So spoke Picasso in 1935, reflecting on his art. Although many artists progress through a painting by stages, always refining an initial idea, Picasso’s way of painting is radically different. After beginning a painting he proceeded to change the painting completely, altering the entire composition as he added and subtracted elements according to what he felt necessary. He placed a high aesthetic value on complexity and ambiguity, which were previously considered to have a negative aesthetic value. In these ways he was like a chess grand master, using his knowledge, creativity, and unique intuition to achieve a high aesthetic ideal.

In chess, grand masters use a positional style of play. Instead of choosing intermediate goals and devising a plan to achieve them, they make small steps to improve their overall position. In doing this, they are using an aesthetic method of evaluation. "The notion of the value of a position is nothing else than an aesthetic evaluation of its beauty... a high value assigned to a given position merely signifies its greater predisposition towards future development." They must use their expertise, creative abilities, and originality to evaluate and realize their positional advantages. Because evaluation is inseparable from implementation, the positional style is highly subjective.

The process of painting can be described in a similar manner. Just as there are different aesthetic methods through which we can evaluate art, there are also several methods, or styles, of creating a painting, and the aesthetic evaluation and artistic creation are intrinsically connected. The aesthetic methods that the artist uses when developing a picture — when choosing the composition, chromatic tonality, luminosity, etc. — are inexorably linked with the methods he uses when he actually paints it on the canvas.

Conventionally, artists painted what they saw, trying to imprint on a canvas the exact image that their eyes perceived. This is referred to as representational or objective painting. In representational painting, the artist already knows what he wants to paint and how the painting should look when he is finished. The artist usually begins by laying down a light wash that includes all the elements of the picture in a fixed composition. The artist then goes back into the painting, retracing the lines and forms of what he did before, adding subtleties of color and texture, refining the whole painting. The composition rarely changes from what it was initially. According to this view, the value of a painting rests on how accurately it represents a visual image.

Just as the physical method of painting on the canvas is traditional, so is the aesthetic method of creating the image: the composition of this kind of painting usually consists of elements that combine harmoniously to form an integrated picture. They will have a predominant center of interest, using elements of order such as repetition, similarity, contrast, symmetry, and sequence minimize the tension of the picture. The aesthetic value of elements such as conflict, ambiguity, and imperfection is considered negative.

In a different method of painting, an artist might begin with a certain idea, but finish with a painting that is completely different to what he had initially pictured. In this style, an artist lays down a foundation, and proceeds to drastically alter elements of both tone and composition according to what he feels will enhance the painting. The artist is taking steps to improve the overall "position" of the picture. The artist evaluates the painting aesthetically as he is working on it, and in assigning a high value to tension and ambiguity, he might proceed to move an object from one place to another in order to suit his purposes. He might, conversely, give a high value to harmony, and proceed to change his painting to achieve such an effect. Whether the artist regards complexity or simplicity as his ideal, he will continue to radically alter the painting until he achieves what he believes is the best possible position. It is this style of painting that most of the modern grand masters of art have used to create their work.

Cezanne was among the first to use this procedure when he painted. He spent so much time on his paintings, continually reworking and recreating compositions, that the fruits he used in his still lives would rot and he was forced to use wooden ones. We see evidence of this constant reworking of his paintings even in their final version — the edges of a table are usually in different planes, the light seems to come from many different angles, symmetrical objects are not rendered symmetrically, the perspective seems off. When first Cezanne exhibited paintings created in this manner, he was mocked and thought of as clumsy and careless.

While at the Salons des Impressionists his contemporaries received recognition and praise, his work was consistently rejected by the dealers and collectors. Clearly the aesthetic methods that Cezanne used when choosing the elements of his paintings, both compositionally and in the rendering, were not understood. However, he was not haphazard in his work — every piece of the picture was intentional. "Every mark on the canvas had to prove itself, " and if it was found incongruous with the rest, it was eliminated. Only later was his genius recognized, and his work gave birth to one of the most innovative, groundbreaking, yet hotly debated movements of modern art: cubism.

Picasso, the co-creator of cubism, epitomizes the aforementioned method of painting. We can see it through his studies and sketches when comparing them to the final result. He himself describes the transformations of his paintings in a conversation with a friend:

Perhaps the best way of appreciating the drastic transformations that a picture underwent as Picasso worked on it is by tracing the progress through one of Picasso’s paintings. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, widely heralded as one of the most seminal works of the twentieth century and considered to be the first cubist painting, underwent many transformations. Andre Salmon, a critic-poet who was also a personal friend of Picasso, wrote an eye-witness account of the stages through which this painting passed through before reaching its final form. The painting was supposed to represent a scene from a parlor of a turn-of -the-century brothel in Barcelona. It consisted of some clothed male figures, patrons of the house, and five nude women, eagerly entertaining the men. Salmon next saw the painting as six large female nudes delineated with severe accent, with the lightness of the previous picture gone. According to Salmon, the faces were neither tragic nor impassioned; he described them as "...masks almost completely devoid of all humanity." However, the canvas did not remain in this state for very long. "Soon Picasso assaulted the faces, placing most of their noses front view in the shape of isosceles triangles. . . Soon afterward, these noses appeared white and yellow; touches of blue and yellow gave volume to some of the bodies."

