Picasso brings two ways of seeing into one

                                                                                                     Choi Hoon

The author is a professor at Hallym University

I recently visited the newly opened Korean branch of the Centre Pompidou at the 63 Building in Yeouido, western Seoul. As the Paris museum undergoes renovations, some of its major works have been sent on tour. The branch’s inaugural exhibition in Korea features cubist works, including those by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. As I entered the gallery, I was greeted by the arresting presence of a Picasso.

Picasso is one of those modern artists whose name is familiar even to people with little interest in art. When I was young, however, we often used his name to describe a drawing that looked strangely distorted: “You drew it like Picasso.” There is, in fact, something unsettling about Picasso’s paintings. They can seem strange, even vaguely grotesque, at first glance.

Cubism, represented by Picasso, broke with the convention of viewing an object from a single fixed point. Instead, it reconstructed on a single canvas what an object might look like from multiple perspectives. A face, for example, might combine a frontal view with a profile, as though several angles had been pressed into one image. Rather than simply reproducing the scene before his eyes, Picasso sought to bring together the different aspects of an object that one comes to know through experience.

In fact, this is not so different from how human beings see. We do not store visual information like photographs. As our eyes move, we gather information and combine it with experience and memory to make sense of what is in front of us. We do not remember a person’s face as a collection of separate frontal and side views. We integrate them into our understanding of a single individual. In that sense, seeing is less an act of copying than one of constructing.

And yet, society today seems increasingly to demand a single way of seeing. We are quick to assume that what we have witnessed is the whole truth, while other perspectives must be mistaken or distorted. Psychologists call this tendency “naive realism.”

Of course, not every perspective carries equal weight. But we should not forget that no single viewpoint can reveal every side of a thing. What Picasso dismantled was not the human face itself, but the belief that one way of seeing it should be enough.

Perhaps what we need, before raising our voices to insist that we are right, is simply to take one step to the side — and try looking again.