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Arts & Communication

ARTICLE
Exploring correlations between Picasso’s

artworks and his personal contacts

1
Enrique Mallen * and Luis Meneses 2
1 Sam Houston State University, Department of World Languages and Cultures, Huntsville, Texas, USA
2 Vancouver Island University, Department of Computer Science, Nanaimo, British Columbia, Canada

Abstract

For a biographical artist like Pablo Picasso, exploring the correlation between
specific individuals or events in his life and certain shifts in his style is a crucial step
in understanding his artistic works. This article analyzes these correlations using
information recorded on a MySQL database by the Online Picasso Project for over
two decades. We exported the database to SQLite and extracted entities using
Python and its BeautifulSoup library to analyze term frequency-inverse document
frequency using the Gensim library. Our analysis has confirmed that the connections
between artistic creations and biographical events do indeed exist.

Keywords: Picasso; Biography; Artwork; Correlation; SQLite; Gensim

1. Introduction
*Corresponding author:
Enrique Mallen The digital humanities are at a turning point where we can digitize and analyze materials
(enriquemallenphd@gmail.com) using computers with relative ease. The use of digital and computer-based methodologies
Citation: Mallen E, Meneses L, can be perceived as innovative by researchers in the humanities, not solely due to their
2023, Exploring correlations digital nature but because of the conclusions that they can yield. However, it is clear that
between Picasso’s artworks and we should depart from traditional analytical approaches used in other disciplines and
his personal contacts. Arts &
[1]
Communication, 1(2): 1004. devise our own methods to address our research questions .
https://doi.org/10.36922/ac.1004
For some time now, our research has taken us through different approaches to
Received: May 26, 2023 analyzing Picasso’s artistic legacy , his poetry , the semantic domains within his
[2]
[3]
[5]
[4]
Accepted: June 27, 2023 poetry , and the distinctions therein . We have also used computer vision to identify
the graphic elements in Picasso’s poetry . However, there are still many facets of Picasso
[6]
Published Online: July 19, 2023
as an artist that remain unexplored.
Copyright: © 2023 Author(s).
This is an Open Access article Many authors have argued that there is a correlation between the person Picasso was
distributed under the terms of the with at a certain time and what he painted then, giving rise to terms such as Olga Period,
Creative Commons Attribution Marie-Thérèse Years, and Dora Maar Years [7,8] . We have verified that this correlation
License, permitting distribution,
and reproduction in any medium, exists by examining the frequency of mentions between specific individuals found in
provided the original work is Picasso’s biography with respect to each other and correlating these frequencies with
properly cited. specific techniques, artworks, places, periods, etc. While verifying these correlations, we
Publisher’s Note: AccScience also had the opportunity to explore the perceived variations between Picasso’s different
Publishing remains neutral with biographers across different languages (French, German, Spanish). For this purpose,
regard to jurisdictional claims in
published maps and institutional we used and referenced the entries published in English on the extensive biographical
affiliations. narrative of the Online Picasso Project.
Volume 1 Issue 2 (2023) 1 https://doi.org/10.36922/ac.1004