It was disconcerting to read the Aug. 14 editorial about the Picasso sculpture (“Take another look at the Picasso”). You posed the rhetorical question of whether it is a woman or baboon or horse or whatever and said it didn’t matter what we think it is.
I’m sure Picasso was not upset that people didn’t recognize it. He did, after all, believe it more important to see as many things as possible in the world. To paraphrase him, he said he always looked down when walking rather than look up, because there is so much to be found laying on the ground.
But what I find troubling is that as Chicago becomes more of the major cultural center that it is, we still don’t recognize the Picasso sculpture. Does no one see Don Quixote wearing his flat-brimmed hat and sitting on his horse?. The theme has even been pointed out in the Tribune before.
After all, Picasso was making ink drawings of Don Quixote at the time the sculpture was commissioned. What better image for Chicago than the uniting of the idealist and realist in the tale of Don Quixote!
Yes, let’s enjoy the variety of images to be found in the sculpture. But are we still the Second City, saying, after 30 years, “I don’t know. . . ? What do you think it is?”
