This talk examines the aesthetic and moral valences of a model of abstraction attributed to Picasso, in the 1940s and 1950s by artists working amid the anti-colonial movements of Arab countries on the Eastern Mediterranean (Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and Iraq). As Adham Ismail, Jewad Selim, and theorist Bishr Fares, among others, negotiated clashing state commitments to scientistic development and artistic efforts to resist Western ocularcentrism, they took Picasso’s “deformations” as a model of intuition and ontological separation from the natural world. Tracking their critical thinking, we find a universalized, postwar Picasso embraced as a world unto his own.