One of the ugliest paintings on the art market sold for $179.4 million in 2015.
The painting is “Girl Before a Mirror” and the painter is Pablo Picasso. He’s a household name, and many consider him one of the great painters of the 20th century. He helped invent cubism, a style of art characterized by geometric shapes and multiple perspectives.
But Picasso represents a shift toward elitism in modern art that has separated painter, painting, and patron from each other in a manner antithetical to the purpose of art — experiencing beauty in a way that informs a person about the world.
Take “Girl Before a Mirror.” It’s a 1932 oil painting in the style of cubism, depicting a garbled image of a young woman looking at herself in a mirror. The colors and shapes conflict, causing spatial confusion and jarring visuals. It’s unclear exactly how the woman’s body is positioned in space and her anatomical proportions are exaggerated to the point of the grotesque. She has an oval face, a single sad tuft of yellow hair, a slouched form, and blank eyes.
It’s unattractive. Many argue beauty is subjective and every person sees beauty in different ways and in different things. That’s a larger discussion to be had, but few are the persons who would walk into an art museum, catch sight of this painting, and rush toward it breathless and in awe. That’s perhaps a simple understanding of beauty, but a nearly universal one. Most have experienced laying eyes on something so beautiful it eliminated the capacity for speech.
Picasso’s famous works do not provoke that reaction in the average viewer. And that separation from the average viewer is precisely the problem. There are people with art degrees or shelves upon shelves of art history books in their home who may find themselves struck dumb at the sight of a Picasso. But the average man does not know what experts say about the significance of Picasso’s work for Western art, or what the socio-political landscape of Picasso’s life looked like.
The average viewer just sees the woman’s deformed body, her sickly purple and yellow skin, and the dizzying shapes and colors in the background. It’s interesting, perhaps. Maybe it’s intriguing or thought-provoking. But it’s not beautiful, and no academic explanation of what cubism did for the modern Western view of beauty will convince a casual visitor of the Museum of Modern Art otherwise.
The trouble with “Girl Before a Mirror”is that no amount of academic expertise can make the background information of this painting rescue the visual. The subject of the painting is the 22-year-old woman with whom the 51-year-old Picasso secretly cheated on his wife for years.
Even if a critic were to argue this work is a commentary on the beauty of the female form or the complexity of a woman’s relationship with her appearance or any other such issue, the truth of the matter is that Picasso was inspired to paint this piece because he found a young woman more beautiful than the wife whom he had already committed to.
This matters because it illustrates that the true meaning of Picasso paintings like “Girl Before a Mirror” are only accessible to the elite, highly academic viewers of his works. The average viewer would likely never guess what inspired this piece and the complexity of the situation behind it. Many who reject a typical understanding of beauty argue art is just supposed to make you think deeply. But one can’t think deeply about something like “Girl Before a Mirror” if the true meaning is so elusive.
Since Picasso set the art world aflame with cubism and other absurd styles, the disconnect between the viewer of a piece of art and the impact of the art has only grown wider. Think of the brutalist metal sculptures in downtown spaces or Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain” — a urinal marketed as a piece of art. People looking at these things might have some intelligent thoughts after the meaning is explained to them, but by sight alone, these works of “art” provide no beauty.
Next time you find yourself scoffing at a pure blue canvas in a museum, thank Picasso.
