Friday, March 25, 2011

The name game

As OTN readers know, we are big fans of lists and this one is right up there. It’s a list of favourite artists written by Picasso for Walt Kuhn, the artist who organised the 1913 Armory show in New York. The 27 year old Duchamp (who was to scandalise the second Armory exhibition a year later with his Nude descending the staircase) is there, which says something for Picasso’s judgement. Braque, on the other hand, appears to have been tacked on at the end as an after-thought, which probably speaks to Picasso’s acute competitiveness given that he and Braque were both on the final stretch of their shared Cubist adventure.