History of Art Enrichment at Tallis

Today we will be exploring a particular view of the human body by early twentieth century artists. To quote the great Robert Hughes:

“The speed at which culture reinvented itself through technology in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, seems almost preturnatural. Thomas Alva Edison invented the phonograph…The first twenty-five years of the life of the archetypal modetn artist, Pablo Picasso  - who was born in 1881 - witnessed the foundation of twentieth century technology for peace and war alike: the recoil-operated machine gun (1882), the first synthetic fibre (1883), the Parsons steam turbine (1884), coated photographic paper (1885), the Tesla electric motor, the Kodak box camera and the Dunlop pneumatic tyre (1888), cordite (1889), the Deisel engine (1892), the Ford car (1893), the cinematograph and gramophone disc (1894). In 1895, Roentgen discovered X rays, Marconi invented radio telegraphy, the Lumiere brothers developed the first movie camera…And so it went: the discovery of radium, the magnetoc recording of sound, the first voice radio transmissions, the Wright brothers’ first powered flight (1903), 1905, in which Albert Einstein formulated the Special Theory of Relativity, the photon theory of light, and ushered in the nuclear age…One did not need to be a scientist to sense the magnitude of such changes.”

It is no wonder that artists sensitive to the times in which they were living responded with new and radical visions of the role of humans amidst all this technological innovation. Added to these sources of inspiration and challenge were the lessons many of the same artists had learned from African art. These forces combined produced representations of the human form the like of which had never been seen before in Western Europe.