In an attempt to break free from the boundaries of realism and use nature as the main subject in art, Picasso, along with other famous painters, founded a movement in art known as Cubism. “Picasso desired to construct and image rather than represent it”(Haddad). Just as Maalouf believed that a person’s true identity is composed of many qualities, characteristics and elements that all contribute to the whole person, cubist painters understood that in order to truly capture the essence of an object, one must acknowledge all of its possible points of views.
In observing the painting, Violin and Grapes, one notices the variation of colors, textures and the summation of all the layers each with a distinct characteristic—the bow, the scroll, the strings, and F-Hole—which all contribute to the overall idea of a violin. Maalouf described that one cannot be simply half Lebanese and half French because he wouldn’t “exist more authentically if [he] cut off a part of [him]self “(Maalouf, 1). When applying Maalouf’s logic to Picasso’s painting, one understands that when only focusing on the belly of the violin, it is indiscernible what the central theme or what object is being portrayed.
In this postmodernist society, everything is in the eyes of the beholder; therefore, not only must one acknowledge all of the characteristics of a person and all of the facets of an object in order to “identify” it, one must also understand the object on a universal scale.
Maalouf, Amin. "My Identity, My Allegiance." In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong. New York: Arcade, 2001. Print.
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