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Tuesday, August 18, 2015
About the Author
John Warren Oakes
A.B., M.A., M.F.A., C.A.A.
John Warren Oakes received the M. F. A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Iowa.
He received the C. A.A. from Harvard University.
Oakes is Professor Emeritus at Western Kentucky University where he taught art for 46 years.
His paintings are exhibited internationally and he has work in public and private collections in 28 states and 16 countries.
He and his wife, award winning poet, Dr. Elizabeth Oakes live in Sedona, Arizona where they founded Ethereal Publications in 2010.
Monday, August 17, 2015
2 Blurbs
ART SOURCES
FOR PICASSO'S WORK
by John Warren Oakes
“With
keen insight and a masterful grasp of the import of Picasso's
artistic creation, John Warren Oakes accurately assesses
multiple sources of inspiration for this twentieth-century giant of the art world. From
seventeeenth-century masters to African sculpture and Picasso's European contemporaries, Oakes pins
down the who and the where of origin. Most frequently, he cites Picasso's French
near-contemporaries, Eugene Delacroix and Dominique Ingres, less
frequently, the earlier Domenikos El
Greco and Francisco de Zurbaran of Spain.
For the
intricate complexities of Picasso's major masterpieces, Les
Demoiselles d'Avignon and Guernica, Oakes dubs him "the
time-traveler," charting the course of his inspiration back to Iberian and Egyptian incarnations in
sculpture and painting that express emotions ranging through sexuality, violence and horror. In his
detailed comparison between Picasso's drawing Encre de Chine and Antonio Tempesta's
engraving Victory of Joshua (1613), John Oakes cites
sixteen incidents of direct inspiration; he finds
fourteen such incidents from the same engraving in a painting by
Ingres, entitled Venus Wounded by Diomedes,
proving the prevalence at the time of the practice of adaptation from existing artworks. In turn, this
work by Ingres played a dominant role in the creation of the immortal work Guernica, along
with extensive possible associations traced to Rembrandt, Poussin, Durer, Bassano, Rubens, Delacroix,
Raphael and Mantegna.
What a
fascinating and complex network of ties and connections among major
artists of several centuries has been revealed by John Warren Oakes!”
Louise Sheldon
MacDonald
Louise Sheldon MacDonald was an art
reviewer for Museum and Arts Washington and The World and I
in Washington, D.C. She also wrote on the arts for the Baltimore
Chronicle and the Baltimore Sun in Baltimore, Maryland.
She served as an Associate Editor of Smithsonian magazine and
as an Assistant Editor of LIFE magazine.
“The discoveries of sources for
the work of Picasso place
John Warren Oakes among the world's leading authorities on Picasso.”
John Warren Oakes among the world's leading authorities on Picasso.”
Helen Dow, Ph.D. Professor of
Art,
University of Iowa School of Art and Art History
University of Iowa School of Art and Art History
2
3 Copyright Notice
Copyright
Notice
The
text and illustrations of this book are copyrighted and restricted to
educational
and academic purposes and may not be used for commercial purposes.
Mallen,
Enrique, ed. Online Picasso Project. Sam Houston State University.
1997-2015.
Artists
Rights Society
65
Bleecker Street
New
York, NY 10012
(212)
420-9160
http://www.arsny.com
Copyright
© 2015
by
John Warren Oakes
Sedona,
Arizona
Ethereal
Publications
Sedona,
Arizona
Cover
Art
Composite
by John Warren Oakes of:
“Demoiselles
d'Avignon by Pablo Picasso.
“Holy
Trinity by El Greco, and
“Diana
and Actaeon” by Titian
3
4 INTRODUCTION
ART
SOURCES FOR PICASSO'S WORK
AN
ARTIST'S SEARCH FOR SOURCES IN THE WORK OF PICASSO
by
John
Warren Oakes
A.B.,
M.A., M.F.A., C.A.A.
Introduction
“What
fundamentally is a painter? He's a collector who wishes to obtain a
collection by making himself the paintings of others he likes. It's
like that, and then it becomes something else”
--Pablo
Picasso (qtd. in Lucas 37).
