AVANT-GARDE AND KITSCH
43
technique that draws on science and industry, has erased this dis–
tinction in practice.
Let us see for example what happens when an ignorant Rus–
sian peasant such as Macdonald mentions stands with hypothetical
freedom of choice before two paintings, one by Picasso, the other
by
Repin. In the first he sees, let us say, a play of lines, colors and
spaces that represent a woman. The abstract technique--to accept
Macdonald's supposition, which I am inclined to doubt-reminds
him somewhat of the icons he has left behind him in the village,
and he feels the attraction of the familiar. We will even suppose
that he faintly surmises some of the great art values the cultivated
find in Picasso. He turns next to Repin's picture and sees a battle
scene. The technique is not so familiar-as technique. But that
weighs very little with the peasant, for he suddenly discovers values
in Repin's picture which seem far superior to the values he has been
accustomed to finding in icon art; and the unfamiliar technique
itself is one of the sources of those values: the values of the vividly
recognizable, the miraculous and the sympathetic. In Repin's pic–
ture the peasant recognizes and sees things in the way in which he
recognizes and sees things outside of pictures-there is no discon–
tinuity between art and life, no need to accept a convention and say
to oneself, that icon represents Jesus because it intends to represent
Jesus, even if it does not remind me very much of a man. That
Repin can paint so realistically that identifications are self-evident
immediately and without any effort on the part of the spectator–
that is miraculous. The peasant is also pleased by the wealth of
self-evident meanings which he finds in the picture: "it tells a
story." Picasso and the icons are so austere and barren in com–
parison. What is more, Repin heightens reality and makes it dra–
matic: sunset, exploding shells, running and falling men. There is
no longer any question of Picasso or icons. Repin is what the peas–
ant wants, and nothing else but Repin. It is lucky, however, for
Repin that the peasant is protected from the products of American
capitalism, for he would not stand a chance next to a Saturday
Evening Post cover by Norman Rockwell.
Ultimately, it can be said that the cultivated spectator derives
the same values from Picasso that the peasant gets from Repin,
since what the latter enjoys in Repin is somehow art too, on how–
ever low a scale, and he is sent to look at pictures by the same
