Picasso and Artistic Variation
Picasso was obsessed with Manet´s painting from 1863, “Lunch on the Grass” (“Déjeuner sur l´herbe”). This may be witnessed in the great exhibition that just opened in Parisian Musée d’Orsay. Until February 1st 2009, more than 40 of the variations, copies, interpretations, whatever you wish to call them, made by Picasso, can be seen circling around Manet’s painting that has, by the way, also been an inspiration for Jean Renoir, who made a film with the same title.
An obsession, one of many that came from Picasso, who often made several of the works in one day. And you understand why the master wrote – on the back of an envelope – probably in 1932: “When I see Manet’s Lunch on the Grass I tell myself there is pain ahead”.
Artistic repetitions and variations of the same theme in documentary films… Where do we find them? I had this thought when I watched Picasso. I thought of Jørgen Leth and his two America-films, “66 Scenes from America” and “New Scenes from America”. The camerawork of Dan Holmberg is in both cases much more linked to visual art than to narrative (literary) structures. I thought of Steen Møller Rasmussen, also a Danish documentarian, who has searched to catch New York, inspired heavily by Leth as a filmmaker and Robert Frank as a filmmaker and photographer. I thought of Sergey Dvortsevoy and his Russian images, full of atmospheres and different moods, as are the Danes I mention above. And as are Picasso´s variations. Could it be possible to talk more about film and (visual) art?
