How To Understand A Picasso

so you're in a museum looking at a picasso you've heard the name a million times you know the influence you know he's one of the most important artists of the 20th century you know he invented cubism you know he loved women lots of women and you know he wasn't that great to them you know he had phases the blue period the rose period neoclassicism surrealism but the painting you're looking at the one in front of you you've never seen it before it's called night fishing at antibes or on t you don't really know you don't speak french the little card next to it doesn't say much but you want to know more about it how the way i see it you can look at any picasso in five different ways the first and often the best way to understand any painting is simply to look at it describe to yourself the objects and the actions that you see in night fishing for example what you see is two spear fishermen hunting for fish from a small boat lit by a mesmerizing light at the top of the canvas one fisherman leans strongly into the water with his spear hesitating before delivering the final blow to a fish while the other leans languidly over the edge looking anxious a fishing line tied to his foot in the upper left we can see two towers and a mass of purple shapes while around the fishermen fly moths or insects lit by the light curving over the back of one of them toward the right side of the frame where two women one with an ice cream cone and a bicycle gesture to the men who don't seem to notice that much i find my first reactions to this entire painting to be a bit contradictory on the one hand there seems to be a violent foreboding character to the scene the central focus is clearly the hand and the spear and the fish but there also seems to be an equilibrium here in the balance of colors and figures and almost magical view into an all too ordinary activity of fishing at night by lamplight and that brings us to the second way to examine this painting understanding the actual content of this scene it is of course a night fishing scene and that light at the top is either the moon or an acetylene gas lamp which spear fishermen use to lure fish to the surface of the water you can see another one under the boat in the upper left we can bet that those two towers in the mass of purple shapes are the chateau grimaldi which by the way has since become a picasso museum and the water is the french riviera at antib a resort town in the southeast of france where picasso was vacationing in the summer of 1939 according to his secretary picasso had come across such fishing scenes walking the town at night after dinner and proceeded to lock himself in his studio to work on this really large canvas his largest since guernica which was completed two years before the form of night fishing is in keeping with picasso's evolving style after guernica which incorporates holdover elements from the cubist period and the flatness of the canvas and its emphasis on geometrical shapes but it also pulls from the painters excursions into both surrealism and primitivism where faces become masks indeed in so much of this painting in the cubist period and beyond the key point to remember is that figures are painted not as they're perceived but as they're conceived picasso adds to each body elements that signify to other bodies and to the canvas as a whole for this reason the critic douglas morgan is right to say that we can't call picasso's people distorted or grotesque because they haven't been distorted from anything there's no version of reality in which they're undistorted in night fishing the people are not meant to be sympathized with the normal reaction to an undistorted figure they're meant to be seen that naked seeing that discernment communicates his meanings more directly and what are those meanings well there are a couple ways we can apply what we see in form and content to find out first it's worth it to look at the historical context the painting was completed in august 1939 just a couple weeks before the outbreak of world war ii life in europe was extraordinarily tense and it was exceptionally so for picasso who was still reeling from the sad conclusion of another conflict the spanish civil war and the defeat of the republican forces by francisco franco and his nationalist army picasso opposed franco in his work most notably in guernica which is one of the most startling anti-war paintings in history and in some ways knight fishing in antibes can be seen as a companion piece to guernica instead of depicting all the violence of the former picasso shows a moment of hesitation the spear is likely to skewer the fish but it hasn't yet a moment of choice opens up and with choice there's hope the painter draws attention to this by making the hand gripping the spear the most realistic depiction in the canvas and as we move outward from that focal point things become increasingly warped and yet even with this hesitation the scene is suffused with a sense of almost apocalyptic apprehension the light at the top resembles a spiraling comet as much as it does a moon or a lamp juxtaposed next to a frightening blotch of red the painting's only use of that color the moths are like poor tents buzzing around the heads of the fishermen the jetty that the women stand on is unsteady the town in the background is a mess these feelings could be a prescient imaging of the coming destruction of europe certainly the feeling in the air was hard to miss but more likely these dark undertones reflect an ongoing personal struggle with the loss of picasso's native spain to a vicious dictator but we're still missing one giant piece of the puzzle the personal context what was going on in the artist's own life in this respect it's worth it to ask who these people could possibly represent first let's look at the women while they both seek to get the attention of the fishermen they do so in different ways the one closest to them and in the closest proximity to the light spreads her arms in a graceful pose the other is more blase licking her ice cream cone her obviously really very obviously phallic head and pronounced breasts makes her the more sensuous of the two and though certainly a misogynistic distinction these two women likely represent picasso's wife olga and a combination of his mistresses maria therese walter and doramar who was with picasso in antibes and finally the spearing fisherman can be read as picasso himself or perhaps the version of himself that he wants to be headstrong looking forward at his goals undaunted by distraction but this man seems to be linked with his partner perhaps picasso's other half a side of himself that is passive that ties a fishing line to his toe and waits whereas the first fisherman is defined by strong perpendicular lines the second's body is a mass of curved lines and contorted limbs remembering the historical context and the stark defiance that is guernica what we might be seeing here is picasso coming to grips not only with passivity and weakness in his nature but the artist's impotence in the face of the world's brutality his mother had died at the start of the year and spain was lost maybe this is why the boat floats in a weird no man's land between the town and the women maybe this is why the scene feels uneasy despite being beautiful in its rendering there's more you can read into this painting and the rest of picasso's work but these five angles always start me down some fruitful paths and each individual method of understanding is less important than the ways all of them connect and feed into each other the historical context usually informs the personal and the form grows out of the content and your first reaction is often surprisingly incisive if you take the time to voice it or write it down picasso's legacy looms so large that the scholarship on him is vast and often contradictory so my feeling is why not decide the significance of his work for yourself

Channel: Nerdwriter1

Views: 2,106,580

Keywords: picasso, art, fine art

Id: _HGW1DQO1xQ

Length: 8min 11sec (491 seconds)

Published: Wed May 04 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/Bubs604]

TIL I don't understand a Picasso

[u/[deleted]]

I usually like his videos, but I couldn't finish this one. Way to unreflectively ascribe causal power to background info. Just because you have some additional information about the context of the creation doesn't mean that the work 1) can be largely reduced to them 2) you coincidentally picked out the relevant contextual elements from a universe of things that might have inspired the artist. It's disappointingly reductionist.