Word: picasso
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...Picasso was an able and gifted artist, but not yet a modern one. He had managed to tame the mannerism of the Blue Period, with its wistful elongations and neurotic passivity of form, by studying Degas. In the Woman with a Fan, 1905, with its "Egyptian" gesture of the raised hand and gravely extended fan, or in the robust columnar body of the Boy Leading a Horse, 1906, Picasso's digestion of Puvis was complete. At that point he could have kept painting such pictures for the rest of his life and died in honors...
What happened was very different. The detachment of expression in his Rose Period hardened: through 1906 the faces took on an increasingly masklike air, blank, inexpressive, with empty eye sockets. Picasso had been looking at archaic Spanish carvings from Osuna. Now he stressed the sculptural, instead of the linear and atmospheric: solid impacted form, not fleeting mood. His 1906 portrait of Gertrude Stein, almost leaden in its pictorial ineloquence, marked the start of this change, and the pink stony torsos of Two Nudes, 1906, delineate the period's end. In between lay some magnificent paintings, such as the Seated Female...
Having brought solid form to such density, having set so absolute a division between figure and field, what choice did Picasso have but to break it all down again? Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907, was the painting that provoked cubism, and one of the most astounding feats of ideation in the history of art. These days the word radical is patched on to any newish artistic gesture, no matter how small: a puddle of lead on the floor, or a face pulled on video tape, or an array of bricks. This use of the word cannot begin to convey...
...Demoiselles is a brothel scene; there had been a whorehouse on the Carrer d'Avinyo, or Avignon Street, in Barcelona, and Picasso and his friends frequented it. But the picture has none of the social irony or even the sensuality with which Toulouse-Lautrec and Degas invested their brothel paintings. More vividly than ever, against the backdrop of earlier Picassos, it becomes clear why his friends thought he had gone crazy, why the painter André Derain actually predicted that Picasso would hang himself behind the big picture. The painting is freighted with aggression, carefully wrought. The nudes are cut into...
...Demoiselles, no cubism. But there was a long stretch between them while Picasso, grappling with late Cézanne, crossed from an art of paroxysm to one of exquisitely nuanced analysis. In a work like Bread and Fruit Dish on a Table, 1909, Picasso picked up on Cézanne's monumentality. Originally Picasso meant to paint a cabaret scene with figures at a table, in homage to Cézanne's Cardplayers, but the image mutated into still life, leaving the drinkers' legs fossilized, as it were, in the sloping table legs. The great brown half-moon of the tabletop, the bread...