The Shock of the New  

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"The essential difference between a sculpture like Andre's Equivalent VIII[1], 1978, and any that had existed before in the past is that Andre's array of bricks depends not just partly, but entirely, on the museum for its context. A Rodin in a parking lot is still a misplaced Rodin; Andre's bricks in the same place can only be a pile of bricks."--The Shock of the New, Robert Hughes.

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The Shock of the New is an eight-part documentary television series about the development of modern art written and presented in 1980 by Robert Hughes for the BBC.

Contents

Overview

The series took three years to create and Robert Hughes travelled about a quarter of a million miles during the filming to include particular places or people. The series also used archive footage of featured artists.

The series was broadcast by the BBC in 1980 in the United Kingdom and by PBS in 1981 in the United States. It addressed the development of modern art since the Impressionists and was accompanied by a book of the same name; its combination of insight, wit and accessibility are still widely praised. Hughes remembers being directed by Pegram with her saying, "It's a clever argument, Bob dear, but what are we supposed to be looking at?".

In 2004 Hughes created a one-hour update to The Shock of the New titled The NEW Shock of the New.

Series outline

The series consisted of eight episodes each one hour long (58 min approx). It was re-broadcast on PBS in the United States. In the three cases, where PBS changed the titles, they are given in square brackets below. Quotations are spoken by Martin Jarvis.

  1. Mechanical Paradise – How the development of technology influenced art between 1880 and end of World War I. Cubism and Futurism
  2. The Powers That Be [Shapes of Dissent] – Examining the relationship between modern art and authority. Dada, Constructivism, Futurism, architecture of power
  3. The Landscape of Pleasure – Examining art's relationship with the pleasures of nature, and visions of paradise 1870s to 1950s. Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Fauvism
  4. Trouble in Utopia – Examining the aspirations and reality of modern architecture. International Style, Art Nouveau, Futurist architecture, urban planning
  5. The Threshold of Liberty – Examining the surrealists' attempts to make art without restrictions.
  6. The View from the Edge [Sublime and Anxious Eye] – A look at those who made visual art from the crags and vistas of their internal world. Expressionism
  7. Culture as Nature – Examining the art that referred to the man-made world which fed off culture itself. Pop art and celebrity
  8. The Future That Was [End of Modernity] – The commercialisation of modern art, the decline of modernism, and art without substance. Land art, performance art, and body art

2004 update

Book

The book of the series was published in 1980 by the BBC under the title The Shock of the New: Art and the century of change. It was republished in 1991 by Thames and Hudson. The book was included by The Guardian in their list of the top 100 non-fiction books, and was still in print in 2012.

Subtitles

Part 1

This series the shock of the new is

about an old subject almost 100 years

old the art of our own Century

modernism the key word of the new

century was

modernity modernity meant believing in

technology and not craft in human

perfectability not original sin and

above all in a ceaseless consumption of

things and the images of things if you

were a Parisian alive in 1890 and you

wanted to show a visitor what modernity

meant you pointed to this structure the

tallest man-made object on earth the

Tower of Babel of the new machine

age

[Music]

since the great exhibition of 1851 in

London the big powers of Europe had

taken are holding world's fairs to show

off their industrial strength Paris

scheduled one for 1889 the 100th

anniversary of the French

[Music]

[Music]

