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Picasso's self portrait evolution from age 15 to age 90
- yung234 4y agoPicasso - aren'tcha sick of him??
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- somecommit 4y agoIt went from fantastic painting at age 15 to what (common people like me would call by lake of knowledge) absolute garbage at the end.
- pmoriarty 4y agoIf Picasso had stayed with the style he had at age 15 he'd be forgotten today. Picasso is renown the world over because he pushed art forward, and he kept experimenting and pushing art ever forward in to his old age. His later work may not be pretty, but there are a billion painters of pretty pictures, but only one Picasso.
- mosselman 4y agoHardly. The style reminds me a lot of Van Gogh and you know who I mean.
- mch82 4y agoGood eye! He was evidently a fan. https://www.pablopicasso.org/picasso-and-van-gogh.jsp https://www.pablopicasso.org/picasso-and-van-gogh.jsp
- eternalban 4y agoThe last time he pushed art, someone named Braque was doing the significant pushing with him. That collaboration ended in 1914. He is a great artist but not a genuine lifelong innovator.
- peoplefromibiza 4y agoexactly: he went from boring art student to full on immortal artist with his own style. edit: not contesting the garbage definition. it might as well be it, at least if you feel it is, you have every right to feel that way. Doesn't mean that he wasn't one of the best painters ever. Art should provoke emotions ( even repulsion is an emotion) not just "look how pretty that is". That's the easy part. Anyway, he was following a path, he was getting better, not deteriorating. https://www.keylight.it/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Toro_picasso.jpg https://www.keylight.it/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Toro_pica...
- smugma 4y ago“Simplifying the bull” is taught at “Apple University” https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/11/technology/-inside-apples-internal-training-program-.amp.html https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/11/technology/-inside-apples...
- peoplefromibiza 4y agoI am terrible at everything about hand drawing. I mean I can't even draw a square right. When I first saw "simplifying the bull" I felt I could draw a bull by replicating what Picasso did. I am still terrible, but in a way he gave me the tools to draw something (or an idea of it if you will) without being able to actually draw it. His process is assimilable to research at its best.
- neonnoodle 4y agoIMO learning to draw is sort of like creating your own compression algorithm. There are many different ways to distill the huge amount of visual information into that which can be expressed through abstraction on a two-dimensional plane. The coolest part to me is that while some of these algorithms are lossy, others are...gainy? (what's the opposite of lossy...?) Depending on how you tune your simplification of the subject, the result can look MORE like the essence of the thing than the thing itself. The magic of caricature.
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- analog31 4y ago>>> (common people like me would call by lake of knowledge) That's fine. My take is that it's perfectly OK to have art for popular appeal, and perhaps separately, art that takes some investigation to fully appreciate. I face this as a musician, specifically playing modern jazz. A lot of my friends find polite ways of telling me they don't like that kind of music, and I reassure them that I'm not in the least bit offended. Of those Picasso portraits, if I could afford just one, I'd take 1971. Turns out I can afford just zero.
- peoplefromibiza 4y ago> Of those Picasso portraits, if I could afford just one For me it would be the 1906 one. But, like you, I can afford zero of them.
- influx 4y agoWhat got you into modern jazz, and was it an acquired taste?
- fredrikholm 4y agoNot OP, but been playing classical music for ... christ, 17 years. It often is. "Modern" usually implies dissonance, syncopation, and sometimes downright atonality and free time. These concepts are fun from a musicians standpoint, as they break away from formalities and rules, but do so within a complex musical context in ways that are very difficult as the instruments are balancing between having the cake and eating it against each other, simultaneously. This is hard to pick up on, which in effect often leads to the sub-genre confining itself to musicians-listening-to-other-musicians demographics, eg. "are they high?"-jazz. Similar comparisons can be made for Picasso and art in general I suppose(?).
- analog31 4y agoProbably a combination of acquired taste, and non-conformism. I took classical lessons as a kid, and played in the school jazz band. I think among some musicians, we get sick of the same old stuff, and thirst for "hotter" music. This tendency was what propelled jazz forward, so if you progress through jazz along a more or less historical path (as a player or a listener), you will kind of experience the same thing. In high school, being interested in anything but top 40 made you a freak. Oddly enough the kids who were accepting of a shy nerd who liked jazz and classical, were the punk rockers. That's whom I hung out with. For some musicians, "hotter" can also mean older, such as baroque or early music specialists.
