[deugtniet]

I tend to disagree with the assessment that the an artists technique has anything to do with how good an artist is.

Case in point: in Picasso's formative years, he was a great realistic painter. He became a great artist because he pushed the boundary of abstract art that is arguably easier to paint than his earlier work. To me, Picasso was so good because he built a story (myth) around his work that resonated with so many people.

The Mona Lisa is the most famous painting because of the myth around it. It's a beautiful portait, but is it really the best portrait ever? I think in the same wing of the Louvre there are better paintings of Da Vinci on show, even though there is no crowd around it.

Recently, the myth builders have been (maybe they still are) Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst, I think that's what makes them great artists.

[boppo1]

Picasso was a hack who contributed to the downfall of a thousand year old tradition of craftsmanship. The modernists destroyed university casts and ruined academic drawing programs so completely that they have not recovered to this day.

We are very fortunate that image sharing on the internet has revealed that the art establishment has no clothes and people enjoy representational works. Artists like Will St. John, Colleen Barry, Ramon Alex Hurtado, Jeremy Lipking and others are reviving academic figurative traditions.

If I sound upset, it's because I am. In highschool I took AP art and all the other art classes I could. I visited all the nearby art associations and establishments that people revered. I wanted to paint people, wanted to make great paintings like the ones I saw in museums. I attended one of the best-ranked public highschools in my state and my teachers with art degrees didn't even know there was an academic path out there because their colleges just taught them about the greatness of conceptual garbage. I wound up giving up on that dream and floundering through the last decade with constructive methods like loomis and bridgman in my spare time. Now I have a degree I'm not passionate about and enough debt that pursuing academic training is out of the question.

Warhol's soup cans are neat and abstract movements were a refreshing breath of fresh air in art history, sure. You might admire works of lesser craftsmanship for their "philosophical" achievements, but consider the destruction that philosophy wreaked upon education and the cultural-nuclear-crater left behind.

Google Sargent, Repin, Bouguereau, and Homer. Then look again at Koons, Hirst, Twombly, etc. and try to convince yourself a grave error and loss has not occurred.

[jiggliemon]

There’s a lot to unpack here. But Picasso wasn’t a hack. Overrated, sure. But he approached his subject matter and technique with as much focus and detail as any artist that came before him. You aren’t required to appreciate his contribution to the artistic conversation; but calling him a hack is dismissive and purposely neglectful of his substantial impact.

Picasso did what he did, and created what he created because of photography. In a world where capturing likeness, and form was basically free - what do you do with painting? Certainly not attempt to capture likeness and form - perhaps you make an Ernest attempt to capture or project the emotional response of form and subject. Picasso’s facial structure was modeled after African war masks, which were at the time ignored by the art world. And his composition and color and repetition were inspired by the Japanese print makers. A lot of the art from that era was inspired by what was coming out of Japan at that time. The product of Picasso was a mashup of influences, like all impactful art.

The backlash against likeness and form was certain way before Picasso. But the fact that he rode that style to such fame is what made the art world dramatically over correct so drastically.

[noema]

Google WW2, the Berlin Wall, Crystal Pepsi, Walmart, Donald Trump and then you may understand why Warhol reflects the contemporary zeitgeist and academic neoclassical art does not. (By the way, Twombly is totally unlike those other two artists. There is in fact a subtle classicism to his work.)

[jack_riminton]

Totally agree. There's a raft of modern realist painters who's work is so similar to photographs that they're utterly devoid of the main criteria of good art... feeling

A lot of this is compounded by the practice of working from high def photographs. Working from life is worlds apart from working from photos. As an illustration of this, try and take a photograph of a beautiful sunset and compare it to what you see

[inasmuch]

I'm very bothered by how much of today's art is based heavily on photographic reference. In some part due to the difference in skill development required by using a photo for reference versus using live references or your imagination/memory/whatever, but mostly because of how much the technological conceits and limitations of that photography come to infect other media which don't suffer from them.

It's most obvious in paintings and videogames. Depth of field, bokeh, motion blur, perspective, lens distortion—even focal length and composition. Once you realize it, it becomes impossible to ignore, and it really compromises the work for me. So many of the most technically adept artists today are using all their skill to effectively simulate one form of art with another. It's an interesting exercise, sure, and I'll never dissuade someone from developing and refining a skill, but in the best-case scenario, I'm just left thinking I'd rather see the photo or the movie, or not see the image at all. And I'm someone who will gladly spend 20min+ standing in front of a Rembrandt.

