Watch Picasso Paint
When I was 13, I got my entrance into modern art through a book that explored the development of modernism artist by artist and piece by piece. My favorite artist from that book? Pablo Picasso, of course. That early art-viewing experience still makes it inspiring to watch the artist paint in this vi
When I was 13, I got my entrance into modern art through a book that explored the development of modernism artist by artist and piece by piece. My favorite artist from that book? Pablo Picasso, of course. That early art-viewing experience still makes it inspiring to watch the artist paint in this video.
Taken from Visit to Picasso, a documentary shot in 1950 by Paul Haesaerts, the artist is shown painting on large glass plates which are shot from the opposite side by the camera. Each brushstroke in the simple drawings, a flower, a bust, a woman, is made eminently clear and distinct. It’s a voyeuristic peak into Picasso’s process, but it’s also just magical to see these single lines become figures in the space of a stroke.
Videos of painters painting are often boring and not particularly revealing, but the effortless minimalism that Picasso brings to his drawings makes it even more apparent how much control and thinking is behind them.
