The Malaysian Insider :: Features
The Malaysian Insider :: Features |
| Posted: 09 Oct 2012 08:26 AM PDT  Pablo Ruiz Picasso. Sure enough, she does so with their children in tow. Françoise, 40 years younger than Picasso, had discovered that he had another love interest and had intended to keep both women, to let them share him as he had done so with other women in the past. Picasso was shocked by her move, as throughout his life he was the one who initiated the leaving when it came to relationships. The world-famous artist then had to deal with utter loneliness – though not for long – and the ghost of Françoise's presence in their home. Picasso was a man destined for glory. His mother María Picasso y López, perhaps with more than a doting eye for her only son born on October 25, 1881, once said to him: "If you are a soldier, you will be a general. If you are a priest, you will be a pope." It's said when Picasso was a toddler, he uttered the word "..piz" (i.e. lapiz, Spanish for pencil), after learning to mouth mama and papa. His father Don José Ruiz y Blasco was himself a painter who specialised in naturalistic depictions of birds and other game, and worked as a curator at a local museum. Ruiz taught the young Picasso the fundamentals of art and guided his entry into the School of Fine Arts in Barcelona at the age of 13. This bustling cosmopolitan city was a far cry from the relatively provincial Málaga, Picasso's birthplace, with its tradition of machismo and bull-fighting, that visceral Andalusian sport which honours the romance of death. It became clear in almost an instant to his peers and teachers that Picasso was gifted. It was a heady time for the teenage Picasso who found excitement in the local brothels and intellectual stimulus in Els Quatre Gats that restaurant bar which still stands today wherein the avant garde engaged in tertulias (intellectual debate). Fresh, bold ideas flowed and soon, young Picasso was yearning to move to Paris, the capital of art.  A Spanish Couple In Front Of An Inn, 1900. Picasso had a colossal ego and had no tolerance for mediocrity, much less competition. The only artist he saw as his true rival was Henri Matisse, who unlike himself, was a polished gentleman who could hold forth at length on art, whereas Picasso – it is said of his early years in Paris – "could barely grunt in poor French." Still, the ever-prolific Picasso won admirers drawn to his magnetism and passion for life. He was fiercely competitive, yet was fortunate to find kindred souls such as his friend and collaborator Georges Braque when others distanced themselves. Picasso and Braque broke the centuries-old principles of perspective which had ruled since the Renaissance and together they founded Cubism, "the highpoint of Picasso's originality", which transformed the world of 20th-century painting. I remember visiting the Picasso Museum in Barcelona five years ago and walking away in awe, but also feeling disturbed, perplexed, with a lingering sense of desolation. Images of the Blue Period, created after the death of Picasso's very close friend Carlos Casagemas, touched a raw nerve. They reflect his experience of relative poverty and instability, depicting beggars, street urchins, the old and frail and the blind. And he painted Casagemas more than once with the bullet-wound in his head, haunted by the fact that he was now bedding the woman who had driven Casagemas to suicide. What is also true of Picasso is that he could be cruel to his lovers, and he was cruel to Dora Maar who cried desolately having to share him with other women. He fed off her despair – in fact he fed off the youth and energy of all his lovers – and made the series called Femme en pleurs (A Woman in Tears) which seem to me suffering in adagio. Dora said of him: "He used me until there was nothing left of me, nothing but the hundreds of portraits of me he painted." Picasso was a rebel, and he rebelled against the stifling conformism of academic painting whilst at the Royal Academy of San Fernando, the foremost art school in Spain.  Françoise, Claude and Paloma, 1951. He spent countless hours at the museum observing, tracing, sketching as "his way of revisiting the classics was to reinvent it." Laughter, playfulness, eroticism and tenacity marked his life and art. "Bad artists copy. Good artists steal." Picasso once said. And steal he did with finesse, notably from Matisse when the latter remarked to Picasso's then lover Françoise Gilot that he would paint her in a singular way. Picasso, in a fit of jealousy, took Matisse's idea and created The Woman Flower with Françoise's body a pale blue and hair a dark green. Picasso was driven to break boundaries in art, and he worked incessantly not simply to achieve perfection at first instance but to create a thing of beauty after having worked at it from untold number of angles and perspectives. Josep Palau i Fabre (poet, biographer and friend) said that Picasso worked inexhaustibly even till his 80s "which was like a struggle against death." "Every act of creation is first an act of destruction," Picasso believed. And true to his conviction, at every breakthrough in his very different art periods covering his early youth, the African-influenced period, Cubism, Surrealism and more, Picasso sought to defy traditional logic, meaning and imagery. Some of his works had been described as "uneven and sloppy", others had caused unease and alienated even his artist friends and benefactors. He leaves us questioning: What is beautiful, and what is repugnant? How do we respond to the sensual or overtly erotic? Picasso was true to his art and true to his soul as a man passionately in touch with his world. He lived to strip bare all that would cloud our eyes from the intensity of being alive. * Sue is a Malaysian writer based in Barcelona, Spain. She can be reached at suechien.lee@gmail.com. |
