Picasso
Bacchanal with Minotaur, MoMA collection, photo by Renzo Dionigi.
Perhaps this seems obvious to some, but it just occurred to me: Picasso wasn’t a painter. He was a drawer. (I wish that term wasn’t so woefully inadequate.) I haven’t yet read Richardson’s biography of the artist, so forgive me if this is an insight others have made time and again. And this is not a negative statement in any way. All artists know deep inside that drawing is far more powerful than painting in most instances. If a student of mine has a problem in their fundamentals, it’s almost never paint handling. It’s drawing.
But you can see from all of Picasso’s masterworks, and even in the speed with which he moved away from painterly effect in his youth: painting was a means to an end for him, but he was never in love with paint. He was in love with line. (Just like Matisse.) His etchings, Guernica, Desmoiselles, the late Musketeers pieces: all of it was line. Nothing that couldn’t have been done with colored chalks.
God, he just makes so much more sense to me now.