I don't have any issue with realism in art and think it can be quite effective when used well. But so much of what makes something like The Night Watch incredible is how it feels both convincingly real and compellingly uncanny at the same time due to its rendering from some fuzzy approximation of what the artist observed from his models, conceived in his mind's eye, and meticulously sketched and reworked.

To me, it's the ability to capture and create something within/from that gray area that makes an artist great.

[cntainer]

I always found that practice weird. When using a photo as a source it feels like you're just taking someone else's vision and photocopying it on a canvas.

Yes there are many photos that you can call art, but if you're not the one that took the original photo it feels like most of the creative effort was not yours and you're just showing off your brush/pen technique.

As a disclaimer, I have 0 talent when it comes to drawing/painting so I'm pretty much clueless about the creative process of modern painting.

[jacobolus]

> Working from life is worlds apart from working from photos

What if you use a camera obscura, as many of the “old masters” are believed to have done?

[meowzero]

I met a local portraiture teacher, and all he did was take a nice photo of someone and copy it on canvas. His craft seemed great. But I didn't get the point of copying a photo exactly. Why not just print out the photo? But I guess he enjoyed the painting process.

[pmoriarty]

Vermeer is highly regarded, yet there is evidence that he worked using technology that was something like a camera (though of course it was primitive by today's standards).

Photography is just another tool, and what matters is how you use it.

[mtts]

The myth of Picasso having been a great realistic painter in his youth is exactly that, a myth, and, in fact, one that has only one source, namely Picasso himself.

Picasso was a great self promotor and back before the internet the opportunities for proving him wrong we’re very limited indeed so the myth could persist. Nowadays, however, the stuff he did back when he was drilled by his father into being an artist can easily be found online and, guess what: it turns out to be fairly mediocre.

[WastingMyTime89]

> The myth of Picasso having been a great realistic painter in his youth is exactly that, a myth, and, in fact, one that has only one source, namely Picasso himself.

What? The source of Picasso being a good realistic painter is the paintings Picasso made when he was a teenager of which most have survived. You can see multiple of them at the Picasso museum in Paris or by simply googling it as you point yourself. Science and Charity which he painted at fifteen is in every way a descent classical paintings and Child with dove is a perfectly fine work in the post-impressionist style. It’s not revolutionary like the work he did later but the idea that Picasso is a mediocre painter is so demonstrably false it gets funny.

[lkey]

For those that wish to judge for themselves: https://mymodernmet.com/picasso-early-work/ https://www.pablo-ruiz-picasso.net/period-first.php

As to whether his early or late works were great or mediocre, that's not something that can be pronounced from on high, but I do think it's fair to say he was proficient in the techniques of his era before branching out.

[pell]

> The myth of Picasso having been a great realistic painter in his youth is exactly that, a myth, and, in fact, one that has only one source, namely Picasso himself.

There are many examples of his early work online. His skill in classical realistic art is hardly deniable even if one might disagree that it reached the levels of Raphael to whom he once compared his pieces of that period. He also was partly educated at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando which wasn't some no-name school either.

[fatbird]

Picasso twice completed copying the entire series of Bargue drawings, a set of 70 lithographs sold all over Europe in the 19th century as a course in academic drawing. His copies are excellent; he'd certainly mastered the academic realist techniques.

He failed to produce great realist work because he found those techniques boring, repetitive, and mechanical, and thus didn't try to work in that mode. He moved on to keep pace with the many radical departures from the French Academy that surrounded him. He had the skills, he just didn't use them.

[lordfoom]

> abstract art that is arguably easier to paint than his earlier work.

Strong disagree. Expertise often looks easy. He had to understand the rules on a fundamental level before he could break them as he did, to express not just pictures but the underlying form and composition.

In my opinion it is harder to paint abstracts like Picasso did than it is to paint realistically.

[javajosh]

>it is harder to paint abstracts like Picasso

I agree with this. It's harder because you have to have all the technique before you start picking and choosing what to leave out. An abstract painting becomes at least in part a story of what the painter decided to try, some unique combination of choices, at several levels of zoom. This is dangerous stuff because its easy to alienate a viewer this way. But done well you find a (substantially) new path to beauty and wonder.

