Video by brendafohio
Category Archives: Art
Pablo Picasso: close to the sun
Pablo Picasso often compared his paintings to the pages of a journal. Yet he hated the idea that art historians and biographers might confine the scope of his work or his character within an article or a book. Born in Málaga in 1881, the artist grew up to become a shape-shifter. He worked in many different styles, to avoid becoming mannered, and would periodically change his friends, his entourage, his homes, his pets and, of course, his lovers. As his old friend and secretary, the Spanish poet Jaime Sabartés, once said, ‘That’s his strength! The key to his youth. Like a moulting snake, he leaves his old skin behind him and begins a new existence elsewhere.’
Nearly four decades after his death in 1973, he remains a surprisingly slippery figure. According to his biographer, John Richardson, Picasso was so paradoxical that almost any statement made about him tends to be no less true in reverse. How can we be sure of anything about such a mercurial man?
This question has preoccupied me while writing and presenting Modern Masters, a new four-part television series about modern art, which will be broadcast on BBC One next month. Each programme is devoted to a different figure that dominated the art of the 20th century. Inevitably, one of the artists is Picasso (Matisse, Dalí and Warhol are the other three). To try to understand the nature of Picasso’s genius, I met several women who featured prominently in his life, and inspired him to make art.
Women were extraordinarily important for Picasso, who was by turns kind and cruel to all his wives, muses and mistresses. According to the French painter Françoise Gilot, who was his mistress for a decade after they met in 1943, Picasso was fond of saying, ‘For me, there are only two kinds of women: goddesses and doormats.’ …
Mozart Requiem Mass in D Minor VI – Confutatis and Lacrimosa
John Eliot Gardiner conducts the English Baroque Soloists and the Monteverdi Choir. This performance was filmed at the Palau de la Musica Catalana, Barcelona in Dec. 1991.
Masterpieces of the Prado Museum in Google Earth
The Prado Museum’s Masterpieces in ultra high resolution.
