EPPH - Every Painter Paints Himself

How Swords Become Paintbrushes

Even though artists across the ages have morphed swords into paintbrushes and spears into etching needles, few have ever been recognized. Indeed the use of weapons as visual metaphors for the tools of an artist is so widespread in art generally that it would take a book to prove. The task is  greater because art scholars are both completely unaware of this and unwilling to listen too. Occasionally, an art historian within their closed shop sees the light in an individual painting but such events are rare.

Michael Fried, an art historian at Johns Hopkins University who is as widely admired in academia as he is ignored, correctly noted of Courbet’s self-portrait as a wounded man (above) that the ‘sword and blood may be read as representing a brush and pigment respectively.’¹ It is odd that he has seen so clearly so rarely. Many of art's most iconic tools, such as paintbrush and pencil, are long and thin like rifles, swords and lances. They should be easy to see. Besides the protagonists themselves, unlike here, often hold their weapons like an artist draws or paints. The links should be obvious to an alert eye but, blinded as we all are by the illusion of reality in our own lives, so art scholars are further blinded by the illusion of reality in art.

The best I can do to rectify this problem in the short spaces available on this site is to show examples that are persuasive in their own right. I have just added three by Picasso, titled Picasso’s Swords. Take a look. You’ll wonder why the underlying scenes have never been noted, especially since Picasso, unlike other artists, was known to project his identity into the figures he drew.

1. Fried, "Courbet's Femininity" in Courbet Reconsidered (Brooklyn Museum) 1988, p.47