Abstract Abstractions

Pablo Picasso, Harlequin, 1915, oil on canvas, Museum of Modern Art.

My taste in art has been consistent throughout my life. For as long as I can remember, Picasso has been among my favorite artists. As a child, I was particularly enamored with the MoMA’s Harlequin (1915), probably because of it’s identifiable shapes and accessible, or at least mimicable, style. As a young adult I’m awed by nearly all of the works I’ve seen by Picasso because of his remarkable ability to transcend the tendency to idealize humanity, a quality I believe most artists fall victim to.

There are two types of idealization frequently used by artists. First, there is the traditional form of idealization, in which a being is depicted using mathematically perfected proportions that do not exist in the natural world for the purpose of creating a flawless being. I’ll call this form of idealization “classical idealization” because it is most clearly exemplified by the hundreds of classical sculptures, that look just like Polykleitos’ Spear Bearer (c. 440 BCE). There are also contemporary examples of this form of idealization, such as advertisements and magazine covers, where women, in particular, are airbrushed to the point that they are unidentifiable, for the sake of perfection, or “beauty.”

The second type of idealization is idealization for the purpose of emphasizing a point other than perfection or beauty. Take Manet’s Olympia (1863) as an example. Olympia is idealized in the sense that she is represented in a particularly grotesque manner: she has disproportionate body parts, a yellowish skin tone, dirty feet, hairy armpits, a threatening gaze, and she is utterly naked. In his work, Manet intentionally amplified these negative qualities to make a statement about the pathetic nature of the female nude in art historical tradition. He challenges the traditional representation of women as passive nudes shamelessly exposed for the consumption of the male gaze. While I am enamored by this painting, and am certainly supportive of his sadly still relevant message, I also recognize that Olympia is in fact idealized in the sense she is not a truthful representation of humanity, though she is intended to look fairly realistic.

Picasso, on the other hand, forgoes both of these forms of idealization, proudly and fully abstracting his characters for the purpose of acknowledging, as I said in a previous post, that humans are abstractions. We are abstractions in the sense that what we are right now, both physically and psychologically, will never be the same as what we are at any other moment in time. And though there is certainly a time and a place for idealization in art, in many ways abstraction, or freedom from concrete representational qualities, is a far more accurate way of depicting human nature given that our essence is ever evolving and thus cannot be captured.

So if people are abstractions, and Picasso represents people in an abstract way, does that mean that Picasso paints abstract abstractions?

1. Polykleitos, Doryphoros (Spear-Bearer), c. 440 BCE, Roman marble copy of bronze original.

2. Edouard Manet, Olympia, 1863, Oil on canvas, Musee d'Orsay.