'I don't believe in accidents. There are only encounters in history. There are no accidents.'
'I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.'
'Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.'
'Learn the rules like a pro, you you can break them like an artist.'
'If I paint a wild horse, you might not see the horse... but surely you will see the wildness.'
PICASSO
An artist's philosophy can start to be unraveled in the things that they say and what they regard as important. Visiting the Picasso Museum in Paris back last November, I came to realise the extraordinary amount of work that Picasso had created and churned out throughout his life and the array of very different styles throughout his course of painting and creation. Picasso, most known for his cubist period, was an artist not only of talent, but also of intelligence, being able to adapt his style and work, keeping up with the ever changing philosophical speculations, cultural diversity and the scientifical discoveries and inventions of the modern society.
During his Cubist period, he approached his work with the thinking and process of pulling objects apart, looking at their shapes and putting them back together in a different, more complex way, rather than painting them how he saw them. Rather than soft, realistic lines, we see the angular, geometric and constructive lines and shapes that look like they are continuously being built, with the sense of movement and rhythm perhaps suggesting the ongoing change and movement and shift in society within ideas, inventions, culture....
His work is complex, liberated, dramatic and dynamic which is not only reflective of the changes in society during the 1900s, but also of his own thinking and perhaps shift of philosophy in how he saw the way to work. Rather than going by the books, the long hours of studying how to 'paint', he saw with a new freshness that he could create how HE liked, a sense of freedom and liberty exploding into his work, and to do things the way he and his mind saw them. He realised that times were changing, and so must art, if it were to keep up with the rest of the world.
And so, although we don't come to regard Picasso's work as beautifully realistic, we do indeed come to admire the sheer liberty, movement and energy expressed in his work and the important frame of mind and thought that we perhaps only come to realise too late in life (am sounding like deep philosopher... or am I?)that it is essential that we do things in the way that we want, because we do have that freedom. This freedom of doing, thinking and saying what we really believe and want is, in fact, what pushes our society forward and keeps it moving and evolving.
So it really is thanks to figures like Picasso, who thought differently and expressively, throughout our time, that we have to thank, for where we are and what we have now.
It was a thoroughly fascinating and thought provoking visit, a fabulous museum dedicated mainly to the works of Picasso which tells the story not only of Picasso's work and life, but of time.
'What people call deformation in my work results from their own misapprehension. It's not a matter of deformation, it's a question of formation.'
Definitely worth a visit for all you art lovers.
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