Praeterita

A painting by Picasso from 1905 has just sold at auction for one hundred and fifteen million dollars -- what ArtNews calls "a rare nine figure purchase." The painting, from Picasso's so-called Rose period, is "Girl with Basket of Flowers": I am in the camp that thinks the reasons why Picasso's Rose period work sells for more than his Cubist work are precisely the reasons why I don't like the paintings that much. That is, they are anachronistic pastiches of late nineteenth century Symbolist painting, their mythological content replaced instead with sentimental idealisations of family pastoral. However, there's no questioning the skill and sensitivity of Picasso's brushwork, particularly in the face of this girl. The first owners of the painting were Gertrude and Leo Stein, the rich Americans who moved to Paris in the early 1900s and set themselves up as patrons to the avant garde (though their taste didn't extend to Picasso's Cubist...

June 16th was Bloomsday, the annual celebration of James Joyce's novel Ulysses , the action of which takes place on one day in Dublin in 1906. I've written before about the set of etchings I made back in the late 1990s, based on the Nighttown chapter of Ulysses. But after posting images of these etchings via social media during the most recent Bloomsday, I realised I could still say something about the various things that influenced my particular interpretation of Joyce's text. When I started planning the project in 1997, I was aware of a few other artists' visual responses to the book, such as Robert Motherwell's attractive and entirely abstract etchings, some hasty and uninspired lithographs by Matisse , and (the best ones, in my opinion) semi-abstract etchings by Mimmo Paladino: Mimmo Paladino, from Ulysses I started by narrowing down to one chapter: the Nighttown chapter, which takes place in the red light district of Dublin, and parallels the Circ...

Following on from my last post , which talked about seeing the contents of Andre Breton's studio: the Orangerie, at the edge of the Jardins des Tuileries, houses Monet's giant Nympheas paintings on the upper level, and on the lower level the collection of Paul Guillame. Guillaume was an art dealer who owned many works by Modigliani, Soutine, Matisse, Braque, and Picasso. But what I found really interesting during my last visit was a tiny, dolls' house-sized mock-up of some of the rooms in his apartment: This was on the Avenue Foch, one of the poshest streets in Paris (it's a wide boulevard that runs west from the Arc de Triomphe). As you can see, if you sat down to eat in the dining room, you could look up and see paintings by Degas, Cezanne, Matisse, and Picasso. And in the living room: Lots of Picasso and Modigliani, plus some gorgeous furniture. If you could select 10 paintings to hang on the walls of your living room or dining room, what would they be...

One of the signal facts of artistic movements in Paris in the first half of the twentieth century is the influence of African art on the painters and writers who created what we now refer to as Modernism. I put the word African in inverted commas in the title to this post to indicate that what Picasso, Matisse, Breton, and others were borrowing from was as much their own, sometimes erroneous, ideas about Africa, as much as the physical objects that fascinated them so. That said, you can't visit museums in Paris without finding evidence for the importance of this south-to-north current of influence. The Musee du Quai Branly houses objects from Africa, the Americas, and Oceania, and early in January I made my first ever visit to the collection: This is the source material, or very similar to it, for the statues that Picasso saw in the Louvre in the early 1900s, and which inspired his 'primitive' painting of the female figure in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon , the ...

I saw these photos at the Musee Picasso yesterday, of Picasso making a fish print in the 1950s. First, eat the fish: Next, arrange fish on surface with satisfied look on face (your face, not the fish's): Finally, roll the fish with ink and press paper against it: Thus did Picasso secure his plaice in printmaking history.

As regular readers of this blog know, I am a maker of linocuts, and a teacher of the linocut printmaking process, and therefore a huge fan of Picasso's linocuts. The British Museum in London released this video in relation to a 2014 acquisition of several of Picasso's 1950s linocuts. It's got some nice insights into Picasso's process.

On the afternoon of January 6th, 2016, I led 20 Columbia College students and two colleagues on an art walk through Montmartre in Paris. We started at the Caulaincourt metro stop on the northern side of the hill, because it's a less steep climb from there, and spent about two hours walking up the hill and around Montmartre, visiting sites that are associated with visual artists. Some of these are very well known, like the Basilica of Sacre Coeur or the Moulin Rouge, but others are much less well known, such as the residences and studios of Van Gogh, Picasso, and Suzanne Valadon. At every stop, I handed round print-outs of paintings by the artists I was talking about so that everyone could make stronger visual associations of the place with the artists and their art. I have rounded up some of my notes and images of those paintings and linked them all together in this Google Map, which traces the exact route of the walk. Click on any of the red place markers to display the associat...

Le Bateau Lavoir from the rear, c. 1900 Continuing my Picasso obsession , I've read three books recently that focus on Picasso to a lesser or greater extent. Given how many books I've read about Picasso and his milieu (particularly in the early years of the twentieth century in Paris), my judgement usually rests not so much on whether I find out new information, but how well the author treats very familiar and often told stories. The first one is In Montmartre: Picasso, Matisse, and the Birth of Modernist Art , by Sue Roe. I bought this one because I read a book by the same author about five years ago, The Private Lives of the Impressionists, which was full of interesting biographical information about Monet, Renoir, Degas, Pisarro, and others, a vivid recreation of Parisian life before and after the time of Commune (1871), and a real sense of the struggles of these artists during the early years of the first Impressionist exhibitions. Sadly, that perceptiveness seem...

There are reasons to believe that Parisians are not necessarily as enamoured of their city as the millions of starry-eyed tourists who go there every year. People with a longer acquaintance of the place, who are married to or have Parisian friends, talk about the dissatisfaction that the natives have with many aspects of life in the capital. Some of these complaints would be familiar to New Yorkers or Londoners: rents are getting higher all the time, you have to work too hard just to feel like you're barely keeping up, it's too depressing in winter and too hot in summer, traffic congestion is worse than ever, there are too many tourists, it's being turned into a tax-haven playpen for foreign billionaires. Some of the complaints are specifically French: ridiculously complicated and burdensome tax regime, a top heavy bureaucracy that slows down all interactions with officialdom, a general societal 'can't-do' attitude that can make a battle out of anything fr...

Of course, Picasso wasn't shot. But he died forty years ago today (April 8th), and although I was very young at the time, I remember exactly what I was doing when I heard the news. I was eleven, I had returned home from school and was watching a British early evening kids' programme called "Blue Peter", and they announced that this very famous artist called Pablo Picasso had just died. They showed one of his paintings, and tried to talk about the picture and the whole event in a way that eleven year olds could understand. I don't remember what the picture was, but I think it was a Cubist painting, so the presenters did something right. I think this may have been the first time I ever encountered the name and the work of Picasso. In honour of the great man, here's the Picasso painting that will always be the one I return to: "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon," oil on canvas, 1907 

Next week I'm going to upload my latest video meditation, which will talk about an etching by Picasso called 'Blind Minotaur Being Led by a Girl'. This is one of the works that led me into printmaking. The drawing is so beautiful, so free and yet tenderly careful at the same time. And those deep, velvety black tones were something I wanted to try and make too. I later learned the way that Picasso created this print. He first aquatinted the whole plate, which involves dissolving rosin dust over the whole plate to create a pattern of thousands of dots. When the plate is placed in the etchant, the etching acid eats around the dots. When you clean the plate and then ink it, the combination of ink in all those tiny etched holes gives the appearance of a dense dark black tone. Picasso then scraped back into that black background to create the grey and bright white lines that define the broad shapes. He then did a little bit of line etching here and there, and finally used a dr...