Picasso said of that same painting:

Why did it change? How did Picasso decide that the men should not be there, that the noses should be in front view and not in profile, that the chromatics be in different colors than what they were before? How did Picasso decide which elements to eliminate, which to preserve? Although we cannot have definite answers to these questions, it is certain that he used a rigorous aesthetic method of evaluation in order to create. Everything in his painting is deliberate.

The process of painting is highly subjective. It is impossible to separate the concepts of aesthetic value that an artist uses when deciding how to proceed in a painting from the actual act of painting. Therefore we cannot ascribe "correct" aesthetic values to Picasso’s paintings. The evaluation is inseparable from the implementation. In Picasso’s words: "How can you expect an onlooker to live a picture of mine as I lived it? A picture comes to me from miles away: who is to say from how far away I sensed it, saw it, painted it..."

Throughout the Demoiselles, Picasso continually shifts his ground as far as visual conventions are concerned. He depicted the female figure was as never before: heads were colossal, deep-hewn and suggestive of anything but female delicacy, and there was something disjunctive in the way in which the parts of the body were put together. There is no one perspective from which we see the image — rather, the painting portrays several perspectives at once. The intensity of the subject matter, coupled with the ascending complexity of the picture language, tore down a tradition of art that had ruled since the Renaissance.

Picasso was hesitant to exhibit this painting, and the few friends who were allowed to see it were dismayed. They saw the painting as the end of something, and his friends could only read it in terms of what was lost. However, in retrospective we can say that the Demoiselles is also the beginning of a new kind of art. George Braque was captivated by the power of the painting, and soon he together with Picasso began to work out the implications of Cubism. This new art involved observing reality from different points of view simultaneously, shifting the different planes and compressing them into one surface. As Cezanne demonstrated, "there were to be no bounding lines to truth, but a form emerging from all different aspects intuited together."

Picasso has given a high aesthetic value to complexity, in contrast to traditional theories of aesthetics which consider it a negative. Likewise, he appreciates the aesthetic values of tension, conflict, and vividness. While Birkoff finds the ambiguity of a rectangle that is nearly but not quite a square to be unpleasant, Picasso goes in the opposite direction to declare that sometimes, the best way of representing roundness is to paint it as a square. The overriding factor in these compositions is integrative: Picasso paid attention not only to the material and positional parameters, but also to the relationships between these. This is true not only in Cubism, it applies to all of his paintings. In reference to his later work, in which his depictions of people and objects are severely distorted, Picasso stated:

This integrative approach is not only part of the evaluation of a finished work, but is fundamental to the physical process of painting. Picasso, like Cezanne, made sure that everything in his picture had a purpose. In order to reach the point of object purposefulness, he had to change his paintings constantly:

  When you begin a picture, you often make some pretty discoveries. You must be on guard against these. Destroy the thing, do it over several times. In each destroying of a beautiful discovery, the artist does not really suppress it, but rather transforms it, condenses it, makes it more substantial.  

Picasso aims at making every element of a painting "substantial". His quest for perfection in a painting was never over, therefore he did not consider any of his work finished. For Picasso, to finish a work was to kill it, to rid it of its soul, to give it its final blow: the most unfortunate one for the painter as well as for the picture.’’ There was always room for improvement. Picasso stated that it was rare when he could prevent himself from taking a thing up again an unlimited number of times, until it became an obsession. And the better the painting, the more room for improvement there was. This reflects the great predisposition towards future development inherent in Picasso’s work — a painting always had potential for betterment in Picasso’s mind.

This seminal quality of Picasso makes his work profoundly intriguing. The predispositions towards development intrinsic to the work also appeal to the predispositions of the observer. In this sense, the act of aesthetic appreciation becomes a re-creation of the artist’s creative act. As Picasso said, a painting lives according to the person who is looking at it, and it changes according to the state of mind of the observer. Because different people have different predispositions, and those predispositions are with them when they regard a work of art, the same painting will be different for each individual. It can even be different for the same person at different times. When evaluating a painting, we bring with us our past experiences, our present mood, our particular knowledge, as well as our psychological proclivities. The process of aesthetic appreciation is highly subjective, so it is impossible to assign a definite, overriding value to any kind of art. Picasso’s art continues to engage us, drawing countless admirers and critics, and this is perhaps the best evidence for its aesthetic value.

Birkoff, George. Aesthetic Measure. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1933.

Chipp, Herschel B. Theories of Modern Art. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968.

Katsenelinboigen, Aron. Selected Topics in Indeterministic Svstems. Seaside, CA: Intersystems Publications, 1989.

Picasso, Pablo. From Picasso: A Centennial Selection, Galerie Beyeler Basel, 1981.

Pioch, Nicolas in "Les Demoiselles d’Avignonn, Web Museum, 27 August 1995,

http://sirio.cineca.it/wm/paint/auth/picasso/people/avignorme World Wide Web.

Russel, John. The Meanings of Modern Art, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1981.

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