Dryad

~~‘I LOVE [EVA] VERY MUCH AND I WILL WRITE THIS in my paintings’, Pablo Picasso wrote in a letter to his dealer Daniel...

In 1931, in the catalogue for his exhibition German Painting and Sculpture, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., the first director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), considered the discovery of so-called “primitive art” by two principal figures of two important European avant-garde manifestations, both...

Some time in late summer 1912 Picasso took a photograph (fig. 94) at the front door of the villa he had rented for the season at Sorgues. We know that Braque had brought down the “machine à photographie” specially from Paris a week or so before. The picture records the main paintings Picasso had done over the previous two months. On the doorstep, from left to right, are perched the imposing Portrait of a Man, which in time got called the Aficionado (fig. 95), the equally grand …

ONE IMPLICATION of all this is that, given such odd objects of explanation, the relation of the art historian to historical method is likely to be a Bohemian one. The theory of historical explanation has tended to divide into two camps — the nomological (or nomothetic) and the teleological (or idiographic). On one side the nomological people argue that it is possible, at least in principle, to explain historical human actions within quite strictly causal terms as examples covered by general laws …