SELF PORTRAIT by Pablo Picasso
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Picasso was still a teenager when he first arrived in Paris. Alone in a strange city, we know he sampled the Pigalle girls because he memorialized his experience with the self portrait shown above. Picasso had not yet developed his own style. He copied the styles of Degas, Puvis de Chavannes, Lautrec.
All the pictures in the art series “PICASSO IN PARIS” by Bob Kessel are based on the early works of Pablo Picasso. These pictures can be purchased as signed and numbered limited edition original fine art prints. Contact Bob Kessel for prices and availability.
PICASSO IN PARIS by Bob Kessel
after Pablo Picasso
FEMME NUE DEBOUT A SA TOILETTE by Bob Kessel
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Picasso’s Variations On the Masters
Iconoclastic yet deeply rooted in the art of the past, Picasso endlessly copied, reworked, paraphrased and transformed well-known pictures by artists who obsessed him Manet, Velazquez, Ingres, Delacroix as well as images by Renoir, El Greco, Rembrandt, Gauguin, Degas, Cranach and Courbet.
In Picasso’s “variations” on these artists, he pits his powers of invention against the conventions of his predecessors. The detachment afforded by the variations enabled him to revitalize his art, to assess his own position in the western European tradition and to take up lifelong themes.
Throughout his career, Picasso used classic paintings as inspiration for his own work. Typically, the earlier paintings did not inspire just a single work, but a sequence of paintings, sometimes dozens of them.
Some of these sequences were inspired by Manet’s “Le déjeuner sur l’herbe” and Velasquez’s “Las Meninas”.
First, it shows that, for Picasso, art was a process, rather than a goal. As the sequences develop, we can see him continuously reinterpreting the original, changing directions, as a way of exploring the original and his reactions to it.
It is OK to be derivative (in the best sense). Our art culture places an extreme value on originality. The idea of copying great art, and being inspired by it to develop your own variations on a theme, is currently underappreciated, even though this technique has always been used by great artists. (In art, Van Gogh comes to mind. And in music, Bach, Mozart, and of course, all jazz musicians).
