Topics Art

Question Why are Picasso paintings so important? How can I appreciate the importance of Picasso paintings? Honestly, when I look at them I think that they are interesting but I never get the impression that they are produced by a genius. If understanding Picasso's paintings (and art in general) needs training (knowing Picasso's life, knowing the context in which the paintings are created, knowing Picasso's intentions, knowing the traditions in painting, etc.) why are they exhibiting art works to the public? Quine's "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" is one of the best and most influential articles in the history of analytic philosophy but nobody expects non-philosophers to appreciate its importance. There are no Quine exhibitions. Thanks.

Accepted:
April 12, 2006

Comments

Let me say something about a very interesting point you raise. How much background, context and so on do we need to grasp in order to understand a work of art? Is art like language, where you have to know the rules before you can make any progress? Or indeed like philosophy as in the example you give of Quine. Or is it more like something that we might expect anyone to appreciate regardless of context? I know there are good arguments for the "art as language" position but I tend to go for the other position, and if you want details you should have a glance at my book on Islamic aesthetics, with that title. In the book I discuss the possibility of understanding Islamic art yet knowing nothing about the context, culture and so on that provided its surroundings. I talk about an experience I had which actually got me to write the book, where a group of schoolchildren who visited an exhibition of Qur'ans were totally immersed in the physical beauty of what they were seeing without knowing anything at all about the religion, culture and so on that produced them. To this experience I would like to add something that often happens to me, which is that I often see art about which I know absolutely nothing (Chinese ceramics, for example) and think it's wonderful. It could be of course that I am making a mistake and that something else is going on here, but I don't think so. As Wittgenstein said, just look, and don't assume that the presuppositions we have about things are necessarily either useful or accurate.

I'm no expert on art, just someone who enjoys it, but I certainly would agree with you that Picasso can be hard to understand. Most of his painting (and sculpture) isn't what one would describe as "beautiful", though there are paintings of his that are beautiful: For example, "Child with a Dove" (see it here). But what's beautiful about paintings like this one, to my mind, is what they convey emotionally and less anything to do with sheer physical beauty. And one finds a similar sort of emotional intensity in many of Picasso's other works. His portrait of Gertrude Stein (here) is just brilliant.

Now, to be sure, Picasso's later works can be more challenging. It can be very hard even to see what's happening in paintings like "The Guitar Player" (here) or "Afficionado" (here). And, in this case, I think it can help a great deal, as one tries to learn how to see these paintings, to learn something about the aesthetic that lies behind them. Picasso did not decide to paint in the ways he did simply out of perversity. He was looking for a way to express things he could not otherwise express. (Schoenberg makes similar remarks about the reasons for his invention of the twelve-tone method of composition.) How much success Picasso had is presumably for the viewer to judge. But once one opens one's mind, and better one's heart, to what Picasso is trying to do, one can come to see a painting like "Portrait of Maya with a Doll" (here) as, indeed, quite beautiful.

For me, though, the proof of Picasso's genius is the single painting "Guernica" (here). No more powerful comment on the horrors of war has ever been produced, and I can't even begin to see how Picasso could have produced such a powerful piece of work except by marshalling everything he had done beforehand. If you are ever in Madrid, you really must see it. It's exhibited along with many of the studies Picasso did as preparation, and it is fascinating to see the vision finally emerge.