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| The Modernist Mission |
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Yve-Alain Bois: Both Matisse and Picasso thought that academic art was basically dead. But they wanted to rescue the great tradition. They saw it as their duty...they felt that on their shoulders rested the future of a tradition. That’s the way they saw it. They wanted to rejuvenate it by transforming it. And they knew that was their task. They saw it unconsciously. They never completely formulated it like that, but I deeply believe that was the way they envisioned their own role in the history of art. If they were not going to rescue the tradition, that tradition was going to die. they were not going to the tradition, the tradition was going to die. I mean, you had mass media, photography, the cinema, Marcel Duchamp’s attack with his ready-mades. Why would painting still be necessary in the age of the magazine? The smell of turpentine was suffering quite a series of hard blows, and they knew that they had to defend painting by transforming it.
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