Our Girl and I have been batting the great-art-we-don’t-get ball back and forth, and in my most recent return service I took a couple of shots that stirred up the natives. In seeking to explain my own lukewarmness about Picasso, I quoted these lines from my Wall Street Journal review of MoMA’s “Matisse Picasso” show:
In the visual arts, the race has always been between Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, and Picasso has always been the front-runner. Certainly Americans, with their puritan distrust of beauty, have typically favored his relentless experimentation to Matisse’s less obviously innovative stylistic pilgrimage.
Then I signed off with this bit of wholesale nose-thumbing:
I wouldn’t lose a bit of sleep if all the German paintings in the world vanished first thing tomorrow morning. Poof.
Second things first. A persnickety reader writes:
What do you include under the rubric of “German paintings”? Is it too pedantic to remind you that Germany dates from 1871? Do you exempt German engravers who also painted (D