Page 14 - summer 22

• Iconic work: Composition VII (1913)

Le Corbusier (Charles Jeanneret) 1887-1965; Swiss-French architect and writer

• Iconic work: Towards a New Architecture (1923)

Sergei Eisenstein 1898-1948: Russian avant-garde film maker

• Iconic work: Battleship Potemkin (1925)

What they did

1. Pablo Picasso
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Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon launched 20 century Modernism. Art historian
Robert Hughes (The Shock of the New, 1991) points out that the women, whores on
parade, are not exactly inviting or coquettish. They stare at us, the viewer, as if

judging us, turning us into voyeurs. Hughes describes their forms as “convulsive”.
There are suggestions of Iberian masks. Hughes detects more than a hint of sexual
anxiety.

After painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Picasso’s Modernist career developed by
his joint invention, with fellow artist Georges Braque, of Cubism. They did so through
painting together in Montmartre, then the Pyrenees in a shared studio. With Cubism,

they rewrote the rules of seeing, as Robert Hughes explains. In the 15th century,
Renaissance painters developed single-point perspective which allowed the two-
dimensional presentation of the three dimensions in which the world appears to us.

Yet it is a brilliant illusion; it is not actually how we see. It is the view through one eye
of a motionless person who is not part of the scene. It makes a God of the spectator.
Although Cubist paintings look baffling, they are closer to how we actually “see”. Our
knowledge of an object is made up of all possible views of it. Cubism seeks to

compress this process, which takes time, into a single moment, into one synthesised
view. A Cubist painting is a report on multiple viewings. It portrays “a geometry of
illusion”, shifting visual relationships which include the viewer.

It was Braque who perfected Cubism, developing its vocabulary, while Picasso moved
on, drawn into abstraction, though never completely (“I paint forms as I think them,

not as I see them”). This raises the issue: how should we judge an abstract painting?

2. James Joyce
Joyce did more than any other writer to assert a Modernist literary style, through
three books set in Dublin. In a creative sense he never left, but he didn’t live there;
he wrote Ulysses, he said, in “Trieste-Zurich-Paris”. His “stream-of-consciousness”