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
164
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