Picasso, The Reservoir, Horta de Ebro

we're on the fifth floor of the Museum of Modern Art looking at a painting by Pablo Picasso from 1909 from the summer of 1909 42 Ebro it's one of Picasso's critical early cubist paintings it looks very cubist already I mean it already looks like a radical departure from say Zen but this is two years after they den was old Avignon yeah he's already made that step he has this is one of those paintings this lives up to the title of the movement right cubism because it really looks like little cute it does there are historical chronology is usually that after Demoiselle rock really begins to explore sazon in very serious ways Picasso responds she goes bra yeah my wave stays on exactly right and he'd gone to the south of Spain to this very arid environment and you can really get a sense of the terracotta we're looking at a hilltop town there's a little water collect down at the bottom right and actually you can even see the reflection in the surface of the water there of course what most people find so interesting about this painting is his willingness to pull and push perspective mm-hmm so that we're looking sometimes at the top of things and the sides of things from below and from above as though we were moving and shifting our gaze through the site yeah so the objects become plastic they become you know malleable they become shaped by our movement through space and through time but they're also all interconnected that thing that Picasso and Cezanne started also before him of interlocking these different claims by color so that something that's brown moves into something else that's brown that is a different shape that's the top of a house that moves into the side of a house so that there's really a kind of loss of the separation of different forms in a space because a synthetic whole and actually he's doing something else that I think further assists that if you look at shadow and reflection they become almost objects in space themselves rather than just sort of optical for what do you mean well if you look for instance at some of the doorways in the center of the canvas you can see that there are shadows or reflections that cast off that that are in some ways almost as solid as the objects that are purported to create those optical phenomena right so there's almost a leveling of object and the visual and surface more than surface object and in a sense the visual phenomena phenomena something that is pure sight and intangible becomes as important in the canvas as a building may be the way that we begin to see and lead and Mozelle that the space itself between the figures seems solid yes exactly right the other thing that struck me is funny when you said that this was a village was that I imagined sunlight in a landscape and there's no sense of you know to me oh there isn't you're right it's funny that light has been I mean light is clearly the thing that constructs form here yeah you've got shadow you've areas of light but in fact there is no actual section it almost has more to do with the subjective experience of one sight as one moves through the way in which light is cast or shadows cast then what is in fact from nature right another thing that strikes me is the way that for example you were talking about those doorways the one on there in the center really looks like a doorway into something but just to the left of that there's something else that seems to be a doorway that also casts a shadow but is also much more obviously a stroke of paint right and it almost seems like a positive form in front of the building and sighs that's right and yet it's also a brush strip that's right that's wonderful so this is constant sort of dislocation of the way in which form is constructed so it's not just about the rendering of form it's not just like observing the form it's actually also sort of this funny dislocating of the process of rendering form right it's very self-conscious in a very modern way certainly is