Bathers on the Beach
Posted: August 21, 2015 Filed under: Art, Painting/Drawing, Photography | Tags: 20th century spanish art, bathers on the beach, luigi ghirri, modern art, pablo picasso, Picasso, Spain, spanish art Leave a commentOn a Sunny Day…
On a Rainy Day…
Nude Standing by the Sea
Posted: April 20, 2015 Filed under: Art, Painting/Drawing | Tags: 20s, 20th century art, Biomorphism, cubism, geometric, modern art, nude standing by the sea, pablo picasso, Picasso, Surrealism Leave a commentAlthough never an official member of the Surrealists, despite Breton’s efforts to coopt him, Picasso nevertheless participated in many of their exhibitions and activities in Paris. His work between 1926 and 1939 has been called surrealist because of its fanciful imagery and sexually charged motifs, but despite many shared features, Picasso’s desire to interpret the real world was at odds with Surrealism’s imaginary inner-generated visions.
Here, he was inspired by bathers on a beach that he had previously sketched, painted, and sculpted in Cannes (1927) and Dinard (1928). In these earlier works, as in this 1929 painting, Picasso ultimately transforms the human figure into a strange mutated being, part geometric masonry, part inflated balloon. The features of the female physique metamorphose into one another—the rounded buttocks also suggesting breasts, the pointed breasts suggesting sharp teeth, and the horizontal slit, a reference to both navel and genitals. The overall effect is conflicted, showing both monumentality and vulnerability, sensuality and cold detachment, as if two different sensibilities inhabit this figure. Such imagery may have been a reflection of the artist’s own anguished love life at the time. Married to Olga Khokhlova since 1918, he had been having an affair with a beautiful young teenager, Marie-Thérèse Walter, since the summer of 1927, which would last through the 1930s.
Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY
Goat Skull and Bottle
Posted: August 15, 2014 Filed under: Art, Sculpture | Tags: 1951, 50s, bottle, pablo picasso, Picasso, sculptire, skull, still life Leave a commentThe Sleepy Drinker
Posted: April 15, 2013 Filed under: Art, Painting/Drawing | Tags: 1902, blue, blue period, drinker, pablo picasso, Picasso, sleeping Leave a commentThe Sleepy Drinker by Pablo Picasso. 1902.
Part of Picasso’s Blue Period, the subject of this painting is a woman from a female prison in Paris where Picasso went to sketch in 1902.