ABSTRACT
A schoolboy was taken to the National Gallery in London and, puzzled by a Picasso canvas, asked his father, ‘What’s this supposed to be?’ His father replied, ‘Well, it’s supposed to be a violin and a fruit dish.’ The boy looked again, and then changed his position, examining the picture closely. ‘Well, why isn’t it then?’ How should his father have addressed such an important question? With the impact of photography on artistic representation? With the advent of modernism? With the abandonment of perspective? With the new interest among artists in colour and shape signalled by Kandinsky’s famous 1911 text Concerning the Spiritual in Art? So much in the modern world has changed that it is diffi cult to know what particular images, concepts or even institutions represent. And yet at the same time there are continuities, traditions, linking Picasso with Fra Angelico, for example. Change and continuity is as much a part of politics as of any other area of human activity. Things are seldom just what they seem – perhaps they never were – and political parties today are certainly not what our Edwardian, Victorian or Georgian forebears would have expected them to be.
