I found my visit to the LACMA to be really fun and interesting to see different art pieces. My friends and I spent our time in the Ahmanson building in the Modern and Expressionist art exhibits. I saw a lot of Picassos and Pissarros, and I think the museum had a good diversity of artwork that I have never seen before. The work I saw that I felt connected with what we have learned in class was “Men and Women” (1969) by Pablo Picasso. Even though this work was done in a later period than what we’ve talked about in class this art piece still stays true to the Cubist principles we’ve talked about. The painting depicts a man and woman contrasted in white and black, and the painting semi-overtly shows the man penetrating the woman. Besides the sexual subject matter, the figures are still distorted as if seen from multiple perspectives. However, Picasso uses a lot of color in this painting opposed to earlier Cubist painting in which expression though color was avoided. The painting style looks more abstract than Cubist, but the underlying techniques still remain, as the painting is still ambiguously fragmented and over exaggerated. The LACMA had the biggest collection of Picasso paintings I’ve ever seen before, so it was interesting to see his creative process and how his art changed over time, especially after learning about him in class. “Men and Women” was displayed alongside the rest of the Picasso paintings, and the me that highlighted its difference in style compared to the other pieces due to his use of color and the way it was painted with heavy brushstrokes. This painting was also much larger than the other Cubist paintings so the eye was immediately drawn to it. Although this painting shows clearly a difference in Picasso’s painting style, the sexual subject matter and fragmented perspectives are very much in the conventional Picasso style. Going to the LACMA was a great experience in relation to the class because it allowed me to visualize the art we talk about in person, and having learned about the kinds of artwork I was looking at made it all the more interesting.
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.
Pablo PIcasso was a prominent painter, widely known for his fluxing and contrasting painting styles that kept aggressively changing over the course of his lifetime. “The Old Guitarist” was painted in 1904 with oil based paint on a canvas. It was painted during the artist’s “Blue Period” which was characterized by a heavy use of various tones of blue. In most paintings, this had a profound effect in the feelings they each depicted. In fact, most of the paintings that were created during that period are often perceived as somewhat “cold”, “melancholic”, and overall “depressing”. Furthermore, this painting was influenced greatly by the ideals of the expressionist movement. It was all about painting “how you see something” contrary to the past impressionist movement which was all about depicting an impression about “how you felt about a moment ‘en plein air’ “. That is exactly what one can see in “The Old Guitarist”; a detailed painting of an old, week, blind man hunched onto his guitar in the streets. Nevertheless, what makes this painting rather depressing is not the objective but rather the subjective. It is the lens through which Picasso depicted that situation what really makes this painting shocking to the public in general. It is that monochromatic selection of different tones of blue that create an emphasis on the lack of emotions thereof. Nevertheless, that monotony is broken by that one object that this man is holding… the guitar. All of those blue tones make this old man appear, spiritless, it is as if this man just passed away. This is why for me, the guitar represents a symbol for something that will live well after this man’s death. It is the music that he once created the one thing that will prosper well after this man’s death, this is the reason why this man is holding onto the guitar so strongly.
All of these elements unite to create a dull, shocking painting that reflect a situation through the perception of the artist. It is not an impression but a perception of reality. Furthermore, this change in ideals from impressionism to expressionism can be reflected in the difference of painting styles. Rather than depicting an impression about how something feels through the use of broken, dappled colors on a canvas, this painting uses monochromatism to represent a reality through a subjective mean.
“Portrait of Ambroise Vollard” (1910) is a painting by Pablo Picasso from Picasso’s Analytic Cubism period (lecture). I noticed how the forehead of the person in the painting seems long, like a gorilla’s. The person’s head also seems to be outlined in white, which might mean they have white hair. I looked at it a bit closer, and I noticed how there seems to be an outline of a jacket on the right side, and maybe a shirt in the middle indicating that the person in the painting is wearing a suit. The person’s face seems neutral, not really emotional. Compared to the impressionists, Picasso’s painting seems similarly “messy”, like the negative review about impressionism claiming how it was just “…dirtying three-quarters of a canvas,” (Emile Cardon). However, I do not dislike the “messiness”, but rather noticed how it appears “messy” like an impressionist’s painting. It also seems to be unnatural in color in certain areas which is another similarity to impressionism, or at least to the definition that we learned, like the person’s face is unnaturally red on one side, but implies how Picasso was “analyzing,” (use of period name) the person’s face, or how the chin is a purple red. (Note: Professor Johnson drew attention to the chin in the lecture, which influenced the last sentence.)
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.
Guernica was painted in 1937, after the official periods of Picasso’s style had transpired. It seems to blend elements of Analytic and Synthetic Cubism: the variety of painted and drawn textures speaks of Synthetic Cubism, while the dark tonal scheme is more like Analytic Cubism. The painting is based on the bombing of the Basque town Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, and is thus very political in nature, reflecting Picasso’s ethos and attitude towards art.
The first thing I noticed about Guernica is that unlike the vast majority of Picasso’s artwork, even the Analytic works, it is solely black and white. This lack of color is probably meant to convey the bleakness of the subject matter, and the emphasis on black speaks of loss of hope and the presence of fear. The next thing I noticed was the anguished expression of every character in the painting. Given that it is a wartime scene depicting a horrific act of violence against defenseless civilians, one of the first of its kind, this anguish is understandable. It is a representation of how not just Picasso felt about the bombing, but the rest of the world as well.
Other things about Guernica began to jump out at me as I looked at it more. For one thing, I realized that the bull towards the left of the painting is a subtle nod by Picasso to Spanish culture and heritage, as the bull is an iconic symbol of Spain. I also noticed more gruesome details of the painting: that the woman crying on the left is holding a limp child in her arms, that the horse in the center has a large gash in its side and is impaled on a spear, and that the man lying at the bottom of the painting appears to have been decapitated in the effort of fighting (he is holding a broken sword). All of these details serve to reinforce the horror of the image and bring attention to the very real injustice that they represent.