2023-09-14 13:14:08
Picasso’s cubist eyes
And this “unparalleled detail” is credited brush by brush both in his beginnings in Malaga, A Coruña and Barcelona and in his paintings from the blue and pink (1901-1907), cubist (1908-1917), neoclassical (1917-1917) periods. 1927), surrealist (1928-1932), expressionist (1932-1946) and Vallauris (1946-1953).
Also, during the last years of his life, before dying in Mougins (France) in 1973. He created one hundred percent Picasso masterpieces based on the interpretation of the classics of his past, such as Rafael, El Greco, Velázquez, Delacroix, Goya or Manet.
“He never abandoned his unique and universal style,” highlights Dr. Julián García Sánchez, ophthalmologist, great fan of art, emeritus professor of Medicine at the Complutense University of Madrid and President of the Spanish Society of Ophthalmology Foundation.
When he was very young, when he still signed himself as “Pablo Ruiz”, he already left unfinished, unpainted areas in his characters, especially in the portraits.
“The eyes, closed, tilted, crouched, hidden under the shadows, even disappeared, were configuring, together with the asymmetry of faces and bodies in different planes, an artistic evolution that stirred the avant-garde core of the 20th century,” he points out.
“The Young Ladies of Avignon,” poorly received in Paris in 1907, catapulted Picasso’s cubism to artistic infinity: his paintings were transformed into space and time, where “Egyptian” eyes interact with the viewer’s thoughts.
The photographs published of the paintings in this multimedia report belong to Dr. García Sánchez: they are slides that he has collected with his camera during the numerous visits he has made to the most important art galleries in the world.
Picasso’s eyes from his “First Communion” to “Guernica”
Fifty years have passed since Pablo Ruiz Picasso said goodbye to art at the age of 91, saying, one day before closing his eyes permanently, that phrase that Paul McCartney set to music: “Drink to my health, I can’t drink any more.”
The genius of Picasso bequeathed to our gaze more than 150,000 works, among them 1,885 paintings, more than seven thousand drawings, 150 sketchbooks, 342 tapestries, nearly 30,000 engravings and lithographs, in addition to 1,228 sculptures or 2,280 works of art captured in ceramics.
And who doesn’t know some of these works of art! or Who doesn’t admire ‘Guernica’!… Even more so now, with the incessant suffering of the Ukrainian people, invaded, bombed and massacred from land, space, sea and air by the visible and invisible Russian army of the deified Vladimir Putin.
The EFE Agency journalist, Gregorio del Rosario, interviews Dr. Julián García Sánchez in front of Guernica, exhibited in the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid. EFE/Carlos González.
Doctor Julián García Sánchez, before focusing on that boy from Malaga who was born in 1881, whose first babbling of words was ‘piz… piz‘ (pencil), what pictorial elements should we take into account when contemplating a painting to perfectly understand the message that the artist wants to convey to us?
“Through my friendships with different painters I have learned that there are many elements in a painting that we must take into account, whether it is the framing; the figures or models represented by the author; or the materials used, both the paint palette and the background of the canvas,” he explains.
“But, fundamentally, we have to look at the classics tricks or tricks that each painter interprets to direct our gaze and our thoughts: for example, lighting levels, shadows, silhouettes, reflections, backlighting, distances or vanishing points,” he emphasizes.
In Picasso, care is taken in the composition, the disposition of the characters and the devices used for his special and original way of bringing perspective to us without using the vanishing point.
“All in all, the key to the success of the painting is achieved when we, the viewers, understand the multiple messages that the painter sends us, always keeping in mind that the artist does not have to reproduce the real world,” completes the Galician doctor.
Why are the eyes so attractive when we look at the face or look at the eyes of a character in the painting?
“The painter expresses in the eyes of the painting what he believes that character is thinking; and we, when we are talking to someone, what we are really trying to do is guess what he is thinking, what his look wants to tell us.
Body language, especially in the dialogue established eye to eye, focuses the human mind.
The painter also uses his eyes to help himself send us the message he wants to convey to us from the painting, as can be seen in the canvas painted in Paris in 1901, titled “El bock (portrait of Sabartés)”.
Opinion of Dr. Julián García Sánchez
And what does an ophthalmologist see in the eyes that Picasso paints?
“My first approach to Picasso’s painting was when I tried to find out what eye diseases they could be detected and analyzed in the characters of his paintings,” he mentions.
“And I only found some protagonists who were apparently one-eyed or blind; The impenetrable detail of his eyes prevented me from discerning the origin of the ocular pathology that was shown,” he highlights.
At the same time, after having studied more than 900 paintings by the artist, he discovered a differentiating feature in the master’s paintings: “The eyes of his characters do not fulfill the function of key to attraction.”
“In most cases these eyes remain closed, looking towards the ground or are painted in shadow justified by the overhead light (projected from the top of the scene); the eye sockets and eyebrows complete the effect,” she distinguishes.
“The first Communion” (Barcelona 1896).
Was this way of painting eyes always like this, from your first paintings?
“I think so; and it is a very evident characteristic of Picasso when analyzing his work as a whole, which has been divided into different periods, according to art experts,” he believes.
