Title of Artwork: “Ma Jolie”
Artwork by Pablo Picasso
Year Created 1911-1912
Summary of Ma Jolie
New York’s MoMA defines Picasso’s artwork as “A kind of stand-in for the woman who can barely be seen [and as such it is] one of the most complex, abstract, and esoteric images of its day” in their catalogue………. Its study of visual space is obscured by the dark palette and the intricate stacking of multi-fractured planes in this piece. This deconstructed portrait’s topic may be deduced only from the composition’s dense use of triangle shapes in the middle, the guitar’s six string lines, and the treble clef in the bottom centre. The portrait is only readable due of the centre figure’s “A narrow pyramidal ‘scaffold’ structure of the central figure [that] ‘anchors’ the faceted planes” according to Frascina. “Ma jolie” or “my pretty girl” is a reference to a famous music hall song refrain as well as Picasso’s nickname for Marcelle Humbert, the woman who was Picasso’s girlfriend. Even yet, the work’s black palette and abrasive fragmentation undermined any romantic or intimate undertones, transforming it into what Picasso termed “a sum of destructions” a possible allusion to the transition from Analytic to Synthetic Cubism, which was more easily grasped.
All About Ma Jolie
A return to abstraction, but with a semblance of representation, this piece exemplifies Picasso’s “high” Analytic approach. E. H. Gombrich, a renowned art historian, summarised Picasso’s intentions when he wrote: “figured [the audience] wasn’t there to learn the basics from his works. As a part of this elaborate game, he asked them to help him create the notion of a solid physical thing from the shards he had scattered about on his painting “is a good example of this. He went on to state the following: “Painting’s fundamental contradiction, which portrays depth on a surface, has been addressed by artists throughout history. Cubism was an effort to find new ways to exploit this contradiction rather than just brush it over as an aesthetic choice “‘s a good example of this. Although “Ma jolie” was completed at the conclusion of a two-year period of intense creative effort, it marks the pinnacle of Analytic Cubism; it reflects a stylistic high point from which the shift to Synthetic Cubism was all-but required in search of “new effects”.
Information Citations
En.wikipedia.org, https://en.wikipedia.org/.
