"Art is a lie that allows us to understand the truth."  Pablo Picasso

I once heard a (very rich) man at a club dining table say he had given his son the best gift a father could give simply by not achieving anything.

Picasso's father was a drawing instructor and provincial painter, so he wasn't an out and out failure.  But he spent a lifetime pursuing the illusion that nature is immutable and can only be represented by following a canon of classical technique. 

Picasso was a great draftsman - one of the best the world has yet seen.  By the age of 15 he had the rules of proportion down.  Perspective?  Check!  Chiaroscuro?  Check!  He would use paper to copy, copy, absorb and learn, just like generations of classical artists before him.  But what he was really doing was arming his rebellious soul.  He wanted more lies, new truths from new fabrications.

Picasso never rejected Old Master practices.  He continued their traditions, he invoked them, referenced them, spoke with them throughout his life.  You will see in the 60 drawings currently on display at the Frick Collection both this classical grounding and this conversation.  From early on, he knew there was more to say about perception, more ways of conjuring the world than orthodoxy had permitted his father.   His interest in pre-classical art, his fascination with tribal masks and markings, his toying with negative space (spot the dog in "The Death of Harlequin"): all this began in the child Picasso.  His later fracturing of conventions and his game-changing innovations (including - with George Braque - cubism): it all click-clacks into place.

Even someone with only a passing or negative ("... the nose is in the wrong place..."), interest in Picasso will be immediately and gratifyingly rewarded with this surprising, beguiling exhibit.  They will see how, from the age of 9, he "got there," how he felt "realism" was, in a sense myopic; how the great practices of the past did not confine the artist to a looking-prison, but let him out to lie in wait and cosh reality as it strode by, extracting from it a wallet-full of unforeseen truths.


Picasso's Drawings (1890-1921) Reinventing Tradition, October 4, 2011 through January 8, 2012
Frick Collection, 1 East 70th Street, New York, NY 10021 212-288-0700 http://www.frick.org

Photo: Pablo Picasso, Woman with Flowered Hat, 1921, pastel and charcoal on paper, The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Gift of Jaqueline Picasso in honor of the Museum's continuous commitment to Paplo Picasso's art (454.1986); © 2010 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.