Leading Up To Darkness

So I mentioned in my previous post that I had gone temporarily blind during World War I. In the first part of this post I’d like to elaborate on that a bit more. I realize that it doesn’t have much to do with my art, but it’s a big life event that happened, and I believe that it helped to shape my view of the world and allowed me to expand past the same things that I had been working on before hand. So, here’s my experience leading up to blindness.

Before the war, I had been working on cubist paintings with Picasso. In 1911 I got rid of color almost completely. Some could say that cubism was approaching pure abstraction.* But I didn’t want that. Neither did Picasso. We both loved our work and we loved cubism the way that we had made it. To get cubism back on track, I started introducing words to my paintings.

In 1912, I painted a piece called Guitar. This piece was the first one that I added words to. I felt that it added another level to the artwork. From here, there wasn’t much more I could do with cubism without revamping it completely. Later in 1912 I switched things up for good. I think some people even distinguish between the early cubism and the later cubism. Anyway, I started adding other materials to my canvases. I added newspaper and wallpaper and oilcloth. I had to spice up my art somehow. 

When things really started to get going in the cubism world, my time came to an end, at least for a little while. The year was 1914, and I was called up to serve for my country. Some say this is an honor, but all I wanted to do was paint. About nine months into my service is when the accident happened. I can’t recall the specifics. I only know that some people say it was just a head injury and others say that my accident was fatal. 

Stay tuned for my account of being blind.

*Lacayo, Richard. 2014. "Space Invader." Time 183, no. 7: 54.