picking cichorium

Even though I adore the despicable emotional and physical brokenness captured by “Guernica,” I still prefer the play between grace and heaviness, gentleness and roughness of the Blue and Pink periods. Anyways, that has nothing to do with what we are about to discuss. I wanted to share a few personal thoughts/associations on these two Picasso pieces that are hanging side by side in the Met, probably not by accident.

Pablo Picasso. Girl Asleep at a Table. 1936. Oil on canvas.

Pablo Picasso. The Dreamer. 1932. Oil on canvas.

Painted only four years apart, “Girl Asleep at the Table” and “The Dreamer” at first strike as dramatically different. The first work is a grayscale image of a girl caught asleep sitting at the table in the sharp electric light from the overhead lamp; the light causes every object in the small room to cast dramatic shadows. (The same technique of image fragmentation and sharp light contrasts found further exploration in “Guernica;” Picasso even uses the same lamp as the centerpiece of his monument to the Basque tragedy of 1937). “The Dreamer” is a colorful painting of the body of a nude woman against the clear blue sky; she is sweetly asleep on the grass in the midday sun, with the dreams that materialize around her in the form of whimsical flowers coiling behind her soft and fresh voluptuous figure. After the second look one starts noticing the similarities in both paintings: the rearrangements in the body part and the separation of the canvas into smaller closed areas by the outlining, which are typical for Picasso.

I walked through the Met purposefully not focusing on anything and wondering if anything will attract my attention. The two sleeping girls intrigued me, so I sat on the bench in front of and thought for a while, looking for my own imagery that would allow me to understand these two works my way. Both girls seemed to be sleeping peacefully, but for the different reasons. The girl in the room seemed to be asleep because of being tired, where the dreamer was probably enjoying yet another of the many frivolous afternoons. The girl asleep on the table made me think of the long evenings that I spent over physics and math homework in high school. I would be so tired after the swim practices that I would often fall asleep over some problem, and my grandma would have to come and wake me up; the wake ups were always abrupt. Sleeping in the field, my personal favorite, would be a complete different story: falling asleep somewhere in the fragrant greenery always meant a deep undisturbed nap. These two memories were my key to understanding Picasso’s choice of grayscale versus color and of sharp shapes versus the rounded ones in both cases. Grayscale captures the tiredness of the sleeper and her indifference to the surroundings because of this tiredness, thus Picasso gives us the colorless world. The color of “The Dreamer,” on the other hand, portrays the ease and pleasure of sleeping in the midday in a field, which translates into the vividness of the dreams. The sharpness of electric light snatches only some parts of the room out of the darkness, and Picasso captures the nature of such light with sharper forms; the generosity of the midday sun mildly reveals the shapes beneath, thus, Picasso gives us the softness of the Dreamer.

I was glad to find the two sleepers; where paintings would normally enforce tsunamis of emotions onto me, these two just made me think.

I am not an in-public crybaby, but this painting left me sobbing when I wondered into it during the Andrew Wyeth show at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. Think of a winter day, rather an afternoon, no snow. The soil and the remnants of the last year’s grass form this frozen yellowish crust. The wind turns your hands rough and red if without gloves. Think of loosing on such an afternoon that, what used to indiscernibly fill you with life every day, and now, wherever you rest your eye, there is just emptiness of withered grass. I, sure, can relate. I think often Andrew Wyeth is under-appreciated because an every day observer does not bother to think and to feel beyond the obvious realism of Wyeth’s works.

Andrew Newell Wyeth Winter 1946, 1946

…almost tumbling down a hill across a strong winter light, with his hand flung wide and a black shadow racing behind him, and bits of snow, and my feeling of being disconnected from everything. It was me, at a loss—that hand drifting in the air was my free soul, groping. Over on the other side of that hill was where my father was killed, and I was sick I’d never painted him. The hill finally became a portrait of him. I spent the whole winter on the painting—it was just the one way I could free this horrible feeling that was in me—and yet there was great excitement. For the first time in my life, I was painting with a real reason to do it.
Andrew Wyeth

More on Wyeth: Andrew Wyeth’s Language of Things by Anne Classen Knutson