Picasso Space Drawings, France, 1949

In 1949, Gjon Mili showed Picasso some time-lapse photographs he had made of the tracery left by an ice-skater's leaps with tiny lightbulbs attached to her skates. Picasso immediately saw the creative potential of this technique. He began to draw shapes in the air even before Mili opened his mouth to explain. This led to their collaboration on these 'space drawings.' Picasso made 'latent' drawings with a tiny lightbulb in a single continuous motion in a darkened room before Mili's cameras. He used a couple of cameras for different angles and for black-and-white and color film. Sometimes he opened and closed the shutter to capture only the light drawings. Other times he set off a strobe flash near the end of the exposure to capture Picasso in the process of drawing. Conceptually, these photographs are related to a series of drawings Picasso made with closed eyes in 1933, like the surrealist practice of automatic writing. They are also akin to "action painting" current in the late '40s among such younger contemporaries as Franz Kline and Jackson Pollock.