The Social Network of Picasso

“The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider's web.”

                                                               Pablo Picasso

Last week, I braved the thirteen-degree temperatures and headed to New York City.  I didn’t really mind the cold. I love New York in any season, whether it’s the oppressive heat and humidity of August or the frozen concrete of January.  Walking in midtown, I observed women who had pulled their fur, Anna Karenina hats, out of storage and doormen bundled in heavy wool coats, just carrying on, business as usual.  The City is always new, but somehow always the same.

My destination was the Museum of Modern Art, to see the “Inventing Abstraction 1910-1925” exhibit, celebrating the early history of abstract art and how it revolutionized art, music, poetry, dance and design in the 20^th century.

Abstraction is considered by many to be modernism’s greatest innovation, encapsulating the moment when a vast group of artists broke with more than 500 years of figurative painting tradition and “dispensed with any recognizable subject matter.”  The result of this revolutionary moment in history is that it became fundamental to our concept of art to this very day.

Sonia Delauney-Terk

Binding for the book Les Paques 1913

Paper collage on book binding

Beautifully arranged and expertly curated by Leah Dickerman, it draws on MOMA's vast collection, but the most interesting aspect of the show, for me, is how compellingly it demonstrates that within just a few short years, abstraction was embraced by dozens of practitioners, spanning the United States, Western Europe and Russia.  What’s more, the evidence strongly suggests that abstraction was not developed by just a few individual thought leaders, but rather an extensive network of painters, musicians, poets, photographers, film makers, choreographers and sculptors - incubating and cross-pollinating the idea collectively.  The result is what we would call today, Disruptive Innovation.

Kandinsky
Impression III (Concert)
1912

The entrance gallery of the show presents a 25 by 16 foot chart illustrating the surprisingly fluid interaction between 84 artists.  I was mesmerized by this “social network” chart and studied it longer than any of the individual paintings.  As a brand marketer who spends much of my professional life trying to anticipate and facilitate Innovation, I was fascinated to better understand how this unique moment in history was possible.

Click here to interactively explore these connections yourself, red indicates more than 24 different connections per artist.

Clearly, the advent of communication and transportation in the beginning of the 20^th century enabled artists from different disciplines, countries and walks of life to process and pollinate ideas much more vigorously than was originally thought.  The catalog describes artists visiting each other's studios and country homes, including boozy road trips that all played a role in facilitating the dialog.

Most of all, the traditional idea of "genius as an inspired loner,” has been dispelled, and more accurately recognized to be found in groups, arising out of social interaction; conversation, sharing ideas, validation and competition.  While many of the Abstractionists claimed ownership of the concept, sometimes pre-dating their paintings as a way to stake their claim, it was truly a collective invention that occurred spontaneously.  

However, as in all innovation, there were key accelerators, those individuals who recognize an emerging trend and proclaim its significance to a broader audience.  The author Malcolm Gladwell uses the term “connectors” to describe these accelerators; often charismatic people with a wealth of contacts dispersed among many different social circles.  It appears from MOMA’s investigation that Alfred Stieglitz in New York, Pablo Picasso in France and Wassily Kandinsky in Russia, were among the strongest social “connectors,” facilitating the network and the concept of abstraction across a wide ranging community.

The show made abundantly clear to me that the more we expand our network, exchange with others and cross-pollinate our perspectives, the greater our opportunity to experience something fresh and significant. 

Since the show, I have been reflecting on the extensive social media channels we have at our disposal compared to those early 20^th century artists, and ask myself, are my social networks expanding my horizons?  Aren’t my LinkedIn contacts primarily clients or marketing professionals like myself?  Isn’t my Facebook crowd mostly old friends and people I went to school with?  Aren’t the news sites I read pretty much framing the issues of the day through my particular political worldview? 

While today's forms of social media represent a technological quantum leap from the networks of the Abstractionists, they are quite often safety zones that keep us in our worlds of “like” minded people.  As American culture becomes more and more stratified and segmented through race, education, income and politics, I wonder if our social networks today are as conducive to the innovation experienced by the Abstractionists a century ago?

Reflecting on this has confirmed my resolve to expand my network -  get more creative with my connections, diversify my social circles and invigorate my news and information gathering.  

Isn’t that what the Abstractionists would do?

Are social networks expanding your horizons?  In what ways do you believe they facilitate, or limit, the kind of disruptive innovation experienced by the Abstractionists?  

“What do you think an artist is? ...he is a political being, constantly aware of the heart breaking, passionate, or delightful things that happen in the world, shaping himself completely in their image. Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.”

                                                                    Pablo Picasso