If you are at all familiar with the history of art, you are aware of Pablo Picasso, the famous Spanish painter who is perhaps best known for introducing the world to cubism.  Much has been written about Picasso, and countless museums have mounted exhibitions of his art over the years.  He has achieved a notoriety, good and bad, and fame which few artists have surpassed.  This week, we remember his birthday.

    It is in the thinking behind cubism, however, that Picasso perhaps made his most significant mark.  Prior to Picasso, art, despite its numerous divergences into Impressionism and Postimpressionism and the like, continued to present its images reasonably proximate to the object it was portraying.  But cubism broke up its images, fracturing them, twisting them up and down and around, bending them in ways that they would never be in real life.

    

    Picasso dared to break boundaries, dared to dream in ways that others either could or would not.  Although some people found his forays threatening and felt as if his art was making their world less secure, others welcomed Picasso's perspective.  Yet his was simply another way of looking at the human condition.  It underscored that a world wrestling with the ennui of modernity was looking for a way out.  Picasso's fractured images made modernity's paradox frustratingly plain:  though we like to think we are significant beings, we do so in what we, gripped in modernity, have no choice but to insist is an insignificant universe.

    Asserting that we can live without boundaries only underscores that we need them more than ever to find who we are.  However mysterious they may be.  Perhaps that's why even some of the most committed modernist painters continued to affirm the idea of God.

    By the way, I'll be traveling into next week and will not be posting for a bit.  Talk to you soon!