I’ve officially fallen in love with a work of art here at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. Meet Picasso’s The Studio (1928), a synthetic cubist, minimalistic, yet painterly work. In the Peggy Guggenheim Collection Catalogue, art historian Lucy Flint suggests that this image depicts a sculptured bust on the left and a full-length painted portrait on the right, or more simply, a conversing male and female.
After reading my last post, my father pointed out to me that “people watching becomes a form of art criticism that invites us to think of human beings as artistic constructions...we are always the artists, the canvases, and the paints.”
Perhaps Picasso is a revolutionary artist because he understood this philosophy precisely… Look carefully at The Studio for a moment… The two figures stand together before a canvas on an easel, suggesting that they are the artists in their studio, (hence the name of the painting). The figures are completely white, suggesting that they are also blank canvases waiting to be filled with color, experience, life. And, as mentioned above, they are depictions of works of art, meaning that they are the paint! And of course, the work itself is abstract, suggesting that humans are abstractions, or ever evolving beings that constitute far more than physical manifestations, and thus cannot captured in a concrete, or idealized, way.
Could this work be more perfect?
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