Pablo Picasso was a Spanish artist who spent most of his adult life in France and became one of the 20th century’s most influential painters. He co-founded Cubism, was a sculptor, printmaker, and ceramicist, and he made an enormous number of works in his lifetime.But beyond just creating art, he also talked about some profound ideas that continue to be relevant even today. He once talked about a quite real-life scenario, about how ideas travel the same road. Every invention, business plan, and story starts as a small seed of something real. Only later does it grow into something others call bold, modern, or even confusing.Let’s know what exactly he meant and how it is irrelevant even today.
Quote of the day
There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward, you can remove all traces of reality
Pablo Picasso
What does the quote mean?
Picasso’s line sounds like a riddle at first. How can there be no abstract art when galleries are full of it? Here he doesn’t deny that such paintings exist. Instead, he talks about the origins of where the ideas of these pictures come from.In his view, no artist paints from nothing. There is always a starting point or an inspiration, such as a person, a tree, a memory, or a bowl on a table. Only after that can the artist paint things through his own inspiration, remove things bit by bit, until the result no longer looks like the original. An “abstract” picture, then, is really reality boiled down.His own work shows this. The Cubist paintings he made with Braque in the early 1910s break guitars, bottles, and faces into flat shapes, yet the entire idea and hints keep pulling us back to the real object. Even his other work, Guernica, is also full of distortion and grew out of a real event, the bombing of a Basque town.The origins of these words are usually traced to a conversation between Picasso and the critic Christian Zervos, printed in 1935 in the magazine Cahiers d’Art. It came as a record of words written down by Zervos, not something Picasso wrote himself, and is a translated version of his words.
How is the idea relevant even today?
Picasso’s idea applies far beyond painting. Digital creativity and the incorporation of arts today begin with basic ideas; for example, app icons and logos. Most are simplified drawings of real things like a handset for “call”, a magnifying glass for “search”. Designers start with the real object and remove detail until only the idea is left.Similarly, writers also begin with one true moment and let the story grow from it. Startups begin with one real problem before they build a big vision.So, it is just simple that, we don’t need to begin with something grand. Begin with something real, look closely, and simplify slowly. The bold, abstract result can come afterwards.
