Cubism's Creator

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{{Porque su mundo es diferente}}

Last Friday I didn't have film class, so I decided it was time to pay the Museu Picasso a visit. The Museu Picasso of Barcelona deals mostly with the artist's young life and his development as an artist that led him to become more or less the founder and most well-known artist of Cubism. Picasso lived in Barcelona for much of his youth, and was a part of the "artists' gang" of Els Quatre Gats, a bar that was frequented by Rusiñol, Casas, and other modernist artists, poets, and thinkers of the late 1800s and early 1900s. He later moved to Paris, where he further developed his style and started branching into a completely new way of seeing that would become cubism.

The Museu Picasso was really interesting and a great way to spend an afternoon. The way that Picasso completely changed his style of painting is absolutely astounding; it's almost impossible to believe that his early paintings and his Cubism paintings came from the same person! He had an amazing creative talent and eye, even turning later to sculpture and ceramic work to branch out on his artistic efforts.

Everyone thought that the young Picasso would grow up to be an excellent landscape painter, but nothing else. But as he started to spend more time with the gang at Els Quatre Gats, they encouraged him to focus more on the human form, and as he began to explore it, he began to play with it as well, to play with perspective and lighting, deconstructing the form into its geometric parts. While beforehand the great search of art had been to perfect the placement of lighting, to make the art look as real as possible, almost as if it could move (like Velázquez's "Las Meninas"), Picasso did away with lighting and perspective, painting a face both in profile and from the front at the same time, turning the curves of a human shape into their basic geometric parts, expressing his view of the modern world with different colors for different moods.

One really interesting part was a movie and then several gallery rooms dedicated to Picasso's reinterpretation of "Las Meninas". He counted Velázquez as one of his great artistic masters, and decided to do a reinterpretation of "Las Meninas" for the current time. The painting of the 17th century was from a world completely different from the world of the mid-50s when Picasso created the series. He painted a total of 58 different paintings expounding upon "Las Meninas", including studies of different characters within the painting, in different colors, with different forms, some in black and white, some more geometric, some less, some more realistic, some less. It's an absolutely astounding body of work and pays a great honor to one of Spain's masters of art.

The Museu Picasso was a great stop on my Barcelona museum list and left me very amazed at what a truly revolutionary and talented artist Picasso was.