Picasso, The Reservoir, Horta de Ebro, 1909

(piano music)

Voiceover: We're on the fifth floor of the

Museum of Modern Art looking at

a painting by Pablo Picasso from 1909.

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

one of Picasso's critical
early cubist paintings.

Voiceover: It looks very cubist, already.

(laughter)

I mean, it already looks like a radical

departure from Cézanne.

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

Voiceover: Yeah.

Voiceover: So he's already made that step.

Voiceover: He has.

This is one of those
paintings that lives up

to the title of the movement, right?

Voiceover: Cubism?

Voiceover: Yeah.

Voiceover: Because it really
looks like little cubes.

Voiceover: It does.

Our historical chronology
is usually that after

Desmoiselles, Braque
really begins to explore

Cézanne in very serious ways.

Picasso responds to-

Voiceover: Follows Braque.

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

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

very arid environment and you can really

get a sense of the terracotta.

We're looking at a hilltop town.

There's a little water collect down at the

bottom right and,
actually, you can even see

the reflection in the
surface of the water there.

Of course what most
people find so interesting

about this painting is his willingness

to pull and push perspective.

Voiceover: Mm hm.

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

of things and the sides of things.

From below and from
above as though we were

moving and shifting our
gaze through the site.

Voiceover: Yeah, so
that the objects become

plastic, they become,
you know, malleable, they

become shaped by our
movement through space

and through time.

Voiceover: But they're
also all interconnected.

That thing that Picasso,
and Cézanne started

also before him, of interlocking these

different planes by
color so that something

that's brown moves into something else

that's brown that is a different shape

that's the top of a house that moves into

the side of a house.

So that there's really a kind of loss

of the separation of
different forms in a space.

Voiceover: It becomes a synthetic hole.

And actually, he's doing
something else that

I think further assists that.

If you look at shadow and
reflection, they become

almost objects in space themselves rather

than just, sort of, optical phenomena.

Voiceover: What do you mean?

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

of the doorways in the
center of the canvas,

you can see that there are
shadows and reflections

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

as solid as the objects that are purported

to create those optical phenomena, right?

So there's almost this leveling of

object and the visual.

Voiceover: And surface?

Voiceover: More than surface.

Object and, in a sense, the visual-

Voiceover: Phenomena.

Voiceover: Phenomena.

Something that is pure
sight and intangible

becomes as important in the canvas

as a building.

Voiceover: Maybe the
way that we begin to see

in Les Demoiselles that the space itself

between the figures seems solid.

Voiceover: Yes, exactly right.

Voiceover: Okay.

The other thing that struck me as funny

when you said that this was a village

was that I imagine sunlight in a landscape

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

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

It's funny that light has been ...

I mean, light is clearly the thing that

constructs form here.

Voiceover: Right.

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

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

Voiceover: No.

Voiceover: Direction.

It almost has more to
do with the subjective

experience of one's sight
as one moves through,

the way in which light
is cast or shadows cast,

than what is, in fact, from nature.

Voiceover: Right.

And the other thing that strikes me is

the way that, for
example, you were talking

about those doorways.

The one in the center really looks like

a doorway into something.

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

else that seems to be a doorway that also

casts a shadow but is also much more

obviously a stroke of paint.

Voiceover: Right and it almost seems like

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

Voiceover: Right.

And yet it's also a brush stroke.

Voiceover: That's right.

That's wonderful.

So there's this constant
sort of dislocation

of the way in which form is constructed.

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

it's not just the observing of form.

It's actually also, sort of, this funny

dislocating of the
process of rendering form.

Voiceover: Right.

Voiceover: Yeah.

Voiceover: It's very self-conscious in a

very modern way.

Voiceover: It certainly is.

(piano music)