It went from fantastic painting at age 15 to what (common people like me would call by lake of knowledge) absolute garbage at the end.
Picasso is renown the world over because he pushed art forward, and he kept experimenting and pushing art ever forward in to his old age.
His later work may not be pretty, but there are a billion painters of pretty pictures, but only one Picasso.
That's fine. My take is that it's perfectly OK to have art for popular appeal, and perhaps separately, art that takes some investigation to fully appreciate. I face this as a musician, specifically playing modern jazz. A lot of my friends find polite ways of telling me they don't like that kind of music, and I reassure them that I'm not in the least bit offended.
Of those Picasso portraits, if I could afford just one, I'd take 1971. Turns out I can afford just zero.
For me it would be the 1906 one.
But, like you, I can afford zero of them.
It often is.
"Modern" usually implies dissonance, syncopation, and sometimes downright atonality and free time.
These concepts are fun from a musicians standpoint, as they break away from formalities and rules, but do so within a complex musical context in ways that are very difficult as the instruments are balancing between having the cake and eating it against each other, simultaneously.
This is hard to pick up on, which in effect often leads to the sub-genre confining itself to musicians-listening-to-other-musicians demographics, eg. "are they high?"-jazz.
Similar comparisons can be made for Picasso and art in general I suppose(?).
In high school, being interested in anything but top 40 made you a freak. Oddly enough the kids who were accepting of a shy nerd who liked jazz and classical, were the punk rockers. That's whom I hung out with.
For some musicians, "hotter" can also mean older, such as baroque or early music specialists.
edit: not contesting the garbage definition. it might as well be it, at least if you feel it is, you have every right to feel that way. Doesn't mean that he wasn't one of the best painters ever. Art should provoke emotions ( even repulsion is an emotion) not just "look how pretty that is". That's the easy part.
Anyway, he was following a path, he was getting better, not deteriorating.
https://www.keylight.it/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Toro_pica...
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/11/technology/-inside-apples...
When I first saw "simplifying the bull" I felt I could draw a bull by replicating what Picasso did.
I am still terrible, but in a way he gave me the tools to draw something (or an idea of it if you will) without being able to actually draw it.
His process is assimilable to research at its best.
My girlfriend she's a painter and studied fine arts in a London art school.
First thing she told me is that everything is asymmetrical, if you're measuring distances, you're doing it completely wrong.
Second thin she told me is that details are completely useless - if not confusing - if you don't get the basic shapes right.
As you correctly point out it's like a compression algorithm, and like compression algorithms (as a computer scientist) I think implementing what's already working is easier than come up with your own new algorithm.
But, despite all the help I got, I'm - unfortunately for me - still a terrible draftsman.
If your goal is to draw like picasso you need to be where he is at 15 before you understand what you're simplifying. Even after you take apple's class you'll have concepts but you won't have thousands of hours of practice that actually using any of those lessons requires.
I understand why you might not like the later paintings (or at least prefer not to hang them on your wall).
The later paintings are best understood in the context of history. Picasso and his peers were experimenting during the industrial revolution when trains and fast motion were new and video cameras didn’t exist to film them. Cubism was a response to some of those social changes at the time.
Art like this is also, partly, about community—having a good time with other artists in a “hey, check out a thing I tried” sense. Picasso may have intended these as a “Ask:HN” or “Show:HN” rather than a post of a gallery ready piece of work.
A lot of these are also probably paintings he did for practice, never planned to show publicly, and just never threw away. Then, after he died, people found them and sell them as Picasso originals.
also for Show HN, i have published just the last week 6 cubism art, picasso style computer generated of course, Dalle, and i have created already 10 other different variations of cubism, in the style of picasso, some of them are really good. And hundreds of them to come in the future. Dalle and Picasso are a benign combination. If anyone is curious insta/pramatias and the albums will be uploaded elsewhere as well. The albums are annotated with the Dalle prompts as well.
I have long thought that programs, operating systems etc could be annotated to ease the understanding of the program. Especially big programs like operating systems, browsers etc. We could annotate for example every function with an image. Black n white could mean that the function has side effects, and colorful images could be used for the pure functions. That way in one glance of a file, just a millisecond we can tell which function is probably to have caused a strange panic.