Picasso and the Classics

Extract

It may seem odd at first glance to include Picasso among those who have taken the torch from Greece. What, it will be asked, have these cruelly distorted images to do with the serenity of classicism? The question is ill conceived. Hellenistic art sought to explore the range of human experience as Picasso has done, and to respond to the violence of the world around as he has responded. The Laocoon or Skopas' Maenads were as shocking to their day as The Charnel-House or The Weeping Woman were to our fathers. Picasso has never been able to limit himself to the confines of one style. His restless, Alexander-like genius has always sought for new worlds to conquer. The man who at fourteen could paint The Girl with Bare Feet or the portrait of Don Ramón Perez Costales was not going to spend sixty years repeating what he had already achieved. Speaking of a contemporary who was trying to find a single solution to the problem of depicting forms he said: ‘There is no such thing as a solution.