Picasso’s The Dream: It features his mistress Marie-Therese Walter and is estimated to be worth £70m
This afternoon we went to see the Picasso exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The show admittedly had problems from a lack of depth in the history of Picasso’s art. As the NY Times review points out, the Met has never been a great purchaser of modern art, so there are lots of holes. In fact, the Picasso collection at the MoMA, just downstairs, is much better.
But the ragged jump in Picasso’s art gave me an opening to think about video.
We have been painting since Lasceaux, some 17,000 years ago. That’s a lot of time for painting to mature. We’ve only been creating video for some 50 years, so we’re still in its earliest days. Never the less, we might start to think about video as more than just the perfect capturing of events or the perfect representation of something that just happened. Video can be far more than news, which painting once was.
Picasso is seminal to the world of art because Picasso took us from a world of painting that represented exactly what people saw to an art form that communicated ideas and emotions.
The Met show, because of its flaws, ironically is forced to make that leap in only the few feet it takes to walk from one gallery to the next.
Picasso’s early self-portrait
Picasso’s earliest work is representational. Like all conventional paintings of his time, at the turn of the Century, he is simply painting the world as he sees it. Ironically, the arrival of photography at the same time may have rendered such representational skills superfluous. In doing so, it also opened the door to take painting to another far more powerful level. Picasso went through that door.
The portrait of Marie Therese Walter, above, currently owned (and recently damaged by) Steve Winn, is valued at $100 million. It has such a high value because it represents the moment in which art made the transition from reproducing reality as it was to creating a representation of more than reality.
Now we come to video.
Up until now we have used video as artists prior to Picasso used painting – to reproduce the world as they saw it. Is there a higher form of video, a better and more powerful way to use this very powerful medium?
Gertrude Stein was able to see the genius in Picasso even when he was in his early 20s and unknown.
Is there a Picasso of video out there somewhere?
