Sunday 20th November

As you know I am a great fan of Art, especially paintings.  I quite like drawings and can appreciate the skill involved, but they are all too often quite one-dimensional and are in any case often only sketches for the real thing – paintings.  I can remember discussions that often spilled into arguments with Adrian, as he said that one shouldn’t be seduced by colour, but concentrate on tone and texture and the inter-play between light and shadow.  Well, I always have been seduced by colour, especially in those early Impressionist paintings which seem to burst with vibrancy and light; a new way of seeing indeed.  There have been several schools of painting, or movements, since the Impressionists, and one I could never learn to like was the Cubists, and the leading light of that and its most famous exponent was Pablo Picasso.

And it’s not as if he cannot paint; I spent a wonderful afternoon in a small gallery in Barcelona a few years back, which was exhibiting hundreds of drawings and sketches and quite a few paintings by the young Pablo, and they are superb.  Mostly very realistic and incredibly well executed.  And I simply adore his blue period, where his use of that colour (and pink too) was brilliant, and not all of these paintings are simple realistic interpretations, many are almost abstract workings of an idea, but are held together by the wonderful brushwork and balance of the compositions.  In many ways he was copying and refining the Impressionists work, such as outlining in black, made famous of course by van Gogh.  It was with Cubism that he began to lose me I am afraid.  He was heavily influenced by Georges Braque, and together they created a whole new way of painting; it was an attempt to represent the three dimensional world on a flat canvas.  Many of their early works are still good to look at, with their softer colours, and refracting surfaces and the things they are painting, the subject matter, is still obvious and recognizable.  But I find that Picasso’s later works are mostly ridiculous, with their split faces and simple, almost cartoon-like blocks of colour, and scrolls for hair, and fat short limbs. I find they simply distort rather than reveal the beauty of the subject, but then I don’t really think that he was seeking beauty, but what he considered a deeper truth lying beneath the surface.  And this is where I find we differ; I love Art for its attempt at distilling beauty and perfection, especially from the world around us.  To me it is saying, ‘Look, I may simply be a person, but I am attempting to show you a moment of beauty I have captured in paint, or maybe a photograph, or a piece of music, or a poem or a story. I am trying to show you that this is the way the world is, this is the human condition.’  I think Picasso is more cynical, he is saying, ‘You may think you know what something looks like, but believe me, there is something else lurking just beneath the surface, and it is my particular task, to show it to you.’

Of course, I could be totally wrong, and there are plenty who find all of Picasso’s paintings wonderful. Maybe they are all right, who knows, but it doesn’t stop me loving his early work,

but really disliking the later ones. You decide.