Pablo Picasso is without doubt the best known artist in
this century, even though he may not be the most revered. Still, critics and art lovers alike never stop praising the works of Picasso, partly for their brilliance, partly for the originality he constantly displayed, and to a degree also for the variety of moods and styles he delved in.
"One painting alone will tell you very little of the art
of Pablo Picasso," write the editors in the Modern Reference
Library ("The Club of the Wild Men" 388-391). They state that Picasso was "forever changing his style" in order to "attack some new problem in Art." The editors continue:
He is said never to have left a problem unsolved; but the minute he is satisfied with what he has done, he turns to something else. So you can see that he has not, as so many artists have done, repeated his own successes until people grow bored with his worn-out mannerisms.
The above quote comes from a library of books initially published in 1939; and the great Picasso, of course, was to change several times again before his death in the mid-1980s. But as old as the book is, it interestingly tells the story of Picasso's refusal to conform or to become predictable.
The group of "Wild Men" artists included Henri Matisse,
Raoul Dufy, and the highly influential Cezanne; along came Picasso and Georges Brague to join the club, in the early 1900s, because, the editors say:
[Picasso and Braque] realized they would seem like wild men to the public and they thought it rather fun to be savage . . . Picasso, to be sure, was a changeable soul, and sometimes painted roundly and solidly enough.
But then Picasso turned to Cubism (no doubt under the influence of Cezanne) which was a kind of world made up of "different arrangements of spheres and pyramids and squares and other geometrical figures."
Looking at the young life of this extraordinary artist, it's not difficult to understand why he wo...