Picasso was relentless about doing his art. He continually tried new things. He stepped out unafraid of what people might think and did art.

An Article of interest:

Pablo Picasso's Guernica

Pablo Picasso's Guernica-a powerful and shocking image of modernwarefare-depicts the chaos wrought by German bombers on a small town during the Spanish Civil War.

Guernica is considered to be one of the visual art worlds greatest anti-war works and Picasso's greatest masterpiece. Despite the enormous interest the painting generated in his lifetime, Picasso obstinately refused to explain Guernica's imagery. Guernica has been the subject of more books than any other work in modern art and it is often described as%u2026"the most important work of art of the twentieth century", yet its meanings have to this day eluded some of the most renowned scholars.

This is an article 'in part' by David Cohen. If you want to read the entire article check out this url:

http://www.slate.com/id/2078242/

Earlier this week, U.N. officials hung a blue curtain over a tapestry reproduction of Picasso's Guernica at the entrance of the Security Council. The spot is where diplomats and others make statements to the press, and ostensibly officials thought it would be inappropriate for Colin Powell to speak about war in Iraq with the 20th century's most iconic protest against the inhumanity of war as his backdrop. Why is Guernica such a powerfully controversial image after all these years, and how did it come to hang in tapestry form at the United Nations?
Guernica is a mural, 11 feet 6 inches high and 25 feet 8 inches wide, which commemorates the aerial bombardment-and obliteration-of the ancient Basque town of 5,000 inhabitants by German and Italian squadrons on April 26, 1937. It has justifiably been held to be one of the masterpieces of modern art. A modern history painting, Guernica self-consciously draws on archetypal forms the artist was exploring at the time: bulls, horses, melancholy women-particularly Spanish themes that were nonetheless classical and universal. Picasso used a distinctive pictorial language to convey meaning in a broadly accessible way without compromising the hermetic originality of the artist's style; the chopped-up, fragmentary treatment of form makes the image more startling and conveys violence. Most notable, though, is the painting's audaciously stark absence of color-Guernica is painted solely in black and white and gray tones. Black-and-white images carry symbolic as well as graphic punch, of course, and, to a contemporary audience used to black-and-white newspapers and film, the added connotation of objectivity.

continued at http://www.slate.com/id/2078242/

Also check out his website:

Art critic David Cohen is editor of the online journal artcritical.com and gallery director at the New York Studio School.
Photo of Guernica tapestry by Mark Lennihan/AP/Wide World Photos.

An Interesting Article:

Hitler's resolve to castrate modern artists only strengthened Picasso's obsession with the bullish minotaur, writes Robert Nelson.

PICASSO'S PICTURE-making during World War II was a powerful form of resistance. I heard this claim at the launch of the current Picasso blockbuster, made by the curator of the exhibition, Anna Baldassari.

Something about this imputed heroism - and about Picasso himself - filled me with sceptical thoughts.

Picasso did paint one direct commentary on war, his mural-sized Guernica from 1936; but this famous picture is the exception that proves the rule.

For the rest, Picasso's pictorial agonies seem to lack a moral or political frame and, instead, you get a great sense of an artist proud of his masculinity.

I've always felt that the image of the weeping woman in Picasso proceeds straight from the artist's ego. The spectacle of female pain and vulnerability flatters the artist's power and boastful privileges - at the expense of female gratification - of exercising an imaginary superhuman potency.

For years, Picasso identifies with the image of the minotaur and once went so far as to describe the bull-man archetype as analogous to himself. This mythical creature is conveniently revived from ancient Greece as a grandiose pretext for showing off; for it allows Picasso to hang upon the human frame the formidable head and testicles of a bull.

What kind of courage did it really take Picasso to advertise his randy instincts? How can his manifest indulgence - supported by an establishment of collectors and museums - be construed as an act of resistance?

Never was ancient myth so prostituted in the service of an artist's delusion, and never were such fantasies turned so successfully to the marketing of conceit and the pomposity of genius. How can we celebrate all that big-headedness, especially when transacted in an age of mass extermination?

The Picasso exhibition at the NGV has made me rethink some of those claims to which previously I'd given no credence. It is a serious study of the relationship between Picasso and his volatile lover and model of the war years, Dora Maar, an interesting artist in her own right.

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Anna Baldassari is more than the curator of the current exhibition; she's also the author of a learned monograph accompanying it. Among many fascinating historical explorations, this eloquent book introduces some chilling facts concerning the culture of the German occupation in which Picasso was domiciled.

