Philosophy, said a great thinker, is the product of wonder. With even more assurance that may be said of art. The basic weakness of all art criticism is that it can analyse everything but the “wonder” of a work. Art is certainly never the product of explanation. Picasso has complained that everybody wants to “understand” painting. ‘Why’, he asked, ‘do they not try to understand the songs of birds? Why are they content to love the night, a flower, everything around them, without seeking to understand such things ? Whilst painting they must understand’. Those who try to explain a work of art, he added, are nearly always on the wrong track. He might have dropped the “nearly”. If one wants to know the time it is scarcely necessary to take the clock to bits.