ABSTRACT
in approaching the work of any contemporary artist one has always to dispose of the tiresome question of influences—tiresome because, being a contemporary question, it is bound to involve those not very creditable emotions we generally hide under the French phrase amour propre. To the objective student of art these emotions seem unreasonable, for the whole history of art is a close texture of such influences, and those who are most free from them are certainly not the greatest artists. One might even risk the generalization that the great artist emerges precisely at the point where the greatest number of strands meet, to create, not a confusion, but a pattern of universal significance. Michelangelo is such a nodus, and in our own time, Picasso.