Revolution this was a emblem a huge Act

of propaganda designed not by an

architect but by an engineer Gustave Eiffel the tower was the static totem of

the cult of dynamism a Colossus planted

with spread legs in the middle of Paris

its shape alluded to the human body and

to the colossi of of the

past it was the guardian of the Future

IT summed up What technological progress

meant to the men who ran Europe at the

end of the 19th century the promise of

unlimited control over the world and its

wealth the most visible sign of the

future was the automobile and this is

the first public sculpture ever set up

in its praise it commemorates the Great

Road Race of 1895 from Paris to Bordeaux and back which was won by an engineer

named IM levur in the car that he

designed and built himself the pona

levur 5 it could do about the same speed

as a jumping frog but not very much more

nevertheless leva's victory was of

tremendous social consequence because it

persuaded Europeans both manufacturers

and public alike that the future of Road

Transport lay with the internal

combustion engine and not as many had

thought before with either electricity

or

steam in all Justice there ought to be a

replica of this thing set up in every

oil Port from the Persian G to Houston

but if it looks somewhat ludicrous to us

as sculpture today that's because of

difficulties between sculpture and the

new Convention of the

machine a stone car the idea seems

surrealist to a modern eye it's simply

in congruous stone is immobile mineral

brittle cold cars are fast metallic

plastic warm a human body is warm too

but we don't think of statues as Stone

men because we're used to the

conventions of representing flesh with

stone there were no such conventions for

depicting Machinery it was too

new but the conditions of seeing were

also starting to change and the Eiffel Tower stood for that too what counted

was not so much the view of the Tower

from the

ground it was seeing the ground from the

tower nobody except a few men in

balloons had ever seen this

before there were individual pilots who

saw the sight from their planes but it

was the Eiffel Tower that gave a mass

audience a chance to see what you and I

take for granted every time we

fly the earth on which we live seems

flat as pattern from

above the Eiffel Tower was therefore a

pivot in human consciousness and that

view of the city seen by those hundreds

of thousands of visitors was as

significant in 1889 as the sight of the

Earth from the Moon would be 80 years

later through the medium of Technology

culture was Reinventing itself

everywhere in 1877 Thomas Alber Edison

came up with the most radical extension

of cultural me memory since the printed

book he invented sound

recording the first human utterance ever

retrieved I designed my original tin for

photograph in cylinder form and gave it

to my faithful John cruy to make he made

fun of it I was almost as surprised as

he was when the first model roduced M

how a little L which I shed into it

place was white as snow and every where

that Mary went the lamb was should to

go in 1879 Edison invented the

incandescent filament

bowel the fairy electricity was now led

loose upon the

world thus amazing people who had up to

now depended upon gas and whale oil to

see at

night

in 1895 The Lumiere brothers made the

images of a magic lantern move they

invented the movie camera and the

projector in 1898 Marie C discovered

radium in 191 gulo Marone sent the first

transatlantic radio message along the

Virgin Airwaves from Cornwall to the

east coast of

America in 193 two home inventors Wilbur

and Orville Wright observed the wind put

Wings on a bicycle scrambled into it

started their motor and the stupefaction

of the world took off achieving Man's

first powered flight in a heavier than

air

[Music]

machine in 195 an obscure physicist

named Albert Einstein developed the

special theory of relativity the basis

of the largest change in man's view of

the universe since Isaac Newton he

ushered in the nuclear age with one

Formula E is equal m

c² in which energy is put equal to mass

multiplied with it square of the

velocity of light showed that very small

amount of mass may be converted into a

very large amount of energy very few

people understood it and nobody could

foresee its

implications by 1913 Henry Ford had so

developed the idea of mass production

that the car running on Mr dunlop's

pneumatic tires ceased to be a toy for

the rich and became Every Man's

Chariot the right Brothers had only got

a few yards off the ground but within 6

years a French Aviator named Lou blero

managed to Pilot his ing wooden

dragonfly from one country to another

from France to England across the vast

cultural divide of the English

[Applause]

