Word: picassos
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...work brilliantly embodied the crisis of belief in finesse and cultural hierarchies that hit postwar French intellectual life. He had an unerring instinct for farce. Picasso had painted bulls, but for decades few advanced artists had painted a cow, and when Dubuffet did so it seemed to set itself against a whole tradition of animal as heroic metaphor. And for those who (understandably) yearned for a return to the French pictorial tradition of luxe, calme et volupte, the sight of Dubuffet's monstrous kippered nudes squashed flat in their beds of pigment was not only an affront, it was like...
...sense of Rubens' appetite for character studies delicately balanced between intimacy and formality. Viewing such work, one realizes that there is no Rubens (or Durer, or Mantegna, or Watteau) of / the late 20th century; what we see here are emblems of a tradition that ended, except for footnotes, with Picasso...
Perhaps one should take Rousseau more on his own terms. The Paris modernists --Jarry, Apollinaire, Picasso, Delaunay, Brancusi--hailed his work because of its fierce, astringent poetry, but also because it seemed to have predicted their own conscious concerns: the interest in popular art like the prints known as images d'Epinal, the invented exoticism, the mode of composition in flat planes, but above all the ideal of the untutored eye unobstructed by academic culture, registering the world with the clarity, as the cliche used to run, "of a child or a savage." Rousseau's innocence might have been invented...
...values enshrined in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, as manifested in the big French Salon painters: Jean-Leon Gerome, Adolphe-William Bouguereau, Felix-Auguste Clement. He loved their important subjects, their grasp of the colonial exotic, their professionalism and high finish. So when artists 40 years his junior like Picasso and Delaunay paid him their semireverent homages, he took them as his due without interesting himself much in their paintings. He patted the Young Turks on the head, telling Picasso, for instance, that the two of them were the greatest artists of their time, "You in the Egyptian style...
...witnessed a real-life scene of antiunion violence that is vividly evoked in John Dos Passos' 1919, and Davita comes to understand him by reading the book. He also introduces a surrogate uncle to Davita, a refugee writer whose fables are full of images that heavy- handedly foreshadow Picasso's Guernica. Then Davita's father dies as a hero during the bombing at Guernica. Soon after, the child intuitively envisions the battle in Picasso-like terms. Later she sees the work of art and recoils in recognition and insight beyond her years. As the story evolves, the focus shifts from...