Picasso's
definition of a painter recreating the artwork of others describes a
process he used throughout his career as he adapted and transformed
the work of artists whom he admired. In fact, he borrowed
compositions, themes, and ideas from other artists. He used his
fertile imagination and memory to generate images from forms and
figures he saw in the work of both his contemporaries and his
predecessors. Picasso's friend Maurice Raynal wrote that "Picasso
looked for the essence of things in other works of art, and he
realized that in order to distill this essence himself, the most
advanced starting point was not reality and nature but the work of
others”
(Raynal qtd. in Blunt 5).
Many
of Picasso's innovations can be explained by this procedure.
Throughout his long career, from the early influence of Spanish
painting, French Impressionism, and Post-Impressionism prior to 1900
to Picasso's late studies based on the "Maids of Honor" by
Velazquez and the "Women of Algiers" by Delacroix, there is
a continued utilization of art which he studied and esteemed. In
addition to being cognizant of trends and involved with other writers
and artists in his own time, Picasso was strongly attracted to the
art of the past. He had in his personal collection works by Cezanne,
Courbet, Degas, Gauguin, LeNain, Matisse, and others. To him, true
art was timeless, as he said in 1935: “To
me there is no past or future in art. If a work of art cannot live
always in the present it must not be considered at all. The art of
the Greeks, of the Egyptians, of the great painters who lived in
other times, is not an art of the past; perhaps it is more alive
today than it ever was”
(qtd. in Barr 272-73).
Susan
Grace Galassi commented “His
many remarks on copying the works of others give insight into his
understanding of this paradoxical relationship and its importance to
him.”
(Galassi 20). For an artist to be influenced by the work of others is
not unusual; most artists know the work of the past and participate
in their own milieu. This aspect of Picasso's career has been
previously discussed by many scholars, among them Sir Anthony Blunt
and Phoebe Pool in Picasso: The Formative Years: a study of his
sources, Sir Roland Penrose in Picasso: His Life and Work, and Susan
Grace Galassi in Picasso's Variations on the Masters: Conversations
With the Past. It is my contention, however, that Picasso went far
beyond influence and immersion, what we might think of as ordinary
give-and-take among artists, to finding the very source of his
inspiration and the raw materials of form in the works of others.
However,
to be clear from the start, Picasso was no mere copyist. In working
from the paintings of other artists, he made them his own by
absorbing and transforming them, in the process often generating a
new style or image.
In
speaking about his artistic process, Picasso was open about this way
of working. “The
laws of composition,”
he said, “are
never new, they are always someone else's”
(qtd. in Penrose 336). In the same vein, in 1952 he made this comment
about his debt to Velazquez “Suppose
you just want to copy "Las Meninas." If I were to set
myself to copying it, there would come a moment when I would say to
myself: Now what would happen if I put that figure a little more to
the left? And I would go ahead and try it, in my own way, without
attending anymore to Velazquez. This experiment would surely lead me
to modify the light or to arrange it differently, from having changed
the position of a figure. So little by little I would proceed to make
a picture, "Las Meninas", which for any painter who
specialized in copying would be no good. It wouldn't be the "Meninas"
as they appear to him in Velazquez's canvas. It would be my
"Meninas””
(Picasso qtd. in Leymarie 273).
For
Picasso, the art of the masters even replaced living models. In fact,
he rarely worked from the live model. There are numerous works in
this book containing a figure or a group of figures, the models for
whom are found in the work of the masters. Leo Stein, who was a close
friend of Picasso's during these years, recalled that Picasso did not
use models during the Iberian period, and he implied that this had
been Picasso's practice for a long time (Stein 174).
Picasso
researched or used from memory art of the past in order to help him
express the present. In his "Guernica" of 1937, Picasso
combined subjects, shapes, and areas from numerous sources to help
him develop his solution. This research insured the inclusion of
elements related to the finest works of art as part of his
compositions. He was a master of mixing all this together so that his
work was created on a solid foundation.
