Questions 52 to 56 are based on the following passage.
Picasso’s art was not just a pleasant distraction. The artist believed that art helps to penetrate further into the world and into men for understanding. With his unusually acute senses, with his intense, black eyes, Picasso saw every subject as no one else did. He tried to express the essence of his subject. He showed people how to grasp a new concept of beauty. He made them realize that beauty can have a diversity of forms. "Now is the time in this period of change and revolution to use a revolutionary manner of painting and not to paint like before." That was Picasso’s idea. Believing it is the artist’s function to discover new forms of expression, he liberated art and made our feelings about it more acute.
Picasso keeps all of art alive. His work encompasses ’all of the past and foretells the future of art. His early paintings were sober and sensible, in the academic style. But Picasso was among the first artists to appreciate the vitality of the primitive African masks and idols that he saw in exhibitions in Paris before the First World War. Later, he experimented in recreating the artist’s world as Cezanne had yzed it, "You must see in nature the cylinder, the sphere, the cone"— "the little Cubes," as one artist called them. This Cubist vision of the world introduced a new period in the history of art and influenced all the forms of self-expression in the first half of the twentieth century: sculpture, architecture, ballet, theater design, and all the decorative arts. Even the zigzag camouflage (伪装) used in modern ware was suggested by Cubist (立体派) art.
In 1925, Picasso began to explore an uncharted world, the surrealist world, the dream world beyond reality. He traveled in the unexplored regions of the mind and expressed thoughts never uttered before by an artist. His giant canvas, Guernica, made in 1937 to commemorate the Basque town bombed by German planes flying for Franco in the Spanish Civil War, is a picture of a ruined world with strange shapes of dying horses and murdered children. It is a violent expression of revolt against the horror of modern ware, in a language not understood by the ordinary man. Many people have not yet been able to accept this modern, revolutionary kind of art, which Picasso influenced more than any other one artist. Perhaps his art will not be fully under stood for many years. "Everyone wants to understand art," protested Picasso. "Why not try to understand the song of a bird" He explained further, "I don’t read English. An English book is a blank to me. This doesn’t mean that the English language doesn’t exist. Why should I blame anyone else but myself if I can’t understand what I know nothing about"
For those who can understand his art, Picasso ranks among the great artists who illuminate the world and help men to see life more clearly. As Michelangelo himself a great artist, said, "Some merit the name of eagles because they surpass all others and break through the clouds to the light of the sun." In the world of art, Pablo Picasso is surely among the eagles.
What do people tend to think of Picasso’s paintings