the early-20th-century avant- garde for having embraced aca- demicism. Picasso, however, took a different view of the older mas- ter. "Renoir's struggle during his last decades to bridge the gap be- tween his early work and the Western classical tradition with- out jettisoning his pioneering contributions to Impressionism," Fitzgerald writes, "provided a model for Picasso's own effort to broaden his art without turning his back on Cubism."
The strange pattern of Picas- so's...