laura_seabrook | Book Meme (Reply)

Infected from leduck...

Grab the nearest book.
Open the book to page 123.
Find the fifth sentence.
Post the text of the next 3 sentences on your blog along with these instructions.
No digging for that "cool" or "intellectual" book in your closet! Just pick up whatever is closest.

OK, here goes...

"For the full potential of the comic tradition to be released into serious painting, it was necessary for an artist to have a natural gift for funny drawing, to have a deep emotional dissatisfaction with the accepted decorum, and finally to find some new and unexpected catalyst that could unlock the repressed energies of satiric imagery in a way that would allow them to enter, and even annex, high art.
This was achieved in about eighteen months in the middle of the first decade of this century by Pablo Picasso. the transformation in Picasso's art from 1905 to 1907 is still perhaps the most astonishing transformation in art history, and is often been described and diagnosed, usually in terms of impact of new influences or as the logical working out of possibilities implicit in his earlier paintings"
High and Low / Kirk Varnedde & Adam Gopnik. - New York, 1991

...I swear I didn't set that it - it was the nearest book to me when I typed this! Mind you, it's no wonder I've been merely browsing through this book, which doubled up as a catalogue for an exhibition in the U.S.A. some years ago.