entertain

I went to the Picasso exhibit at the Legion of Honor with a fellow Bamboozledee Matt, and one of our facilitating adults, Rebecca. Matt works on the tech parts of the web site. He’s one of those people that manages to squeeze 48 hours into 24, but he’s not really the museum type. Rebecca is 26, but she still got in for free because the museum folk thought she was a student. She is a counselor, a shrink, who works at the Beacon and who smiles all the time. I’m innocent — I just like Picasso.

The first piece I looked at was an etching called "The Dream and Lie of Franco," a comic strip type deal. It was very enjoyable, because if you look at it, it’s full of scribbles, jagged lines, weird proportions and is drawn in the innocent, shameless and unthinking way you draw when you’re a child. Except that he was an adult, and the power to evoke the feelings that art like that does, was a deliberate thing.

These art pieces are supposed to be very dark and foreboding, but for some reason they made me very happy. Maybe it was just because Picasso is such an obvious master of art. I arrive at this from the following observations — the fact that Picasso can create a depth and a realism in paintings that are clearly unrealistic. The fact that he can paint ridiculousness and make people see it so seriously. The fact that he can take a concept, complicate it, explicate it, make it express everything that the concept is capable of, then simplify it to the complete basics when he paints it and yet it still retains all of the depth and complexity without the extra ornaments. (You can see the process in a series of studies that lead up to "The Guernica.")

There is a detail of a horse from the painting "The Guernica" that I though was hilarious. Matt’s comment: "Time for braces!" Rebecca’s favorite was "Night Fishing at Antibus", because it was "very cute." Everybody gets their own gratification from Picasso. The cool thing about him is that you really can interpret him whichever way — it’s all there somewhere.

The exhibit is fairly large — there are five rooms. It is quite tiring, but it really gets inside you. When I went for the second time I was reluctant to leave. (Even though the person I went with embarrassed the hell out of me by making loud and rather odd interpretations.) I had to pay $9 for the second visit and I’m not complaining, so it must’ve been worth it.