Then, on 28 April, Guernica, the holy city of the Basques, is destroyed in an air raid. The Civil War had only inspired him to a few sarcastic etchings, of which “Songes et Mensonges de Franco” are the most widely known. In January the artist starts making sketches, but inspiration fails. Gonzales forges "La Montserrat." The long wall near the entrance is given to Picasso. Sert becomes the architect, Miró and Picasso are invited to paint great frescoes, Calder creates his famous fountain of Mercury. It is to be not a commercial pavillon, but a home for democracy. It commissions a few great artists to express their ideas. The Spanish Government, assailed by Franco and his blood-stained friends, decides to demonstrate its love for freedom and humanity in a pure and simple building. Paris 1937: Every nation prepares its contribution to the world fair. Again and again he startles us with new discoveries.
#IN FLANDERS FIELD GENIUS SERIES#
His researches are laid down in a long series of masterpieces. Cubism concerns our intellect, not our heart-that is left to Expressionism.įor three decades Picasso investigates the field of form. Now after four hundred years the painter rises from his chair, starts moving around his object, and tries to render the totality. This decisive act we call Cubism.Ībout 1500 the artists of the Renaissance invented the perspective we are still accustomed to: the artist sat down on his chair, looked at the scene from one definite angle, and tried to fix it on his panel accordingly. The table top becomes a rectangle again, and the human face is rendered from the side and the front at the same time.
Picasso and Braque quit visual reality and start to paint the environing objects as they know they are. The camera sees only one side of our face, but we know it to be in profile and en face at the same time. But we know the table to be a pure rectangle. We see a rectangular table in perspective-that is, as a trapezium our side of the table looks more important than the other side. During a few years of daily contact they transform reality, give it a new shape-not the reality they see with the eye but the reality of the mind. In the beginning of the century Picasso and Braque come to Paris. Genius is inspired by life-talent, by art. They adapt to the taste of the public what in the creations of genius seems strange and abhorrent they form a school. More modest talents also are often attracted they are inspired not by the turbulent life around, but by the work of greater artists, forerunners and contemporaries. With the technique taken from their predecessors they create a new form. In the fifteenth century: Florence and Flanders.įrom 1910 to 1920: Moscow (Chagall, Gabo, Kandinsky, Malewitch, Pevsner, Tatlin). Great artists by some hidden direction assemble where life is most intense, where a new world is about to be born: