Picasso

 

There are several jokes about Picasso, which may be some measure of how much he is taken to represent modern art. My favourite one is:

" Mum, there's a Mr Picasso at the door. He wants to have a quick word in your nose."

There are also plenty of cartoons which pillory modern art and especially the weird distortions of cubism, like the image at the top.

We have just about finished a lovely weekend in Paris, which got off to a great start when we found we had booked a place about 100 yards from the excellent Picasso Museum, which has the best collection in the world of his art from his whole long career.

So on the first morning we went there and were bowled over. It's not just that this beautiful ex-palace(?) is so appropriate and fantastically-lit, it's that the collection takes you through all of the changes and explorations in his style with clarity and intelligence.

Picasso was obviously compelled to make art, and you felt that he didn't do this just for money. In each period he goes through more and more adventurous attempts to change how we look at things and to remake them in ways that make you look differently. 

He starts with a very conventional painter's approach but spirals off into cubism and abstract approaches; ceramics; classical images; art made from found objects; etchings; even poetry.

There is something that doesn't feel like restlessness in all these changes. It feels more like he was obsessed by the different ways you could see images, by the different ways you could get something past the eyes and into the brain. 

It can feel like an intellectual activity, but when you go from the Picasso museum to one of the other painting-filled galleries, everything suddenly looks a bit flat. It's like watching TV after seeing something in real life.

Here are a couple of pictures that particularly struck me, and to give a taste and variety of the place. The first is a wall of different paintings of the same woman, Dora Mars, a fellow artist:

The second is a playful sculpture of a skipping girl, suspended in mid-air, and made from all kinds of found objects and pieces of wood. 

I loved it, and if you get to Paris, it's a great morning out.