GREATNESS

 
The USA, it is often assumed, is a great nation, especially by its own citizens. In this election year, it is perhaps salutary to reconsider what makes something great, rather than be great just for its own sake without attaching any concrete facts after it. What does it mean to be great? What makes something great? Why do you seek it in any case and why is it so important? What do you mean?

In painting, sometimes, greatness is measured by how many reproductions sell as big posters to hang up on the walls of student dorms. The desire to adorn a room, even by transient means says a lot about the importance of beauty and how some art works embody this through their popularty as such a medium:

An example is, 'Negro Attacked by a Jaguar' a 1910 painting by Henri Julien Félix Rousseau. Here the pictorial qualities are such that the savagery of the event described simply merges into a splendid but out of scale African jungle depicted as though it was a detail from the underbrush of an everday suburban garden. Without analysing it too much, people just love images such as these, effortlessly, and quite involuntarily wish to put them up, even on the droll temporariness of Australian student lodging walls. Surely the evocativeness of his illustrations have no equal and even in the microcosmic horror of nature, both man and jaguar are shown as co-inhabitants of a certain magical world that the romantic mind conjures, then through the efforts of his brushstrokes, unerring in the application of the right colours, manages to reproduce that world in the minds of those like me, who looked and dreamt the same dreams.