Value

The Kitchen




Pablo Picasso
MoMA NY
November 1948
Oil on Canvas
69" x 8' 2 1/2"








          Pablo Picasso was a Spanish painter, printmaker, sculptor, ceramicist, and stage designer. He was born Pablo Ruiz y Picasso October 25, 1881 and died April 8, 1973. A precocious draftsman, Picasso was admitted to the advanced classes at the Royal Academy of Art in Barcelona at 15. After 1900 he spent much time in Paris, remaining there from 1904 to 1947, when he moved to the South of France. Picasso had many different styles in his works like his Blue Period, Rose Period, and Cubism.

         Picasso created this somber, existential work at the end of a series of large-scale monochromatic paintings all of which depict scenes of violent turmoil. The works restricted, mute abstraction may be a response to Europe's then recent atrocities, (Picasso had just returned from his first visit to the Nazi Concentration Camp in Auschwitz, Poland), as well as the loss of a great friend, his good friend poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who had passed away thirty years before. Picasso wanted to strengthen the emotional impact of things like war through his works. I believe he has done this using value. He used black, gray, and white to show that emotion. I feel that the agony is shown through the dark tones.



http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=79668