An artist of true genius

"An artist of true genius is not one who wholly dismisses old traditions and plunges us headfirst into an unknown, disorientating, possibly meaningless paradigm, but rather one, who working from within a predetermined framework, subtly manages to push away our blinkers an inch or two, to reflect our faces in a mildly distorted mirror, to find a second bottom in the most familiar things or a second meaning in the most exhausted words - in short, to wipe the accumulations of dust from our world - and who by doing so allows us to rise with him to a higher plane of existence. That is why Chagall, with his deceptively simple, childelike universe of flying fiddlers, green-faced lovers and mysteriously smiling cows, will always be grater than Kandinsky, with his icy swirls of colour and elegant abstract compositions, for all the brilliant innovations of the latter." (The Dream Life of Sukhanov, p. 121)