Austin Kleon

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Picasso’s owl

a photo of Pablo Picasso with his owl
Picasso with his owl, 1946 (photo by Michel Sima, who brought him the owl)

As I have become obsessed with the owls that live outside our house, watching them, photographing them, drawing them, I’ve been delighted to discover the story of Pablo Picasso’s owl, as told in Françoise Gilot’s wonderful memoir, Life With Picasso:

Pablo loved to surround himself with birds and animals. In general they were exempt from the suspicion with which he regarded his other friends. While Pablo was still working at the Musée d’Antibes, [Michel] Sima had come to us one day with a little owl he had found in a corner of the museum. One of his claws had been injured. We bandaged it and gradually it healed. We bought a cage for him and when we returned to Paris we brought him back with us and put him in the kitchen with the canaries, the pigeons, and the turtledoves.

She describes the owl’s behavior:

We were very nice to him but he only glared at us. Any time we went into the kitchen, the canaries chirped, the pigeons cooed and the turtledoves laughed but the owl remained stolidly silent or, at best, snorted. He smelled awful and ate nothing but mice. Since Pablo’s atelier was overrun with them, I set several traps. Whenever I caught one, I brought it to the owl. As long as I was in the kitchen he ignored the mouse and me. He saw perfectly well in the daytime, of course, in spite of the popular legend about owls, but he apparently preferred to remain aloof. As soon as I left the kitchen, even if only for a minute, the mouse disappeared. The only trace would be a little ball of hair which the owl would regurgitate

She then describes Picasso’s weird friendship with the owl:

Every time the owl snorted at Pablo he would shout, “Cochon, Merde,” and a few other obscenities, just to show the owl that he was even worse mannered than he was. He used to stick his fingers between the bars of the cage and the owl would bite him, but Pablo’s fingers, though small, were tough and the owl didn’t hurt him. Finally the owl would let him scratch his head and gradually he came to perch on his finger instead of biting it, but even so, he still looked very unhappy. Pablo did a number of drawings and paintings of him and several lithographs as well.

I love the paintings, but also the sculptures:

And these plates:

I should also note that Gilot herself has painted owls:

And that she is still alive and painting! Here is an interview from 2019 in which she talks about the memoir.

In another photograph by Michel Sima (he published a book, Picasso à Antibes, in 1948), you can see one of the owl paintings in the background:

Sima himself is an interesting character: when he met Picasso, he had only recently returned from the death camps, and was recovering from poor health. Picasso convinced him to take up photography. You can learn more about their friendship in Gilot’s memoir and the documentary, Picasso and Sima, Antibes, 1946:

PS. Here’s Picasso’s self-portrait as an owl:

400 years of collage

“An Art Revolution, Made With Scissors and Glue” is a wonderfully-produced NYTimes “Close Read” column by Jason Farago, looking at Juan Gris’s 1914 “Still Life: The Table,” and talking about the Cubists’ use of collage and its impact on art.

My only quibble is with this sentence:

Okay, maybe it’s a little more than a quibble. I’ll let curator Patrick Elliott explain with this excerpt from his essay in the catalog for a thoughtful show I saw at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, “Cut And Paste: 400 Years of Collage”:

The idea of collage is so brilliant, so simple, so rich and imaginative in every way, that you might wonder why nobody had thought of it before. Well in fact they had, but historians of modern art have tended to ignore anything before 1912. Books on collage scarcely mention the fact that collage has a history stretching back hundreds of years. Almost all of the exhibitions of collage held around the world have started with Cubist collage. If pre-modern collage is discussed, it is treated dismissively as a hobby, as the world of amateurs, folk artists, women and children, or something the well-off did in private, at the dining-room table and showed only to family and friends.

This is a point I made in Newspaper Blackout: We think of collage and cut-up writing as a 20th-century invention, but there’s actually a 250-year-old history of cutting up texts, going at least as far back as Caleb Whitefoord skipping newspaper columns in the 1760s and Thomas Jefferson cutting up the gospels 50 years later. This work was done either in a pub to amuse friends (Whitefoord) or in private study (Jefferson), but it still happened.

