The flat dog

Three Musicians
Picasso c. 1921
at MoMa, March 2013

 Most everyone has seen this at sometime or another; Picasso and friends - 3 musicians; a one armed instrumentalist, a guitar player and a singer...and woof the dog.

I've spent a lot of time trying to find out some information on the dog.  Can't find a hair.

I have a "painting" of the family dog made by one of my grand daughters that also appears "flat" and just suggestive. She isn't Picasso yet, wish that were so, but there is time.


I always like it when art folks get all flowery describing the "inner tensions" of this stuff.  During my doctoral years, I had to partake in a number of art history courses as my "minor field" and this painting - the three musicians - was to be juxtaposed with Picasso’s Three Women at the Spring, also the same year and perhaps within a brush stroke of time from one another.  It was a disaster.

I had just started in and started with the flat dog in the

Picasso’s Three Women at the Spring, c. 1921

"Musicians" commenting that from my limited point of view it (the dog) was just a shadow from some impossibly positioned light source.  That sent the rest of the seminar students foaming at the mouth. Idiot. Can't you see? The extreme of cubism  v. the other (Three Woman) which is just sculpture in paint...Naive, Fool...simpleton. Hey, what did I know, I was just a musician at a table with artists.

I plunged on. No one ever spoke to me again for the rest of the seminar/semester.  Our final exams were given one on with with "the Professor" who asked me what I gained from the class.  I stated that art students saw and spoke in some gobble-d-gook language, filled with allusions only they understood.  "So .. then what was the Picasso stuff about in your words"?   I answered that someone probably paid him good money to compose/paint a neo-classically themed picture and someone else wanted something with a little adventure to it...you know Occam's Razor - the simplest answer being the most likely correct.

Unfortunate response.