WEBVTT

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(piano music)

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Voiceover: We're on the fifth floor of the

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Museum of Modern Art looking at

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a painting by Pablo Picasso from 1909.

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From the summer of 1909,
Horta de Ebro, and it's

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one of Picasso's critical
early cubist paintings.

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Voiceover: It looks very cubist, already.

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(laughter)

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I mean, it already looks like a radical

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departure from Cézanne.

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But this is two years after
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.

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Voiceover: Yeah.

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Voiceover: So he's already made that step.

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Voiceover: He has.

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This is one of those
paintings that lives up

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to the title of the movement, right?

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Voiceover: Cubism?

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Voiceover: Yeah.

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Voiceover: Because it really
looks like little cubes.

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Voiceover: It does.

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Our historical chronology
is usually that after

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Desmoiselles, Braque
really begins to explore

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Cézanne in very serious ways.

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Picasso responds to-

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Voiceover: Follows Braque.

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Voiceover: Yeah, by way of
Cézanne, exactly, right.

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And he'd gone to the
South of Spain to this

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very arid environment and you can really

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get a sense of the terracotta.

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We're looking at a hilltop town.

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There's a little water collect down at the

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bottom right and,
actually, you can even see

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the reflection in the
surface of the water there.

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Of course what most
people find so interesting

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about this painting is his willingness

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to pull and push perspective.

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Voiceover: Mm hm.

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So that we're looking,
sometimes, at the top

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of things and the sides of things.

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From below and from
above as though we were

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moving and shifting our
gaze through the site.

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Voiceover: Yeah, so
that the objects become

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plastic, they become,
you know, malleable, they

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become shaped by our
movement through space

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and through time.

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Voiceover: But they're
also all interconnected.

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That thing that Picasso,
and Cézanne started

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also before him, of interlocking these

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different planes by
color so that something

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that's brown moves into something else

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that's brown that is a different shape

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that's the top of a house that moves into

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the side of a house.

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So that there's really a kind of loss

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of the separation of
different forms in a space.

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Voiceover: It becomes a synthetic hole.

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And actually, he's doing
something else that

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I think further assists that.

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If you look at shadow and
reflection, they become

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almost objects in space themselves rather

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than just, sort of, optical phenomena.

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Voiceover: What do you mean?

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Voiceover: Well if you
look, for instance, at some

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of the doorways in the
center of the canvas,

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you can see that there are
shadows and reflections

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that cast of it that
are, in some ways, almost

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as solid as the objects that are purported

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to create those optical phenomena, right?

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So there's almost this leveling of

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object and the visual.

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Voiceover: And surface?

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Voiceover: More than surface.

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Object and, in a sense, the visual-

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Voiceover: Phenomena.

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Voiceover: Phenomena.

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Something that is pure
sight and intangible

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becomes as important in the canvas

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as a building.

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Voiceover: Maybe the
way that we begin to see

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in Les Demoiselles that the space itself

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between the figures seems solid.

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Voiceover: Yes, exactly right.

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Voiceover: Okay.

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The other thing that struck me as funny

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when you said that this was a village

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was that I imagine sunlight in a landscape

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and there's no sense of
it here to me at all.

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Voiceover: There isn't, you're right.

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It's funny that light has been ...

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I mean, light is clearly the thing that

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constructs form here.

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Voiceover: Right.

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Voiceover: You've got shadow, you've got

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areas of light, but in
fact, there is no actual-

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Voiceover: No.

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Voiceover: Direction.

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It almost has more to
do with the subjective

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experience of one's sight
as one moves through,

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the way in which light
is cast or shadows cast,

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than what is, in fact, from nature.

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Voiceover: Right.

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And the other thing that strikes me is

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the way that, for
example, you were talking

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about those doorways.

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The one in the center really looks like

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a doorway into something.

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But just to the left of
that, there's something

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else that seems to be a doorway that also

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casts a shadow but is also much more

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obviously a stroke of paint.

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Voiceover: Right and it almost seems like

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a positive form in front
of the building in a sense.

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Voiceover: Right.

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And yet it's also a brush stroke.

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Voiceover: That's right.

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That's wonderful.

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So there's this constant
sort of dislocation

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of the way in which form is constructed.

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So it's not just about
the rendering of form,

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it's not just the observing of form.

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It's actually also, sort of, this funny

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dislocating of the
process of rendering form.

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Voiceover: Right.

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Voiceover: Yeah.

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Voiceover: It's very self-conscious in a

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very modern way.

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Voiceover: It certainly is.

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(piano music)