WEBVTT 00:00:06.403 --> 00:00:08.115 We’re on the fourth floor of museum of modern art 00:00:08.115 --> 00:00:11.510 looking at the painting by Pablo Picasso from 1909 from the summer of 1909 00:00:11.510 --> 00:00:18.205 ’ Horta de Ebro’. It’s one of Picasso’s critical early cubist paintings. 00:00:18.205 --> 00:00:21.337 It looks very cubist already. 00:00:21.337 --> 00:00:25.774 I mean it already looks like a radical departure from Cezanne, 00:00:25.774 --> 00:00:28.512 but this is two years after the ‘Demoiselle d’Avignon’, 00:00:28.512 --> 00:00:31.651 so it’s already made that step. Yeah, he has. 00:00:31.651 --> 00:00:36.078 This is one of these paintings that lives up to the title of the movement. Cubism, 00:00:36.078 --> 00:00:39.983 cause it really looks like little cubes. It does. There are historical chronology 00:00:39.983 --> 00:00:44.245 is usually that after Demoiselle Braque really begins to explore 00:00:44.245 --> 00:00:48.415 Cezanne in very serious ways. Picasso’s response to… follows Braque. 00:00:48.415 --> 00:00:52.246 Yeah, by the way of Cezanne, exactly, right. And he got to 00:00:52.246 --> 00:00:56.012 the south of Spain to this very arid environment and he can really get the sense 00:00:56.012 --> 00:01:00.153 of the terra cotta. We’re looking at the hilltop pound, there’s a little water 00:01:00.153 --> 00:01:04.261 collect down at the bottom, right, and actually we can even see the reflection in the surface 00:01:04.261 --> 00:01:07.718 of the water there. Of course what most people find so interesting by this painting is his 00:01:07.718 --> 00:01:12.219 willingness to pull and push perspective. 00:01:12.219 --> 00:01:16.656 So that we’re looking sometimes at the top of things, at the sides 00:01:16.656 --> 00:01:19.814 of things, from below and from above as we were 00:01:19.814 --> 00:01:23.652 moving and shifting our gaze to the side. Yeah, so the 00:01:23.652 --> 00:01:28.188 objects become plastic, they become malleable, they become 00:01:28.188 --> 00:01:31.823 shaped by our movement through space and through time. But they’re 00:01:31.823 --> 00:01:35.653 also all interconnected. That thing that Picasso and 00:01:35.653 --> 00:01:40.116 Cezanne started also before him of interlocking 00:01:40.116 --> 00:01:43.815 this different planes by color, so that something 00:01:43.815 --> 00:01:47.402 that’s brown moves into something else that’s brown like there’s 00:01:47.402 --> 00:01:51.584 a different shape that’s the top of the house that moves to the side 00:01:51.584 --> 00:01:55.649 of the house. So there is really a kind of loss 00:01:55.649 --> 00:01:59.316 of the separation of different forms in a space. They become 00:01:59.316 --> 00:02:03.452 a synthetic whole and actually he’s willing something else that I think further resist that. 00:02:03.452 --> 00:02:07.565 If you look at shadow and reflection they become almost objects and space 00:02:07.565 --> 00:02:11.154 themselves rather than just sort of an optical phenomena. What you mean? Well, if you look 00:02:11.154 --> 00:02:14.865 for instance at some of the doorways in the center of the canvas, 00:02:14.865 --> 00:02:18.885 you can see that there are shadows, the reflections that cast of it and that is in some ways almost as 00:02:18.885 --> 00:02:23.122 solid as the objects that are purported to create those 00:02:23.122 --> 00:02:26.525 optical phenomena, right? So it’s almost this leveling 00:02:26.525 --> 00:02:31.088 of object and the visual. And surface? More than surface, 00:02:31.088 --> 00:02:34.824 object and the sense of visual phenomena, 00:02:34.824 --> 00:02:38.821 something that is pure sight and intangible becomes as important 00:02:38.821 --> 00:02:42.590 in the canvas as a building. Maybe it’s the way that we begin to see Les Demoiselle 00:02:42.590 --> 00:02:46.659 is the space itself between the figures, seems solid. 00:02:46.659 --> 00:02:51.195 Yes, exactly, right. Ok. The other thing that attracts me as funny when you said that this is a village. 00:02:51.195 --> 00:02:54.533 Was that I imagined sunlight in the landscape and 00:02:54.533 --> 00:02:58.751 there’s no sense of it here to me at all. No, there isn’t, you’re right. 00:02:58.751 --> 00:03:02.493 It’s funny that light has been. I mean light is clearly the thing that constructs 00:03:02.493 --> 00:03:06.264 form here, you’ve got shadow, you’ve got areas of light, right? But in fact 00:03:06.264 --> 00:03:10.077 fact there is no actual sort of direction. And it also has more to do 00:03:10.077 --> 00:03:14.243 with the subjective experience of one side as one moves through. The way in which the light 00:03:14.243 --> 00:03:17.908 is cast or shadow is cast, then what is in fact from nature? Right 00:03:17.908 --> 00:03:22.075 And other thing that strikes me is the way that you’re for example you were talking about 00:03:22.075 --> 00:03:26.500 these doorways. The one in the center really looks like 00:03:26.500 --> 00:03:29.962 a doorway into something. But just to the left of 00:03:29.962 --> 00:03:33.595 that there is something else that seems to be a doorway, that also 00:03:33.595 --> 00:03:37.798 cast the shadow but is also much more obviously as stroke of paint. 00:03:37.798 --> 00:03:41.666 and it almost seems like a positive form in front of the building in a sense. 00:03:41.666 --> 00:03:45.503 And yet it’s also a brush track. That’s right. So this is 00:03:45.503 --> 00:03:49.867 constant dislocation of the way in which the form 00:03:49.867 --> 00:03:53.534 is constructed. So it’s not just about rendering of form, it’s not just observing a form, it’s 00:03:53.534 --> 00:03:57.210 actually also sort of this funny dislocating of the process of 00:03:57.210 --> 00:04:02.035 rendering form. It’s very self-conscious in a very modern 00:04:02.035 --> 00:04:02.335 way. It certainly is.