Word: picassos
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Johns cites his own early paintings, those of his contemporaries (Barnett Newman, for instance) and those of past masters -- Durer, Grunewald, Picasso. His indirectness and liking for allusion coexist with something akin to physical rage: the body parts in his paintings speak of dismemberment, not mere anatomy. His diagonal cross-hatchings are both subtle and banal, for Johns' scrutiny flickers in a perplexing, teasing way between simple pattern recognition and active, probing attention -- so that something quite unremarkable as an image can swell up into a ravishing pictorial event. Sometimes one is excluded; it is like eavesdropping...
...that Huffington makes no interesting points about Picasso the man, only that she wants too much to thrust her conclusions upon the reader. To break down a myth is a difficult thing, though, and Huffington is not an effective enough demagogue to accomplish the task...
...problematic aspects of her analysis are compounded by the breathless tone which infects the book. The author seems stunned to realize that Picasso ate, slept, drank, defecated, etc. And when she reveals that Picasso actually did mean and petty things, Huffington writes with a disdain and lack of comprehension that only reveal how deeply she still sees the master artist as a mythic figure...
...Picasso's life "was, in a very real sense, the twentieth century's own autobiography," Huffington writes at one point. That statement can be seen as the epigraph for the book's failings, as well as for the man it seeks to portray, because the book embraces wholeheartedly the narrow commonplaces which comprise bestselling books today. If there are no heroes, only 15-minute celebrities, then the People magazine school of biography is appropriate for cultural figures...
...there is still an Art that transcends sexual foibles and the quirks of personality, then Huffington's book--and her approach to the subject--is a failure. Her critique of Picasso the publicity seeker and sadist makes no contribution to our understanding of the artist at work and very little to our understanding of the artist at play...