Interesting you should mention this; I’m reading a book on Picasso I picked up used and have been surprised at how the writer attempts to make this farfelly point you point out. I’m starting to wonder why he’s so revered; a lot of the his work is very scrappy, and I don’t like it. He possessed the eye and craft to do well, even with his exploratory ideas. But looking at a lot of his pieces — in a very nicely printed book — make me feel a lot more confident in my own craft!

And more to your point, abstraction has been around for ages, ages before Picasso (and his compadre Braque).

I do still think that Guernica is a very successful painting, but at this point I’m wondering how much I’ll come away respecting this artistic icon.

Some posts are fairly easy to digest and respond to, but these are a meatier type that deserve more thought. Besides, I need time to self-edit so I don’t embarrass myself any more than usual.

I would say that the idea that decorative art is less “serious” than fine art is one of those persistent myths that need to be scuttled. Art is art. Good decorative art has its own magic. It isn’t the same magic as pictorial art, though.

As I was saying to someone else today, I want to be fair to the strengths of non-representational art, while being realistic about its limitations. One point that I would like to get cleared up is the idea that European artists of the early twentieth century were inventing something new, when in reality abstraction is as old as art, which is as old as people. The whole concept of abstraction being a bold, evolutionary leap, a new window into a broader spiritual sense of artistic expression, is just farfel.

I think everyone who enters these kinds of discussions runs the risk of analyzing the subject to death. It’s like trying to dissect a soap bubble. Chesterton talked as if he believed we could never – this side of heaven – fully understand what art really is and what it does.