- mch82 4y agoSkilled artists often get bored with photo real art. Why paint if a camera phone is within reach. Artists also often resist optimizing for commercial success (“selling out”). I understand why you might not like the later paintings (or at least prefer not to hang them on your wall). The later paintings are best understood in the context of history. Picasso and his peers were experimenting during the industrial revolution when trains and fast motion were new and video cameras didn’t exist to film them. Cubism was a response to some of those social changes at the time. Art like this is also, partly, about community—having a good time with other artists in a “hey, check out a thing I tried” sense. Picasso may have intended these as a “Ask:HN” or “Show:HN” rather than a post of a gallery ready piece of work.
- metabagel 4y agoThe feeling I get is that Picasso was going for quantity over quality in his later pieces.
- mch82 4y agoProbably some truth to that. A lot of these are also probably paintings he did for practice, never planned to show publicly, and just never threw away. Then, after he died, people found them and sell them as Picasso originals.
- emporas 4y agoWell photorealistic art for me is too much information. More abstract paintings, simpler ones get saved into long term memory easier. For example you can take a look athanasart (google search), which is a friend of mine. Simple abstract paintings, not always that simple but avoiding the overwhelming amount of information. That friend of mine, usually states that he is painting, because if he doesn't he will go crazy. also for Show HN, i have published just the last week 6 cubism art, picasso style computer generated of course, Dalle, and i have created already 10 other different variations of cubism, in the style of picasso, some of them are really good. And hundreds of them to come in the future. Dalle and Picasso are a benign combination. If anyone is curious insta/pramatias and the albums will be uploaded elsewhere as well. The albums are annotated with the Dalle prompts as well. I have long thought that programs, operating systems etc could be annotated to ease the understanding of the program. Especially big programs like operating systems, browsers etc. We could annotate for example every function with an image. Black n white could mean that the function has side effects, and colorful images could be used for the pure functions. That way in one glance of a file, just a millisecond we can tell which function is probably to have caused a strange panic.
- sabujp 4y agoThe 1st one at 90 is fantastic
- cs702 4y agoWow. The last handful of self-portraits, painted when he was 90, capture aging and decay in a way that I find... powerful: * https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Picasso-self-portraits-photos-12.webp https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/... * https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Picasso-self-portraits-photos-13.webp https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/... * https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Picasso-self-portraits-photos-14.webp https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/... * https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Picasso-self-portraits-photos-15.webp https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/... He was near the end of his life when he painted those self-portraits.
- strikelaserclaw 4y agowhats the difference between these and me scribbling random mish mash of curves?
- pdabbadabba 4y agoHard to say until we've seen the results of your scribbling! A There are a lot of people who say "I could do that!" but curiously few who actually do it.
- baisq 4y agoYou are not Picasso.
- roywiggins 4y agoYou have Picasso as a reference. Picasso was working off-book.
- peoplefromibiza 4y agoI'm eager (honestly) to see your "mish mash of curves" works. There'll never gonna be "too much" good art.
- fredley 4y agoAs I someone who has studied art a little, try it! Appreciation for work of this kind comes quickly when you try and emulate it.
- bluenose69 4y agoDid one of his eyes bother him? From the earliest images on this (fantastic) website, one of the eyes is always a bit black-ringed, or asymmetrically placed, or covered over.
- nojito 4y agoFaces aren’t symmetrical so its likely he exaggerated the asymmetry in his art.
- selfhifive 4y agoIt's always interesting how artists go from generic to eccentric. There's no one as divisive as Picasso. Are there any artists who just took the fundamentals and did everything textbook to become successful? Any near unanimously good ones?
- superjan 4y agoIt sounds like you want an artist who paints in the style of Rembrandt today? Why would a genius deny themselves the license to be original?
- trgn 4y agoBecause Rembrandt is awesome. > Why would a genius deny themselves the license to be original? Because originality as a virtue is a fairly recent concept (post-WW1, after disintegration of the bourgeois order). Some artists reject that premise. Can't wait for a future with more Rembrandts, it's something I'd totally buy.
