The recent discovery in an old intelligence file that Picasso sought French nationality in 1940 should have come as no surprise. Throughout his life Picasso was an unprincipled charlatan, and for all his enormous artistic skills, he knew the depth of his own vapidity.
He knew he was loyal to nothing, honoured nothing, respected nothing - not even, as we now know, his supposedly adored Catalonia. It was a pretence throughout; and what completes the picture, what establishes him an odious and modish poser, was the disclosure in the file that in May 1940 he attacked a Polish army officer in a café, shouting pro-Soviet slogans.
The reputation of any artist would never have survived the diseased double standards of western liberal life if he had taken a pro-Nazi stance; but of course, supporting Stalin, who murdered more people than Hitler, is never held against a writer or painter. Collaboration with left-wing totalitarianism was and is regarded as entirely respectable for an artist, right-wing totalitarianism is cultural death.
I cannot prove that the collapse in artistic standards in the second half of the 20th century was connected with the ideological capture of the artistic community by the left, with Picasso as the standard-bearer. But the two processes occurred simultaneously: and of course the left, being in favour of "progress" as a matter of principle, would also welcome changes in artistic standards that seemed to make art and its presentation more accessible to the unskilled. This is called anti-élitism, and anti-élitism is the essence of the left; but, of course, élitism is the essence of real art.
The embodiment of the compromise between "left-wing" politics and art is in the person and the works of Pablo Ruiz Picasso, who probably never did a "socialist" deed in his life and who, like the rest of that grisly shower, the left-bank intelligentsia, did nothing for freedom while France was occupied. Picasso, being a citizen of a neutral country, could have left. He didn't. Nor - unlike Beckett - did he join the resistance.
Guernica is Picasso's great political statement, revered everywhere. But it could have just as easily been called "Consequences of the Ford Model T", "Long Day in the Bull-fight at Zaragoza," or "Bored Housewife". You can be sure it wouldn't have been greeted with the witless whinnies of approval if it had been entitled "Stalinist Concentration Camp in Siberia", which it resembles every bit as much as it does the massacre at Guernica.
Subtract Picasso from the story of the degeneration of European painting and drawing in the 20th century and it's hard to imagine it taking the catastrophic turn that it did. Because he was the finest artist of the century. He knew it. But he also knew that that though he was technically skilled as Raphael or Rembrandt, and perhaps even Leonardo, he lacked the purity of their muse. The moral dimension was missing. He looked into his soul and found only aridity.
His semi-defection to the visual gibberish of abstraction was art's Stakeknife moment: the man who should have been protecting the artistic legacy of hundreds of years of technical discovery in fact betrayed it.
The results have been simply catastrophic. Generations of people calling themselves "artists" have been churned out by art schools, and with no more idea how to draw than to make plutonium. Worse, they are proud of their invincible ignorance. For the first time since the Renaissance, the colleges of Europe have made it their business to laud cretinism and to rejoice in technical mediocrity.
Once upon a time, Damien Hurst would have been a purveyor of piccalilli, gherkins and mango chutney. Today his pickles have become a valuable art commodity. Tracy Emin has turned a list of all the people she's had sex with ("and most of all, with myself") into a "work of art". And these buffoons win prizes and make fortunes.
Hurst-Emin, the Baader-Mienhoff of art: they are a cultural nadir. Go over to that nadir, and stare down: and unless it is resisted, beneath it lies an abyss; beneath that abyss, another nadir; beneath that nadir another abyss. It is a hall of mirrors into an infinite hell of junk masquerading as art - and in the background you can hear the brainless babble of critics who exult in the Turner prize, and who see the canvas as an opportunity to daub political statements about feminism or the Palestinians or AIDS. The tat of Knock is preferable, for at least that is about real feelings, if only of the simple-minded.
A real and coherent resistance to the lunatic orthodoxies of abstraction, and the critical acclaim that goes with it, is now finally beginning to take shape in Ireland. The many artists who are dedicated to defending and perpetuating the principles of draughtsmanship and composition and who have held the fort against the splash 'n' daub school of abstract unart are now represented by "Figurative Art Ireland". They are no longer individuals: they are a movement.
Some 40 of these artists have contributed to FAI's first exhibition, with over 200 canvases and prints, opening in Dun Laoghaire Town Hall on Friday, May 23rd and running until June 2nd. Two of the exhibitors are students, Damien Flood and Siobhan Strahan; and one, the resoundingly-named Tarquin Landseer, is the son of the splendid Gabrielle Williams, formerly the fine art critic for this newspaper. Paintings you can understand and enjoy, without having to endure some critical babble deciphering meanings from that soiled sheep or that pickled sheet.