the eye to a glaring electric light at the top, in which the light bulb is set in
an eye-like oval. Whose eye is this? The eye of God? The eye of conscience?
The eye of the world turned on atrocity?
My reasons for concluding with Guernica are several: This is a survey
of European art, and World War II brought European art to a momentary
standstill. Guernica itself is a masterwork of European art, and it is a history
painting with allegorical elements, similar to Delacroix’s Liberty Leading
the People. Taking an even longer view, we may place it beside the Bayeux
Tapestry, which we discussed in Lecture Two and a detail of which we now
see. Recall the violent climax of the Battle of Hastings in the tapestry, where
horses are turned upside down and dead soldiers À oat in the bottom margin
of the embroidered chaos. Some 860 years separate these two works, but
much also connects them, both in history and in art history.
Much art is beautiful, as beautiful as life often is, and creating beauty is
one purpose of art. Another purpose of art is to remind us of historic and
personal truths, many of them unpleasant. The achievement of great art is
to express both the beautiful and the unpleasant in such a way that we never
forget them. Ŷ
Umberto Boccioni:
Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, 1913, bronze, 48 ½ x 34”
(124.5 x 86 cm), Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Milan, Italy.Salvador Dali:
Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War), 1936,
oil on canvas, 39 5/16 x 39 3/8” (101.5 x 102 cm), Philadelphia Museum
of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA.Marcel Duchamp:
Fountain, 1917 (replicated 1964), porcelain, 14” H (35.6 cm H), Galleria
Schwarz, Milan, Italy.Works Discussed