This picture, titled “Signs and Portents”, was painted in 1956 by the Spanish artist José Guerrero, and is now in the show called “Art of Another Kind: International Abstraction and the Guggenheim, 1949–1960”, at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. There’s something poignant about the almost ethical weight that abstraction used to carry. It feels as though the simple act of making your picture look different from others once counted as a philosophical gambit. “Art of Another Kind” leaves us immersed in that moment, and while we’re there we can buy into its unlikely values.
