04 May 2011
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
01 May 2011
Picasso’s Pain on Being an Artist
If Picasso saw an attractive subject, like a girl lying on a beach, he would cryptically say :
“What a pity one isn’t a painter! If one was a painter one could do her portrait!”
What did he mean? Picasso&
09 Apr 2011
Picasso on Himself
The best art historians are the artists themselves. What I provide is a pale imitation of what a great master could explain to you but, almost without exception, they keep quiet. Both Lucian Freud and Philip Pearlstein are still alive, both well
28 Mar 2011
The “Open Drawer” Question
I’m traveling and don’t have much time to go into explanation. For more than ten years I have been bugged by the “open drawer” question: why do so many still-lifes by artists as different as Picasso (above) and Chardin ha
18 Mar 2011
Face Fusion is Everywhere
For years I’ve been rattling on about face fusion to demonstrate that portraits by true artists are not what they seem. Many are not accurate depictions but a fusion of features from different faces, often the artist’s own. Salvador Dali, fo
13 Jan 2011
How Swords Become Paintbrushes
Even though artists across the ages have morphed swords into paintbrushes and spears into etching needles, few have ever been recognized. Indeed the use of weapons as visual metaphors for the tools of an artist is so widespread in art generally
08 Jan 2011
Picasso and Paul McCartney’s Two Fingers
Alberti’s Window, an art history blog, has an intriguing video of Paul McCartney discussing the origin of his song Two Fingers. McCartney was in the waiting-room of a hospital staring at a poster of Picasso’s painting, The
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