I think the message of Farago’s piece — that we can all use the revolutionary tool of collage to process our overwhelming world —  is strengthened by acknowledging this preceding work that is usually ignored, like Victorian scrapbooks, mosaic work, découpage, paper collé, etc. The innovation of Picasso, Braque, and Gris, was to do this thing that people were already doing, but do it as Art with a capital A. Now, we can take collage back from Art, and back into our spaces, where it first begin.

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Read more posts about collage

The Vampire Test

Here’s an animated excerpt from my audiobook about a test that will tell you who and what you should let in and out of your life. (Also on Instagram.)

https://twitter.com/austinkleon/status/1336388678122344450

It may be easier or harder to practice during a pandemic, depending on your situation. (I often joke in talks, “Children don’t count. Their job is to suck you dry.”)

I got the idea for the test from a story in John Richardson’s A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932 (Vol 3). Brancusi, who’d had several of his sculptural ideas ripped off from Pablo, “was anything but an admirer of Picasso or his work”:

[He] disapproved of [one of] of Picasso’s fundamental characteristics—one that was all too familiar to the latter’s fellow artists and friends—his habit of making off not so much with their ideas as with their energy. “Picasso is a cannibal,” Brancusi said. He had a point. After a pleasurable day in Picasso’s company, those present were apt to end up suffering from collective nervous exhaustion. Picasso had made off with their energy and would go off to his studio and spend all night living off it. Brancusi hailed from vampire country and knew about such things, and he was not going to have his energy or the fruits of his energy appropriated by Picasso.

I also cribbed a little from this Lynda Barry interview:

My friend Frank Chimero pointed out this is also #3 on Milton Glaser’s 10 Rules for Life & Work,  “SOME PEOPLE ARE TOXIC AVOID THEM.”

[T]here is a test to determine whether someone is toxic or nourishing in your relationship with them. Here is the test: You have spent some time with this person, either you have a drink or go for dinner or you go to a ball game. It doesn’t matter very much but at the end of that time you observe whether you are more energized or less energized. Whether you are tired or whether you are exhilarated. If you are more tired then you have been poisoned. If you have more energy you have been nourished. The test is almost infallible and I suggest that you use it for the rest of your life.

What’s really funny is that the book came out in 2014, way before the What We Do In The Shadows show, which features one of my all-time favorite characters, Colin Robinson, a self-proclaimed “energy vampire”:

You gotta look out for these people. Once you start noticing them… they’re everywhere!

Related reading: Human vantablack, finding nourishment vs. identifying poison

Drawing with light


The story goes that when photographer Gjon Mili visited Picasso’s studio in 1949, he showed the artist these photos he’d taken in 1945 of Carol Lynne skating with flashlights embedded in her boots:

Mili suggested Picasso draw with a flashlight in a darkened room. What happened next, as detailed in LIFE, Jan 30, 1950:

Picasso gave Mili 15 minutes to try one experiment. He was so fascinated by the result… that he posed for five sessions, projecting 30 drawings of centaurs, bulls, Greek profiles and his signature…. Mili took his photographs in a darkened room, using two cameras, one for side view, another for front view…. By leaving the shutters open, he caught the light streaks swirling through space. By setting off a 1/10,000-second strobe light, he caught Picasso’s intense, agile figure as it flailed away at the drawings.

You can see their further experiments, many in color, with Picasso playing with drawing in 3-D, here.

Mili did the light trick with many other kinds of artists:

Henri Matisse, sculptor Henry Moore, and violinist Jascha Heifetz

There are lots of his curiosities in the Mili LIFE archives. Here’s an image of a housewife ironing from a Sept. 9, 1946 article on “Easier Housekeeping”:

Here’s a picture of Mili from the table of contents:

Going through the LIFE archives is a total trip. I feel like somebody could write a whole book based solely on the juxtaposition of these two images and their captions. (“Squatting in the darkness, Picasso draws a distorted spatial centaur.” “Pattern of light streaks shows how an efficient housewife makes a bed.”)

More on Mili: “Hands in Motion,” and his books: Photographs and Recollections, Picasso’s 3rd Dimension, and The Magic of the Opera

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