The Visual Grammar of Pablo Picasso by Enrique Mallen

Enrique Allen's The Visual Grammar of Pablo Picasso book is available at the UCSB Arts Library and can be searched for in the library catalog. In the introduction to his book, Mallen writes about Picasso’s approach to art and his relationship with primitivism. He explains Picasso’s interest in primitivism as an attempt to connect with art “at its origins.” “Picasso wanted to eliminate the…conventions of western tradition in order to concentrate on the deeper aesthetic principles. He determined that art, at its origins, was capable of an expressive force…” (Mallen 2). The expressive force that art possesses interested Picasso, as did the relationship between form and space.

 Thus primitivism was a sanctuary for Picasso. He looked to the art of past cultures for inspiration because he felt it provided more direct connections with aesthetic values themselves and focused less on the pictorial representations of these aesthetic values. Mallen suggests that visits to Iberian sculpture exhibits at the Louvre might have stimulated Picasso’s return to values present in primitive art. He exchanged qualities such as symmetry and overall appearance for abstraction and distortion of forms. The emphasis of his work was on structure and essential qualities of his figures, a technique he borrowed from the primitive.

 Mallen references Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon throughout the introduction as an example of his primitive technique.

Picasso did not pretend that his approach was revolutionary, or even that Cubism was; he advocated for the return of primitivism as means of breaking away from the set conventions of imitative art.

Sources:

Mallén, Enrique. The visual grammar of Pablo Picasso / New York : Peter Lang, c2003.

Arts Library/Art, General Collection N6853.P5 M337 2004

Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon by Pablo Picasso, 1907

Image source: http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?criteria=O%3AAD%3AE%3A4609&page_number=32&template_id=1&sort_order=1