Enlighten Vovan about Picasso's art

[vovan]

Alright, so I am very much ignorant about more modern art movements like Cubism and Futurism and what-not, and was wondering if someone could help me with this here.

Basically, I went to Picasso estate museum in Barcelona last week. There was this one room in the museum that contained a "normal" looking family portrait and then a bunch of Picasso's "reinterpretations" of it in a more abstract form. In his paintings, all the shapes were very much simplified. For example, people's eyes were just like little circles and noses like letter L, and faces made of essentially triangles and rectangles. Most of the lines were straight, except for the "dog", which was the only thing in the paintings that had curvy lines. The shapes on the paintings were outlined in thick black strokes, and filled in with simple bright colors - for the most part, there were no color gradients anywhere, and wherever there needed to be a change of color, there was basically another black line separating "pools" of color.

So, now my question is: what art style is that?

I tried looking online, but didn't succeed. The sites mostly list three periods of Picasso's painting styles: blue, rose, and cubism, and it's really none of those. It's closest to cubism, I suppose, as the paintings are composed of simple geometric shapes, but it's not quite the developed kind of cubism that the sites talk about, where you have multiple planes of view composed into the one image... I don't know. I tried looking through this here collection of Picasso's works:

http://www.tamu.edu/mocl/picasso/

But there are just too many, and I couldn't find the ones I saw at the museum, or anything resembling them (unfortunately I didn't note the year on the paintings).

So any way, if any of you people who know more about art than me could help me with this, it would be much appreciated.

[molly bloom]

Picasso also had a brief flirtation with some aspects of Surrealism (going so far as to write two Absurdist/Surrealist plays too).

He also had a phase based on his interest in classical antiquity and in 18th/19th Century Neo-Classicism.


The painting you mention sounds as though it combines aspects of Synthetic Cubism with Surrealist inspiration too.


Is it at all similar to 'Three Dancers' ?

Some sites that may be of help:

http://web.org.uk/picasso/dancers.html

http://www.1st-art-gallery.com/artists/picasso/pablo-picasso.html

http://www.artchive.com/ftp_site.htm

[General Ludd]

Sounds kinda like minimalism.

[molly bloom]

I think I have it- it sounds like late period Picasso, his multiple studies of Velasquez's famous painting of the Spanish court, 'Las Meninas' painted in the mid-late 1950s :

http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbbc/art/artyfacts/picasso/picasso_showcase.shtml

Try the 'Las Meninas' activity for fun:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbbc/art/artyfacts/picasso/picasso_activity.html

[Traianvs]

I prefer the original Las Meninas tbh

[vovan]

Ah, here, I found the actual paintings I was referring to. I guess I wasn't describing them entirely correctly.

http://www.xarxa.infomataro.net/mem/webart/picasso/meninas.htm

They do sort of look (to me) like the Three Dancers. I suppose one would qualify them as surrealism then?

EDIT: Oops, cross-post with second molly bloom post. Thanks.

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by Trajanus
I prefer the original Las Meninas tbh

I confess I do too, but it is interesting to see Picasso's deconstruction of/homage to, old master paintings such as 'Las Meninas' and 'Les Femmes d'Alger' .