Picasso and Delacroix
Earlier I wrote about Picasso and Manet, one of several parts of the exhibition ”Picasso et les maitres”. Now, back in Paris for some days, Louvre was the location to visit to see the master’s variation of the Delacroix painting from 1834, ”Les femmes d’Alger”. Pablo Picasso made from December 1954 to February 1955 15 paintings and a sketchbook of drawings, all related to the old master and very much dedicated to his good friend Henri Matisse and his odalisques. And of course to his obsession with women.
I repeat myself from the first exhibition: 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.
