The greatest.....

At the time I thought it was a pretty simple question to answer...

It was the end of the week and over breakfast I asked my wife who she thought was the greatest painter ever……she raised her head above The Times and gave me a look that said, ‘now that is too difficult a question for a Friday morning and before my second cup of coffee.’

It’s fair to say I know considerably more about art than my wife knows about football - not difficult when her knowledge extends only so far as Bobby Moore and the ’66 World Cup Final.

CÉZANNE, VELÁZQUEZ, TURNER, ROTHKO, MIRÓ, DALÍ, LEONARDO DA VINCI, HOCKNEY……I offered them all hoping that she would say ‘yes…him….’ Before my catalogue of names dried up.

But she just screwed her face up even tighter and offered….’it’s not possible….you just can’t compare techniques and style…periods and scale….’

I tried to help by suggesting that perhaps the answer lay somewhere in the emotion of the painting. The mood that it created or the feelings stirred within. ’Perhaps it would help if you took account of originality…..what about Kandinsky….the father of abstraction?’

’Picasso…..yes Picasso’, she exclaimed before pouring her second cup of coffee.

Picasso, the young man of the Blue and Pink Periods, when he was delicate and compassionate, the genius in his late twenties who, embracing the primitive sculpture of sub-Saharan Africa, developed Cubism, and the fervent protester against Nazi German intervention in the Spanish Civil War who painted Guernica in 1937.

This ugly masterpiece, a fractured monochrome composition from which all colour has been drained, was defined thus by Picasso: 'All living creatures in Guernica, human and animal, were turned into tortured objects, decomposed, distorted and shrieking their agony to the sky. The painting is simply a symbolic representation as seen in my own mind - that is all.'

Lionel Messi scored five goals for Barcelona against Bayer Leverkusen last week and we are now told that he really is the greatest footballer ever to have graced a pitch.

I would certainly agree that Messi has great control and poise. His balance and touch are exquisite…..but for all of his technical ability does he stir my emotions like Pele or George Best?

And are his abilities no more than the refined perfection of everything that has gone before…..a world created by Puskás, Di Stéfano, Pele, Best…..Cruyff?

Guernica: Without space and perspective, Picasso offers not a classical composition but a fast-moving kaleidoscope of child-like images inspired by a superhuman act of total war, the saturation bombing of a little country town. In the foreground a man with a broken sword lies dead; behind, a mother screams over a dead child, a wounded horse screams its agony, an old woman screams, arms outstretched in grief and rage. In all these, in an impetuous storm of emotion, Picasso too screams like a child.