CUBISM IN A BOX....PICASSO.....

Autumn 1906: Picasso announces that he has discovered photography ... "When Picasso declared that he had discovered photography, he was revealing the most profound nature of his eye. For when Picasso drew or painted, he already saw what he was still in the process of drawing or painting, on paper or on canvas; his eye projected the image because it was already prefigured in its own pupil. Very frequently, all he did was to trace out the lines of what he already saw. His discovery of photography changed everything." – Fernande Olivier    photo by Gino Severini "In 1906 the only contents of Picasso’s studio were a day-bed, a long, rickety table, a tub and a small, rusty iron stove which was supposed to serve for cooking and heating. A dim light from a single window fell on festoons of cobwebs hanging from the ceiling. The furniture was completed by two dilapidated chairs.  On top the table rested a worn box camera with a cracked lens, and nearby a glass prism."      --Antonina Vallentin CUBISM IN A BOX   The box camera’s cracked lens caused the facial plane in Picasso’s photo-portraits to be broken themselves, and raised slightly on one side. Attributes he would soon utilize and transpose to his early sketches and preparatory drawings for the seminal LES DEMOISELLES D’AVIGNON. Sleuthing through archives and old letters has found that the camera initially belonged to Italian futurist Gino Severini who moved to Paris in 1905. Dropped too often, the brutish Severini viewed the now-broken camera’s consequent distorted photographs as “slight, humorous and mere divertissements.”  He easily gave up the camera to Picasso who viewed the “fractured” photographs and “broken” camera as “intriguing with possibilities.” Once in his hands, as evidenced by the developed roll of film, Picasso augmented the distortion of planes with a simple prism held over the cracked lens. The artist would sometimes further play and manipulate the negatives, adapting a century-old print-making process called cliché verre whereby he drew and scratched designs into the emulsion and then used the resulting negative to print the photograph. PHOTOGRAPHIC ORIGINS DISCOVERED USING X-RAYS ON LES DEMOISELLES D'AVIGNON          X-ray evidence that the painting was re-worked many times over,  and that the seated figure to the far right was most likely a man, perhaps even the young ladies' pimp. The obvious source for the pimp in the original version of Les Demoiselles d'Avinyo (sic) is thought to be this 1905 photograph of the artist's friend Carlos Vallentin taken with Severini's broken camera.    RECONSTRUCTING PICASSO In order to re-create Picasso’s original photographs, a research team headed by Dr Åke Neilsen had to teach the computer how to pick out the elements of an image that, until now, only artists have been able to recognize as important. By giving the computer this ‘aesthetic sense’, Dr Neilsen from the Department of Art Sciences, was able to create a series of automated artworks with Picasso’s signature effects, such as making a cubist-style picture from the seemingly ordinary found negatives. According to Dr Neilsen the key to the new software is helping the computer recognize the important aspects of the photograph being used: "When artists draw or paint they distill all the vast detail a camera sees into a few lines or daubs of paint. We plugged digital cameras and scanners into our battery of computers and wrote software that 'looks' for the same kind of important things as Picasso did." "Art is a lie that makes us see the truth"  Picasso’s Guernica Hidden from View So as Not to Offend, 2003 NYC - When Secretary of State Colin Powell appeared at the United Nations Wednesday, February 5, to argue that Iraq had not complied with UN demands to disarm and poses an imminent threat, UN officials closed the curtain –- literally – on Pablo Picasso’s GUERNICA (1937), the most widely known artistic interpretation of war. The tapestry reproduction, which hangs outside the entrance to the UN Security Council, was initially covered on Jan. 27. Press accounts indicate that some UN diplomats believe the United States exerted pressure on the UN to hide the tapestry while Powell and others made the case for war on Iraq. The cover-up was a solemn reminder of the intensity of Picasso's images, and the power of art to give voice to war's horrors. Though the artwork may have been unsettling for those urging military action, the public response proved that war's brutal reality could never be concealed, especially as war is being heralded as a necessity. "Mr. Powell can't very well seduce the world into bombing Iraq surrounded on camera by shrieking and mutilated women, men, and children," wrote the ever-candid Maureen Dowd, adding, "The UN began covering the tapestry last week after getting nervous that Hans Blix's head would end up on TV next to a screaming horse head." Guernica was the cultural capital of the Basque people, seat of their centuries-old independence and democratic ideals. It had no strategic value as a military target. Yet some time later, a secret report to Berlin was uncovered in which Von Richthofen stated, "...the concentrated attack on Guernica was the greatest success," making the dubious intent of the mission clear: the all-out air attack had been ordered on [General] Franco's behalf to break the spirited Basque resistance. Guernica had served as the testing ground for a new Nazi military tactic -– blanket-bombing a civilian population to demoralize the enemy. It was a wanton, man-made holocaust. Which is not unlike the intense bombing planned for Iraq: the “Shock and Awe” strategy calls for dropping up to 800 cruise missiles within two days.