Picasso's Views On The Human Condition

Just as the philosophers of ancient times searched for the answers to the human condition through questions and thought, Pablo Picasso depicted the various stages of the human condition by dissecting the world through art. What views on the human condition do the philosophers of old and Pablo Picasso share and how does each reflect in Picasso’s art and life? What does it mean to be a human and how do those experiences change the way we see the world and the questions we ask regarding it? Dictionary.com defines the human condition as “the positive and negative aspects of existence as a human being, esp. the inevitable events such as birth, childhood, adolescence, love, sex, reproduction, aging, and death.” (Dictionary.com LLC)
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The University Bookman explains that the “opposition of appearance and reality is a central component of Plato’s metaphysics.” We can also see the same in Plato’s Phaedo, “that a person can reach a pure form of reality only by using pure thought apart from sensory experiences.” (Mason) Just as Plato proved that you cannot rely on the senses to understand truth, Picasso shared this view. His belief was the “classical style of painting and realism was being untrue to the viewer by attempting to create a false illusion of reality” stating that it was “simply tricking the viewer into seeing something that was not there and, even then, you could only see one view of whatever was depicted in the work; no matter how three-dimensional it appeared.” (Philosophy of Art) You can see Picasso’s view of reality depicted in most of his cubist paintings, such as the Massacre in Korea. This work is influenced by the 1950 Sichon Massacre carried out by the North Koreans, South Koreans, and the American forces. (PabloPicasso.org) The idea behind the way in which the scene is painted reflects events or truths rather than Picasso trying to pass off his imagery as truth. Such the painting is painted in the essence of Forms to invoke the truth and does not depict the actual scene. The Art Story explains it with the following. “Picasso's immersion in Cubism eventually led him to the invention of collage, in which he abandoned the idea of the picture as a window on objects in the world, and began to conceive of it merely as an arrangement of signs that used different, sometimes metaphorical means, to refer to those objects.” (The Art