Picasso's New Way of Seeing
By general consensus, Pablo Picasso is the most influential Western artist in the 20th century. Before his time, no painter in history–including Michelangelo–had been as famous in his own lifetime or had a greater impact on the wider culture in which he lived. He was the first to transform the visual forms of modern popular culture–billboards, printed labels, posters overlaid on walls–into widely-recognized visual images and to bring them into the domain of "high art." The visual language of Cubism which he formulated with George Braque became, in Robert Hughes's words "the most influential art dialect of the early 20th century."
Picasso's way of looking at the world was truly revolutionary; it was significantly linked to the break-through ideas of the leading scientific thinkers of his time. "Picasso was not a philosopher or mathematician ..." writes Robert Hushes, "but the work he and Braque did between 1911 and 1918 was intuitively bound to the perceptions of thinkers like Einstein and Alfred North Whitehead: that reality is not figure and void, it is all relationship, a twinkling field of interdependent events." (Time 1999:74)
In order to represent the world as a field of interdependent events, Picasso chose an approach that later became known as "Cubism."
His idea was to take normally solid forms like the human body and fragment and dissolve them; he would represent physical objects from several different vantage points at the same time. The vocabulary of Cubism thus became "the vocabulary of a world in motion." (Nelson Atkins Museum of Art Object Label) In "Desmoiselles D'Avignon," for example, he transformed the women's bodies–prostitutes in a Barcelona bordello–into a series of sharp curves or angles, flattened rather than solid, making them appear threatening rather than inviting. In this work and in many that followed, he re-constructed the female form in accordance with his own fantasies about it and created images that were both shocking and compelling. His credo was to displace and contradict nature: "to put eyes between the legs," he once said, "or sex organs on the face.... My painting is a series of cock-and-bull stories." The stories were powerful enough, though, to influence a whole generation and shape a culture.
Steve Martin's play improvises on the playfulness Picasso saw at the heart of his work and suggests that it is this playfulness–this sense of sheer serendipity–that lies at the root of the creative process. Picasso couldn't have found a wilder or a crazier guy to tell a cock-and-bull story about him.
