Picasso at Nasher

[John Jackson]

Pablo Picasso is heralded as one of the greatest artists of all time. His 1937 piece Guernica, his most famous, portrays the horrific bombings of the Spanish town by Nazi war planes. The 20 X 12 ft work is the only Picasso piece I was familiar with, having not taken an art class since junior high. As an assignment for ECI 525, our class was asked to look at other Picasso works of art.

I made a trip to the Nasher Museum at Duke University on Saturday to see the "Picasso and the Allure of Language" exhibit. After lunch at Bullock's BBQ took longer than expected, I was on a tight time crunch and didn't get to spend as much time as I would have liked in the exhibit hall. Parking was at a premium (which wasn't free) and paying 10 bucks to get into the exhibit itself put me in the wrong frame of mind for absorbing art. I won't pretend to be a person who understands visual art anyway though, much less the abstract style of Picasso.... and I am not sure that I got much from going. The exhibit had some interesting pieces, ranging from sketches, to paintings, and sculptures. I also found it interesting that the sculptures were simply sitting on pedastals without glass cases.... though they had guards in the exhibit, it would be so easy for someone to damage these pieces. It was very crowded in the exhibit (I wish I had gone on a weekday), and combined with my grumpy mindset this day, I found it hard to deeply analyze the art. Maybe class today will help me gain a better understanding of how I am supposed to rationalize what I saw and apply it to the teaching of Social Studies.

"The Sovereign of Modern Painting"... Simon Schama refers to Pablo Picasso as such in his episode on the artist in his "The Power of Art" series. The BBC documentary spins a colorfully dramatic view on the artists' life, and focuses heavily on Guerninca. It was interesting to learn about the symbolism and references that Picasso included in this epic painting. I have always been more in tune with music as an art form, but watching this BBC documentary at least helped perk my interest in visual art. The cool thing about all forms of art is that it is largely left open to interpretation... different works mean different things to different people. I am looking forward to seeing how we incorporate these readings into our final class of the semester.