[hoseja]

You're, perhaps intentionally, mixing hard and hard. Could a child paint an abstract Picasso if it had him hanging behind a shoulder, saying what to do? Could it paint a realistic Picasso?

[Bayart]

> The Mona Lisa is the most famous painting because of the myth around it. It's a beautiful portait, but is it really the best portrait ever? I think in the same wing of the Louvre there are better paintings of Da Vinci on show, even though there is no crowd around it.

That's not a good example to affirm your point : it's a painting that was historically know for its technical qualities, representing the pinnacle of Leonardo's sfumato. But it's also been extremely damaged to the point these qualities are heavily lacking now.

[pmoriarty]

"[Picasso] became a great artist because he pushed the boundary of abstract art that is arguably easier to paint than his earlier work."

This reminds me of the old joke about the customer who got upset at having to pay $100 to a mechanic who fixed his car by hitting the engine with a hammer. The mechanic replies that he only charges $1 for the hammer hit, but $99 for knowing where to hit.

So it is with Picasso. His mature style is easier on a technical level than some more photorealistic work, but I challenge you or anyone else who thinks it's "easy" to paint something with even half the emotional impact of Guernica, or to come up with a novel style that's as innovative as Picasso's was when he created it.

Picasso wasn't copying anyone else's style. He was innovating and pushing art forward... that's why he gets pride of place in the art history books and artists who just copy his style don't.

As in science, you get a lot of credit in the art world for being first.

The art world also appreciates being shown the world in a different light, which you don't necessarily need great technical skill to accomplish (as Picasso and many artists before and after him showed).

This whole debate about the need for technical skill in "art" actually predates Picasso, and was hashed out before him about the Impressionists, who were already accused of sloppy technique by Academy artists.

Impressionism is no longer controversial, and most people can appreciate it, even though on a technical level it's arguably no better than cubism (the style that Picasso is most well known for).

[HWR_14]

Picasso's abstract work was only accepted because he proved he could master and reject the realistic style. It's similar to Norm MacDonald telling horrible old jokes. A huge part of the humor was the metajoke that he could be telling better jokes if he felt like it.

[dagw]

arguably easier to paint than his earlier work.

This is hard to judge from the outside. My wife is an art school graduate and serious amateur painter. There are some artists that she follow, where she is in absolute awe of what they do, and I just see some quite 'simple' paintings that are nowhere near as detailed or 'interesting' as some of what she paints. Yet she assures me that what those artists are doing is Really Hard, and far beyond what she is capable of.

[rixed]

I'm not surprised.

That is something I became aware when practicing competitive programming as a teen: anyone would have an opinion on how nice/pretty the outcome was, but only the few thousands people actually involved in the competition would have an actual clue about what mattered, what was important and what was actually hard to achieve. It's hard not to notice the same pattern in any activity one is deeply involved with, be it sports or arts.

It is to be expected, after all, that specialization implies some form of impediment to communication.

[m463]

I think some of Picasso's paintings were exceptional.

The bullfight paintings define to me how a master can do so much with so little:

https://www.pablopicasso.org/images/paintings/bullfight-3.jp...

[LordAtlas]

This is true of many things in life. The branding and marketing is more important than actual quality. :)

[JohnBooty]

This is a weirdly bleak assessment.

You are of course correct that art is more than raw technique. And you are of course correct that art appreciation is no stranger to fads and hype.

But, you seem to suggest there is nothing else to it at all.

Is that what you mean to say?

[ahartmetz]

>Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst

Damien Hirst is a salesman who makes shit art. Jeff Koons makes things that are at least amusing. I don't think that these are taken seriously by too many people, and they won't be in the future.

[pmoriarty]

"I don't think that these are taken seriously by too many people, and they won't be in the future."

You're an optimist.

It's more likely we'll slide towards an Idiocracy future, where it's garbage that'll be praised to the heavens.

The contemporary art world has been sliding that direction for a long time, and outside the art world kitsch dominates, and it's probably only going to get worse over time.

[pradn]

The greatness of Picasso's formal skills can be seen in one genre: his prints for the Vollard Suite. His lines are quick and delicate and invoke a whole body and its suppleness. The economy of line is astonishing.

[cosmojg]

I'd add that Banksy is another modern artist who's done a pretty good job developing his own mythology.