Picasso, Breaking and Setting Down Again

One

One face.

A woman's face.

And it is strange.

Both eyes are on the same side.

They are both round, as eyes seen from the front, and the face is looking sideways.

The nose is the shape seen from the side.
The ridge is drawn as a line.

The mouth is frontal.

Two directions are inside one face.

What is seen from the front and what is seen from the side are in the same place.

The color is divided into planes.

One cheek is yellow and the other is gray.
The boundary is clear.

They are not divided by shadow.
They are simply divided.

A thick black line separates the planes.

It is an outline.

A real face has no outline.
This one has one.

There is no depth.

The nose does not come forward.
It is on the same plane.

The background is one color.

Room or outdoors, there is no telling.

Come close and the paint is laid on evenly.

It is not thick.
There are no rubbed places.

It was painted fast and it is exact.

The exact opposite of Turner's surface in the last part.

Turner erased the boundary.
Here the boundary was drawn.

Two

Pablo Picasso was born in 1881 in southern Spain.

In Málaga.

A city on the Mediterranean.

His father was a man who taught drawing.

He drew from childhood.
He drew very well.

By his early teens he already drew like an adult.

He went to Barcelona and was in Madrid as well.

Around 1900 he went to Paris.

He was poor.

There was a period he painted in blue.
He painted thin and hungry people.

After that there was a period with pink mixed in.

In 1907 he painted one large surface.

A picture with five women in it.

Several of the faces are made like masks.

Around that time he saw African and Iberian sculpture.

He saw it in museums and kept some in the studio.

Those carvings did not make a person resemble a person.
They made a person different.

The eyes are large, the nose is straight, the face is flat.

He knew that this was not clumsiness but another grammar.

For some years after that he broke form into pieces.

He split a thing into many planes and set it down again.

He laid one thing seen from several angles onto one surface.

Later people called this Cubism.

He lived a long time.

He lived past ninety and painted until he died.

He changed his manner many times.

There was a period he painted classically and a period he broke things again.

In 1937 he painted a large gray surface.

It was of the bombing of a village in Spain.

A bull and a horse and people are tangled together and there is a lamp above.

There is no color.
Only gray and black and white.

In his late years he lived in the south of France.

He made pottery and pulled prints.

He died in 1973.

Three

Here is the argument of this chapter.

This chapter needs care.

Explain Picasso by fūdo and the argument strains.

He made his painting in Paris.
Paris, not Spain.

And his manner spread across the world.

It was not tied to any one land.

So it is more exact to ask this.

What were the conditions under which he could break a grammar.

There are two.

The first is light.

The light of the Mediterranean is strong.

When light is strong, shadow deepens.

Then the lit plane and the dark plane divide cleanly.
The middle grows thin.

Under strong noon light a person's face does not look solid.
It looks cut into planes.

In the overcast light of the north it is different.

The light is soft, so it passes slowly from bright to dark.
That becomes solidity.

Here is why northern painting is strong in modelling and volume.

Turner, in the last part, dissolved form in that overcast light.

In the south form does not dissolve.
It is cut.

Rearranging cut planes is natural to a southern eye.

The second is layering.

This is the more important.

Southern Spain is a land many cultures passed through.

Rome was there, Islam was there a long time, Jews lived there.
Africa is close across the sea.

Inside one city there are buildings of several ages.

Islamic ornament did not make the human figure.
It went to geometry.

Beside it there is the carving of a cathedral.

Two grammars are in the same place.

Someone who grew up in such a land knows that grammar is not one thing.

It is not known by learning.
You just come to know it.

A person who believes there is only one grammar cannot break it.
He cannot think there is anything to break.

Only one who knows there are several breaks them.

Three things follow.

First, strong light begets the plane.

In the earlier parts we met this argument several times.

Tamayo's surface had no depth.
O'Keeffe's had none either.

Both lands were dry and the light was strong.

Picasso is in that line.

The Mediterranean and Mexico and New Mexico are set on one row.

The painting of strong light goes toward the plane.

Second, layered cultures beget plural grammars.

In the Prologue the range of fūdo was settled.

War too becomes fūdo, and a place many cultures have passed through also becomes fūdo.

This chapter is the second case.

In the body of one who grew up there is more than one grammar.

Third, breaking requires a grammar.

He could draw very well.

By his early teens he already drew exactly.

That exactness is what makes breaking possible.

When one who does not know the grammar uses it wrongly, it is a mistake.
When one who knows the grammar uses it wrongly, it is form.

The same surface can be a mistake or a form.

What divides them.

Whether what stands beside it is exact.

At the head of Part Three we said the same thing.

The void is proved by what stands beside it.

A broken grammar is also proved by what stands beside it.

Four

Stand before Byun Shi-Ji's surface.

In this encounter the opposition is sharp.

Picasso broke the grammar.
Byun Shi-Ji kept it.

The grammar of Byun Shi-Ji's surface is very simple.

One horizon divides the surface into above and below.
Below is ground and above is sky.

The person usually stands in the lower part.

What is far is small and what is near is large.

There is nothing broken.

It was not broken. It was reduced.

Here is the heart of this encounter.

Breaking and reducing are both roads toward simplicity.

And the results are opposite.

Break it and it becomes strange.

A face with both eyes on one side is strange.
It becomes something seen for the first time.

Reduce it and it becomes familiar.

A surface with only a horizon and one person is familiar.
It is an arrangement anyone knows.

Make it strange and one looks again; make it familiar and one looks long.

Looking again and looking long are different things.

Why did one man break and the other reduce.

Because the land differed.

In Picasso's land several grammars were layered.

Where they are layered one can break.
There are several things to break, so one is not bound to any.

On the island Byun Shi-Ji returned to there was one grammar.

One wind, one sea, one horizon.

In a land without several, one cannot break.

Break it and nothing is left.

So the way left is to reduce.

Toward setting the only thing there is more exactly.

There is a second difference.

Picasso changed his manner many times.

The blue period and Cubism and the classical period and the pottery of his late years.

Different enough that it is hard to see as one man's work.

Byun Shi-Ji kept one manner a long time.

After going to Jeju he went in the same direction for thirty-eight years.

One who changes and one who keeps.

There is no ranking here.

One who changes grows wide and one who keeps grows deep.

Growing wide takes courage and growing deep takes courage.

There is a third thing to look at.

Both painted violence.

Picasso painted a bombed village.

It is an event with a date.
It happened in a certain month of a certain year.

Byun Shi-Ji painted the storm.

And later, in the oral history, he said the storm was not weather but resistance.
(Korean Culture and Arts Foundation oral history, 2004–2005, p. 171)

There is no date.

It is not an event but a state.

Paint an event and those who know that event read it.
Paint a state and those who undergo that state read it.

An event ends and a state continues.

So one surface becomes testimony and the other becomes endurance.

Both are needed.

Without testimony it is forgotten, and without endurance one cannot live.

Five

There are two directions in a face.

What is seen from the front and what is seen from the side are together.

He tried to see one person all at once.

On the surface of a distant island an old man shows his back.

There is only one direction.

The front is not seen.

One tried to show all and the other showed less.

See all and you know; see less and it stays.

Both surfaces painted a person.

The way of placing differed.