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Figures au Bord de la Mer, 1931
On loan to the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto
for the exhibit: Picasso: masterpieces from the
Musée National Picasso, Paris
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Tom Wolfe understood the high level farce of Picasso, as he writes in The Painted Word:
...a few fashionable people discovered their own uses of [Modern Art]. It was after the First World War the modern and modernistic came into the language as exciting adjectives...By 1920, in le monde*, to be fashionable was to be modern, and Modern Art the new spirit of the avant-garde were perfectly suited for that vogue.I'm still trying to find researched articles (or books) on the artists that influenced Picasso (or that Picasso copied from, to use a more accurate activity). My recent tour through the Picasso exhibit at the AGO was of some help, but few of the commentaries by the paintings indicated his actual (artistic) influences. I wrote about it in my blog in 2008 thus:
Picasso was a case in point. Picasso did not begin to become Picasso, in the art world or in the press, until he was pushing forty and painted the scenery for Diaghilev's Russian ballet in London in 1918. Diaghilev & Co. were a tremendous succès de scandale in fashionable London. The wild dervishing of Nijinsky, the lurid costumes - it was all too deliciously modern for words. The Modernistic settings by Picasso, André Derain, and (later on) Matisse, were all part of the excitement, and le monde loved it. "Art," in Osbert Lancaster's phrase, "came once more to roost among the duchesses."
Picasso, who had once lived in the legendary unlit attic and painted at night with a brush in one hand and a candlestick in the other - Picasso now stayed at the Savoy, had lots of clothes made on Bond Street nearby, went to all the best parties (and parties were never better), was set up with highly publicized shows of his paintings, and became a social lion - which he remained, Tales of the Aging Recluse notwithstanding, until he was in his seventies. [pp 27-30]
Anyone who has studied Picasso will realize the fraud that he is, just as Tom Wolfe writes. Every step of Picasso's, which was so radically different from his previous steps (from his blue period, to his "cubism" to name the more famous ones), was a copy of other more serious artists in his milieu. An art critic who doesn't recognize this is being dishonest, to say the least.I got these ideas from somewhere. I studied art books, paintings and gallery pieces over a number of years to have reached this conclusion. I remember telling my film teacher, Bruce Elder, that I thought Jackson Pollock was a fraud, throwing paint on paper. Granted, he had a good aim, but so do I being a former goal shooter for my netball (English version of girls' basketball) team. And that Picasso was a bigger fraud than Pollock because his fraud was not even his own physical effort, like Pollock's was. Picasso copied the movements and artists around him (some with considerably more talent and innovative abilities like Braque) and made a ton of money by "redefining" his art every now and then to his gullible, rich patrons, who loved this modern idea of "progress" in art. Professor Elder eyed me with suspicion after that, and rightly so. I ended up critiquing his work too [here and here].
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*...the social sphere described so well by Balzac, the milieu of those who find it important to be in fashion, the orbit of those aristocrats, wealthy bourgeois, publishers, writers, journalists, impresarios, performers, who wish to be "where things happen," the glamorous but small world of that creation of the nineteenth-century metropolis, tout le monde, Everybody, as in "Everybody says"...the smart set, in a phrase..."smart," with its overtones of cultivation as well as cynicism [p 16].