每日英语听力

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毕加索 Part 03

And then, around 1910, having seen off beauty and history, Picasso goes for the hat trick. Something even more mind-blowing, something that, for most people over the centuries, had been the entire point of art.

Bye-bye, resemblance. If a two-dimensional duplicate of the world is what you want, then photography is going to do that job much more efficiently.

This is Picasso's art dealer, Ambroise Vollard. This is how Picasso saw him, a different vision of the way things really are. Cubism.

Deep inside his Slinky-toy cascades of form seen juddering through moments in time, was, he insisted, something compact, solid and firm. By blowing up the look of things, Picasso was saying, I'm getting beyond surface appearances, to the core.

It wasn't for those who wanted something easy on the eye. But then Picasso wasn't interested in pleasuring the public.

He positively revelled in the cult of difficulty. ''Too hard? '' you can almost hear him sneering. ''Tough. ''

In the 1920s, there's something else he doesn't lose much sleep over, the state of the world. . . . . . .

He's doing fine, thank you, but Europe is in deep trouble, fascism beginning to strong-arm its way into power. But of the chaos and hatred, riot and revolution, there's not a hint in Picasso's work.

For some artists, it was no problem, obligation even, to combine radical politics and radical painting, to have modern art criticise hypocrisy and injustice. . . . . . .

George Grosz, the German artist, was busy having a go at the military dinosaurs and Nazi sympathisers, who were busy subverting Germany's fragile democracy. Creatively, of course, Grosz is no Picasso.

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