After a brief sojourn in not-Barcelona, I’m about to start the trip back. I have a busy week ahead so I hope the journey is relatively stress-free. I’ll be making another trip in a few weeks to a different part of not-Barcelona and I really need to finish a couple of things before then.
Anyway, lacking the time for a longer post, I thought I’d post a little art quiz. Without googling, or any other form of cheating, can you identify the artist who painted this:
I’ll post the answer when I get back to Barcelona.
UPDATE 1: the journey wasn’t bad at all. My plane was a bit late but the arrivals process at Barcelona was super-efficient and I walked straight out of the Terminal building and onto the excellent Aerobus which took me to Plaça de Catalunya, which is a five-minute walk from my apartment. As I expected, it’s quite a lot warmer in Barcelona than in not-Barcelona.
UPDATE 2: The painting is called Science and Charity and it is attributed to Pablo Ruiz Picasso (although his father José Ruiz -also a painter – may have helped him. In any case, Picasso was only about 15 years old when he painted it. I don’t think it’s a really great painting – the composition looks a bit stiff and contrived to me – but it is interesting to see the young Picasso experimenting in a style that could be describe as social realism and which is very far from his later work. Incidentally, Picasso signed his early work Pablo Ruiz, but his signature subsequently evolved to Pablo Ruiz Picasso to Pablo R Picasso to Pablo Picasso and finally to Picasso. People have wondered why he did that, but it’s probably just because he wanted to be distinctive: Ruiz is a fairly common name in Spain whereas Picasso is not.
In the Dark 