Channel in 1913 the French writer charl

pege remarked the world has changed less

since the time of Jesus Christ than it

has in the last 30 years he was right

and it was a widespread feeling for the

essence of the early modern experience

was not the specific inventions most

people weren't affected by a prototype

in a lab or an equation on a Blackboard

not yet no the important thing was the

sense of an accelerated rate of change

in all areas of human discourse it

provided the feeling of an approaching

Millennium a new order of things as the

19th century clicked over into the 20th

the end of one kind of history and the

start of

another soon after after blero flew the

channel his little monoplane was carried

in public procession through the streets

of Paris and installed in a church for

all the world like the relic of an

archangel and such was the early

apotheosis of the

machine but to have a cult does not mean

that the images automatically follow the

changes in man's view of himself and the

world between 1880 and 1914 were so far

reaching that they produced as many

problems for artists as they did stimuli

for instance how could you make

paintings that would reflect

the immense shifts in

Consciousness that this changed

technological landscape

implied how could you produce a parallel

dynamism to the Machine Age without

falling into the elementary trap of just

becoming a machine

illustrator and above all how by shoving

around on a canvas sticky stuff like

paint on a static

surface could you produce a convincing

record of process and

transformation

now the first artists to come up with a

sketch for an answer to this were the

cubists since the Rance almost all

painting had obeyed a convention it was

that of one point

perspective perspective was a

geometrical means for producing an

illusion of reality for showing things

in space in their right sizes and

positions nevertheless it was an

abstraction it was a view seen by a

motionless oneeyed person clearly

detached from what he

sees perspective gathers the visual

facts and it stabilizes them it makes a

god of The Spectator who becomes the

person on whom the whole world converges

the unmoved

onlooker cubism argued that reality

includes the painter's efforts to

perceive it both the viewer and the view

are part of the same

field the first artist to explore this

idea and finally to base his work on it

was Paul

seisan the question of why the paintings

that Sean made in his old age were to

have such a vast effect upon the history

of art can't be answered in terms of

style what they proposed was more

radical than style it was a fundamental

argument about the way that we actually

see he wants to show the process of

seeing not just the results and he takes

you through this process you share his

hesitations about the position of a

trunk or a

branch or the final shape of a mountain

and the trees in front of

it the statement this is what I see

becomes replaced by a question is this

what I see relativity is all the idea

that doubt can be heroic if it is locked

into a structure as Grand as the

painting of Sean's old age that is one

of the keys of our century and a

touchstone of modernism itself cubism

would bring it to an

extreme the idea began here at 13 Ru

ravino in Paris in 197 in a Warren of

cheap artist Studios called the batt

lavoir or laundry

boat it was set off by a Spaniard Pablo

Picasso then age 26 Picasso's partner in

inventing cubism was was a slightly

younger and rather more conservative

Frenchman George

bar in the public eye these men didn't

exist the audience for their paintings

might have been a dozen people and this

meant that they were free as researchers

in some very obscure area of science are

free nobody cared enough to

interfere they wanted to paint the fact

that our knowledge of an object is made

up of all possible views of it top sides

front back they wanted to compress this

inspection which takes time into One

Moment One synthesized

view one of their experimental materials

was the art of other cultures Oceanic

and African as despised as they then

were at the time there were no museums

of tribal art like this one to

consult one of the mild ironies of

cubism is the extent to which it was

helped by the French Empire in Africa

Picasso and Brock both owned African

carvings but they had no anthropological

interest in them at all they didn't care

about their ritual uses they knew

nothing about their original tribal

meanings or about the societies out of

which they

came they simply used them forly and in

that regard cubism was like a small

parody of the Imperial model The Masks

were simply raw material from the

darkest Congo like copper or palm oil

and Picasso's use of them was in effect

a kind of cultural plunder but then why

use African art at all

the Cubist were just about the first

artist to even think of doing so 130

years before when Benjamin West admired

the cloths and the clubs and the

carvings that had come back from the

Pacific with Captain Cook no Royal

academ misss then took the queue and

started painting taresian

style when Picasso started to produce

what was in effect white art in

blackface he was saying what no 18th

Century painter would ever have imagined

say himself saying

he was proposing that the tradition of

the human figure which had served

Western Art so well over the preceding

centuries had had last run out and that

in order to renew its Vitality you had

to look elsewhere in effect to look to

those folks in Africa with

rhythm this was not so much a gesture of

homage in the direction of the blacks

though as it was a successful raid on

them by the

whites what Picasso did care about was

the formal Vitality of the carvings the

freedom to

distort and something else they were to

him in the most literal sense emblems of

savagery of violence transferred into

the sphere of

culture but this did produce the

painting whose shock value provoked

cubism and this was LE demoiselle

[Music]