In Picasso's library, Baldassari found a volume of a magazine (Lit tout) summarising Hitler's policy on art. It described a strategy so unsettling that I decided to check to see if the report on Hitler's plans was really true. So I hunted down the 'Urtext' to find a loathsome document that is predictably painful to read. This awful exercise proves the truth of the account that Picasso would have read in Lit tout.

In 1937, Hitler gave the inaugural address at the opening of the "Haus der deutschen Kunst". This was a defining moment in Nazi cultural history, launching not only the severe neo-classical building by the architect Paul Ludwig Troost, but announcing what kind of art should go into it. The only profession for which Hitler had any training was art; he had a special interest in controlling it and approached it with a vengeance.

Hitler's philosophy of art is much as you would expect. He hates modern fads and fashions; he wants to see eternal greatness and absolute beauty, as of the Greeks, beyond time and transcending the happenstance and contingencies of the epoch. Art should aspire to universal virtues and beauty.

These tenets, structurally speaking, are the same kind of essentialist aesthetic still pursued by some writers today who denounce the relativism of critical theory in contemporary art. But Hitler's diatribe against modern art isn't just an expression of scorn and contempt, such as conservatives rehearse still today.

By 1937, Hitler was not merely venting his frustration but redesigning the world to his plan. Just as he was determined to eliminate Jewry and homosexuality from Aryan dominion, so he was prepared to stamp out, by whatever means, the congenital sickness that expressed itself in modern art.

Towards the end of his somewhat reasoned speech, Hitler comes to the crunch. In regard to the distortions and perversions of modern art, he declares:

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"There are only two possibilities: either these so-called 'artists' really see things in that way and believe in the (appearance of) things that they represent, in which case it would only remain to investigate whether their ocular failure has arisen in a mechanical way or through inheritance ('Vererbung').

"In the one case, it is deeply sad for these unfortunate ones, in the second, important for the Ministry for the Interior, which would then have to concern itself with the question of how, at the very least, to prevent ('unterbinden') further inheritance of such a ghastly disturbance of vision."

by Robert Nelson

To read more of this article:
http://www.theage.com.au/news/arts/balls-to-picassos-masculinity/2006/09/08/1157222309194.html?page=3

Loving Picasso: The Private Journal of Fernande Olivier. - Review - book review
Art in America, June, 2001 by Michele C. Cone
Loving Picasso: The Private Journal of Fernande Olivier, with a foreword by Marilyn McCully and an epilogue by John Richardson, New York, Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2001;296 pages, $35.

Would we be interested in Dora Maar and Fernande Olivier, had they never entered the Picasso vortex? Until recently, the answer was no, despite the fact that, prior to meeting Picasso, Maar and Olivier had both achieved unusual independence, the former as a professional photographer and the latter as a popular artists' model. Mary Ann Caws's biography, profusely illustrated with examples of Maar's photographic and painted works, is intended to redress the view of Maar as "just the weeping woman" in Picasso's oeuvre. The private journal of Olivier, with a foreword by Marilyn McCully and an epilogue by John Richardson, is also intended to evidence its author's special talent, in her case as a memorialist.

In her biography of Maar, Caws, best known as a feminist literary scholar and translator of Surrealist texts, is most interested in her subject's brief association with the Surrealists in 1935 and 1936. Caws glosses over Maar's early years in Argentina, where she lived from the age of three to the age of 19, and briefly evokes the young woman's student work in photography done in Parts in the late '20s. Soon she draws our eyes to Maar's first "professional" photographs (coauthored with the man who shared her studio in the early '30s, Pierre Kefer). There is no question that Maar displayed precocious signs of an unconventional, possibly "surreal" turn of mind, as in a double-profile photomontage from the early '30s, a plunging view from the late '20s of a Paris street in the manner of Atget, and a circa 1927 study of a rock formation that calls to mind the wrinkled folds of aged skin. (All of these photographs and more are beautifully reproduced in Picasso's Weeping Woman.)

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Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don't start measuring her limbs.

Art is never chaste. It ought to be forbidden to ignorant innocents, never allowed into contact with those not sufficiently prepared. Yes, art is dangerous. Where it is chaste, it is not art.

The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place; from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider's web.

If there is something to steal, I steal it!.

Painting is stronger than me, it makes me do its bidding.

When we discovered Cubism, we did not have the aim of discovering Cubism. We only wanted to express what was in us.

People want to find a "meaning" in everything and everyone. That's the disease of our age, an age that is anything but practical but believes itself to be more practical than any other age.

Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility.

Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.

I don't say everything, but I paint everything.

~Pablo Picasso

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