Artistic innovation and supposed prophecy in pre–World War I painting

Did these painters actually see the future, or are people looking back at their work and finding a prediction? That's my first reaction to calling their paintings prophetic. If enough people paint enough different things, some of those paintings might resemble whatever happens next. We need more than an unusual painting followed by an unusual event to know how impressive the prediction was.

The opening gives us a more specific idea of what people mean. These paintings challenged familiar ways of seeing the present, so some viewers interpret them as anticipating a very different future. The styles varied, but they all broke with traditions of representational art stretching back to the Renaissance. We don't need to know the history of every style. The useful point is that these artists were doing something substantially different.

The second paragraph makes the claim bigger. Picasso, Braque, Kandinsky, and Malevich are credited with anticipating later developments in art and the political and social upheavals surrounding World War I. Those are two different achievements. Getting ahead of an artistic trend is one thing; foreseeing what will happen to society is another. We still haven't been shown a particular painting and the event it supposedly predicted.

Then one critic goes further: the paintings' chief value comes from their prophetic power. So this person thinks the impressive thing is what the artists supposedly saw coming. Their new techniques take second place. Keep that opinion attached to the critic. So far, the writer has been explaining a view, not necessarily endorsing it.

The third paragraph begins with a concession. Artists can speculate about the future just as writers and politicians can, and speculation about war was widespread. Fair enough. But making a prediction isn't automatically evidence of special insight. Think of someone who keeps predicting a recession. If one eventually happens, we'd still want to know how specific and well supported the prediction was. That's a way to test the idea while reading; it isn't an example supplied by the text.

Now we get the writer's own judgment: credit these artists' forward-looking quality to their “exceptional aesthetic innovations.” That's the important turn. The writer values their new ways of making art and rejects clever guesses about politics or society as the explanation of their importance. The disagreement is about what deserves credit, not about whether artists are allowed to imagine a future.

Picasso and Braque make that distinction concrete. Their own statements, along with accounts from their contemporaries, show a concern with representation and form. They wanted to create a reality beyond what was available to the eye alone. We don't have to solve the philosophy of cubism to understand their priority: they were exploring what art could do. Social reform wasn't their concern as artists. That qualification matters; we aren't being given a complete account of their private political interests.

The final paragraph adds another reason to resist reading artistic innovation as prophecy. A major change in art doesn't have to come before a dramatic change in society. Delacroix's innovations responded to social conditions already emerging from earlier political upheavals. The order is social change, then artistic response. That's different from looking at innovative work as a forecast of what will happen later.

Notice that this is a question of anticipation, not whether a painting caused a war or a social movement. Delacroix helps separate artistic originality from the ability to predict events. He could make startlingly innovative work while responding to changes already underway.

We can now put the central idea in our own words: these prewar painters deserve recognition for pushing art forward, rather than for supposedly foretelling social upheaval. That keeps the writer's evaluation separate from the critic's and gives us a useful starting point for the questions.