![]() There are risks involved and great leaps of imagination are as likely to end in failure as in canonical achievement. Their poverty and proximity to disaster is representative of the lack of confidence so common in creative thinkers prior to insight. In his next phase, the Rose Period, Picasso again focuses on the social outcast, facing an uncertain future, but now, as acrobats and circus performers, they are a metaphor for the anxiety and high-wire act involved in artistic production. ![]() 6 Thus the Blue Period works mostly represent the feminine half of Picasso’s mind waiting, disconsolately and melancholically, for conception. Picasso’s earliest paintings done in Paris, as we have already seen, are views of himself as an earlier great artist (normally, Raphael) in deep thought. “I was Picasso”, you ought to say, “What did he/I see?” The hundreds of paintings analyzed on this site all come down to a view inside the artist’s mind as he or she imagines the conception of the very image we are looking at. This website would not be needed if art lovers thought differently but they almost always think alike: as viewers. Picasso, we will see, extended art's traditions he did not break them. Great masters have always broken the perspectival rules minor painters abide by because while minor painters traditionally depict the exterior world great masters never have. Very few, if any, of the great masterpieces of Western art use one-point perspective to begin with. John Richardson, Picasso’s acclaimed biographer, sees Cubism as a reaction against earlier styles like Impressionism and approves of Roger Allard’s definition that Cubism was a means to register ‘mass, volume and weight’, that everything including space had to be tactile and that it need not ‘look like the real thing it simply had to be as real as the real thing.’ 5 These explanations sound impressive but are flawed. It is a temporal coincidence that Einstein should have begun his famous work Elektrodynamik bewgter Korper, in 1905 with a careful definition of simultaneity.” 4 It views objects relatively: that is, from several points of view, no one of which has exclusive authority…Thus, to the three dimensions of the Renaissance…there is added a fourth one time.The presentation of objects from several points of view introduces a principle which is intimately bound up with modern life – simultaneity. ![]() “Cubism breaks with Renaissance perspective. “Cubism was, after all, the painstaking and thoroughgoing dismantling of unified, perspectival space that the camera, with its particular optics, could not but reproduce again and again.” 3 “to open up the fourth dimension of time so that objects ceased to be determinable by three co-ordinates alone and can present themselves in any number of aspects and in all states of either 'becoming' or 'disintegrating.'” 2 Erwin Panofsky, a colleague of Einstein’s at the Institute for Advanced Study, wrote that Cubism was an attempt: [Many scholars essentially claim that Picasso, being modern, destroyed the tradition of one-point perspective to bring art in line with developments in modern science and technology. Skip the next four paragraphs if you are short of time. Nevertheless, before I try to define it, I need to tell you what others have said. I am not quite sure what that means but like other attempts to clarify Cubism it views the art objectively. That, given what we have learned on this site, has to be a mistake. ‘to state the penetration of knowledge beneath the appearance of objects that we normally accept as reality.’ 1 Roland Penrose, a close friend of Picasso, claimed that Cubist images try: Indeed I have found the explanations and their complexity totally confusing. ![]() No-one, to my mind, has ever satisfactorily explained Cubism. Right: Picasso, Standing Female Nude (1910) Charcoal on canvas Left: Picasso, Portrait of Ambroise Vollard (Spring 1910) Oil on canvas
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