Perhaps
Picasso (qtd. in Barr 273) explains it best “We
must pick out what is good for us where we find it--except from our
own works. I have a horror of copying myself. But when I am shown a
portfolio of old drawings, for instance, I have no qualms about
taking anything I want from them.” Helene
Parmelin (Picasso qtd. in Parmelin 43) quoted Picasso as saying,
“What
does it mean, . . . for a painter to paint in the manner of so-and-so
or to actually imitate someone else? What's wrong with that? On the
contrary, it's a good idea. You should constantly try to paint like
someone else. But the thing is, you can't! You would like to. You
try. But it turns out to be a botch . . . . And it's at the very
moment you make a botch of it that you're yourself.”
Picasso
told us what he was doing. Have we ignored his comments?
What
this Art from Art series does is examine Picasso's debt to the
masters that goes beyond influence. I will show how he, throughout
his career, created art from art, how he looked for compositional
structure with which to frame his subjects. He followed suggestions
of imagery in other works, building on what his imagination saw. “I
try to paint what I have found, not what I sought,”
he said (Picasso qtd. in Picasso ). In him the physical world around
him and the world of art in which he lived in his imagination, which
included the art of the past, merged into one.
Picasso
has been the subject of much investigation, with each year more books
being added to the already vast number. My aim is not to repeat the
documented history about Picasso. I have been a practicing artist for
over fifty-five years. My purpose, as an artist, is to examine his
working methods and the result. I am interested in his imagination as
he interacted with the art of others. I don't see his content; I see
form. Just as a bicycle seat can be a bull's head, many things from
other artists' work undergo a metamorphosis in his imagination.
I
have been researching art sources for his work since 1965, when I
wrote my thesis at the University of Iowa on the sources in Picasso's
early work 1900 -1906. I have done extensive research on Picasso's
complete production focusing on sources. The comparisons presented in
this book are my observations based on my understanding as an artist
on how Picasso worked. I have relied on the writings of Picasso
himself along with what his friends and art historians have written
about this topic to augment my findings.
I
believe that the comparisons presented in this book reveal and
demonstrate what a master Picasso was at grounding his art in art
history. Admittedly, some of the relationships I present in this
study are subtle; if they were obvious, they would be like his
variations on Velaquez's “Infanta Maria Theresa.” My focus is not
on subject matter but his magical transformation of forms and
structures he gathers from the masters.
This
book presents the work of Picasso together with the works of the
masters who served as models. He did not enter the twentieth century
alone but brought with him the art and culture of past centuries.
4
5 CHAP I
CHAPTER
I
Early
Attractions - 1901-1904
Xavier
de Salas has given an account of Picasso’s experiences in Paris.
When Picasso first visited Paris in the fall of 1900, he brought with
him the preconceived notions he had developed from the descriptions
given by the young Spaniards -- Ramon Casas, Miguel Utrillo, Santiago
Rusinol, and others -- who had gone to Paris before him. They
returned to Spain praising Paris to the rebel group that met at "the
Four Cats" bar in Barcelona. In Paris, they said, they had found
galleries to exhibit their work and inspiration from the artists and
writers who worked in the more liberal atmosphere of Paris.
Picasso
had been attracted to the rebels in 1894 when he saw a procession in
which two El Greco paintings were carried through the streets
accompanied by Catalan poets and artists. Because El Greco was not
held in high esteem in Madrid at this time, the paintings had been
purchased in Paris to be installed in a museum in Barcelona. It was
after this event that Picasso, who had established some reputation as
an artist by that time since several medals had been awarded to him
for his paintings, joined the group.
In
Spain, Picasso had also developed an appreciation for Velazquez,
saying in a letter that he thought the work of Velazquez was first
class and the heads of El Greco were magnificent. This letter was
dated 1897, showing an early admiration for these artists. In the
same letter, he vows to surpass the Spanish painter, Nonell, who
seems to have had some influence on Picasso's early work. We also
know that he studied Velazquez and Goya in the Prado Museum in Madrid
(de Salas 483).
