My trip to New York City at age seventeen… on my own… to the Guggenheim Museum where I saw, for the first time, de Koonings “Women” series, and a Picasso close up… “Three Musicians, 1921” the version owned by the MOMA. That day changed my life.
Three Musicians, 1921
Seeing Picasso’s six by six foot painting “Three Musicians, 1921″ I had a “conversion experience.” Although I had grown up with art and artists, this was the first time I experienced joy coming from a painting. I had to test it. I turned my back on the painting, I looked at it over my shoulder, looked at it with my good eye closed. Yep, it was real all right.
From there I quickly drew three conclusions:
1) It is possilbe for a painting to give off joy.
2) I am capable of receiving the joy that a painting gives off.
3) I can find out how a painting gives off joy. Therefore, I am capable of making a painting that gives off joy.
I decided to become a painter.
A year later in Middlebury College at the end of term for art history we were given a choice: write an essay or paint a painting from art history. I chose Picasso, “Plante de Tomates, 1944″. He painted nine versions in a week, in the apartment of Dora Maar, August 1944.
Plante de Tomates, 1944
While wrestling with the canvas my friend (now the sculptor) Bob Gober stopped by and helped me with thumbtacks and a rock to stretch the thing. Later that week as I was painting he passed by and said, “Oh Deborah, you should go become a painter.” And so I did.
All these years later I am still looking at Picassos. I have a good print of Three Musicians over my computer. I have never tired of looking at it. I am also very interested in his Synthetic Cubism period.
Here is a wee passage from “The Creative Mind” about the period when he made preliminary studies for, and completed “Guernica.”
“All of my paintings are researches… there is a logical sequence in all this research. That is why I number and date them. Maybe one day someone will be grateful.
“It’s not sufficient to know an artist’s work. It is necessary to know when he did them, why, under what circumstances.. Some day there will undoubtedly be a science — it may e called the science of man — which will seek to learn about men in general through the study of the creative man.”
Creating Minds, Gardner, 1993
(Picasso’s sexism, even misogyny, has never lessened the importance of his work for me because he portrayed himself, the artist, through his career as: clown, monster, monkey, dwarf, voyeur. He exploited himself, his psyche, and his life for the work. I know he was the quintessential egoist, but I am only concerned with his work.)
