MEDICINE VERSUS ART 15 



The following remarks made by Picasso in 1923 throw a curious 

 light on this. Said he, 



To me there is no past or future in art. If a work of art can- 

 not live always in the present it must not be considered at all. 

 The art of the Greeks, of the Egyptians, of the great painters 

 who lived in other times, is not an art of the past; perhaps it is 

 more alive today than it ever was. Art does not evolve by itself, 

 the ideas of people change and with them their mode of ex- 

 pression. When I hear people speak of the evolution of an artist, 

 it seems to me that they are considering him standing between 

 two mirrors that face each other and reproduce his image an in- 

 finite number of times, and that they contemplate the successive 

 images of one mirror as his past, and the images of the other mirror 

 as his future, while his real image is taken as his present. They 

 do not consider that they all are the same images in different 

 planes.* 



Science is progressive and therefore ephemeral; art is non- 

 progressive and eternal. A deeper contrast could not be imagined. 



In the field of science, the methods are supremely important. A 

 history of science is to a large extent a history of the instruments, 

 material or immaterial, created by a succession of men to solve 

 their several problems. Each instrument or each method is, as it 

 were, a crystallization of human genius. Look at the cockpit of an 

 airplane, and ask yourself what was the origin and development of 

 each one of its tools; it is an endless story of patient accumula- 

 tion and adjustment. In art, on the contrary, the results matter 

 more than the methods. I am not interested in knowing how a 

 symphony was produced, how a fresco was painted, how a dish 

 was cooked. The beauty of the symphony and the painting satisfy 

 me, and so does the tastiness of the food; I do not ask for the 

 recipe. 



The scientist strives to be more and more objective and accu- 

 rate; the artist lets himself go and his accuracy is intangible. The 



* Picasso, forty years of bis art, 2nd ed., edited by Alfred H. Barr, Jr., issued by Museum 

 of Modern Art (New York, 1939, p. 11). 



