Picasso and Braque had not set out with any specific program in mind, and Picasso in 1923 rejected the idea of research in art with words which soon became famous:  “To search is meaningless in painting. To Find…that is the thing.” It will be clear from later Volumes that a very large proportion of what is best in this century’s art has been predicated in one way or another on what Picasso and Braque “found” between 1907 and 1914. They had liquidated, one by one, the problems which had been left unsolved at the time of the death of Cezanne in 1906; they had given altogether new answers to the question, “What can a picture be?” ; they kept alive the idea of the masterpiece and on many occasions lived up to it. In one sense, in 1914 their careers had hardly begun…certainly they were still giving new resonance to the idea of Cubism in the late 1940s and 50s…but it could equally be said that by the end of that fateful year they had completed what the art historian Edward Fry has rightly called the “greatest single aesthetic achievement of the twentieth century.”

January 6, 2010. Uncategorized.