Light-and-Shadow Dialogue Today the Home Forum Begins an Occasional Series, `Crosscurrents in Art,' a Look at How Artists Are Inspired by Other Artists Regardless of Period, Geography, or Culture

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THE narrative of art is, like the complex web of lines in an etching, a fascinating pattern of crosscurrents, or convergences and divergences.

Art is nourished by art as much as by other forms of experience, and artists have carried on intriguing, if one-way, conversations across the centuries. The later conduct a kind of dialogue with the earlier, since every artist has the entire scope of previous art on which to call.

This chronological narrative of art is only partly an "evolution" - only to the degree that every artist is involuntarily a child of his period. But the idea of some clear line of development, like scientific knowledge refining or …