Picasso Draw Like A Child

For this week, I picked Cubism and decided to focus on Picasso. Picasso is quoted as having said, "When I was a child, I could draw like Raphael, but it took me a lifetime to learn to draw like a child." The thing about Picasso is that many people forget that he was classically trained and incredibly talented, and could create realistic art. Cubism was his way of breaking free of classic training and trying something more freeing and creative. Here are examples of his classically drawn work:

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As you can see, Picasso understood the accurate proportions of the human body before choosing to experiment with new form of presenting the human figure. I chose to focus on Cubism because I think this style "gave permission" to other classically trained artists to experiment with breaking the rules.

Typical characteristics of this style are objects are broken up into various shapes, objects are flattened and presented from multiple angles at the same time, oftentimes things are placed at odd and unpredictable angles to each other, and the between background and foreground are ambiguous. Here are examples from Picasso of him pushing the human form and breaking down traditional rules:

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In the above two paintings, you can see all of the characteristics of Cubism — the angles of the fruit make it look like they cannot possibly stay on the table, and the bodies are distorted to the point where you don't know what side or sides of the body you are looking at exactly. Proportions are quite off.

I do see cubism in today's graphic design when it comes to illustration work. Here is example of using polygons in digital design to create a cubist-inspired portrait:

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You can see more of this work here. I do think Cubism had a huge impact on the other -isms of this time because it seems to be first of the "rule breakers" that gave way to doing art in a more modern and abstract way. Classically trained artists like Picasso took amazing leaps to break the rules, which in turn made other artists attempt new things as well.