
The Girls of Avignon
Five nude women stare out with their faces turned into masks, and Picasso kept the canvas rolled up in his studio for years.

Five nude women stare out with their faces turned into masks, and Picasso kept the canvas rolled up in his studio for years.

Only the face and hands are painted naturally and the rest is gold. The Nazis seized it, and a long restitution case eventually got it back.

A black silhouette plays a flute and the snakes come out of the leaves toward the music, in moonlight Rousseau invented entirely.

Conrad wrote the first great modern novel of terrorism. Verloc keeps a seedy London shop, informs on anarchists for a foreign embassy, and is ordered to bomb the Greenwich Observatory to frighten England.

Truth is not something ideas possess but something that happens to them when they work, James argues. He sets friends bickering over a squirrel to show the quarrel is merely verbal.

Zeus arrives as a stream of gold coins and ornament between her thighs, and Klimt makes no attempt to be subtle about it.

A sallow green face fills the front of the picture while behind him a woman in red picks fruit beside another man. He is imagining it.
Modern politics is, at bottom, a struggle not of men but of forces.
All the steam in the world could not, like the Virgin, build Chartres.

Hot pinks and oranges laid on freely, a year before Cézanne and Picasso's Demoiselles sent Braque off toward Cubism instead.

Rivera as a student in Europe, years before the murals, still working inside the academic tradition he would later blow up.
At best, the renewal of broken relations is a nervous matter.
A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.
Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.