In the time of A Coruña and Barcelona the eyes do not appear painted in his paintings because they are closed, tilted or crouched, as can be seen in the paintings where he draws his mother, his father or his sister.
“In his first large painting (The First Communion), we cannot distinguish the eyes of the godfather, the altar boy or the family member, not even those of the girl who is the protagonist of the religious act,” he states.
Style that continues in a series of paintings about motherhood, “very beautiful”, in which women and babies, with few exceptions, appear with their eyes closed or their faces are barely visible.
Almost all of the paintings from this period until 1900 maintain the tendency not to paint faces, hands and eyes, leaving them invisible or unfinished, as well as some unpainted “gaps” in many of them.
A very good example of this stage is the Barcelona “Girl in front of an open window”.
“Picasso was just starting out; But nevertheless he had one thing, that from a very young age, thanks to the fact that his father was a teacher in art schools, he was already very clear that to be a painter he had to master the technique,” he credits.
“And if you don’t master the painting technique you can never become a revolutionary painter like Picasso… And even less a genius,” says the ophthalmologist.
“Family of acrobats with a monkey” (Paris, 1905).
In his blue and pink period, which Picasso did not distinguish, although the rest of the world appreciated some difference, Picasso’s way of painting was closer to that of his predecessors from previous centuries.
“But the painting he paints is perfectly known to be his, since, embedded as it seems in its predecessors, the final result is a work that is 100% by Picasso,” he says.
This stylistic format will exaggerate it in its neoclassical and surrealist stages.
“He does not limit himself to imitating the great painters of those times, but he transforms the idea of the painting, expressing his artistic thoughts, as will happen in his series on ‘Las meninas’ by Velázquez,” he adds.
“Picasso offers us totally new concepts, neither better nor worse than those we enjoy in the Sevillian painter’s masterpiece, the excellence of the Prado Museum, or any other wonder of the palette and brush,” he compares.
The cubist stage, represented by ‘your ladies of Avignon‘, which some conclude is an unfinished painting, happens after the author worked on more than eight hundred sketches of this incomparable canvas.
“None of his paintings show signs of improvisation: the numerous sketches that are totally or partially included in the final versions of the vast majority of his great works are well known,” points out Dr. García Sánchez.
“This painting, exhibited at the MoMA in New York, which marks a before and after in the world’s pictorial avant-garde, confirms without ambiguity or broad brush palliatives his entire artistic evolution: academic training, revolutionary, transgressive, innovative, timeless and brilliant ”, he argues.
The facial asymmetry, exaggerated until two different facial sides can be observed, the deformation of the characters and objects, together with the unequal and arbitrary frontality of the eyes, is a conquest of the four space-time dimensions that he has pursued since his childhood.
“Guernica.” Paris, 1937. EFE/Carlos González
Picasso shows one of his most symbolic works during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). We delve into the expressionism of Guernica.
“It is perhaps Picasso’s best-known and most admired painting in the world. And we find a really curious aspect: an attack on the civilian population without the presence of the enemies is explicit. You only see the consequences of the genocide,” he explains.
“We see the wounded horse, the deceased man under the horse, the women who enter the scene in terror, the burning of the houses, painted with absolute sophistication, with its resident gone mad, and the mother broken with pain who carries her dead son. in arms,” he describes.
The bull is a communicative icon. Picasso, like Nostradamus, could place the message of the painting in this turbulent year of politics in Spain 2023.
“Many specialists of all kinds have gone around and around the meaning of the Guernica bull. I am left with the one that contains a great truth: the capacity that the Spanish have to overcome the greatest misfortunes that befall them,” he assures.
And furthermore, the eyes of the protagonists of Guernica certify a pictorial evolution that is identified like smoke to the sign of fire.
The bull, the horse, the mother, the child, the women, the mourner and the surrendered dead show us their eyes from the front, although their heads are painted in profile,” he develops.
“Here we see a clear influence from ancient Egypt. Their artisans and painters drew people in profile, carrying out an activity, but their eyes always looked at the observer. In Picasso it is leitmotif“, he reaffirms.
Doctor Julián García Sánchez, do you think that if Picasso had painted realistic eyes he would have been able to move towards cubism?
“Probably not. And I think he realized it from a very young age. He didn’t know where he was going to go, but it is evident that he was avoiding painting realistic eyes, and the few times he painted them he did so with some small deformation, out of place or out of place,” he reasons.
“I think Picasso was aware that a large part of the future of his own artistic transformation was in the eyes of his paintings,” he adds.
And since people look into each other’s eyes to guess the thoughts of our interlocutor, pretending to be the protagonist of a painting, Dr. García Sánchez, what does the look of Dr. María José Vinuesa, his life partner, tell you?
“Fundamentally, he is a person who has eyes that will accompany you in the future and that will help you move forward despite the difficult circumstances of each day.”
Picasso said, in this sense, one of his typical phrases: “I would like a person who has a toothache to see my painting and have the pain in their tooth go away.”
Julian Garcia Sanchez
Our eyes are witnesses of history and Pablo Ruiz Picasso used his to capture on canvas the best and worst of human beings, including himself.
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