Today is Pablo Picasso’s birthday… he would have been nearly 19 dog years old today (born 1881). As a painter, one of the early reactions to his Cubist work when it first appeared was that he was untrained and unskilled in the actual craft of painting, which was completely false. In fact his early paintings were highly realistic as you can see from this “First Communion” painting from 1895. I personally found the paintings from his Blue Period (Man with the Blue Guitar) to be among the most moving. Here is a You Tube clip of poet Wallace Stevens reading his poem “The Man With the Blue Guitar” inspired by Picasso’s painting. youtube/watch?v=isFZYAac3u8 Picasso’s Surrealist period works were perhaps the most emotionally powerful. “Guernica,” which I saw at the NY Museum of Modern Art when it was there as part of a larger Picasso show many years ago, his most powerful. The painting is in black, grey and white images capturing the horrible events during the Spanish Civil War; the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica. Lovers and Mother and Child is tenderly moving, many have complained, overly romanticized. So we say rest in peace on your birthday, Pablo, though had you been with us, you may have preferred remembering your various lovers on your cake day, artist Fernande Olivier, dancer Olga Khokhlova or the youthful Marie-Therese Walter, rather than your artistic accolades.
Posted on: Fri, 25 Oct 2013 10:31:48 +0000
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