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As an expressive art, painting consists of the organizing of ideas in terms of line and color upon a two-dimensional plane: Such is the substance of the definition of basic painting given by the French painter, Maurice Denis, in the late 19th century. And in the final analysis-in spite of all the breadth and variety of style that painting has developed in its long history-it is in those terms that every painting can be characterized, whether it be an anecdotal illustration of a story in a magazine, a Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci, or a study in purely abstract formal relationships by Picasso. It is because of the very simplicity of the elements involved that the practice of painting is popular and universal, and it is for the same reason that the art can be used equally for the epic interpretation of the Creation of the Universe, of Man, and his Fall, as in Michelangelo’s ceiling in the Sistine Chapel, or for the nucleus of a page of advertising. The quality of the result as a work of art depends on the extent to which the artist’s idea is embodied in and made clear by the pattern of line and color that constitutes the physical substance of the painting.