Curator, Ann Temkin: In the early 20th century, it was hard for even the most avant-garde artists to imagine an abstract work—a picture that was not a picture of something. Curator Leah Dickerman.
Curator, Leah Dickerman: One story that tells you how difficult it is to arrive at this radically new idea of abstraction is the story of Picasso, where he …approaches the brink of abstraction. When he’s in Cadaques, Spain, in the summer of 1910, he begins to make pictures that have something of the character of a diagram, with linear scaffolding and flickering planes that move in and out.
Ann Temkin: Cubist pictures like these made the most radical assault on representational art to date.
Leah Dickerman: The subject matter is hardly discernible. In fact, the only things that suggest that this is a woman with a mandolin, as the title says, is the curved line that suggests a mandolin in the bottom of the center of this work of art.
And then after he made these pictures, he quickly [backs away] from making works like these. And he adds what he called ‘attributes’ back in. Fragments of figures, fragments of words, as if he’s working to tether these pictures to things in the world.
For Picasso, maintaining the link between a work of art and things in the world was central. He said later that there is no abstract art; you always have to start with something.
Ann Temkin: For many artists that followed, the lesson of Picasso’s Cubist painting was abstraction.