Davon

[Music]

no painting ever looked more convulsive

and none signaled a faster change in the

history of Art and yet it was anchored

in the tradition of the new Picasso

began it the year seison died and its

nearest ancestor was Cesar's

bathers it also descends from Picasso's

Spanish Heritage those unstable twisting

bodies are like elgreco and so is is the

angular harshly lit

space the five nudes are chopped into

planes and arcs as though the brush were

a butcher knife their mass is breaking

up and even today you think of

dismemberment even the melon looks like

a weapon the space is flattened like a

squashed box as solid as the

figures

and in the midst of all this violent

abstraction The

Masks the three on the left are derived

from archaic Spanish

sculpture the two on the right from

African

carvings all of them staring with the

hypnotic fixity that Picasso would

always give to the

eye Picasso never like the title he

called his painting the aenor brothel

because there had been a [ __ ] house on

the carer D

or aor Street in Barcelona when he was a

student his original idea was to paint

an allegory of venial disease called the

wages of sin a man carousing in a

brothel and another man coming in at the

left with what was going to be a scull

that very Spanish reminder of

mortality in the final painting though

only the nudes are left archaic and

aggressive and their cult is the fear of

women no painter ever put his anxiety

about castration more plainly than

Picasso did here and the combination of

form and subject was alarming to the few

people who saw Le

demoiselle George BR was horrified by

its ugliness and

intensity but he painted a relatively

timid and laborious response to it and

from then on Brock and Picasso would be

locked in a partnership of questions and

responses roped together like

Mountaineers as Brock memorably

said Picasso cleared the ground for

cubism but it was George Brock who over

the next two years 198 and 199 did the

most to develop its

vocabulary they say the fox knows many

things but the Hedgehog knows one big

thing now Picasso was the fox he was the

virtuoso Brock was the Hedgehog and the

one big thing that he knew was

Sean with whom he identified to the

point of

obsession he admired Sean as he put it

for sweeping painting clear of the idea

of Mastery he loved his doubt his

doggedness his concentration his lack of

eloquence well Brock wanted to see if

Sean's way of building a painting that

fusing of little tilted facets that

solidity of structure and ambiguity of

reading could be pushed further which he

did with the Landscapes he painted in

two places where Sean himself had worked

first at leak in the south of France in

198 the estar paintings began as almost

straight

saisan this is one view that Brock

looked at that

summer this is what he made of it every

scrap of detail edited out prisms

triangles yet the shading no longer

gives you a feeling of solidity some of

the corners could either be sticking out

of the picture or pointing back into

it in the summer of 199

Brock went painting closer to Paris in a

village in the S Valley called laros

gong the valley is lined with chalk

Cliffs and there's a castle built into

them it belongs to the lashuk cold

family and Brock made it his Motif that

jumble of planes and Gables and spires

stacked up against the

cliff moreover on the top there's a 13th

century Norman

Tower and it was in Ruins when AR sort

as it is today but it gave him another

part of his Motif a big strong cylinder

on top so there was this from his point

of view nice rhyme between the actual

forms of the landscape and the shapes

that he wanted to put in a painting

between those planes ascending the cliff

going in and out pressed forward by the

cliff itself which blocked off the

perspective this was what he painted

[Music]

he then scrambled up the Chalk Bluff to

the side and looked at the castle from

an angle which gave him an even more

complicated geometry of Gables and

turrets coming down into the

[Music]

town

[Music]

