Picasso's Works at Metropolitan Museum of Art Essay

Picasso's Works at Metropolitan Museum of Art - Essay Example The essay "Picasso's Works at Metropolitan Museum of Art" explores the famous museum and analyze Pablo Picasso's artworks. Spanish-born artist Pablo Picasso is One of the undisputed masters of modern art. His initial Blue Period of 1901-04 is marked by the monochromatic focus on that particular color and subject-matters defined by ‘a particular cast of characters: lonely, suffering, poverty-stricken outcasts from society’. This morphed into the brightened tones of the Rose Period lasting two years, which featured the first appearance of circus performers in his paintings. Yet a transitory revolution was on its way, sparked by his association with Braque, whom he met upon moving to Paris. By 1910, Analytical Cubism was erupting, defined by the pictorial deconstruction of an object to produce a conceptual (as oppose to perceptual) image of an object. After two more years came Synthetic Cubism, with its revolutionary collages. After World War I Picasso broke with Braque and began moving towards Surrealism. The significance of this cannot be underestimated, as ‘the Surrealist movement moved Picasso in a direction including new imagery and vocabulary for emotional expression, and he incorporate violence, psychic fears, and eroticism in his works’. This is the period of the painting hung before me at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1934’s Girl Reading at a Table. Color is my first impression—the warmth of the red, orange and yellow against a black background with hints of blue and green. A woman with white skin and hair and an elaborate green garland around her head is reading at a tall and simple table. One feather-esque hand touches her face while the other secures the book that so thoroughly captures her attention. Her fair skin features slight echoes of pink on her cheeks and neck, and her head is at such an angle that her pale hair falls before her eyes. Also on the desk is an amorphic yellow lamp and a tall and curving po tted plant in a brown container rises from the ground. This still thriving plant and the wreath adorning her hair bring a form of nature inside this space. Although the contents of the room are compressed within the frame of the painting, there is no awkwardness in the composition. The straight table legs are wonderfully offset by the gorgeously flowing lines of the red and orange dress as well as the plant and the yellow light flowing from the small lamp that brightens the dark night scene. Yet there is something young about this woman at the oversized reading table, and that is