Wednesday, November 8, 2023

     If you are at all familiar with the history of art, you are aware of Pablo Picasso, the famous Spanish painter who is perhaps best known for introducing the world to cubism.  Much has been written about Picasso, and countless museums have mounted exhibitions of his art over the years.  He has achieved a notoriety, good and bad, and fame which few artists have surpassed.

     Prior to Picasso, art, despite its numerous divergences into Impressionism and Postimpressionism and the like, continued to present its images reasonably proximate to the object it was portraying.  But cubism broke up its images, fracturing them, twisting them up and down and around, bending them in ways that they would never be in real life.

Girl Before a Mirror Pablo Picasso     Although some people found Picasso's forays threatening and felt as if his art was making their world less secure, others welcomed Picasso's perspective.  It was simply another way of looking at the human condition.  It underscored that a world that was, oddly enough, wrestling with the ennui of modernity was looking for a way through it, a way to navigate the bewildering--and exciting--angst that it created.  Though Picasso's cubism didn't necessarily solve the problem, it more than made it plain:  we are significant people in, apart from loyalty to a divine being, an insignificant universe.
     
    When boundaries fade, we find new boundaries still.

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