Picasso’s journey from prodigy to revolutionary artist shows why originality sometimes depends on unlearning skills that get in the way…
Pablo Picasso is often quoted as saying: “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.”
Whether or not those were his exact words, the idea feels unmistakably Picasso. It captures something at the heart of his life’s work: the long, restless attempt to get beyond the obvious, the polished, the approved and the technically correct, and recover a more immediate way of seeing.
One of the lazier misunderstandings about modern art is that artists like Picasso painted in strange, simplified or distorted ways because they could not do anything else. In Picasso’s case, that could hardly be further from the truth.
He was a prodigy who had absorbed formal artistic training at an unusually young age. His father was an artist and drawing teacher, who taught the young Pablo academic discipline and the skills of careful observation and technical control.
So Picasso could certainly draw and paint to a rare level, and he understood the formal rules of art. The remarkable thing is that he spent much of his life trying to escape them.
Skill is essential, but skill can also become a trap.
Once we have learned how something is supposed to be done, we start to see through that framework. We know what counts as a “proper” drawing, and, while useful, that knowledge can become a cage and we only reproduce what has already been approved.
For an artist, this might mean drawing the body in the conventional proportions and seen from a single consistent viewpoint. For a team in a business, it might mean reaching automatically for the familiar process or answer.
Picasso’s great act of imagination was to question the assumptions hidden inside skill itself. What if a face did not have to be shown from one angle? What if an object could be seen from several viewpoints at once? What if likeness was not the same as veracity? And what if the purpose of art was not to copy the world, but to remake how we see it?
Although you might not call these childish questions, they have something of childhood’s total freedom in them: they refuse to accept that the existing rules are obviously inevitable.
Picasso is also often credited with another famous line: “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.”
Children draw with a fearless, unselfconscious directness. They are not usually worried about perspective and proportion, or whether the hand has exactly the right number of fingers. Instead, they focus on what matters to them, so a person may be all eyes and smile, or a family may float in the sky beside an impossibly flat house because, to the child, the relationship between things matters more than spatial accuracy.
Most adults lose that freedom and learn to judge self-correct based on how things “should” look. Gradually, we stop making marks unless we are sure they will be good ones.
The point of the Picasso quote is that adult originality may require recovering something we have been trained out of: directness, boldness, appetite, curiosity and the willingness to make something before knowing whether it will be acceptable. That’s not easy.
Unlearning is distinct from forgetting. Picasso did not forget his skills but he used them differently, and he was able to take the rules apart because he understood them so well.
This idea applies far beyond art. In organisations, people become grooved in good, effective habits – but over time, these can make it harder to think freshly. Processes can run smoothly but nothing especially new appears.
To get beyond this, people sometimes need permission to loosen their grip on being impressive, and to be given space to try things that may look rough at first. They need to suspend judgment long enough for a weird idea to become a useful one.
In other words, they need some of the conditions of play.
Play allows people to step outside the normal performance of expertise. It creates a space where the first version does not have to be perfect and where ideas can be moved around before they are judged.
That is why play is so closely linked to creative thinking. It does not replace skill or knowledge but releases them from over-control.
A playful mind is more willing to ask questions like: why does it have to be this way?.
There is something wonderfully paradoxical about Picasso’s version of creative development. The child begins free, then learns rules, then perhaps – with enough courage – learns how to move beyond them.
Unlike the sudden revelations of Archimedes, August Kekulé or Paul McCartney, Picasso’s story is about something slower and perhaps more difficult: the lifelong work of unlearning the habits that prevent originality.
Read more about the serious benefits of play in our free white paper The Transformational Power of Play.
