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

                                                              

Influenzes

“If you wanna talk about influence, man, then you've got to realize that influence is not influence. It's simply someone's idea going through my new mind."

                                                                          Jean-Michel Basquiat

                               

During these first weeks of the New Year, I’ve been flat on my back.  What started out as a year filled with promise, ambitious resolutions and over-achieving to-do lists, quickly devolved into two weeks of Influenza.  You know, the kind where you’re too sick to read, watch TV or even sleep.  You just lay there, staring out the window or locking onto objects in your immediate visual periphery.

In my state of torpor, I have been studying a painting of mine that hangs on the wall facing the bed that has sheltered me while I recover.  This painting is one of the first I ever made using encaustic paints, a medium made of beeswax, damar resin and rich pigments of color.

Linda Povey - Lemon Song
encaustic on panel
6x6 inches
2012

As I reflected on it, I began to ask myself, where did this painting come from?  What influences came into my brain, travelled through my consciousness and then somehow came out through my fingertips?  As the great American designer, Charles Eames, once said, “To be realistic one must always admit the influence of those who have gone before.”

On the surface of it, I can say that this painting was made from a place of exuberance.  I was ecstatic to discover the delicious, tactile sensuality of the encaustic paint.  The smooth way it came off the brush and onto the substrate.  Furthermore, I was delighted to be back on my beloved Cape Cod once again, painting with my artistic partner in crime, Sharon Hayes.  Having just turned 50, I felt confident and optimistic about my life, and I think the painting reflects the joy I felt in making it.

But as I reflected on the painting more deeply, I began to consider other artistic influences.  I have always been drawn to Mark Rothko, even as a child visiting the Philadelphia Museum of Art.  Rothko, an Abstract Expressionist painter, believed in color as "merely an instrument" to get to the "basic human emotions."  He was an early pioneer of the Color Field school of painting, which is defined as painting "large fields of flat, solid color spread across or stained into the canvas creating areas of unbroken surface and a flat picture plane."  Something about these strongly emotional, unapologetic paintings has always captivated me.

Mark Rothko - Untitled
Oil on canvas
8'8" x 11' 9"
1968

Visiting my favorite Rothko at MOMA, 2011
Untitled - Blue and Yellow
7'4" x 5'10"
Oil on canvas
1969

Another influence in my artistic journey was the wonderful experience I had working with Stephen Haller at Stephen Haller Fine Art in the 1980’s, when it was still on West Broadway.  Steve had a singular vision for his gallery; to cultivate and nurture artist's whose work was “emotional, gestural and dedicated to driving the image to its minimal essence.”  

One of the gallery's shining stars, and represented by Stephen Haller for over thirty years, is Ronnie Landfield.   A next-generation Color Field painter emerging in the 1960’s, Landfield sums up the essence of his work beautifully, “Spirituality and feeling are the basic subjects of my work.  They are depictions of intuitive expressions using color as language, and the landscape (God’s earth) as a metaphor for the arena of life.”

Ronnie Landfield - Rite of Spring
acrylic on canvas
79 x 112 inches
1985

Ronnie Landfield - New Day Dawning
acrylic on canvas
112 x 132 inches
2001

One of the most interesting elements in his work is the linkage between Color Field and Chinese Landscape painting, with their distinctive, hard-edged borders.  Ronnie once shared with me that this provided a context, or a way to frame the complexity of emotions within the borders.  I realized how many of my own works over the years have incorporated the borders inspired by Ronnie Landfield and the Chinese Landscape painters before him.

Linda Povey
The Hi-Lo Mix is Very Now
water color and mixed media on paper
5 x 7 inches
2007

Linda Povey
Copper Pennies
collage and mixed media on paper
4 x 6 inches
2012

I am grateful for Ronnie's inspiration and still proudly own a drawing he did for me in appreciation of my contribution to his successful solo show in 1987.

The artist whose work I am most inspired by currently is among the latest generation of Color Field painters, Joanne Mattera.  A talented painter and journalist, she has written the seminal book, The Art of Encaustic Painting, as well as a highly engaging blog on the global art scene, JoanneMattera ArtBlog.

Mattera's Silk Road series alternates thin, vertical and horizontal layers of encaustic paint, creating a subtle grid, like a weave, or a piece of raw silk.  

Joanne Mattera - Silk Road 146
encaustic on panel
16 x 16 inches
2010

Joanne Mattera - Silk Road 107
encaustic on panel
12 x 12 inches
2010

Beyond the technical achievement of these paintings, which is significant, is a luminosity which must be seen in person to be fully appreciated.  Mattera describes her work as “lush minimalism,” using a grid pattern "the way classical poets used rigorous rhyme schemes to impose elegant order onto an otherwise messy outpouring of emotion.”  Again, the structure of a grid, or a border, provides the necessary framework to express complex emotions.

It occurred to me that ultimately I had come full circle, right back to the initial joy I had experienced in painting Lemon Song.  Rothko reflected in his final years that his interest was in "expressing human emotions — tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.  The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them.”  Maybe it's just as simple as that.

I recently discovered that it was Stephen Haller who gave Joanne Mattera her very first solo exhibition back in 1995.  I thought there was a nice symmetry to that.  Again and again, the threads of our influence overlap and intertwine, artist to artist, generation to generation, producing an ever-evolving tapestry of what Jean-Michel Basquiat called, "someone's idea going through my new mind."