so would Brock have invented cubism on

his own probably but it would have

lacked the power that Picasso brought to

it this was his unequal ability to

realize form to make you feel the shape

and the weight and the Silence of things

this is the plastic power of a sculptor

but in paint and distorted as they are

you're made to feel them so strongly

that you can imagine them picked off the

canvas in three

dimensions for the moment Picasso's

portraits like this one of the D VOA

were still recognizable but any reality

was bound to Al once it was thrust into

the shifting abstract space that he and

BR had

invented by 1911 Picasso and Brock were

painting like siamese

twins this painting of a guitarist is by

Brock this one of another guitarist is

by

Picasso they painting of this period are

virtually indistinguishable except for

fine differences of handwriting without

the labels on the gallery wall you could

hardly guess which painting is by which

of the two

paintings all this break up and

shuffling nobody had ever painted more

baffling images nothing is constant

every shape is a report on multiple

meanings it's an attempt to set out the

world as a field of Shifting

relationships that include the onlooker

they were trying to paint

process BR and Picasso were not

mathematicians and certainly they

weren't philosophers but their art was

part of the same great tide of modernist

thought that included

Einstein and the philosopher Alfred

Whitehead the misconception which has

haunted philosophic literature

throughout the centuries is the notion

of independent existence there is no

such mode of existence every entity is

only to be understood in terms of the

way in which it is interwoven with the

rest of the

universe as Gertrude Stein remembered it

the Cubist game of hide and seek with

reality fed back into the world in odd

[Music]

ways the first year of the war Picasso

and myself were walking down the

boulevard

raspay all of a sudden down the Street

came some big cannon first any of us had

seen painted that is

camouflaged Pablo stopped he was

Spellbound

sen he said it is we that have created

that and he was right he

had camouflage was cubism at War and

ever since the cubist's Delight in

ambiguity what is seen and not seen has

had its ominously practical

uses Picasso's Next Step was to stick a

piece of oil cloth to one of his still

lives it was printed with a design of

chair caning and so collage began

collage which simply means gluing was a

way of strengthening the link between

cubism and the real world

it gave Picasso and Brock bigger and

Bolder shapes to play with and these

shapes were real things emblems of the

industrial present newspapers packets

wallpaper and the fake wood graining

that Brock had learned to do when he was

an apprentice house painter in

Normandy they were recoiling from the

abstractness of those pictures of 1911

and in that they were joined by the

third musketeer a more classical artist

than either of them Juan gree in him

cubism found a mind of the coolest

analytical

weight to gree the world of cheap mass

production and reproduction was a sort

of Arcadia a pastoral landscape as it

was to a poire you read hand Bills

cataloges posters that shout out loud

here's this morning's poetry and for

pros you've got the newspapers six SP

detective novels full of cop stories

biographies of big shots a thousand

different titles lettering on Billboard

and walls door plates and posters squark

like

parrots Cubist Paris is receding now but

it's still there the glass and Iron City

of small arcades The Marble City of Cafe

tables the place of zinc bars dominoes

dirty chest boards crumpled

newspaper the brown city of old paint

and pipes and paneling history to us now

but once the landscape of the modernist

[Music]

dream

[Music]

n

[Music]

the

[Music]

the fourth major Cubist was fno LE he

wanted to make a public style of cubism

a popular art images of the Machine age

for the man in the

street he was the son of a Normandy

farmer an instinctive socialist who

became a practicing one in the trenches

of World War

I I found myself on a level with the

whole of the French people my new

companions in the engineer Corp were

miners navis workers in metal and wood

among these I discovered the French

people at the same time I was dazzled by

the breach of a 75 mm gun which was

standing uncovered in the sunlight the

magic of light on white

metal metal or flesh it made no

difference leer painted the body as

though it were made of interchangeable

parts like

Machinery the soldiers Insignia on these

cardplaying robots might as well be

Factory

brands to him society as machine meant

Harmony an end to

loneliness the three women one of the

paintings that best expresses this is

among the great didactic images of

French classicism this philosophical

harim is Leer's vision of Human

Relationships working as smoothly as a

clock with the binding energy of Desire

transformed into rhymes of

shape there were some artists to whom

this mechanical age was much more than a

context and very much more than a

pretext they wanted to explore its

characteristic images of light structure

and dynamism as subjects in their

[Music]

work Rober Delon was crazy about the

Eiffel Tower he thought of it as a new

tower of B La emitting a clamor of

tongues from the first radio system

installed on it in

[Music]

