CSP 6: Making It New

 

Created in 1937, Picasso’s painting Guernica was created in protest to the bombing of Guernica by Nazi Germany at the command of the Spanish government as a part of a civil war. Picasso shows the death and suffering caused by the bombing in this work. The human figures are seen suffering immensely and the bodies are contorted and abstract. The pair of people on the leftmost side, at the feet of the bull embodies this. The woman holds the body of a dead man. Picasso shows the woman with a long, mutilated neck and open mouth as if she is shrieking in grief because of the death of a loved one. Picasso uses black, white, and grey in various chaotic patterns. This was done in order to display the chaos that the citizens in Guernica faced. Picasso uses overly dramatic contrast of black and white. In the background there are flaming buildings and broken walls displaying the chaos that was caused by a civil war. The gigantic light bulb in the room represents the sun as it illuminates the terrible scene facing Guernica. The person on the far right of the painting seems to be tormented, showing the world the agonizing conditions that the people of Spain had to live through during the civil war.

Upon my first glance at Violin and Guitar, one of the of artworks Pablo Picasso created during his Cubism period, I was amazed by how Picasso disassembles the violin into small parts and put them in such dimensional way on canvas that allow the viewers to reassemble these parts into a complete instrument while interpreting this artwork in their minds. This piece was painted during Picasso’s late period of analytical Cubism, during which I think he “subjective” the object and maximized the information while he painted. After I took a more careful look at this artwork and noticed more details, I realized he somehow combined the two string instruments together on the painting because of their certain similarities, but depicted detailed difference as well. For instance, from Picasso’s perspective, these two pieces of instrument shared the same “body”, but have different top parts: the violin has a leaned top part while the guitar has a vertical. The sound holes that only violins have also illustrate the difference. After a closer look, I realized it is the seemingly dimensional shapes in the middle of the painting that create a sense of dimension for the first impression.

Analytical Cubists works compared to impressionist works have more lines and apply more dark colors. In contrast to Monet’s artworks, Picasso’s paintings used less bright colors and have more clear and even maximized characteristics of an object. Additionally, Cubism artworks are more involved with geometry and mathematics.

When looking at Boy with Pipe (1905), my mind immediately pictures (although this is 55 years earlier) walking into a tent made of Arabian-style fabric to find a young boy filling the space with hash smoke from his pipe in the flower-child 60’s. Beyond that personal image, my immediate reaction is Picasso’s step away from the stylistic norm of painting portraits: the boy body is cut off by the bottom of the canvas in a peculiar location, the symmetry of his face is far from perfect, and his angelic wings and crown are made of flowers. This painting is at the beginning of Picasso’s “Rose Period” (1905-6), which is very clearly expressed through the floral headband and wings as well as the background color. Upon closer inspection I notice the pipe is awkwardly being held, the color green is used as a shadow on the boy’s outfit, and there seems to be something cutoff at the top of the canvas. Much like the impressionists, Picasso’s brushstrokes are clearly visible in the background of the painting. His use of light, although dull, is still expressed through green on the boy’s sleeve and the shadow on his face so there isn’t an absence of light, just a different perception than that of impressionists.

Pablo Picasso painted “The Sculptor” (1931) between what art historians have posthumously identified as his Neoclassicist period and his Surrealist period. In addition to its date, this classification is supported by the painting’s focus on sculpture, a theme critical to neoclassicism, and its fantastical composition grounded in Picasso’s own vocabulary of shapes and hue, a marker of surrealism.  Upon first impression, my eye was drawn to the top right corner which in isolation appears as two men’s faces locked in a seemingly sensual embrace.  As my eye travels from the sculptor’s form to the also seemingly-erotic female bust, I am able to form a more complete understanding of the painting’s narrative; each unique geometrical shape relies on those that surround it to relay a coherent story despite objective confusion.  Unlike Picasso’s Blue and Rose period, “The Sculptor” uses a more saturated and varied color palette. The paint is not mixed extensively but consists predominantly of primary colors situated next to their complements. Furthermore, the painting includes spaces left intentionally white, a practice fundamentally outside of the status quo in Europe’s formal art sphere during the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries.

The surreal composition and unmixed color palette that rely on an interaction between painting and viewer to complete its narrative rather than on extraordinary attention to realist detail reflect similar effects of impressionist work.  Like Monet and Van Gogh’s deliberate application of hues side by side rather than combined pre application, or most exemplary the pointillism techniques used by Georges Seurat, the palette used in “The Sculptor” derives significance from the viewer’s eye’s absorption of each hue as a whole.  However, unlike the geometrical vagueness of Monet’s impressionist works, the Cubist methods applied in this painting offer a more concrete description of how shapes sit in relation to one and other.  The same confusion regarding where the forms end and environment begins exists in Picasso’s cubist dissolution of physical boundaries, however the clear geometrical classifications point to the cerebral quality of “The Sculptor” as opposed to the more observant nature of impressionist works.  The use of contour outlines demands recognition of these figures existence.  However, it is clear that their existence lies in the artist’s perception of “some transcendental version or Platonic form of a thing” (Baudelaire), rather than in their objective structures rendered by light, as in impressionism, or analytical accuracy, as in realism.

Pablo Picasso’s famous painting “Guernica” (1937) uses a palette of black, grey, and white to depict the violence resulting from the bombing of Guernica, Spain during the Spanish Civil War. Looking at this painting, one can discern people dead or dying, along with expressions of horror and multiple sources of light. This was painted during Picasso’s surrealist period, in which the compositions of his painting become increasingly dream-like and he begins to incorporate social issues of the time into his artwork. At first glance, it is hard to understand what is going on in “Guernica.” Every part of the canvas has something going on; floating faces, wailing people, cows, horses, and limbs strewn about. Even though it is hard to fit these pieces of suffering together, I can understand the pain and anguish Picasso is trying to express using this method of painting. The chaotic composition stays true to how the actual bombings affected people in Spain, and I think the painting does a very good job of showing the pain people endured and allowing the viewer to sympathize with this horrifying event. I think the palette Picasso used also makes the suffering in the painting clear, as these colors distinctly stand out and contrast with each other invoking a sense of turmoil and loss. The colors also differ greatly from impressionism, which concentrated mainly on using multiple bright colors to convey a certain mood. Picasso also creates a mood with his colors, but these colors are much more concentrated and less care-free than those of impressionism. Moreover, while Impressionist art tries to capture a single moment almost like a photograph, Picasso captures multiple moments and scenes of death and destruction and piles them into one huge canvas, so the jagged angles and piles on bodies each hold their own stories and points of view like those who died in Guernica. I find this painting to be greatly upsetting, which means that Picasso did his job well in trying to incite social change, and I think “Guernica” captures the powerful images you can express in art using any style, because by invoking a particular mood one can create an art piece that transcends style and affect people beyond the realm of art.