20th century art history the Don Rickles way

[mmcirvin]

Recently Jorie was playing with her Mr. Potato Head and suddenly announced she was making "a Pitosco".

It wasn't hard to figure out what she was talking about since I've now seen the Toy Story movies approximately 50,000 times. Near the beginning of the first Toy Story, Mr. Potato Head (voice of Don Rickles) scrambles up his facial features and says something like, "Hey, look at me, I'm a Picasso!"

The great thing about the Internet is that you never lack for visual aids. I was able to explain the joke by whipping out Wikipedia and showing Jorie some Cubist paintings, and some of Pablo Picasso's other work. The idea immediately appealed to her, and we went upstairs and drew some vaguely Cubist faces. And for a few days she kept asking me to show her some Picassos when I took out my laptop.

I think Jorie's currently more into music and performance than visual art. But the 20th-century modernist stuff seems to appeal to her more than straight representational art. Anyway, I have Pixar to thank for her introduction to Picasso.

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah, another connection she made was that when I showed her "Three Musicians", she recognized it from a short animation based on the painting that sometimes appears on "Sesame Street."