199 he must have painted it 30 times the

first time for his Russian wife and

fellow painter so

light seen through structure it became a

theme his fundamental image of modernity

that great grid rising over Paris with

the sky reeling through

[Music]

it

[Music]

[Music]

[Music]

Delon also painted windows landscap

capes of Paris seen as though through a

prism and a poire Illustrated them with

words raise the Blind and see how the

window opens if hands could weave light

this was done by

spiders Beauty palor unfathomable

indigos from the red to the green all

the yellow

dies Paris Vancouver y Manon New York

and the West Indies

the window opens like an

orange the beautiful fruit of

light whereas leier thought the core of

modernism was structure the delones

believed it was light Pure Energy

flooding the world its emblem was the

dis this was the basic unit of Rob's

Grand allegory of nness the the homage

to blero the great Constructor as he

called the

[Music]

[Music]

pilot

[Music]

la

[Music]

[Applause]

[Music]

one of the effects of today's museums

with their lovely White Walls and their

feeling of a Perpetual presence is to

make art seem newer than it actually is

you have to pinch yourself to remember

that when the paint was fresh on those

cubis picassos and delones people wore

hobble skirts and they wrote around in

machines like this one sitting up front

of the

driver and that feeling of disjuncture

the sense of the oldness of Modern Art

becomes acute when you reflect upon the

only art movement that came out of Italy

in the 20th century futurism was the

invention of filipo Tomaso

marinetti part lyrical

genius part organ grinder and part

fascist demagog and by his own account

the most modern man in his own country

when right-minded people between the

wars thought of modern artists as

subversive buffoons their image was

formed by marinetti he was a genius at

publicity and used every trick to get it

for himself and for the futurist

painters posters leaflets demos meetings

he even invented The Happening Montage

in real time with poems and declamations

paintings and music all on stage at once

he took his Road Show everywhere even to

Russia

[Applause]

[Music]

[Applause]

[Music]

[Applause]

SP no

[Applause]

[Music]

[Applause]

[Music]

[Music]

[Applause]

no

[Music]

[Applause]

[Music]

marinetti called himself the caffeine of

Europe he was the first International

aan provocateur that Modern Art had the

name futurism was a brilliant Choice

challenging but vague but the central

idea that marinetti trumpeted forth in

the first futurist Manifesto in 199 was

that the machine had created a new class

of Visionaries himself and anyone who

cared to join him

for marinetti and his group all the old

ideas about art and artists were about

to be blown off the cultural

map

you needed to come from a

technologically backward country to love

the future as passionately as marinetti

did Machinery was pal it was freedom

from historical

restraint Manifesto of

futurism one we intend to sing the love

of danger the habit of energy and

fearlessness

we affirm that the world's magnificence

has been enriched by a new Beauty the

beauty of speed a racing car whose hood

is adorned with great pipes like

serpents of explosive breath a roaring

car that seems to run on shrapnel is

more beautiful than the victory of

samothrace we want to H the man at the

wheel who hurls the Lance of his Spirit

across the Earth along the circle of its

orbit

but we want no part of it the past we

the young and strong

futurists so let them come the gay

incentuous with charred fingers here

they are here they are come on Set Fire

to the library shelves turn aside the

canals to flood the museums oh the joy

of seeing the Glorious old canvases

bobbing a drift on those Waters

discolored and shredded take up your

pickaxes your axes and Hammers and wreck

wreck wreck the venerable cities

[Music]

pitilessly in their art they set out to

find an equivalent for the speed and the

movement that they worshiped in their

[Music]

cars

[Music]