- dylan604 4y agoAre you talking painting/sketching specifically? I'd suggest Ansel Adams as somewhat consistent. What about Andy Warhol? I don't recall any of his work that went drastically different, but admittedly not an art student
- mynameishere 4y agoFrederick Hart, Thomas Kinkade, Norman Rockwell. None too well respected, I suppose. The problem is that there are thousands (or more) young people with all the technical ability of Michelangelo, and so they absolutely need something else to distinguish them. Thus many artists go through their "Michelangelo phase" to get to their "weird scribbly splotchy phase" which is the real lottery ticket. Perhaps more importantly, the critics needs something to say about art, or they won't say anything. See "The Painted Word" by Tom Wolfe
- tintor 4y agoJago: https://www.instagram.com/jago.artist/?hl=en https://www.instagram.com/jago.artist/?hl=en
- czbond 4y agoThe 85yro one looks like he placed an I.P. address at the top Yes, I realize it is the date. ;)
- aantix 4y agoI looked into buying a Picasso once. Someone on Reddit mentioned that his pottery was lesser known and could be obtained for a reasonable amount (10-15K at the time I think). I just thought it would be cool to say that I owned a "Picasso". :) It ended having to read everything I could find online about detecting fake vs authentic artwork. Anything on eBay is (probably) a fake. Anything from the big auction houses will have authenticity priced in (makes sense). I never bought anything.
- s5300 4y agoInteresting, but auction houses are historically known who sell fakes as authentics (sometimes/often knowingly) & eBay would be one of the easiest hiding in plain site for a thief to offload his wares… That said, your comment is probably the true one in reality.
- umvi 4y agoYou know the movie "Yesterday" where everyone except a small handful of people forget The Beatles ever existed? Well, I sometimes wonder... if everyone in the whole world forgot about artists like Picasso, could the masses still be convinced his art is good in modern times? I for one would be pretty unimpressed with most of his work ("is this some random grade schooler's work you are showing me?"). Meanwhile if the whole world forgot about Michelangelo, my mind would still be blown if I saw any number of his works for the first time. The first time I saw The David up close I was astonished at the level of detail carved into the marble. Like... you could see individual veins in the hands and forearms.
- sydthrowaway 4y agoThis is such a techbro opinion. You know Picasso mastered "typical" art before he engaged in the abstract forms, right? That's what makes him special.
- umvi 4y agoAnd? That would be like if Chris Lattner got bored of making compilers and languages so he started making bizarre ML-generated creations and everyone started worshiping it because "he previously mastered typical programming, so anything bizarre or abstract he churns out now is automatically special!"
- yupper32 4y agoIMO thinking Picasso is special is more "tech bro" than not. Specially crypto-bros. Every time I see someone defending art like this and its value, it reads exactly like people defending crypto.
- starwind 4y agoMy favorite is the one he did at 25 https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Picasso-self-portraits-photos-06.webp https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/... Abstract, but not as crazy as the ones he did after he turned 50
- manholio 4y agoReminds me of Loise Wains' series of cat paintings, which some say is illustrating his descent into schizophrenia: https://dangerousminds.net/comments/the_psychedelic_madness_of_louis_wains_cats https://dangerousminds.net/comments/the_psychedelic_madness_...
- bobthechef 4y ago
- TheRealNGenius 4y agoimages don't load on safari
- yupper32 4y agoHow much of art popularity is people wanting to feel in the know, and desperately trying to find reasons to enjoy it? If you say Picasso was a genius, then you're automatically accepted into a "smart" or "high class" or whatever group of people. If you criticize, then you're ostracized. It's exhausting to criticize, because the arguments for are so lacking in any substance. You get arguments like "art is about art", "its subjective", and "there are lots of people who paint pretty pictures, but only one Picasso". All actual arguments from this thread, all completely lacking in substance. Another good one: "if you're talking about it then it must be good". Barf. I truly do not believe even 50% of people who claim to like Picasso actually like Picasso's paintings. I'm very confident the majority are people who say they do to fit into a group.
- cm2187 4y agoThere are many crypto currencies but only one bitcoin! Art is my best analogy to crypto.
- yupper32 4y agoExactly. I'm currently getting downvoted elsewhere for comparing crypto-bros to art enthusiasts. Are some crypto technologies cool and useful? Sure. Are some artworks nice to look at and/or thought provoking? Absolutely. But some are just hyped by people who are all-in on it, without any actual merit. And convincing someone otherwise is like convincing a devout religious person that there's no god. No amount of convincing is going to change their mind because they're all-in.
