Spent yesterday at two museums: the Picasso and the History of Catalunya. At the Picasso I went to the temporary exhibit of Picasso's Self Portraits. Very interesting. Seeing how his vision of himself changed I really got a feel - I think - for one of the keys o his shift from classical to his own style. It's his eyes. Picasso had these big, dark, intense eyes. Looking at his classical, realistic self portraits it takes a while to notice that even in those he has exaggerated them just slightly, always showing the whole pupil as a black disk. After a while the disks of his eye start to get bigger and bigger even as the rest of his face remains basically the same. Then, suddenly, one of the eyes changes, becoming unaligned with the other. Then the color starts to change. I think, and I could be very wrong on this, that there was something about Picasso staring deeply into his own examining eyes that changed Picasso, made him want to see deeper into his own eyes, and the eyes of others, to see them from all sides at once, to look directly into both eyes simultaneously - which you can only do with Cubism. So you have the same round, unrealistic eyes that feature in his early more realistic work also is his later Cubist work.