ABSTRACT
Picasso’s rage is, I believe, perfectly visible in Guernica, and it would be deeply misguided to deny that brute aesthetic fact. To claim that the emotion is metaphysically private, that it is only contingently associated as the mental meaning behind a physical artwork, and that the proper function of criticism is to provide guidance from the visible artifact to an hypothesis concerning the immaterial emotional state hidden behind it, is to revert to the dualistic categories from which Wittgenstein’s arguments provide a much needed escape.
