With each successive painting ask yourself: What is depicted? Is it immediately recognizable? How does the thing depicted effect me emotionally? What connection do I have to it? Do these questions become harder to answer as Picasso moves away from realistic content into more form-based art? Do I feel a desire to inflict my own interpretation on the painting? Is this desire stronger for the earlier, content-based paintings or for the form-based paintings? Why do I think this is?
Now ask yourself this: What colors does Picasso use? How does he form his lines? What lighting is used? What patterns are used and where? How does this effect me emotionally? Intellectually? Furthermore, can I separate form from content?
Picasso, Pablo. Garcon a la Pipe. 1905.
Picasso, Pablo. Guernica. 1937. Prado Museum, Madrid.
Picasso, Pablo. Still Life. 1924.
Picasso, Pablo. Three Musicians. 1921.
Picasso, Pablp. Le Pichet Noir Et La Tete De Mort. 1946
Picasso, Pablo. The Guitar Player. 1911.
Susan Sontag says that "By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art." Is this what we want--to tame art just so we feel comfortable with it? Sontag also believes that "What is needed is a vocabulary-a descriptive, rather than a prescriptive, vocabulary-for forms." That is what I am trying to accomplish with this post. I want the reader to try and separate form and content and to find new ways of describing art on the level of form. When we focus on form rather than content we learn to see the art for what it is, rather than what we think it is or what we want it to mean. For this entry I decided not to place my own narrative on the paintings and instead allowed the viewer to explore and create his/her own thoughts on content, form and interpretation. However, for examples of how focusing on content rather than form can degrade a work of art see these entries on Georgia O' Keeffe's "Red Canna," T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, and Leonardo Da Vinci's "Mona Lisa."
