Facets of Us

wanderingscrap:

The Tragedy, 1903 

Pablo Picasso

Artists frequently make changes to a painting or reuse a canvas or panel with an image already painted on it. Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) often left visual clues on the surfaces of his paintings to suggest a hidden image underneath, as on The Tragedy of 1903. Picasso used the panel at least four times. In 1899 it became the support for quickly drawn sketches; in 1901 he painted a bullring; in 1902 he painted a work similar to the pencil drawing of El Arrastre, and in 1903 he covered all the other images with The Tragedy. Rather than simply reusing the support because he was poor or dissatisfied with his work, it is important to understand that Picasso incorporated each layer into the subsequent one because he believed that a painting was the “sum of destructions.”

“What comes out in the end is the result of the discarded finds.” 
~ Pablo Picasso