Pablo Picasso
This month we had a very enjoyable discussion about Picasso. We are entering in to a whole new set of work which most of us find interesting and often exciting, but also often incomprehensible! Picasso was something of a child prodigy and has moved through several different styles of art throughout his life. We enjoyed his Blue and Rose period but it was his Cubist work which provoked most discussion. Cubists deconstructed conventions of perspective. Objects are broken apart and reassembled in abstract form. We spent some time examining paintings and identifying its components - which provoked some lively discussion and opinions! Of course, we couldn’t look at Picasso without looking at ‘ Guernica’ a quite extraordinary work depicting his response to the bombing, by the German Luftwaffe, of Guernica in 1937. A German soldier, when looking at the painting, asked Picasso “Did you do that?” To which Picasso replied “No, you did.” Picasso not only left a legacy of a huge number of paintings, but sculptures and poetry too. He described painting as ‘another way of keeping a diary’. He also said ‘ The world doesn’t make sense so why should I paint pictures that do?’
