Name: How To Understand A Picasso
Uploaded: 2025-05-23T05:53:08.000Z
Duration: 8 min 11 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

So you're in a museum looking at a Picasso, you've heard the name a million times, you know the influence, you know he's one of the most important artists of the 20th century, you know he invented cubism, you know he loved women, lots of women, and you know he wasn't that great to them, you know he had phases, the blue period, the rose period, neoclassicism, surrealism, but the painting you're looking at, the one in front of you, you've never seen it before, it's called Night Fishing at Antibes, or Antibes, you don't really know, you don't speak French, the little card next to it doesn't say much, but you want to know more about it, how?

The way I see it, you can look at any Picasso in five different ways.

Relative clauses (Restrictive vs. nonrestrictive)

The first, and often the best way to understand any painting, is simply to look at it, describe to yourself the objects and the actions that you see.

In Night Fishing, for example, what you see is two spear fishermen hunting for fish from a small boat.

Lit by a mesmerizing light at the top of the canvas, one fisherman leans strongly into the water with his spear, hesitating before delivering the final blow to a fish, while the other leans languidly over the edge, looking anxious, a fishing line tied to his foot.

In the upper left, we can see two towers in a mass of purple shapes, while around the fisherman fly moths or insects lit by the light, curving over the back of one of them toward the right side of the frame, where two women, one with an ice cream cone and a bicycle, gesture to the men who don't seem to notice that much.

I find my first reactions to this entire painting to be a bit contradictory.

On the one hand, there seems to be a violent, foreboding character to the scene, the central focus is clearly the hand and the spear and the fish, but there also seems to be an equilibrium here in the balance of colors and figures, an almost magical view into an all too ordinary activity of fishing at night by lamplight.

And that brings us to the second way to examine this painting, understanding the actual content of this scene.

It is of course a night fishing scene, and that light at the top is either the moon, or an acetylene gas lamp, which spear fishermen use to lure fish to the surface of the water.

In the upper left, we can bet that those two towers in the mass of purple shapes are the Chateau Grimaldi, which by the way has since become the Picasso Museum.

And the water is the French Riviera at Antibes, a resort town in the southeast of France where Picasso was vacationing in the summer of 1939.

According to his secretary, Picasso had come across such fishing scenes walking the town at night after dinner, and proceeded to lock himself in his studio to work on this really large canvas, his largest since Guernica, which was completed two years before.

The form of night fishing is in keeping with Picasso's evolving style after Guernica, which incorporates holdover elements from the Cubist period in the flatness of the canvas and its emphasis on geometrical shapes, but it also pulls from the painter's excursions into both Surrealism and Primitivism, where faces become masks.

Indeed, in so much of this painting in the Cubist period and beyond, the key point to remember is that figures are painted not as they're perceived, but as they're conceived.

Picasso adds to each body elements that signify to other bodies and to the canvas as a whole.

For this reason, the critic Douglas Morgan is right to say that we can't call Picasso's people distorted or grotesque, because they haven't been distorted from anything.

There's no version of reality in which they're undistorted.

In night fishing, the people are not meant to be sympathized with, the normal reaction to an undistorted figure.

That naked seeing, that discernment, communicates his meanings more directly.

Well, there are a couple ways we can apply what we see in form and content to find out.

First, it's worth it to look at the historical context.

The painting was completed in August 1939, just a couple weeks before the outbreak of World War II.

Life in Europe was extraordinarily tense, and it was exceptionally so for Picasso, who was still reeling from the sad conclusion of another conflict, the Spanish Civil War and the defeat of the Republican forces by Francisco Franco and his Nationalist Army.

Picasso opposed Franco in his work, most notably in Guernica, which is one of the most startling anti-war paintings in history.

And in some ways, night fishing in Antibes can be seen as a companion piece to Guernica.

Instead of depicting all the violence of the former, Picasso shows a moment of hesitation.

The painter draws attention to this by making the hand gripping the spear the most realistic depiction in the canvas, and as we move outward from that focal point, things become increasingly warped.

And yet even with this hesitation, the scene is suffused with a sense of almost apocalyptic apprehension.

The light at the top resembles a spiraling comet as much as it does a moon or a lamp, juxtaposed next to a frightening blotch of red, the painting's only use of that color.

The moths are like portents buzzing around the heads of the fishermen, the jetty that the women stand on is unsteady, the town in the background is a mess.

These feelings could be oppression imaging of the coming destruction of Europe, certainly the feeling in the air was hard to miss.

But more likely, these dark undertones reflect an ongoing personal struggle with the loss of Picasso's native Spain to a vicious dictator.

But we're still missing one giant piece of the puzzle.

What was going on in the artist's own life.

In this respect, it's worth it to ask who these people could possibly represent.

While they both seek to get the attention of the fishermen, they do so in different ways.

The one closest to them, and in the closest proximity to the light, spreads her arms in a graceful pose.

The other is more blasé, licking her ice cream cone.

Her obviously, really very obviously, phallic head and pronounced breasts makes her the more sensuous of the two.

And though certainly a misogynistic distinction, these two women likely represent Picasso's wife, Olga, and a combination of his mistresses, Maria-Therese Walter and Dora Maar, who was with Picasso in Antibes.

And finally, the spearing fisherman can be read as Picasso himself, or perhaps the version of himself that he wants to be.

Headstrong, looking forward at his goals, undaunted by distraction.

But this man seems to be linked with his partner.

Perhaps Picasso's other half, a side of himself that is passive, that ties a fishing line to his toe and waits.

Whereas the first fisherman is defined by strong perpendicular lines, the second's a mass of curved lines and contorted limbs.

Remembering the historical context and the stark defiance that is Guernica, what we might be seeing here is Picasso coming to grips not only with a passivity and weakness in his nature, but the artist's impotence in the face of the world's brutality.

His mother had died at the start of the year, and Spain was lost.

Maybe this is why the boat floats in a weird no-man's land between the town and the women.

Maybe this is why the scene feels uneasy, despite being beautiful in its rendering.

There's more you can read into this painting and the rest of Picasso's work, but these five angles always start me down some fruitful paths, and each individual method of understanding is less important than the ways all of them connect and feed into each other.

The historical context usually informs the personal, and the form grows out of the content, and your first reaction is often surprisingly incisive if you take the time to voice it or write it down.

Picasso's legacy looms so large that the scholarship on him is vast and often contradictory, so my feeling is, why not decide the significance of his work for yourself?