Van Gogh freed us all

Great art, by my definition, changes the way we perceive.  I was thinking about the incredible popularity of Van Gogh and Picasso.  Both had all the appropriate balance, color and other associated aesthetics of their era and their peers.  So what did each of them do that was so exceptional?

I think Van Gogh freed us from the need to be careful with our brush strokes.  Van Gogh went wild with his brush strokes making them visible, bold and deeply integrated into his paintings.  He left everyone after him free to use their brush with wild abandon.

Picasso, while not the first to modify and distort his human and animal images, did so in a way that also freed everyone after him to distort and contort human and animal images in a grotesque manner. It was his grotesque distortions that freed us all to do the same.

Interestingly, the painter who freed us the most, Jackson Pollock, has not experienced the popularity of Van Gogh and Picasso.  I think the reason is simple: in the popular mind Pollock was not creating art, he was just making a mess.