[Music]

aah

[Music]

they kept issuing manifestos operatic

Love Letters to Industry and hyms to the

beauty of its products the artists who

gathered around marinetti before the

first world war were the core of the

futurist group and some of them would

soon be dead the most gifted of them

Umberto Bon fell off his horse and was

killed in 1916 in the war which he and

marinetti had praised as the hygiene of

civilization but in the meantime he had

produced some extraordinary images none

more so than the city rises his pan of

joy to Industry and heavy construction

with its straining cables and draft

horses and plunging

figures but the problem was how to

represent

movements for that the futurists

resorted to photography especially the

sequential photographs published by the

French Pioneer Ian je

Mar by giving you the successive

positions of a figure on one plate these

photos introduced time into

space the body left its own memory in

the

air 400 years before Leonardo had bought

birds in the Florentine market and let

them go to study the beat of their wings

for a few seconds now the cameras of

maray and Edward mybridge could describe

this world of unseen movement some of

Jakob balor's paintings were almost

transcriptions of their photographs this

one for instance is entitled Swifts

Paths of movement and dynamic

sequences

dynamism of a dog on a leash was a

glimpse of Boulevard life with a

fashionable lady or D her feet trotting

her duxon a low slung modern animal the

sports car of the dog world along the

pavement watching a virtuoso's Le

fingers gave Bal the clue for rhythms of

a

[Music]

violinist as well as movement they

wanted to paint noise this painting of

Bon is called the noise of the street

penetrates the house futurism loved any

noise that was dissonant loud or made by

a

machine the most ambitious effort to

paint equivalence for sound and movement

was Gino sein's picture of a cabaret in

Paris where he and the Cubist used to go

the B

tabaran like them seini loved common

popular

[Music]

entertainment

[Music]

[Music]

