Parenting: Shared Experiences.
Introducing children to art.
A true story.
Names have not been included to render deniability futile.

Grandchildren, ages 4, 9,9,10, 11.
Sitting on the floor in front of “Les Demoiselles d'Avignon,” oil on canvas, 244 x 234 cm
Pablo Picasso - Museum of Modern Art, New York, the guards watching closely, as in “What the…”

Each child equipped with a clipboard, a pen, and several sheets of questions.
They knowing only that for a moment in their lives they would be in the hands of their Grandfather.

First question. “Write down as many colors as you can see.”
Share the answers with the group.
Lots of colors.
Pointing out to each other where they saw the ‘blue’ or the ‘black.’

Find the fruit.
Identify the fruit.

Do any of the women look African?
Which?

How many women are there?

What kind of clothes are they wearing?

Does the artist paint a distant horizon?

Describe how the artist groups the women? Are they scattered in the distance?

And on.

Does it surprise any of us to learn that these guys (four girls and one boy) sat in front of that painting, discussing it and only it, for 90 minutes. That’s ‘ninety.’
Striking a blow for attention span.
And we’d be there still if the sympathetic guards hadn’t felt that we’d better move along.

Point being.
Parenting made easy when you engage with your children rather than find something for them to do on their own.

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Tagging Today
Monday, November 5, 2018
My 209th consecutive posting.
Time is 12.01am.
Boston’s temperature will reach a high of
It will

Dinner is Roast Turkey, again. This is the bird I shared with my cousins and aunt.

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Quiz Question of the Day:
What was the importance of Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d'Avignon”

Hint:

Left:
Henri Matisse
Bathers with a Turtle (Baigneuses), 1907–08
oil on canvas, 71½ × 87 in.
Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis

Matisse considered "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" something of a bad joke, yet indirectly reacted to it in his “Bathers with a Turtle.”

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Picasso’s work bears similarities to the works of artists he admired, Cezanne, Gauguin, and El Greco.

Second from left:
Paul Cézanne
Les Grandes Baigneuses
1898–1905
Oil-on-canvas
(​82 7⁄8 in × ​98 3⁄4 in)
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, United States 

Second from right:
Artist El Greco
Opening of the Fifth Seal
Year 1608–1614
Medium oil on canvas
Dimensions (88.5 in × 78.5 in)
Location The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

Right:
Paul Gauguin,
Oviri (Sauvage), 1894
partially glazed stoneware
(29.5 × 7.5 × 10.6 in)
Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Short Take:
A roast turkey feeds a lot of people for not so much money per person. Makes the festive first meal; an excellent leftover roast turkey plate; and then superb sandwiches, salads, soups.
Twice the production but as easy as a roast chicken.
Serve it without stuffing to simplify the dinner.
We can make stuffing for the second time we serve the turkey to enhance that second dinner and to reduce the time we spend in the kitchen.

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Answer to Quiz Question:
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (The Young Ladies of Avignon) is a large oil painting created in 1907 by the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso.
The work, part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, portrays five nude female prostitutes from a brothel on Carrer d'Avinyó (Avignon Street) in Barcelona.
Each figure is depicted in a disconcerting confrontational manner and none is conventionally feminine. The women appear as slightly menacing and rendered with angular and disjointed body shapes.
Three figures on the left exhibit facial features in the Iberian style of Picasso's native Spain, while the two on the right are shown with African mask-like features.
The racial Primitivism evoked in these masks, according to Picasso, moved him to "liberate an utterly original artistic style of compelling, even savage force."

In this adaptation of Primitivism and abandonment of perspective in favor of a flat, two-dimensional picture plane, Picasso makes a radical departure from traditional European painting.
This proto-Cubist work is widely considered to be seminal in the early development of both Cubism and Modern art.

Les Demoiselles was revolutionary and controversial, and led to widespread anger and disagreement, even amongst the painter's closest associates and friends.
Matisse considered the work something of a bad joke, yet indirectly reacted to it in his 1908 Bathers with a Turtle.
Braque too initially disliked the painting, yet perhaps more than anyone else, studied the work in great detail. And effectively, his subsequent friendship and collaboration with Picasso led to the Cubist revolution.
Its resemblance to Cézanne's Les Grandes Baigneuses, Paul Gauguin's statue Oviri and El Greco's Opening of the Fifth Seal has been widely discussed by later critics.

At the time of its first exhibition in 1916, the painting was deemed immoral.
The work, painted in Picasso's studio at Le Bateau-Lavoir in Montmartre, Paris, was seen publicly for the first time at the Salon d'Antin in July 1916, at an exhibition organized by the poet André Salmon.
It was at this exhibition that Salmon, who had already mentioned the painting in 1912 under the title Le Bordel philosophique, gave the work its present title Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (in preference to the title originally chosen by Picasso, Le Bordel d'Avignon) to lessen its scandalous impact on the public.
Picasso, who had always referred to it as mon bordel (my brothel), or Le Bordel d'Avignon, never liked Salmon's title, and as an edulcoration would have preferred Las chicas de Avignon instead.

A November 5 Good Morning
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We’ve talked about a parental experience, introducing children to art, gone into a detail re: Picasso’s seminal “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” that came to mark the start of Modern Art, and we did a short take on making roast turkey more often. And, as always, we’ve looked at some images.

Che vuoi? Le pocketbook?

Have a good day, my friends.
See you soon.

Love

Dom