PABLO PICASSO: CARTOONIST

What do you think of Picasso? A lot of animation cartoonists don't like him because he was the inspiration for U.P.A., which indirectly wrecked traditional full animation.  He certainly planted the idea in the public's mind that anything representational, even cartooning, was obsolete and old-fashioned.

I like him because he was a cartoonist at heart, even though he tried to refashion cartooning into a purely graphic art.

He colored his pictures (above) the way newspaper comic artists colored theirs.....well, somewhat. It was more of a caricature of the way newspaper cartoons were colored.

I wonder if the picture above influenced the way Dedini used color?

Without Picasso we wouldn't have had Virgil Parch, Cliff Sterrett, and Steinberg. We wouldn't even have had Searle.

Thanks to Amid Amidi and The Modesto Kid for the Steinberg-type picture above.

This (above) is a better example of what I meant when I said Picasso was influenced by newspaper comic color. He even added the dot pattern that newspapers used.

Picasso had a great sense of humor.  The figure above is magnificently ignorant (I mean that as a compliment).  It's really goofy and funny.

Sometimes I can't believe that he managed to get critics to accept stuff as overtly cartoony as this (above).

Really, is it so hard to see the influence of cartooning on his work (above)?  The man was a cartoonist. He was one of us, though you could argue that he undermined cartoon art by abstracting it and removing it from acting and storytelling.

Picasso's mission seemed to be to liberate cartoon technique from cartoons. He seemed to think we cartoonists had a bag of tricks that was too valuable to be entrusted to us only. 

The man obviously read newspaper comics. It could be that he was influenced by Herriman and Sterrett, Opper and Fenninger, maybe even funny animal comics, and simply didn't admit it.  He may have had closets full of comic pages that were thrown out after his death by custodians who didn't think they were important. 

BTW, I'm aware that some readers are saying, "Wait a minute! Herriman was influenced by Picasso, not the other way around!" To that I say don't be so hasty.  My guess is that Herriman and Picasso influenced each other. 

So what do ya think?