Tag: Pablo Picasso
Matisse & Picasso
Friday, January 10th, 2020 Art Column,Two boxers circling each other in the ring: a favourite image used to describe the relationship between Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. One wonders if it inspired those notorious promotional photos of Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat as boxers in the 1980s. Indeed, it says a great deal about the evolution of the art market […]
Matisse & Picasso: A First Look
Thursday, December 19th, 2019 Blog,It must have been tempting to call this exhibition Matisse v. Picasso, a bit like Batman v. Superman. The Australian public responds well to healthy competition, as demonstrated by the perennial mania for art prizes. Instead the National Gallery of Australia settled on the more dignified Matisse & Picasso as the title of its summer […]
Picasso to Warhol
Saturday, September 29th, 2012 Art Column, Uncategorized,Australia’s economy may be one of the most robust in the world, but our art markets, and attendances at public galleries, lag far behind Europe and the United States. It is a cultural problem: a general feeling that visual art is not an essential part of life, merely a sideline or a luxury. This is […]
Picasso – In Living Colour
Thursday, December 15th, 2011 Art Column, Art Essays, General Art Essays, International Art,Pablo Picasso never travelled to Australia. He never even visited the United States, where his reputation as the leading artist of the twentieth century was set in stone. It’s a different story for those works Picasso loved best, which have recently been seen in Madrid, Helsinki, Moscow and St. Petersburg; before crossing the Atlantic, to […]
Picasso- Five Highlights
Thursday, December 8th, 2011 Art Column, Art Essays, International Art,It is difficult to choose only five works from an exhibition which covers all the major periods in Picasso’s career, from the earliest days, through his Blue and Rose periods, his experiments with Cubism, the neo-classical pictures of the post-war years, his flirtation with Surrealism, and the variations of his later life. Neither should we […]
The Steins Collect
Saturday, September 24th, 2011 Art Column, International Art,“There are two geniuses in art today,” Gertrude Stein told Picasso, “you in painting, and I in literature.” Whatever posterity has made of Gertrude Stein’s literary efforts, her self-confidence has rarely been surpassed. For the most part, her cryptic, repetitive prose style ensured that her books found few readers. The outstanding exception was The Autobiography […]
Paths to Abstraction
Saturday, July 3rd, 2010 Art Column,Cézanne’s lesson, according to Picasso, was not to be found in his beautifully painted apples, but in his anxiety. This is echoed in the words of the artist, Paul Signac, who reported that Matisse was “anxious, madly anxious”, in the year of 1905, when the Fauves made their cataclysmic debut at the Salon d’Automne. It […]
Modern Painting in 15 Easy Pieces: The past 100 years
Friday, August 15th, 2003 General Art Essays, International Art,All definitions of modern art are bound to end in failure, but that has not prevented artists and writers from making the attempt. In fact, one might see the entire twentieth century as an unbroken sequence of definitions and re-definitions, with each movement taking its cue from an earlier one, but striving to surpass and […]