The shirt design with the nodes was sometimes reported as a Yamaha reference or a reference to the light grid stage but the source is Pablo

These are pictures I got from a book archive of a small edition of abstractions Picasso included with an illustrated edition of Balzac’s “the unknown masterpiece”. The abstractions are on the theme of music. Some of the abstractions are obviously based on the shapes of musical instruments, but there is a greater theme of music as vibration, waves

Balzac's story is set in the Seventeenth century at a studio in the rue des Grandes-Augustins in Paris. It unfolds around an aging artist called Frenhofer, who is the greatest painter of his day. Frenhofer reveals to two of his ardent admirers, Pourbus and Poussin, that he has been working on a secret painting which has for years consumed all his creative powers. Pourbus and Poussin then scheme to get Frenhofer to show them the painting by procuring a beautiful young model for its completion. When they finally see the Unknown Masterpiece it appears to be nothing but a mess of lines and layers of paint which they immediately interpret as being the work of a raving madman.

Picasso identified with Frenhofer and was fascinated by Balzac's eerie story. In the 1930's, as if by a strange twist of fate, he rented Nº 7 rue des Grandes-Augustin, which he and others believed to be the the house in which the story begins. It was at this address in 1937, exactly one hundred years after Balzac's final version, that Picasso painted his most famous masterpiece - Guernica.

The merch if you forgot

dope find op

inb4 "i'm not reading that"

I happened to find a detail from this in an exhibition in an art museum, then tracked down a copy I could see in person and sneak pictures of at this papers archive where they also got one of the 6 guttenburgs in the Western Hemisphere. Once I saw the back story to the plot of the novella and Picasso’s fascination with it I knew that this is where Kanye got the design

you're really committed. that's great detective work homie 😎

Woah this is sick

good find

I’m not reading that

Might be a reach but FIRE if true

Waves

its not insane that some ye designer came up with it separately. the dotted line abstraction exists in other art of the period, probably most famously miro. plus associations with the look of staff notation of music and circuit board design (associations of futurism).

the thing that convinces me re picasso is obviously feeling like pablo, and the confluence of references to music in picasso's work (all day) the misunderstood genius element in the balzac story, the idea of it being a sample that could be found very easily if ye just asked a picasso expert on examples of the artist's abstractions about music.

thinking about willy chavarria and how much ye curbed from LA cholo culture in the pablo era