Today is truly our day of culture. We head out first to the Picasso museum. This is a lovely example of realising you actually have very little idea about an artist you assume you know a lot about.
There’s a (surprising? Not surprising?) focus on his earlier, less abstract work, which is really interesting to see - he’s very good at it! I’m a big fan of the series of pigeon paintings.
There’s also a lot on his other media, especially his ceramics, which really do span the extremes of quite beautiful to hilariously childish.
We do of course come to the more abstract stuff towards the end, but what’s really remarkable here is the number of variations and studies towards single pieces - the work put in to get it just right. I know this is not unique to Picasso, and it’s not that this was a particularly conscious thought on my part, but I can imagine it’s easy to dismiss the more abstract works as… easier? Less effortful? Thrown together? To see that to be so clearly not the case is wonderful.
That being said, if I spent a week not doing the work I was meant to be doing and turned round to my manager and said I’d spent it painting pigeons, I don’t think I’d have the career Picasso did.