Word: picassos
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...article on the abuses from a magazine and whipped out his sketchbook. "I began drawing immediately and when I got to Paris I kept going," he says; he worked for several months before completing the series. Botero, 73, says artists have for too long abandoned warfare to photojournalists. Picasso's 1937 masterpiece Guernica became the most lasting image of the Spanish Civil War, for example, yet there is no great art depicting the Vietnam War, he says - or, until now, the war in Iraq. Botero's paintings and charcoal drawings will be unveiled in June at Rome's Palazzo Venezia...
...Picasso pictures in the show date mainly from the late '20s and early '30s, when the painter was flirting with Surrealism. Bathers with contorted necks, lovers with daggerlike teeth, minotaurs with ravaged victims - all find some allusion in Bacon's works. "I think of myself as a maker of images," Bacon once said, that produce an impact "immediately on the nervous system." Picasso gave him the artistic vocabulary to do that. Bacon claimed it was this "brutality of fact" that linked their work. But Bacon clearly wins in the cruelty stakes, especially in his nudes. His Lying Figure...
...Picasso and Bacon used practically identical language to describe their work on crucifixion paintings: Picasso said he had started to draw an interpretation of a macabre early 16th century altarpiece when it became "entirely something else"; Bacon claimed he had the idea of first putting figures around the base of the cross, but then "something happened" and he "just tried to make something else." Bacon also applied his Picasso obsession to his Triptych in Memory of George Dyer (1971), a tribute to his model and lover. You'll see visual echoes of Dyer's shadowy profile in Picasso's nearby...
...Picasso and Bacon took different paths toward portraiture, too. While Picasso used live models, Bacon depended on photographs. Not that he painted from photos; he merely used them, as well as just about everything else in his cluttered studio, from newspaper clippings to garbage-can lids, as starting points for his creative energies. Still, the results can be startlingly similar, as you can see in the entire room of heads painted by both artists. Bacon's 1971 Selfportrait shares some Cubist influences with Picasso's 1909 Head of a Man. But in almost every case Bacon's portraits reflect more...
...Bacon was entirely self-taught, and Picasso was hardly his only influence. Bacon's debt to Rembrandt's 1655 Carcass of Beef, for example, is obvious in his own renderings of raw meat. But when Bacon died in 1992, he left behind a London studio dominated by the reproductions, press clippings, published anecdotes and other worked-over memorabilia of one painter: Pablo Picasso. Such single-mindedness makes for a great two-person show...