| Dutch architect dreams of future floating cities Posted: 09 Oct 2012 07:43 AM PDT  A street scene in Amsterdam is seen in this file photo. When Koen Olthuis landed his first job in Amsterdam after graduating as an architect, his new firm wouldn't let him work on the most historic or prestigious accounts. He only got houseboats. Today, Olthuis, who along with building partner Dutch Docklands, designed a section of floating islands for Dubai's man-made Palm Islands development project, has also created a patent which scales up the technology used for a houseboat to floating structures big enough to hold cars, roads and houses. – Reuters pic But the young Dutchman, who stems from boat building and architecture stock, dove right into his new job, and it wasn't long before he started making connections between the principles of a floating house, and the battle the Dutch have been waging against the sea to reclaim land and stay dry for 500 years. He thought, if a house can float, why not an office complex or a structure big enough to hold a whole city? Olthuis, who along with building partner Dutch Docklands, designed a section of floating islands for Dubai's man-made Palm Islands development project, has also created a patent which scales up the technology used for a houseboat to floating structures big enough to hold cars, roads and houses. "Water is a workable building layer or a floating foundation and if you turn water into space, which is a dramatic change of mindset, there's a whole new world of possibilities," Olthuis said. He said the basis for his design isn't any different than the normal Dutch floating technology used for houseboats. "It is just a floating foundation, mostly made of concrete and foam which is quite stable, heavy, and goes up and down with waves and up and down with the sea level," he said. The floating city of the future is still a dream, but Olthuis's firm, WaterStudio, which he started a decade ago, designs buildings and floating structures which try to combat the challenges posed by rising sea levels. "Because of urbanisation and climate change, all the big cities have space limitations. We can create space with water, space that others have never even seen," he said. He said he wants to create space where land is under threat from rising sea levels and compares the methods for building floating structures to the invention of the elevator. "If the elevator were never invented, then cities wouldn't have buildings with more than three or four levels, because nobody wants to walk up more than that. But with elevators, we can climb 20, 30 even 40 flights." Olthuis's firm has designed plenty of floating homes in The Netherlands and is laying plans to start building an entirely new floating neighbourhood with 1,200 homes. It has projects in India and China and has begun preparing the lagoons for a holiday resort project in the Maldives, a chain of islands in the Indian Ocean that is one of the world's most endangered nations due to flooding from climate change. "We started thinking seriously about designing a whole floating island when we got a request from the Maldives, which are threatened in the long-term by rising sea levels, and they are looking for new development opportunities." In response, Olthuis's team and building partner Dutch Docklands designed an estate of 185 luxury floating villas, called The Ocean Flower, part of a larger development across five lagoons, including a conference centre and a golf course. The islands are designed to move with the waves and sea levels but because they are so stable, Olthuis said being on one of his artificial islands is like being on normal land. "You do not feel any waves." The islands will be connected to the seabed with the same sort of cables used in offshore technology, for oil rigs, which lets them stay in one location and not drift away. "The development in the Maldives is for a happy few who can afford to buy their own floating holiday home," Olthuis said. But he said that building luxury resorts for the rich helps to refine a technology that can in turn be used to benefit the poor in places such as Bangladesh, where flooding regularly destroys lives and livelihoods. "So we let the rich pay for the innovation for the poor," he said. Olthuis said future designs could see floating structures detached and moved to new locations, or new cities, put together like a puzzle, responding to particular urban needs. For a man who was told as a young trainee to "forget about houseboats," Olthius's focus on water has had a resounding impact on the way he looks at space and the environment. "I am a Dutchman, and for me, Holland is an artificial country. It is all fake. We live below sea level and it takes too much effort and money to keep the pumps working 24 hours a day," he said. Olthuis said that within 50 years, it won't even be possible to pump all the water back to the sea and reckons it is time for the Dutch to forge a new relationship with water. "We need to learn to live with it rather than fight it. We should let the water come back, and then build on it." – Reuters |
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