Further Developments

I really should devote more of my time to furthering my education in the visual arts through the resources available online. There's an astonishing amount of informative and insightful material out there of obvious expertise. The excellent Open Culture website regularly features intriguing posts on artists ranging from the classically famous to the modishly obscure and keeps reminding me of how enjoyable it is to expand my knowledge and understanding of the basics.

For example, a recent piece about Picasso at fifteen reminded me of something I once knew and had managed to forget. The young Pablo was a gifted artist in formal terms. An awareness of that helps put in perspective how extraordinary his later development was. The brilliance of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon becomes even more obvious when juxtaposed against the earlier naturalistic canvases. You are forced to understand how nothing in the modernist Picasso has come about arbitrarily: his command of technique is such that he means all of it, even if it leaves us puzzled as to what exactly it 'means'.

By the way, Open Culture doesn't provide an interpretation of Les Demoiselles, but it's very easy indeed to google quite a number, some of which sound reasonably plausible. And if you click on the title itself in the article you're given a link to a decent article on the great work. So no shortage of good stuff, like I said.