| Picasso was a hack who contributed to the downfall of a thousand year old tradition of craftsmanship. The modernists destroyed university casts and ruined academic drawing programs so completely that they have not recovered to this day. We are very fortunate that image sharing on the internet has revealed that the art establishment has no clothes and people enjoy representational works. Artists like Will St. John, Colleen Barry, Ramon Alex Hurtado, Jeremy Lipking and others are reviving academic figurative traditions. If I sound upset, it's because I am. In highschool I took AP art and all the other art classes I could. I visited all the nearby art associations and establishments that people revered. I wanted to paint people, wanted to make great paintings like the ones I saw in museums. I attended one of the best-ranked public highschools in my state and my teachers with art degrees didn't even know there was an academic path out there because their colleges just taught them about the greatness of conceptual garbage. I wound up giving up on that dream and floundering through the last decade with constructive methods like loomis and bridgman in my spare time. Now I have a degree I'm not passionate about and enough debt that pursuing academic training is out of the question. Warhol's soup cans are neat and abstract movements were a refreshing breath of fresh air in art history, sure. You might admire works of lesser craftsmanship for their "philosophical" achievements, but consider the destruction that philosophy wreaked upon education and the cultural-nuclear-crater left behind. Google Sargent, Repin, Bouguereau, and Homer. Then look again at Koons, Hirst, Twombly, etc. and try to convince yourself a grave error and loss has not occurred. |
Picasso did what he did, and created what he created because of photography. In a world where capturing likeness, and form was basically free - what do you do with painting? Certainly not attempt to capture likeness and form - perhaps you make an Ernest attempt to capture or project the emotional response of form and subject. Picasso’s facial structure was modeled after African war masks, which were at the time ignored by the art world. And his composition and color and repetition were inspired by the Japanese print makers. A lot of the art from that era was inspired by what was coming out of Japan at that time. The product of Picasso was a mashup of influences, like all impactful art.
The backlash against likeness and form was certain way before Picasso. But the fact that he rode that style to such fame is what made the art world dramatically over correct so drastically.