Pablo Picasso at the National Gallery, London
A hundred years ago, in the summer of 1909, a young artist stood staring at a brick factory. Pablo Picasso's stare still holds us when we look at his big black eyes, from his own early self-portraits to photographs of the old, famous, rich artist at home in the south of France. In his fearsome Self-Portrait, done on 30 June 1972, unshaven, looking at the approaching End, his eyes are huge circles set inside kite-shaped sockets, with one pupil huge, the other small - as if sight is finally failing him.
In 1909, at the age of 28, his vision was perfect. Staring at the factory in the summer heat during a holiday from his adopted Paris to his native Spain, he made a painting that today hangs in the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg in Russia. Brick Factory in Tortosa is an experiment in how brutally you can reduce, simplify, solidify and abstract forms and still produce a picture that is not simply recognisable, but profoundly full of life. It is a study in dryness and heat. The factory's buildings and chimney offer Picasso perfect, geometric shapes to play with: like a child with Lego, he can take the elemental structures of what he is looking at and remake them. Planes of grey and orange, fading to white, sketch the volumes, rather than exterior appearance, of big sheds, sloping rooftops, a dark rectangular doorway. This sounds like a mathematical exercise, and in the hands of any other artist (except Picasso's close working partner Georges Braque) it would be. But Picasso's geometric reductionism seems driven by something far more passionate and real than a desire to simplify nature. The triangles and squares are not regular, the forms not logically neat - far from revealing a plain lucid truth beneath appearances, his abstraction reveals a reality that is infinitely hard to describe.
With pure genius, Picasso reveals summer heat not in a blue dazzle but in a grey sky of bleak planes beyond the factory. Three palm trees, their cylindrical trunks topped by broad, green leaves, bring relieving vitality into the dessicated scene.
Brick Factory in Tortosa is a quiet moment during a revolution. Picasso, together with Braque, is moving rapidly towards the style that is already being nicknamed (in a review of Braque's new paintings in spring 1909)" cubism". The word denotes a way of seeing already manifest in Picasso's brick factory: the systematic transformation of surfaces into planes of colour, their jarring arrangement in rough geometries, the harshness of palette. You can see here, very clearly, how much Picasso and Braque owed to their discovery of Cézanne's landscapes. The brick factory in the heat has the toughness of Cézanne's Provencal rocks - but it has a 20th-century quality that makes it different. Factories had only been acknowledged by 19th-century landscape painters as smokestacks in the distance. Picasso looks the modern world squarely in the eye...
Read entire article at Guardian (UK)
In 1909, at the age of 28, his vision was perfect. Staring at the factory in the summer heat during a holiday from his adopted Paris to his native Spain, he made a painting that today hangs in the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg in Russia. Brick Factory in Tortosa is an experiment in how brutally you can reduce, simplify, solidify and abstract forms and still produce a picture that is not simply recognisable, but profoundly full of life. It is a study in dryness and heat. The factory's buildings and chimney offer Picasso perfect, geometric shapes to play with: like a child with Lego, he can take the elemental structures of what he is looking at and remake them. Planes of grey and orange, fading to white, sketch the volumes, rather than exterior appearance, of big sheds, sloping rooftops, a dark rectangular doorway. This sounds like a mathematical exercise, and in the hands of any other artist (except Picasso's close working partner Georges Braque) it would be. But Picasso's geometric reductionism seems driven by something far more passionate and real than a desire to simplify nature. The triangles and squares are not regular, the forms not logically neat - far from revealing a plain lucid truth beneath appearances, his abstraction reveals a reality that is infinitely hard to describe.
With pure genius, Picasso reveals summer heat not in a blue dazzle but in a grey sky of bleak planes beyond the factory. Three palm trees, their cylindrical trunks topped by broad, green leaves, bring relieving vitality into the dessicated scene.
Brick Factory in Tortosa is a quiet moment during a revolution. Picasso, together with Braque, is moving rapidly towards the style that is already being nicknamed (in a review of Braque's new paintings in spring 1909)" cubism". The word denotes a way of seeing already manifest in Picasso's brick factory: the systematic transformation of surfaces into planes of colour, their jarring arrangement in rough geometries, the harshness of palette. You can see here, very clearly, how much Picasso and Braque owed to their discovery of Cézanne's landscapes. The brick factory in the heat has the toughness of Cézanne's Provencal rocks - but it has a 20th-century quality that makes it different. Factories had only been acknowledged by 19th-century landscape painters as smokestacks in the distance. Picasso looks the modern world squarely in the eye...