Pablo Picasso's Ma Jolie-"my pretty one"-takes its title from the refrain of a popular song and celebrates Picasso's lover, Eva Gouel. The artist used color sparingly in order to focus attention on the fractured, overlapping shapes. Indeed, upon closer examination, images of musical instruments, cups and glasses, sheet music, a bottle, a cigarette, and a newspaper emerge from the layered forms.
By reducing everyday objects to simple geometric forms and by showing them from a variety of vantage points at once, Picasso moved beyond the notion that a painting should merely create an illusion of the world. A canvas became a surface on which to experiment with shapes, lines, and textures. Picasso was equally inventive in the way he applied paint to the canvas: a comb pulled through wet pigment creates staves on sheet music and the wood grain of a recorder; a clump of white paint evokes smoke from the long cylinder of a cigarette.
This style, which art critics soon called "Cubism," emerged in the years before World War I, when Picasso was working with the painter Georges Braque. Although neither artist ever completely abandoned representational painting, Cubism helped pave the way toward pure abstraction, a radical development of 20th-century art.
No theoretician, no writer on art, however interesting, . . . could be as interesting as Picasso. A good writer on art may give you an insight to Picasso, but, after all, Picasso was there first.
-Artist David Hockney, 1988
