Q: Picasso is commonly thought of as the father of Cubism. Throughout his life, he continually invented new styles. In fact, his work was a continuous metamorphosis of styles. Is this the reason he is thought of as the most influential modern artist?

A: Picasso’s name has become synonymous with Modern Art; it is difficult, if not impossible, to think of one without the other. He may have been only 5’4” in height, but his influence towered over most of the other artists considered Modern Masters. Is that because he is the best artist of them all? Not necessarily, and one wants to avoid ranking artists as if it were a competition. The more curious issue is how Picasso became such a cultural institution in his own right. How, for instance, does he get dubbed “the father of Cubism” when the Cubist project was something he undertook in collaboration with Georges Braque? Cubism’s complexity was bigger and more groundbreaking than any one artist’s vision could contain, and I think the much more interesting story is how these two artists gave birth to it together, and how it was then disseminated in many stylistic directions developed by many artists. The tale of how Cubism grew and expanded is perhaps a bigger story than simply one of influence; it is more an example of a complex system that involved many dynamic elements and players, yet Picasso is the one whose name surfaces as the “originator.” Why does this twisted tale ultimately reduce to him? Perhaps it has something to do with the way his body of work adds up to a complex, non-totalizing whole, like a map of the Cubist project itself. For Picasso, style performs like Cubism by branching into many forking paths and acting out the principle of multiple perspectives.

From the Blue Period to the Rose, from Cubism’s embrace of the “primitive” to his Neo-Classical mannerism after Ingres, from hard-edge grid networks to his sensual, biomorphic nudes, from his precocious student work to the wildly exuberant and expressionistic late paintings, Picasso’s many styles certainly have something to offer everyone and constitute a mini-History of Art in microcosm. Taken in their totality, these many styles, along with the many media he tackled, often seem conflicting and at odds with each other, especially when he combines several in a single work or series. However, his “trickster” capacity to play one hand and then the other attests to another impulse, and that is to avoid being boxed in by the question of style itself. He once said:

"Basically I am a painter without style. Style is often something that locks the painter into the same vision, the same technique, the same formula during years and years, sometimes during one’s whole lifetime. One recognizes it immediately, but it’s always the same suit, or the same cut of cloth. There are, nevertheless, great painters with style. I myself thrash around too much, move too much. You see me here and yet I’m already changed. I’m already elsewhere. I’m never fixed and that’s why I have no style."

Of course, that artful dodging becomes his style. The desire to elude being defined by any stylistic designation makes Picasso more postmodern than might be suspected. What he embraces is closer to the stylistic pluralism that characterizes our own age rather than allegiance to any particular school or avant-garde movement modeled on competing “isms.” So once again this Modern Master manages to be “influential” even to a more contemporary, postmodern scene that eschews signature or period “style” in favor of destabilizing strategies, cultural diversity, and hybridity.

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