Pablo Picasso worked for decades to be able to draw like a child. I certainly don’t compare my own painting to the great master of twentieth-century art. But any kind of artist can be inspired by Picasso’s ceaseless, restless innovation. The greatest visual artist of his time was never satisfied with his achievements. He never stopped—not even into his nineties—experimenting, tinkering, inventing, and opening new frontiers.
You don’t have to be ninety (like me) to find that inspiring.
I’ve walked around some of the great art museums in the world to see his work and, in a way, drink from it. Picasso’s father, José Ruiz, was an artist and a teacher, and young Pablo apparently had an art pencil or a paintbrush in his hand from an early age. He became so quickly accomplished at drawing and painting that his father more or less gave up his own painting.
Picasso was just fifteen—fifteen!—when he painted his first major work, First Communion. It shows his sister Lola making her First Communion. The folds in her white dress almost rustle. The candles on the altar seem to flicker. The painting is as finely, minutely detailed as any that you see by Rembrandt or El Greco.
But by the early twentieth century, Picasso had entered what’s now called his Blue Period. There’s a picture I’ve seen at New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum called Woman Ironing that Picasso finished in 1904. It shows a woman, bent over and haggard, pushing a hot, heavy iron across a shapeless white expanse. The entire painting is tinged with a blue light with streaks of gray, and just a couple of light flashes of flesh tones in the woman’s arms. Picasso has dramatically reduced the details in the portrait, so that your eyes are drawn to just a few strands of hair that seem to hang from her head in exhaustion and the large gray shrouds of her eyes. At the time, he was down-and-out in Paris. That period was indeed blue in all ways.
But just a few years later, he entered his Rose Period. He painted lots of circus performers, and for the first time in years added bold strokes of orange, pink, and red. Then he was on to his Cubist Period, in which he reimagined the basic shape of objects and people. His 1910 Girl with a Mandolin, which is at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, is all beige and gray, depicting a girl with light brown hair, holding a mandolin in a series of bare, spare planes and half spheres (the painting was a bequest to the museum by the late Nelson Rockefeller, who had extraordinary taste in modern art).
By the 1920s, Picasso was on to what would become known as surrealism. His 1919 Sleeping Peasants, a watercolor and pencil composition that’s also at the Museum of Modern Art, shows a man and a woman on a bale of hay who are folded into each other (her blouse is open, and their feet are bare; a lot of critics say it must be after a real roll in the hay). Each human feature—toes, knuckles, legs, throats—seems swollen. But the colors are bright, vivid, and varied.
Of course Picasso’s most famous painting, Guernica, hung for years at MoMA before the museum decided to return it to Spain. For that historic painting, the master went back to black, grays, and smoky whites to show a mother grieving over a dead child in her arms, a horse buckling in pain, a remnant of a human arm still holding on to a broken sword. It epitomizes my view of war perfectly.
Picasso painted it after the pitiless destruction of the Basque town of Guernica by German and Italian warplanes in 1937, during the Spanish Civil War. But you don’t see any national or political symbols in the painting, just shattered women, children, and animals. It’s kept that great painting timeless, as eloquent about Syria as it was about Spain.
Picasso was staggeringly prolific. It’s estimated that he produced about fifty thousand works of art in his ninety-one years, from drawings to prints to paintings to sculptures. And he never stopped drawing, painting, and creating. But what you see, as he grew more experienced and wise but no less bold, is how, year by year, he cast off technique and tricks to draw and paint clear, simple, elegant lines that conveyed a world of feeling with no distracting superfluity. In a way, that’s what children do: put all they feel into a stroke or line; except with Picasso, it’s as if he tried to pack decades of what he had learned into just that slender line.
I hope I’ve learned more about that in my own painting. And I’ve learned to try to apply that idea to my music. To sing with a simple, clear, elegant line that invites the audience to open their hearts and minds.
San Francisco