More Thoughts About Picasso as The Greatest Artist of the 20th Century

According to James Voorhies in an essay about Pablo Picasso, written for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York:  “The artistic genius of Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) has impacted the development of modern and contemporary art with unparalleled magnitude. His prolific output includes over 20,000 paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures, ceramics, theater sets and costumes that convey myriad intellectual, political, social, and amorous messages.” http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/pica/hd_pica.htm

Thinking about Picasso’s obvious knowledge and comprehension of Biblical and Mythological concepts, as well as his material genius, sometimes even in the guise of simple and rustic colors and shapes originally reminded me of Carol Bly’s comment about the inadequacy of my own (Karen’s) education. I can quote Jane Austen all day long, and You’ve Got Mail, the real, “I Ching of all wisdom.” But, all those gods and goddesses make pudding in my mind, and I certainly don’t have the skill to create heart stopping portraits and self-portraits drawn out of origins buried in history and the historical renditions of other artists that came before me.

This little epiphany I’m expressing right now may be a doorway into something else. It grows out of what I figured out earlier, that James Joyce wrote the authors in whose company he wanted to be considered into his own writing. Picasso seems less self-serving, more honest, and more deeply brilliant (even though Carol Bly included The Dead in her list of the best ten short stories every written).

If all art is essentially self-portrait, then the truth of oneself is bound to cause more discussion and be more disconcerting as it more closely approaches honesty.

More on Picasso/Mythology

From inside the front flyleaf of Alexander Eliot’s book, The Timeless Myths/How Ancient Legends Influence the World Around Us: “Do scholars, anthropologists, and psychologists, between them, possess and exhaust mythology? They cannot: it is the primal resource of the entire human race.”

I’m still working my way through this fascinating book where Alexander Eliot credits mythology as the bonding medium drawing and holding humanity together. As I wrote a few weeks ago, I gasped when I saw Picasso’s mythological works currently on display at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) Pablo Picasso

I gasped again this week when I opened The Timeless Myths and saw one section of the book titled, Demoiselles. Could this title refer to Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon? Yes!

Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is a painting I think about often, ever since I walked around a certain corner at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and found myself facing Les Demoiselles, and wept. I have never known why.

I wrote an essay once, asking whether James Joyce included Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare in The Odyssey in order to increase the likelihood of his own name being included in the Bibliography of great writers. The answer: Yes, a lot of writers have done the same thing.

According to Alexander Eliot, in 1907, Picasso made this painting with distorted figures shortly after he and friends had begun collecting African masks. Picasso told a friend that the figures in Les Damoiselles d’Avignon represented prostitutes. But also, Picasso’s friend, Zuloaga, owned El Greco’s painting, Opening of the Fifth Seal,  a painting Eliot claims that Picasso recast in Desmoiselles, inspired by African art. Elliott goes on to say these five damoiselles, “Form the fingers and thumb of an unseen hand…”

El  Greco came from Crete, where Rhea the titaness gave birth to Zeus, at whose birth “Rhea, convulsively clutched the ground. Then, from the grooved earth ten finger-beings or ‘Dactyls’ arose. The five at Rhea’s right hand were youths, and they became the first blacksmiths. The five at her left hand were maidens, ‘Demoiselles,’ destined to become the first witches.”

I  keep remembering Carol Bly telling me she didn’t think much of my education. Also from Alexander Eliot: “Intolerance is the father of illusion and evil deeds. Tolerance is not its opposite; tolerance is neutral. The opposite of intolerance is creative imagination, sympathetically exercised in the service of ever-illusive truth.”

Again: It is Picasso who’s collective work consistently pops and makes you pay attention to his mastery. Larry Tolle