EPPH - Every Painter Paints Himself

Picasso on Art vs Painting

I hoped to show in the last entry [“Picasso’s Pain on Being an Artist”] that Picasso’s distinction between a painter and an artist matches our own – that on the underlying level art depicts the creation of the work itself inside the artist’s own mind. Here are a couple more comments by Picasso to show the consistency of his thought. He never actually stated it as such but his numerous comments on the difference between the two types of painting (art vs. illustration) shed much light. A mere copy of the exterior world – such as an Impressionist painting was long thought to be and still is by many - is never art. When he came across a painter by the Seine depicting the view he used to say:. “Every time I see a painter like that working from nature and I look at his painting, I always see bad painting.”¹

On the other hand, listen to his advice for true artists. “He [the artist] must stay as close as possible to his own inner world if he wants to transcend the limitations his reason is always trying to impose on him.”² [italics added] Creation in the imagination, practising on a human scale what God does in the heavens, is the key to art. Yet, like Shakespeare and other literary giants, Picasso felt the different levels should appeal to different types: “I’ve always felt that painting must awaken something even in the man who doesn’t ordinarily look at pictures, just as in Molière there is always something to make the intelligent person laugh and also the person who understands nothing.”³

 

 

1. Gilot and Lake, My Life with Picasso (London: Thomas Nelson) 1964, p. 50

2. Gilot and Lake, ibid., p.111

3. Gilot and Lake, ibid.,p. 65