- micromacrofoot 4y agoYou seem to be building a narrative that fits a certain conclusion, rather than approaching the subject in an inquisitive way.
- shrimpx 4y agoTo expand on what a sibling comment suggested, the art world since the early 1900s has become defined by speculative trading, and some of those early artists were ultra-hyped, and their art has appreciated by millions-fold in the speculative art markets. Picasso is one of those ultra-hyped artists that was at the center of the initial FOMO fevers. Picasso is a good artist, but you have to wonder how, what, and whether Picasso would have painted if the art world didn't gain this feverish speculative dimension with Picasso at the center of it.
- planetsprite 4y agoIf noone knew who Picasso was this could pass as a depiction of how dementia affected the work of an artist over time, like this one: https://www.boredpanda.com/alzheimers-disease-self-portrait-paintings-william-utermohlen/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=organic https://www.boredpanda.com/alzheimers-disease-self-portrait-...
- pmoriarty 4y agoThis guy's art is way better to me than 90% of what I've seen in SFMOMA. And, like Picasso, his later "ugly" work is more interesting and more expressive than his earliest work.
- barbecue_sauce 4y agoI mean, it's not like Utermohlen is some entirely unknown artist. Though most of his popularity was posthumous, he was in exhibitions and galleries throughout his career. The probable reason he has not risen to the profile of something like SFMOMA is the aesthetic similarity in some of his work to Francis Bacon's, which is very distinct and well-known, and who enjoyed success before Utermohlen even began his career.
- micromacrofoot 4y agoThis quote is quite a nice way to think about art “The different styles I have been using in my art must not be seen as an evolution, or as steps towards an unknown ideal of painting… “ it can be crushing to feel the need to constantly improve and move towards an ideal (whose ideal?), abandoning that concept seems so freeing
- PKop 4y agoThe one at 15 was the best
- VladimirGolovin 4y ago"It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child." -- Pablo Picasso.
- oldstrangers 4y agoIts true. Anyone can technically learn to paint really well. Finding and articulating a unique or compelling artistic vision is the hard part.
- praveen9920 4y agoFirst thing I noticed is how his hair style changed over period of time.
- greenglass 4y agoI love a lot of modern Art, but I do feel Picasso is both way overrated and simultaneously a bit under appreciated. I think this is true of most of the big names in modern art. “Meme art” if you will. Some of it is deserving, but most of it is going to lose value over the next century, by a lot, and that will be a good thing for Art and for artists. Really wish there was an easy way to short sell art. Artists themselves are pretty good at judging this stuff, but the market can stay irrational a long time.
- robbomacrae 4y agoWhat an unfortunate choice of title considering that it goes against the artists wishes, quoted in the very same article: "The different styles I have been using in my art must not be seen as an evolution, or as steps towards an unknown ideal of painting…"
- ransom1538 4y agoIMHO If Picasso was 24 today, painted what he did today, there would be no Picasso. Artists need to be at the perfect time + the perfect skill set at said time. This is a hard ask. EG. If you paint realism - 2020s+ is going to be hard time to make money.
- bee_rider 4y agoI'm always surprised to see Picasso was alive until the 70's. He feels like much more of a "historical figure." I mean, he was a brief contemporary of "Queen," haha.
- Victerius 4y agoIt's the name. "Picasso" sounds similar to names like "Michelangelo", "Leonardo (da vinci)", and "Raphael" (short but not too much, easy to remember, and pleasant to the eye/ear). It's also a very uncommon name. Hence why we are tempted to associate a famous painter named "Picasso" with the distant past. Like we would associate a painter named "Jennifer" or "Peter" with more modern times.
- lostcolony 4y agoOnly sort of; great artists do get referred to by a single name, regardless of the time period. Dali is one such; we aren't shocked at his modernity, because he feels like a modern artist. Matisse lived into the 1950s, Monet into the 1920s. Van Gogh until the 1890s. Picasso is -weird- because he was a contemporary of Monet and Matisse and Cezanne...but also Dali and Pollock and O'Keefe. He was alive, painting, when Andy Warhol was active, for crying out loud. It's the age, not the name. Picasso feels like a late 1800s, early 1900s master, but he lived so long he saw the moon landing, and was painting the entire time.
- ezconnect 4y agoHis vision seems to degrade as he ages.