but not every artist had that kind of

straightforward optimism about the

machine there were some that viewed it

with more irony and Detachment more like

V than participants because they

perceived that the thing was more more

than a tool more than simply an

extension of the manufacturing

self having been made by man it had

become a perverse but substantially

accurate

self-portrait such was the implication

of Francis picabia's work and of Marcel

duon the machine as picabia put it in

one of his titles is the daughter born

without a mother a modern counterpart to

the Virgin birth in which Christ the son

was born without a

father Machinery parody both TX and

religion it contained Limitless

possibilities for giving offense which

picabia was born to

do picabia was one of those men almost a

modernist invention in themselves who

was locked in a struggle with the very

idea of art he wanted to laugh the

notion of painting to death he had a

very strong sense of myth and he

couldn't find another outlet for it the

myth was that of the machine as man's

counterpart it obsessed picabia it was

his main Amusement he married rich and

he bought one fast car after another as

though he were trying to turn himself

into a mechanical

centur it was also the theme of his art

the body as

machine in 1914 he painted an enormous

image of a sexual encounter with a

dancer called I see again in memory my

dear

udney the 19th century novelist yoris

whisman foresaw it in a way when he

wrote look at the machine the play of

pistons and the cylinders they are steel

Romeo inside cast iron

juliets the ways of human expression are

in no way different to the back and

forth of our machines this is a law to

which one must pay homage unless one is

either impotent or a

saint picario was neither he had a flare

for the old inout mechanical sex

mechanical self no wonder picabia's

machine portrait still looks so very

sardonic the machine is aoral

its movements are programmed it can only

act and nobody wants to be compared to a

mechanical

slave Marcel duon would push the machine

metaphor even further before giving up

out for chess duon had played with every

existing art movement and predicted a

number of those to

come well when you are 15 and uh paint

like the

Impressionists you experimenting with

yourself so to speak you don't know what

you going to do you don't know even that

you are going to do anything else it

took me 10 years or more to change the

style at least to say where there's

nothing more in the impression is to

find and I tried to find something else

I first went through

fism I went through cubism and it's only

1912 or 13 that I I found more or less

what I wanted to do which would not be

influenced by movements that i' had been

through see the nude descending a

staircase is one of the half dozen most

famous paintings of our Century it's a

transcription of movement based again on

Mah's

photographs as cubism it's quite

academic

when the American Press saw it it was

seized on as a supreme joke but the

cubists themselves back in Paris were

not

amused when I came with my new

descending staircase they didn't see

that it applied to their theory was not

an illustration of their

Theory and in fact it had more than

cubism had as the idea of movement which

the futurists had at the same time so

they thought it was too much either

neither one no futurist nor cubism and

they condemned it but it did open up the

way to dua's most influential work the

large glass which he left unfinished

after 8 years like the nude the glass

treated the body as a mechanical object

why on glass Dua explained because the

trans mainly the transparency of the

glass I wanted to I've had always

noticed that the trouble with oil

painting and easel painting is you never

know how to do the the background you

make a portrait or you make some scene

or some still Al and then comes the

background what are you going to do in

the background you put something in the

background and it always false so at

least very seldom Justified it's just a

filling up canvas with a glass you don't

have to do that the glass is trans

transparent and you put anything behind

you wish and you change it every day if

you wish as

well and that was for me an element of

novelty to convince me I could go on

with it there's also some kind of

literary part to it was

intended to have every item on the glass

every little design on the glass explain

with a lang with the language with

language with words

there was nothing spontaneous about it

which of course is a great objection on

the part of aestheticians they want the

the subconscious to speak by itself I

don't don't

care and it was the opposite in that way

so at the end of 8 years even un not

finished I stopped to I decided to

stop so what is this

thing well it's a machine but we'd be

better off calling it a project for an

unfinished contraption that could never

be built because its use was never clear

because in turn it parodies the language

and the forms of science without the

slightest regard for scientific

probability or cause or effect supposing

that an engineer were to use this thing

as a blueprint he'd be in deep

trouble because the large glass is never

explicit and looked at from the point of

view of Technical Systems it's simply

absurd the notes that Dua left to go

with it are the most scrambled

instruction manual that you can imagine

but they're deliberately scrambled for

instance he talked about the thing

running on a mythical fuel of his own

invention Called Love gasoline which

passed through filters into feeble

cylinders which activated a desire motor

none of which would really have meant

very much to Henry

Ford but this is a meta machine that

takes us away from The Real World of

machinery into that of allegory with the

naked bride up there perpetually dis

robing herself in the top half and down

below the poor little bachelors in their

empty jackets endlessly grinding away

signaling their frustration to the girl

above them in fact this thing is an

allegory of profane love which Marcel

duon would have us believe is the only

sort that is left in the 20th

century its real text was written by

Sigman Freud in the interpretation of

Dreams published in

1900 the imposing mechanism of the male

sexual apparatus said Freud lends itself

to symbolization by every sort of

indescribably complicated

Machinery but the male mechanism of the

large glass is not imposing at all the

Bachelors are Just Uniforms like

marionet according to dua's notes they

try to indicate their desire to the

bride by making the ch chocolate grinder

turn and it grinds out an imaginary

milky stuff like seman which squirts up

through those rings but can't get into

the bride's half of the glass because of

that

bar and so the bride is condemned always

to tease and the bachelor's fate is

endless

masturbation in one sense the brid strip

bear is a glimpse into hell a peculiarly

modernist hell of repetition and

loneliness but you could also see it as

a declaration of freedom if you recall

the crushing taboos against masturbation

that were in force when duon was

young it was the symbol of rebellion

against one's parents and to that extent

the large glass is a free machine or at

least a defiant

machine but it was also a Sad Machine a

testament to indifference that emotion

of which duon was the master when the

large glass was broken in its crate

while being shipped how did he feel

nothing not

much I was well no I was not because I'm

fatalist maybe enough to take anything

as it comes along and fortunately a

little later when I look at the brakes I

love the brakes it happened to be that

two two paints glass paints on top of

one another with paints on it holding a

bit when they break on the vibration of

being transported flat you see on a on a

truck the the brakes take a

similar uh Direction in the two panes so

when you put them on top of one another

they seem to continue the same the same

breakes as though I had it done in done

in purpose dua's finally tuned

indifference is one of the divides

between the late Machine age and the

time in which we live the large glass

was a long way from the optimism and the

sense of possib ability with which

greater painters but less sophisticated

men than duon greeted the machine in

those long lost days before World War

I for Machinery was now turned on its

inventors and their children after 40

Years of continuous peace in Europe the

worst war in history canceled the faith

in good

technology the myth of the future went

into shock and European art moved into

its years of irony disgust and

See also


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