Picasso on Art

Picasso is quite a personality and that comes through in this book. I would recommend reading this book along with Gertrude Stein's book on him.

"Everyone wants to understand art," reflects Picasso early in this book. "Why not try to understand the songs of a bird?" It is a playful observation, and one that can only emanate, we imagine, from the mind of an artist throughly engaged with the material on palette. Picasso's witty comparison suggests art's elusive form and implies a truism which the reader will discover to be a driving force throughout these pages: The audience to a work of art, like its creator, succeeds by embracing rather than understanding the rendered object. It is the artist's full embrace which resolves itself into an all-encompassing vision, the very contradictions inherent in that panoramic view requiring for their complete rendition an array of angled planes that can only be created by the shattering of constructive materials. Hence arises that formal abstraction that so often mystifies those who seek understanding through simple assertion. How many individuals, indeed, feel that certain works by Picasso misrepresent rather than render the real? "We all know that Art is not truth," muses Picasso in acknowledgment of this confusion. "Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand." The truth that is so realized, adds Picasso, is something different from the artist's original vision, for the truly rendered subject, in a paradox, evaporates. Picasso recalls an effort to paint the portraits of two people; by the time his work was done his subjects existed no longer. In the artist's words: "The `vision' of them gave me a preliminary emotion; then little by little their actual presences became blurred; they developed into a fiction and then disappeared altogether, or rather they were transformed into all kinds of problems. They are no longer two people, you see, but forms and colors: forms and colors that have taken on, meanwhile, the idea of two people and preserve the vibrations of their life." So Picasso's human beings become real by disappearing from view, just as Isabel Archer becomes fully realized by vanishing at the conclusion of Henry James's novel. Art reveals truth by lying. Subjects become realized by disappearing. Any reader witness to this book's magical paradoxes, arising as they do from that hidden place where the creative flint strikes steel, can only view Picasso's observations as lending to our vision of artistic discourse a rich chiaroscuro. We cannot say this book will deepen the reader's understanding of art, unless by that understanding one means an embrace of the imaginative machine's secret pistons.

An engaging, if not wholly cohesive, account of Picasso's sayoing and writings about art, but more. The strength of the book comes when he speaks on art. The ancilliary issues that come up serve to round out the figure of Picasso more, but may not quite be the art treatise you're looking for.