–for Kass<\/p>\n
When Picasso died in 1973, the political cartoonist Pat Oliphant published a cartoon tribute to the artist that depicts then-President Richard Nixon–in modified cubist style–at breakfast reading a newspaper with the headline, “Picasso dead at 91.” The cubefied Nixon quips to his wife Pat, “I was always glad he wasn’t a political cartoonist.”<\/p>\n
Funny enough, but the real punchline is down in the lower left corner of the cartoon, where Punk, Oliphant’s wry penguin commentator, offers a scorching retort: “He was the best in the business, sport!”<\/p>\n
Punk’s commentary brings to mind first, of course, a masterpiece like “Guernica,”<\/a> Picasso’s visual condemnation of Franco’s aerial attack (using Hitler’s Luftwaffe) on the Basque city in northern Spain. The painting’s images are indeed cartoonish; the anguish and horror are not.<\/p>\n But all art is political, not just works with explicit contemporaneous subjects like Guernica. All great art is subversive.<\/p>\n To stay with “Guernica” for a moment: it was the first painting I ever fell in love with. I remember the first time I saw it as a teenager. As I climbed the wide marble staircase at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art, the 11-by-25-foot canvas of “Guernica” loomed ahead of me, majestic in size, overwhelming in its effect. It gave me a love for large, affective paintings. It shaped my understanding of what art does and how.<\/p>\n Artists make us look again, often at stuff we’ve seen before–a bucolic landscape, an all-night diner, a starry night–and let us see things differently. We discover what we might have missed, and we find ourselves affected in unexpected ways by stuff we’ve become complacent about.<\/p>\n Because what is there to be complacent about, anyway?<\/p>\n “Complacent” is our word for today’s episode of “Etymology with Auntie Jane.” It comes from Latin and means “to be pleased with.” And what is there we can ever be pleased with once and for all?<\/p>\n Nor I nor any man that but man is<\/em><\/p>\n With nothing shall be pleased til he be eased<\/em><\/p>\n