Tuesday, August 11, 2015

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first sight appear incongruous with his cubist discoveries. But even during the most hermetic period of cubism he shared with all great artists a desire to keep in touch with reality, and knew that there has been more than one way of doing so” (Penrose 191).

One of the ways Picasso did this was by searching through the art of the masters to find examples relating to his current formal and thematic interests. He said "When I paint my object is to show what I have found and not what I am looking for" (Picasso qtd. Barr 270).
He would paraphrase or combine, seeming to delight in finding
associations within numerous works which he could reconstitute, freely mixing the work of different periods of art history. He rejected non-objective art, choosing to have his work refer to his experience of the he technology of the twentieth century assisted him in his travels through art history. He had at his command reproductions, photographs, projection slides to supplement original art and artifacts.

Parmelin description in describing Picasso's studio in the 1960's
mentioned "Stacks of projectors and easels..." (Parmelin 87).

Stacks of slide projectors suggest a practice of projecting numerous images and that Picasso's comparison and evaluation of his work with the art of the masters was enhanced by his study of projected slides of their work. Parmelin gave this amazing account of projection in the winter of 1963-64 “At Mougins, winter out of doors has its famous sun, but the nights in the studio are more magnificent still, warm, intimate, and deep.


I have a memory, extraordinarily violent and almost magical in its clarity, of an evening that winter at Notre-Dame de Vie, before Christmas. At the end of the room Picasso generally uses when he is not working, there is a studio which he had built on a terrace. The wall facing the vast countryside (with its motorway at the foot of the hill and its sea studded with the shining triangles of warships) is glass for half its height. The whole of the night lives in this window with its strings of lights, its sparks flashing from earth and sky, the one alive with the red and white meteor-streaks of cars, and the other fixed and motionless, with no shooting stars. These vastnesses of the night, so

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