People often wonder what 'modern' artists mean when they represent human beings in a simplified and apparently distorted manner, as in the case of the famous M. Picasso, and very many others, sincere and insincere. The explanations of the artists themselves are contradictory and often unconvincing to any but their own kind, and indeed it is as unlikely that their rationalised explanation should have any greater value than that of any other category of human beings explaining anything that they do.
One can hardly doubt that what is seeking expression is the reality of a man or a woman conceived as an individual. Evidently reality has no form, and its expression can only be a symbol, such as plain circle or the Taoist symbol of a circle containing the Yin and the Yang, but the artist may often be impelled, quite unknown to himself, to seek to express the inherent reality, of which he has an intuition, behind a human being, or, indeed, any animal or object. And that he could not express it in any other manner than by extreme and apparently exaggerated simplification and distortion.
I do not mean to imply that only recently have artists been subjected to this urge or have experienced such an intuition; indeed El Greco very evidently had it, but the artists of classical and Renaissance times were primarily concerned with the soma (physical form) and secondarily with the psyche of their subjects. The deliberate present-day rejection of these factors, or their relegation to a level of subsidiary importance, may have left the way open to a profounder intuition which finds this expression that is so surprising and incomprehensible to the workaday observer.