EXAMPLES
FROM 1901
In
the spring of 1901, after he had returned to Spain, Picasso came back
to Paris. There he studied the work of Toulouse-Lautrec, Van Gogh,
Gauguin, Denis, Carriere, Cezanne, and others. In the Louvre he
visited the collections of the old masters and the rooms of Egyptian
and ancient Mediterranean art which Alfred H. Barr, Jr. believed were
the sources for the “archaisms” which appear in Picasso's work
from 1900-1902 (Barr 19).
It
is significant that Picasso was inspired by the masters of art whom
he deemed sympathetic to the conditions of the common man. Thus,
artists like Rembrandt, Velazquez, El Greco, Zurbaran, Courbet,
Degas, Manet, Van Gogh, Lautrec, and Steinlen are significant sources
for him during this time.
“Mourners”
1901 (1)
In
"Mourners” (1), it has been noted that the little nude boy on
the right was taken from El Greco's "Holy Family with St. Anne
and the Infant Baptist" (1B) (de Salas 484). However, it has not
been reported that the painting is a mirror image of Zurbaran's
“Burial of St. Bonaventure” (1A).
“Burial
of Casagemas / Evocation” 1901 (2)
In
the larger canvas of the "Burial of Casagemas,” done in 1901,
also called "Evocation" (2), Picasso shows the burial of
his friend who committed suicide after being rejected by a woman he
desired. The mourners surrounding the body are smaller in scale than
those of the earlier, smaller version. For this work Picasso combined
sources, a signal that this was an important project for him.
A
major connection, I believe, exists between this painting and
Rembrandt's etching "The Death of the Virgin" (2A), as the
Rembrandt provided the compositional framework.
Other
elements may derive from William Blake's "O How I Dreamt of
Things Impossible" (2B) as the figures ascend on the back of a
horse.
In
a manner recalling El Greco's "Burial of Conde de Orgaz"
(2C), Picasso substituted nudes, prostitutes, children, a mother and
child along with a dancing horse for the Count, friends, religious
figures and Christ, Mary, St. John the Baptist, St. Peter and other
saints and angels in heaven., Phoebe Pool relates Picasso’s figures
to Redon's horses (“Sources” 180), all allegorical figures
mounting a bank of clouds above the heads of the mourners who are
solidly modeled and simplified.
A
stone sepulcher in a forced perspective vision has been added to the
right of the picture. According to De Salas, these figures with
folded arms and mothers carrying infants are some of the first signs
of a personal style in Picasso's art and evoke a feeling of
compassion (de Salas 484). Picasso played down the spiritual theme of
the sources and made this work more of a reflection of his worldly
situation.
The
circular cloud patterns and the placement of the figures in Picasso's
painting suggest that Delacroix's "Peace Restoring the Bounty of
the Earth" (2D) made a significant contribution to the
development of this work.
I
believe this is one of the first examples of Picasso's combining
sources.
“L'
entrevue / The Visit (study)" 1901 (3)
This
study for "L'entrevue / The Visit) (3) is an early example of
Picasso using "The Return of the Prodigal Son" by
Charles Gleyre (5A).
“Self
Portrait” 1901 (4)
When
he left his home in Spain, Picasso was searching for himself and
becoming aware of the misery of his own life and of those around him.
His "Self-Portrait”(4) focuses attention on the face. The
background is painted flatly as is the texture of the heavy coat.
This portrait gives evidence of a Picasso who has suffered the cold
and hunger of the poor in Paris. He had burned some of his own
drawings to keep warm that winter, and his meals often consisted of
rotten sausage. Considering this, the portrait does not seem to have
as strong an element of self-pity as it does of acceptance.
The
drawing and mood of this portrait may be traced back to a portrait of
a "Dominican" (15A) by El Greco in the emphasis on the
forehead, ear, and cheek-bone and in the treatment of the mouth and
beard.
5
5
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