![]() Pablo Harlequin Playing Guitar, 1914-1918. Such are the features of that transition, caused by a host of reasons and events, the most important of which were internal. At the same time, his introduction into painting of letters and slogans as naked facts of reality opened the way to other facts of reality: in particular, the gluing on of different materials with their own ready-made printed forms, textures, ornaments-and so the collage technique appears. Somewhere at the very start of the year Picasso felt the need to work with tangible forms of reality-to sculpt. The artist was clearly enthralled with the contrast between the prismatic refractions of light in the glass objects and the solid, wave-like texture of the warm-toned wood.Īt the same time, his imitation of window advertisements imparts an element not merely of reality but of new poetry: by their chaotic nature, as well as by their spatial and semantic relationship to alcohol, these bits and scraps of advertisements echo the perception of modern life as inherently intoxicating and bitter.Īccording to the generally accepted classifications, during the first half of 1912, Picasso’s Cubism underwent a mutation from Analytic to Synthetic. They endow the picture with the unmistakable look of modern urban life, while the motif-the bottle of Pernod and the glass with its spoon and cube of sugar, placed on the oval table-reveals Picasso’s new taste for a material, concrete environment. In the painting Table in a Café (Bottle of created in the spring of 1912, the letters crossing the background behind the still life are part of advertisements painted on the invisible glass panel of the café window. Yet this combination of two pictorial levels also leads to the transformation of the picture into a charade with many meanings, a play on words, a total metaphor-an effect that Picasso highly prized. ![]() Besides that, words and entire sentences, parts of words and syllables, are, to artists who live in close contact with poets (especially to Picasso), also verbal images assuming meaningful relations with the painting’s pictorial realities, giving the image a multiplicity of Having acquired equality in the canvas with plastic forms, verbal print material at the same time heightens the associative meanings of object motifs, stimulates their literal character and, ultimately, their recognisability. They are also elements of the surrounding environment that participate in presenting the theme, supporting its subject, which they enter untransformed. First, for both masters of Analytical Cubism, letters are flat forms that help create the spatial relations of the picture. Soon, in the summer of 1911, another kind of allusion from the real world entered Picasso’s painting-street signs, newspaper headlines, words from book jackets, wine bottles, and tobacco labels, musical notes-all of which are thematically linked to the subject of the canvas.Īlthough such letters and words had appeared before in paintings (for instance, in those of Cézanne and Van Gogh, to mention only Picasso’s closest predecessors), in such objects as a newspaper, a book, a sign and so on, the use of verbal elements by Braque and Picasso was of a different character and pursued a different aim.
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