As I often explore on my Monday Morning Art tweets – you'll note it if you scan back a few posts or follow me on Twitter – the early works of an artist are often surprising and interesting. Particularly with the most successful abstract painters. My thought is that those who are most adept have a solid grounding classical or at least representational painting.
My reasoning is that if you cannot put a line or a dab of colour precisely where, and exactly how it needs to be to create strong realist works, then how can we be confident that your abstract piece is as you intended it to be? Plus, who can better break the rules than someone who knows well what the rules are?
Of course, sometimes abstracts are more about happenstance, and an artist will create willy-nilly hoping that something is attractive or interesting in the outcome. But I have a bit more respect for those who are sharing a vision, an idea, that they fully intended to bring about.
A long intro to say here are some views of Picasso that you may not have seen before.This piece with a distinct feel of the orient is 'Boy with a Pipe" from 1905.
It's interesting on a few levels. The pose and off-centre framing, the bold colour and heavy contours, the prominence of the rose-pattern backdrop or wall, and the flowers around the boy's head.
The influence I most felt in this piece upon first seeing it was that of Gustav Klimt, who was an older, established contemporary, and doing similarly evocative portraits into the 1890s as well.
Take a look at some of Klimt's works, like this piece called Love (1895) or his "Schubert at the Piano" from 1896.
There's an interesting connection too with this early Picasso self-portrait from nine years before. The same person? No, I don't think so, but the expression and orientation of the face and figure are similar. There's a confidence and emotion behind both that is interesting.
The sense of an 'explorer of styles' is very evident when you contrast that dark self portrait to one he did a bit later, in 1901which could easily be a Renoir or Gauguin, in classic post-impressionist style.That orange - my theory was that Renoir was gifted a big case of that orange paint, and used it in everything he did for a while. Perhaps he shipped the left-overs off to Picasso to see what he could do with it
Of course we all know where Picasso goes after this period. The cubist and heavily abstracted work from the '20s to the '60s changed the art landscape in dramatic ways.
Here, is Picasso's "Seated Woman" from 1938. He continued to create art throughout the 1960s, by then very famous, and considered by some as perhaps even a bit of a caricature of himself.
Then too into the early 1970s he was still active, his later work being seen, after the fact, as the vanguard of a "Neo-Expressionist" movement.
