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We’re on the fourth floor of museum of modern art

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looking at the painting by Pablo Picasso from 1909 from the summer of 1909

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’ Horta de Ebro’. It’s one of Picasso’s critical early cubist paintings.

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It looks very cubist already.

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I mean it already looks like a radical departure from Cezanne,

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but this is two years after the ‘Demoiselle d’Avignon’,

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so it’s already made that step. Yeah, he has.

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This is one of these paintings that lives up to the title of the movement. Cubism,

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cause it really looks like little cubes. It does. There are historical chronology

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is usually that after Demoiselle Braque really begins to explore

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Cezanne in very serious ways. Picasso’s response to… [br]follows Braque.

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Yeah, by the way of Cezanne, exactly, right. And he got to

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the south of Spain to this very arid environment and he can really get the sense

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of the terra cotta. We’re looking at the hilltop pound, there’s a little water

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collect down at the bottom, right, and actually we can even see the reflection in the surface

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of the water there. Of course what most people find so interesting by this painting is his

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willingness to pull and push perspective.

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So that we’re looking sometimes at the top of things, at the sides

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of things, from below and from above as we were

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moving and shifting our gaze to the side. [br]Yeah, so the

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objects become plastic, they become malleable, they become

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shaped by our movement through space and through time.[br]But they’re

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also all interconnected. That thing that Picasso and

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Cezanne started also before him of interlocking

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this different planes by color, so that something

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that’s brown moves into something else that’s brown like there’s

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a different shape that’s the top of the house that moves to the side

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of the house. So there is really a kind of loss

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of the separation of different forms in a space. They become

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a synthetic whole and actually he’s willing something else that I think further resist that.

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If you look at shadow and reflection they become almost objects and space

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themselves rather than just sort of an optical phenomena.[br]What you mean? Well, if you look

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for instance at some of the doorways in the center of the canvas,

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you can see that there are shadows, the reflections that cast of it and that is in some ways almost as

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solid as the objects that are purported to create those

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optical phenomena, right? So it’s almost this leveling

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of object and the visual. [br]And surface? More than surface,

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object and the sense of visual phenomena,

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something that is pure sight and intangible becomes as important

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in the canvas as a building.[br]Maybe it’s the way that we begin to see Les Demoiselle

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is the space itself between the figures, seems solid.

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Yes, exactly, right. [br]Ok. The other thing that attracts me as funny when you said that this is a village.

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Was that I imagined sunlight in the landscape and

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there’s no sense of it here to me at all.[br]No, there isn’t, you’re right.

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It’s funny that light has been. I mean light is clearly the thing that constructs

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form here, you’ve got shadow, you’ve got areas of light, right? But in fact

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fact there is no actual sort of direction. And it also has more to do

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with the subjective experience of one side as one moves through. The way in which the light

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is cast or shadow is cast, then what is in fact from nature? Right

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And other thing that strikes me is the way that you’re for example you were talking about

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these doorways. The one in the center really looks like

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a doorway into something. But just to the left of

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that there is something else that seems to be a doorway, that also

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cast the shadow but is also much more obviously as stroke of paint.

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and it almost seems like a positive form in front of the building in a sense.

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And yet it’s also a brush track. [br]That’s right. So this is

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constant dislocation of the way in which the form

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is constructed. So it’s not just about rendering of form, it’s not just observing a form, it’s

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actually also sort of this funny dislocating of the process of

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rendering form. [br]It’s very self-conscious in a very modern

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way. [br]It certainly is.