The other day I posted drawings from a sketchbook I've started which will be about family memories. I'm currently enrolled in Sketchbook Skool, a new online course about journaling (and much more). Several classmates inspired me to do this family themed journal by things they posted. Today is my mothers birthday (had she lived she would be 94!) In skool there have been a lot people who said their creative life was stifled by parents who put down their attempts at drawing. Heartbreaking stuff. I realized how fortunate I was to have the parents I did. They both encouraged me to pursue the arts. Especially my Mom. She took me to movies and Broadway plays, Christmas shows at Radio city, concerts at Carnegie Hall, etc. Best of all she took me early and often to the museums...Museum of Modern Art, Whitney, Metropolitan, Guggenheim, and to a lot of galleries. In those days (60's - 70's) you could go into these galleries and see new art and the attendants were nice to you even though you were not buying.
At MOMA this was the very first painting I remember seeing as a child. Les Demoiselles d' Avignon 1907 by Picasso. It is huge. 96" x 92". I still recall a strange aura emanating from it. My mother knew all about this painting. She told me that Picasso feared he had lost his mind when he painted it--so shocking! He turned it against his studio wall and did not exhibit it until 1916. This is the first masterpiece of the 20th century and it detonated the Modern Art Movement. For Picasso it was an exorcism and it cleared the way for Cubism.
The sources for this work include African masks, Iberian sculpture and the paintings of El Greco.
What impressed me most upon seeing it for the first time was Picasso's rejection of tradition in order to free himself.
