Picasso’s The Dream: It features his mistress Marie-Therese Walter and is estimated to be worth £70m
The show admittedly had problems from a lack of depth in the history of Picasso’s art. As the NY Times review points out, the Met has never been a great purchaser of modern art, so there are lots of holes. In fact, the Picasso collection at the MoMA, just downstairs, is much better.
But the ragged jump in Picasso’s art gave me an opening to think about video.
We have been painting since Lasceaux, some 17,000 years ago. That’s a lot of time for painting to mature. We’ve only been creating video for some 50 years, so we’re still in its earliest days. Never the less, we might start to think about video as more than just the perfect capturing of events or the perfect representation of something that just happened. Video can be far more than news, which painting once was.
Picasso is seminal to the world of art because Picasso took us from a world of painting that represented exactly what people saw to an art form that communicated ideas and emotions.
The Met show, because of its flaws, ironically is forced to make that leap in only the few feet it takes to walk from one gallery to the next.
Picasso’s early self-portrait
Picasso’s earliest work is representational. Like all conventional paintings of his time, at the turn of the Century, he is simply painting the world as he sees it. Ironically, the arrival of photography at the same time may have rendered such representational skills superfluous. In doing so, it also opened the door to take painting to another far more powerful level. Picasso went through that door.
The portrait of Marie Therese Walter, above, currently owned (and recently damaged by) Steve Winn, is valued at $100 million. It has such a high value because it represents the moment in which art made the transition from reproducing reality as it was to creating a representation of more than reality.
Now we come to video.
Up until now we have used video as artists prior to Picasso used painting – to reproduce the world as they saw it. Is there a higher form of video, a better and more powerful way to use this very powerful medium?
Gertrude Stein was able to see the genius in Picasso even when he was in his early 20s and unknown.
Is there a Picasso of video out there somewhere?
About the author
mrosenblum - For more than 20 years, Mr. Rosenblum has been on the cutting edge of the digital ‘videojournalist’ revolution. During this time, he has lead a drive for videoliteracy, and the complete rethinking of how television is made and controlled.
His work has included: The complete transitioning of The BBC's national network (UK) to a VJ-driven model, starting in 2002. The complete conversion of The Voice of America, the United State’s Government’s broadcasting agency, (and the largest broadcaster in the world), from short wave radio to television broadcasting and webcasting using the ‘VJ” paradigm (1998-present). The construction of NYT Television, a New York Times Company, and the largest producer of non-fiction television in the US. Rosenblum was both the founder and President of NYT TV, (all based on the “VJ” paradigm – 1996-1998). The President and Founder of Video News International, a global VJ-driven newsgathering company, with more than 100 journalists around the world. (1993-1996).
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From TCA to CNN in One Step
October 23, 2009 