Picasso’s eclecticism goes hand in hand with his ability to combine multiple sources. Even though during his life Picasso’s work was heralded as representative of specific artistic movements, such as Cubism, Classicism, and Surrealism, the artist actively resisted categories and challenged notions of linear development. Works as different as the painting Woman with Pears (1909), the papier collé Head of a Man with a Hat (1912), the pastel Woman with a Flowered Hat (1921), the sculpture Head of a Woman (1932), and the ceramic tile Head of a Faun (1956) exemplify some of the multiple creative strategies that Picasso adopted, discarded, and returned to. Take, for example, his eclectic approaches to rendering the human head. 1 “If an artist varies his mode of expression this only means that he has changed his manner of thinking, and in changing, it may be for the better or it may be for the worse.” 2 With these words, Picasso shed light on two central principles of his artistic production over nearly 80 years: his openness to a diverse range of styles, subject matters, and mediums, and his resistance to the notion that change in art necessarily corresponds to improvement or progress. “Variation does not mean evolution,” Pablo Picasso said in 1923. “To me, there is no past or present in art.”
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