Dreams


Picasso's Dream, oil on masonite, 24" x 24", Steven Rhude

Picasso in many respects was one big dream, or nightmare depending on how one views his art and time, and his various artistic periods. Picasso's portrayal of contemporary man and his wars, was very much the story of man's inhumanity to man with little time to consider the consequences of his actions, or spiritual decline. Carnality for Picasso was the antidote.

 Dreaming turbulently, mirroring an image of the twentieth century, Picasso's world was deeply inhabited by those women he seduced and transformed into his muses, consuming them until his creativity was almost exhausted, enough so that a new muse was needed to enable the dream to continue, and so making their dreams into his dream as the cycle of the artist/model manifested.

The muse for Picasso's "The Dream" was Marie-Thérèse Walter whom he met when she was seventeen and he in his forties. In 1977, four years after Picasso’s death, Marie-Thérèse Walter hung herself in the garage of her home in France. She was 68 years old.

Steven Rhude, Wolfville, NS

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