Focus on Portrait of Ambroise Vollard (Picasso) and analyze the Description.
The painting is a portrait of Ambroise Vollard and displays Picasso's analytical approach to Cubism. In contrast to earlier, more traditional portraits of Vollard, created by Cézanne and Renoir, Picasso's painting uses sharp, geometric shapes and planes to convey the form of the subject. The facial features, such as the eyebrows, nose, mouth and beard are conveyed using short, broken lines. The focal point of the painting is Vollard's large, bald head, which has been highlighted by the use of gold in an otherwise mainly brown surround. In this portrait, Vollard is depicted wearing a brown suit. In contrast to his face, the surroundings have disintegrated into indistinguishable shapes. Vollard was notorious for falling sleep in company and this painting accurately represents this habit by depicting the head drooped and the eyes closed.Picasso's portrait offers a realistic resemblance of Vollard's appearance, in particular, his heavy eyelids, wide nose and compressed mouth. However, the face has been deconstructed, allowing the viewer to put together the image and view the varying planes simultaneously. Each plane flows freely with movement and layers with the next. It is Vollard's face that acts as a magnet and draws these planes together.
The Pushkin Museum says of the portrait, "There is no single source of light in the picture: each of the elements has a special, "internal" light, the vibration of which makes you perceive the work as the pictorial equivalent of the world in continuous motion and creating from colourful matter, as if from the fragments of a cracked mirror, the unique titanic image of Vollard."Jonathan Jones for The Guardian described the portrait as a "kind of caricature" and opined that, "The more you look for a picture, the more insidiously Picasso demonstrates that life is not made of pictures but of unstable relationships between artist and model, viewer and painting, self and world."
Picasso said of the painting, "The most beautiful woman who ever lived never had her portrait painted, drawn or engraved any oftener than Vollard - by Cézanne, Renoir, Rouault, Bonnard... But my cubist portrait of him is the best one of all."
Cubism The Guardian Pushkin Museum Ambroise Vollard