Why does anyone consider Picasso a genius?
His paintings?
Not to be glib or anything, but at each stage of his career, Picasso showed great technical achievement, remarkable compositional skill, extraordinary creativity, and unsurpassed power of expression, all with a unique and identifiable artistic voice that was at the same time emblematic of the times in which he lived and worked. And he had another quality as well, one that is to be seen not just in paintings like Boy With [an opium] Pipe or Guernica —
— but in his cubist nudes and his late, gracile drawings as well. It is what T. S. Eliot famously called, in his essay on Blake, a peculiar honesty:
IF one follow Blake’s mind through the several stages of his poetic development it is impossible to regard him as a naïf, a wild man, a wild pet for the supercultivated. The strangeness is evaporated, the peculiarity is seen to be the peculiarity of all great poetry: something which is found (not everywhere) in Homer and Æschylus and Dante and Villon, and profound and concealed in the work of Shakespeare—and also in another form in Montaigne and in Spinoza. It is merely a peculiar honesty, which, in a world too frightened to be honest, is peculiarly terrifying. It is an honesty against which the whole world conspires, because it is unpleasant.
Blake. T.S. Eliot. 1921. The Sacred Wood; Essays on Poetry and Criticism
It is in this context that the strangeness and peculiarity of Picasso’s seemingly malformed figures evaporates.
So Picasso had all of the qualities that makes an artist great. But just as the plays of Shakespeare and the symphonies of Beethoven are what tell us of the genius of their creators, it is the paintings themselves that tell us of the genius of Picasso. They touch and disturb and delight us in a way that only the greatest works of art do.
Criticism can help us appreciate. But reading a description of a sunset isn’t the same as seeing one, and no critical analysis, however informed or astute, can substitute for the experience of coming to know Picasso’s works themselves. So look, and look again. With time, you will come to understand, and the paintings will have answered your question in a way that I cannot.
The Artist's Father - 1896
Unknown Subject Unknown Date
Self-Portrait - 1901
Mother and Child - from p. 28 of sketchbook 77 - ca. 1922
Femme assise dans une chaise (Dora) - 1938
Frankly every artist since the 1500’s had focused in realism, art had become stuffy and emotionless. Many of the masters of realism had used camera obscura, simply tracing a scene projected onto a wall. Artists began to realize that there was more to express than just the appearance of subjects they were painting.
Movements like Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism etc were about expressing the emotional impact of the subject. They brought more to the table than simple representation.
Because Pablo Picasso was, by any definition of the word, a genius (not to mention a remarkable prodigy).
Genius in visual art doesn’t necessarily mean a great artist; though I would argue that Picasso was both, the fact that he was a genius is beyond dispute. For one thing, he mastered classical art techniques by the time he was 15:
Picasso went on to experiment with a variety of different styles throughout his lifetime, most of them a more difficult vehicle in which to easily recognize his skill. However, his mastery of composing visual forms was peerless, making even his most wildly abstract pieces memorably iconic and powerfully evocative, like this violent bullfight:
Or this tragic massacre:
Or this poised courtesan, painted after Delacroix’s Women of Algiers:
Compare that to the original:
and you can see how brilliantly Picasso was able to retain the visual and psychological character of the work while transforming it so radically. Whether one personally admires the work or not, Picasso‘s status as a visual genius is beyond question.
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