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A New View of the World – Technology and the Natural Sciences Change the Mechanistic World View

In the 20^th century, cultural revolutions and counter-revolutions followed one another in rapid succession, and with this, the boundaries and the possibilities of artistic expression were explored to the outer limits. The divergent kaleidoscope of languages in the visual arts developed with (and was challenged by) the resulting extreme confrontations; but the overarching, all-encompassing style, which had crystallised in other centuries, was still missing. A variety of turbulent political developments, economic and social changes, technical advancement, and scientific discoveries, the wars and political tensions, as well as the rapidly advancing industrialisation had, at the close of the 19^th century, led to a significant change in the existing view of the world, and to an increasing degree, a transformation of the prevailing ethical constructs. The discoveries in the natural sciences, primarily in chemistry, physics, and medicine had a huge impact on practically every person by providing a higher quality of life.

Visual habits changed with the introduction of the car, radio, and telephone because of the new speeds and the manner of seeing things from great heights, from aircraft, hot air balloons, and from tall buildings.

Scientific research, and the discoveries which resulted, radically altered the way people conceptualised the world around them. In 1895, Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen discovered Röntgen rays, better known as X-rays, and suddenly, it was possible to see inside of a person. In 1900, Max Planck developed with quantum theory, which contradicted the very basis of traditional physics. In the same year, the world was shaken by the psychoanalytic interpretations of Sigmund Freud, giving further insight into a person’s innermost feelings and motivations. Shortly thereafter, Hermann Minkowski developed the mathematical model to describe the space-time dimension, which in turn led his student, Albert Einstein, to develop his famous theory of general relativity.

Since around 1890, fundamental changes have occurred in the art of Western cultures. These developments were born from the desire for pure, unconditional vision. Over the years, it was no longer visual improvement of an object that was the goal of artistic expression, but rather the depiction of the ‘second reality’. Therefore, that reality (which we cannot recognise and experience with the five senses alone) became the goal of artistic creation.

At the beginning of the 20^th century, trends began to emerge that began to diverge from a naturalistic conception of reality and set out to explore beneath the mere superficial appearance of things. Regardless of the multitude of stylistic backgrounds in individual Western countries, everywhere, the new realisation that a work of art ought no longer to be made in the spirit of the old aesthetics of imitation, as if taken from nature, but rather rise from its own independent dimension of existence. A work of art is now autonomous.

The inner mission of the artist was no longer to portray or interpret, as in the previous centuries, for photography had perfected that aim. Invented and developed by two Frenchmen, Jacques Mandé Daguerre and Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, between 1822 and 1838, photography increasingly competed with painting as a means to document events and to depict situations. However, it was also helpful to artists as an aid to a broadened vision.

Almost all modernist artistic movements received their momentum from the new visual relationship to the non-stationary object that had suddenly revealed itself to be a mobile and fragmented. Despite the artistic developments of individual countries, all innovative artists were united in the common search for a new graphic style of movement, one which encompassed a sense of autonomous colour creation and an abstract language of independent forms. In 1905, the Fauves, the new wild ones, displayed their subversive explosions of colour at the Salon d’Automne in Paris.

Expressionism started in Germany in 1905 with the founding of the Dresden artist group, Die Brücke. In 1907, Paris dedicated an extensive exhibition to the works of Paul Cézanne. It was at this exhibit that Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso came into contact with the gray shades of Cubism, which rejected the perspective of the Renaissance, fragmented the visual world, and radically separated the world of painting from that of natural phenomenon. In 1911, the Cubists exhibited for the first time at the Paris Salon d’Automne. The same year in Paris, Robert Delaunay developed Orphism, which sought to give colours their autonomy. In Italy, Emilio Filippo Tommaso Marinetti founded Futurism, a vocal movement that infused the visual world with a net of dynamic energy. His first manifesto was published in February 1909 in Paris. The Futurist painters announced their first manifestos in 1910. In 1909, the Neue Künstlervereinigung (New Artists’ Association) was formed in Munich. Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) would later emerge from this around the intellectual centre of Kandinsky and Marianne von Werefkin. In early 1912, a touring exhibit of Futurist painters began in Paris that would trigger a veritable avalanche of explosive painting genres in almost all Western-oriented countries.

The phenomenon of the unconscious became general knowledge through the writings of Sigmund Freud in the years around 1900 and subsequently by Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav Jung. Like the former customs officer Henri Rousseau or Marc Chagall, painters depicted the visual kingdom of the soul and wrote fairy tale-like stories. Artists like Max Ernst, Francis Bacon, Salvador Dali, and René Magritte painted the heights and depths of the unconscious. In the case of James Ensor, personal fears played a role as well, compulsive delusions, hallucinations, and death fantasies. Eventually, James Ensor became the great mentor for the art of the 1980s with respect to the routine association with the hallucinatory and in the method of intuitive depiction and imagery. In general, the works of great painters have always been based on the experience of the human soul, as the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, Jan van Eyck, Francisco Goya, Leonardo da Vinci, Vincent van Gogh, or Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec underscore.

An additional topic which was of particular interest to art and science at the close of the 19^th and the opening of the 20^th centuries was the affect of invisible phenomenon in matter and in nature. Scientific discoveries fundamentally changed the view of space and matter. As a result of the evidence proving the existence of electromagnetic waves provided by Heinrich Rudolf Hertz in 1888 and the discovery of practical wireless telegraphic transmission in 1900, the layperson gained the impression that space was now full of imperceptible, oscillating waves. The assumption was that every piece of matter was radioactive and emits particles into the surrounding space.

Artists and writers reacted strongly to the new paradigms for seeing and communicating. L’Evolution de la matière by Gustave Le Bon was the decisive best-selling work in spreading these ideas. The French astronomer, Camille Flammarion, in his book, L’Inconnu called for science to study the ‘mysterious phenomenon’ such as telepathy, because reality does not correspond to the limits of our knowledge and observations. At that time, one associated occult phenomenon with scientific findings: x-rays with clairvoyance, telepathy with wireless telegraphy, and radioactivity with alchemy.

André Derain, Le Séchage des voiles, 1905.

Oil on canvas, 82 × 101 cm. I. A. Morosov collection, The Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.