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So he learned something in mid-career to change everything, and an optical device is a likely aid. Do you have evidence to suggest a mechanical aid rather than
by rquantz 12y ago
So he learned something in mid-career to change everything, and an optical device is a likely aid.
Do you have evidence to suggest a mechanical aid rather than just improvement in skills? Artists often change the way they produce art midway through their career. Ever listen to juvenalia by Beethoven, Brahms, or Strauss? Ever listen to early Stravinsky and compare it to what he was writing in the 1960s? Ever look at what Picasso was doing before his primitivist paintings? They all completely changed over the course of their careers, and they all had a moment in their career when they starting making art that was in their voice.
So seeing someone get better at something like painting mid-career doesn't indicate to me some deus ex machina, just the gradual accumulation of skill and judgement, until it finally clicks and a mature artist is born.
This is not proof that you're wrong, I just want to know why you jump to that conclusion when there seems to be a perfectly normal explanation.
- stan_rogers 12y agoThere are no transitional fossils, so to speak. That is, there are no examples where he got the perspective right but the lighting was a bit rough, or the general proportions correct with foreshortening a bit off. As a man who needed to earn a living, he couldn't afford to take a couple-three years off to learn how to draw. Picasso (who was never much of a draughtsman, even in his youth) was working in an era where photography had largely supplanted painterly realism; his concern was not with middle-class portraiture or advertising his skills in creating it.
- kirsebaer 12y agoPicasso was skilled at drawing as a child, and he started formal art education at age 10. But maybe you mean he wasn't that impressive at drawing perspective and architecture? Childhood drawings by Picasso: http://drawingatduke.blogspot.no/2012/02/drawings-of-pablo-picasso.html http://drawingatduke.blogspot.no/2012/02/drawings-of-pablo-p...
- stan_rogers 12y agoNo, I don't think it's particularly remarkable, even for a ten-year-old. (At that age, I had been attending an atelier myself for three years, fancying myself a draughtsman and painter, and being told repeatedly that I had some skill. There were kids there who were immensely better than I was, and the differences in direct comparison were extremely subtle -- fractions of millimetres here and there -- but made all kinds of difference.) Nor was there anything convincing or compelling about his blue period paintings. Hell, even his cubism was inferior to Braque. Picasso was merely successfully audacious.