themselves believed they were presenting a new kind of perspective and illusion.

•   For example, they showed multiple views of an object on the same canvas to convey more information than could be contained in a single, limited illusionistic view. 

  As Kahnweiler saw it, Cubism signified the opening up of closed form by the "re-presentation" of the form of objects and their position in space instead of their imitation through illusionistic means; and the analytic process of fracturing objects and space, light and shadow, and even colors was likened by Apollinaire to the way in which the surgeon dissects a cadaver.

•    This type of analysis is characteristic of Picasso’s work beginning in 1909, especially in the landscapes he made on a trip to Spain that summer ("Facroty at Horta de Ebro"). Picasso merged figures, objects, and space on a kind of grid. The palette was once again limited to monochromatic ochres, browns, and grays. Neither Braque nor Picasso desired to move into the realm of total abstraction in their Cubist works, although they implicitly accepted inconsistencies such as different points of view, different axes, and different light sources in the same picture.
•    Furthermore, the inclusion of abstract and representational elements on the same picture plane led both artists to reexamine what two-dimensional elements, such as newspaper letter, signified. A song title, "ma Jolie," for instance, could point to events outside the painting; it could refer  to Picasso’s new mistress, Eva (Marcelle Humbert). But it could also point to compositional elements within the painting, to the function of flat pictorial elements that play off other flat planes or curvilinear motifs.
•    The inclusion of lettering also produced the powerful suggestion that Cubist pictures could be read coming forward from the picture plane rather than receding (in traditional perspective) into it. And the Cubists’ manipulation of the picture shape—their use of the oval, for example—redefined the edge of the work in a way that underlined the fact that in a Cubist picture the canvas provides the real space.
•      Picasso wanted to get as close to reality as possible. He felt the only way to represent a real object on a flat canvas was to create a painting that would show every side of the object. If he took each point of view, emphasized the main geometric shapes, and spread all these points of view out of the canvas, he would have a total picture of the object he was representing.

   The image would unfold and the viewer would be able to know everything there was to know about the subject. With this Cubist style, objects became so broken up they were almost unrecognizable. In his later Cubist paintings, Picasso began to combine several points of view of the object and to overlap them. This technique expressed the idea of an object, rather than any one view of it. It led to the development of abstract or non-representational art later in the 20^th century. Picasso was interested in all forms of art and in 1917, he began to design scenery and costumes for dance performances. Characters from the theatre were also the subjects of many of his works.