PICASSO AT MOMA 1

How could there be such free composition, such deft assembly, and such humor? In every piece? This show has to be considered the motherlode. I believe that the entirety of modernism, if not the artistic output of humanity,  is condensed in this show. Everything is here. Classicism. Assembly. Decomposition. Whatever term your pet cultural attribute, all of them are in this show. And Picasso in his sculpture did them all.  The drawing above was generated from this photo I took of a piece titled “Head Of A Man.”

Glowing reviews by those steeped in art history have been written by others. I’m certainly not qualified to write a comprehensive review. So all I can do is respond to the show with a Transparent Drawing mindset, for whatever that is worth.

Transparent Drawing gives me a way of looking at a show like the Picasso. It gives me a frame of reference with which to understand. While it is personal for me, I believe that Transparent Drawing can be universally shared. It is open source. Everyone can benefit from it. Anyone can do it.

And I have been devoting my drawing time pretty much non stop to transparent studies of the Picasso sculpture. Each time that I look at a photo that I took of a sculpture, I see something different. There are so many overlapping resonances to the sculptures that it is nearly mind blowing.  This is the photo that I took which I then used to generate the drawing immediately above.  The title of Picasso’s piece is “Chair.”

If there is a body of work that can provide bottomless inspiration, this is it. You can make a drawing of an entire piece. Or a segment of a piece can serve as a form generator. The composition that you get from one angle is typically very different from what you get from another. Some of his methods; folding, cutting, punching, found objects, etc.; any of these can be used a a form generating method.

So on this page I have provided two transparent drawings that were made in response to Picasso’s sculptures. There will be many more where these came from.