"Art is beauty. Beauty takes many forms beyond the stereotypical and expected ie. a flower or a warm summer's day. — Outlander
Art critic Sister Wendy Beckett once said that before Picasso, painters took it for granted that their job was to produce works of beauty. What else is art to do, after all? It was only after Picasso—specifically, after 1907's “Les Demoiselles d'Avignon,” with its squatting French prostitutes with faces like grotesque African masks—that painters realized they were not bound to beauty, that beauty was not a fate but, in a way, a limitation. Picasso showed that ugliness too could be the subject of great art, that artists could capture ugliness without rendering it beautiful, and this forever changed the course of culture. Like all truly deep assumptions, this one about beauty had hardly seemed like an assumption at all. It had seemed rather like an unquestionable, inescapable truth—until someone questioned it and thereby escaped it. What had seemed self-evident came to be seen as a self-imposed restriction. How much of the world, how much ugliness, how much mundanity had artists been ignoring? How much more could they now capture? This was perhaps the question of twentieth century art, with its depictions of hideous slaughter, its sliced-up cow carcasses, its snow shovels and urinals and soup cans, paint splotches and blank canvases.
(Lee Braver)
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