The year is 1939. It’s a balmy August night, lit by a big, yellow moon. Two fishermen in a boat are earning their keep out there off the shore of Antibes in southern France. Gas lamps reflect on the water’s surface and flicker into the air. But beneath these calm waters swirl malignant tides that portend the onset of a Second, much deadlier World War just a few weeks away. This scene in Pablo Picasso’s “Night Fishing at Antibes” stopped hakimbishara in his tracks during a visit to the MoMA on a hot Saturday afternoon in New York City. “A quick perusal of the headlines,” Bhishara writes, “is enough for one to conclude that dictators don’t die but multiply, and that history doesn’t repeat itself — it vomits in its own mouth.” Currently hung on a wall at a busy intersection connecting two escalators on the museum’s fifth floor, it’s nearly impossible to have a private moment with this Cubist masterpiece, much less heed its alarm that we’re never really too far away from a third, infi...