Tuesday, August 11, 2015

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through a microscope. The head of Van Gogh's self-portrait stretches from floor to ceiling. And even though it is the Van Gogh pictures which suffer most from reproduction, Picasso says that all the same, on the wall as everywhere else, it is he who is the greatest of all” (Parmelin 49).

Slide projection gave Picasso the opportunity of using more than one projector at a time with multiple images. He could have used these multiple projections to compare his work with that of others; to notice relationships between the works and even to selectively enlarge sections, alter perception by projecting the slides out of focus, reversing the slides, even overlapping two or more slides in the same space frame. It is not inconceivable to imagine Picasso working with the aid of projected slides in this manner. Indeed, it would be very natural for him. He had the many projectors, slides, the great white wall, the darkness of the night when he preferred to work, and the need throughout his career, as we have seen, to combine and alter images.

Another way Picasso used photography was to work from photographs that he he took or to make copies of photographs and picture- postcards that he obtained. Penrose reported “A postcard of a young couple in Tyrolian national costume was transformed into a large and splendid pencil drawing which is no slavish copy, but rather a noble and inspired study, drawn with such vitality and freshness that the original photo would look a travesty of reality beside it. There is similarly a well-known drawing of Diaghilev and Selisbourg taken from a photograph for which they had dressed themselves with the greatest care. In this case the photograph still exists. In comparison with the direct simplicity of the drawing, in which all superfluous detail is eliminated and only a pure unhesitating line remains to describe their features, the photograph is a poor, insufficient likeness of the two men. Just as Picasso had delighted in showing even as a child that he could rival the masters, here it gave him great satisfaction to show that he could beat the camera” (Penrose 217).


Blunt commented on Picasso's uniqueness “Basically, however, Picasso is an eclectic in the best and most traditional sense of the word. Like all the great artists of the past - though with an avidity perhaps rare with them - he has studied every form of art which came before his eyes and, with modern museums and art galleries, and twentieth-century methods of photography and book production, the quantity and variety of art accessible to him are of a quite different order from what would have been known to an

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