Once upon a time Picasso was one of the few artists everyone knew about or at least the one artist whose name everyone knew once you got past Da Vinci and Michaelangelo. A shrewd marketing campaign and regularly signing tablecloths to pay for a meal, all helped to create the myth of the artist as mystical hero but beyond the obvious characteristics of his art, what was he actually doing? It all comes down to how he, and we, perceived the world.
A definition of Cubism throws some light on what he was doing.
‘a style of painting and sculpture developed in the early 20th century, characterized chiefly by an emphasis on formal structure, the reduction of natural forms to their geometrical equivalents, and the organization of the planes of a represented object independently of representational requirements.’
This describes the paintings and sculptures but does little to explain what Picasso was after once he got past the blue, pink and proto-cubist block houses at L’Estaque. Let’s go back a bit in time. When the cave painters at Lascaux approached their task, they placed brilliantly observed animals on endless wall surfaces deep within caves. In some ways the wall surfaces mirrored the reality of the endless plains on which they hunted. There was no consideration of composition or anything more sophisticated artists would later have recognised as control mechanisms. The wall canvas was unlimited as was the vision of the world. There were no boundaries. The reality of the world they lived in combined observation and memory. Time did not stand still but was an indication of a diurnal rhythm they recognised as eternal. Animals and seasons came and went.
Step forward to the Renaissance and we see those vistas being contained by rectangles and time coming to a standstill. Artists were seeing the world as through a window with perspective depth and solid forms in space in which were placed figures of symbolic and religious significance. The hunter gatherers had been displaced by civilisation and the need for a determined, controlled, secure space had evolved. Perspective imposed an artificial view of the world which the cave painters wouldn’t have recognised. Picasso, of course, grew up with those same traditions of a constructed world and his early paintings all show evidence of a single viewpoint and the idea of the symbolic snapshot but at some point he came to see the world differently.
The questions that Picasso asked are just how do we actually perceive the world and how do we choose to represent that vision? Using a window is inherently false. Given half a chance most people would rather go outside and view the landscape from a raised point such as a hill. In fact, we have made a social distinction of betterment based upon just how high that point can be and how much we can see below us. The ability to pan across a landscape for aesthetic purposes is inherently human but even then, the succession of viewpoints and images defeats the idea of a single window as the brain retains only the immediate image and memory asserts itself to fill in the blanks before and after the moment.
However, essentially Picasso was a painter and sculptor of the human figure and not the landscape. He realised that while we might seek out a high point to appreciate the landscape, we don’t do that with people. With people it is a combination of visual acuity and memory. Asked to describe a friend or relative we might well pick out an oversized nose [seen in profile], eyes front on and a mouth that could be open, closed, smiling or gaping. It is the portraitist’s job to decide just what to use but the Cubist portraitist says, let’s use all of elements, angles and memories simultaneously. There are of course precedents for this approach. The ancient Egyptians reduced the human form to a series of symbols or schema so that it didn’t matter how often the Pharoah changed, the picture would always be the same [profile face, front on eye]. Picasso though didn’t want to stop time so much as recognise that a human face is forever on the move, always in a state of transition. No one view or moment in time is enough to describe a person.
Perhaps the sculptures and collages demonstrate this best. The sculptures combine multiple views and without the limitations of a flat painting surface, never cease to shift and move. There is no one position from which to view a Picasso sculpture that is any more relevant than any other. While the collages are built on a flat surface, they do not present a one-dimensional windowed view of the world either. The assemblage of found materials presents a visual journey. The tickets, fragments of posters and text could all be found in an area of the city but couldn’t be seen as a Renaissance perception. Reality is not a fixed image built of symbols but a fluid juxtaposition. The legacy of Picasso in this regard can be seen in the assemblages and installations of the post-modern period. In being able to walk in, around and through an installation you are essentially seeing the world as Picasso did.
The introduction of television and film however, returned humanity to the artificial world of controlled perspective and the frame. While the Surrealist film makers tried to remove the notion of visual logic, their work was still contained by the framing device of the screen.
Do we still appreciate Picasso for the visionary that he undoubtedly was? There are no direct antecedents but in freeing perceptive vision from the Renaissance strait jacket he paved the way for generations of artists to see the world differently. The public though is a different matter.