Geniusz rozkładu. Nikołaj Bierdiajew wobec sztuki Pabla Picassa

Picasso occupied a very special place within Nicolai Berdyaev’s philosophical considerations. What motivated him to assess avant-garde art was an exhibition at the art gallery owned by Sergey Shchukin in 1914. The Russian thinker became personally acquainted with the exhibition. In his attitude towards Picasso’s art, Berdyaev shows the universal category of assessment which he had applied earlier to random artistic phenomena. The philosopher gives avant-garde art the status of the verifier of spiritual changes, at the same time pointing to the evolution of people’s attitude towards both the surrounding reality and themselves. By paying so much attention to the works of the Spanish artist, Berdyaev formulates a thesis concerning the spiritual crisis of the culture occurring in statu nascendi. That is to say that he perceives avant-garde art as, on the one hand, the foreshadowing of inevitable socio-political changes and, on the other hand, a graphic equivalent of the spiritual changes which are about to happen. In the role of category which should present the direction of assessing not only Picasso’s works, but also, in a broader sense, the historical and cultural changes, Berdyaev uses the terms of crisis, freedom, beauty, humanism and spirituality. The Russian philosopher considers Picasso a helpless exposer of illusions of materialized and synthesized beauty, whose paintings are the proof of the crisis occurring in art, self-awareness and, in a broader sense, also within humanity.