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it connected with his vision of abstract painting; they remained in contact via a group

of avant-garde artists and intellectuals called The Blue Rider (after a picture by
Kandinsky); abstract pioneer Paul Klee was also a member. Picasso painted alongside
Georges Braque and between them they invented Cubism in their shared studio;
nothing was ever written or published. Eliot and Pound read an advance typescript
copy of Joyce’s Ulysses and straight away saw how allusion could be used to make
connections and draw parallels between past and present. Ezra Pound, founder of
the Imagist school of poetry, read and annotated Eliot’s The Wasteland.

Modernism came to the attention of the public as a result of an early major art
exhibition, the Armory Show in New York in 1913. Held in a regimental armoury, it
was officially called The International Exhibition of Modern Art. It showed around
1300 works by 300 artists. It provoked much interest, but also shock, indignation and
ridicule – “That’s not art,” declared ex-President Theodore Roosevelt. It included
Marcel Duchamp’s famous Cubist work, Nude Descending a Staircase” painted in
1912.

This painting, executed through a series of superimposed images to express motion,

as in the motion pictures, drew much ridicule. It was variously described as “an
explosion in a shingle factory”, “a staircase descending a nude” and “the rude
descending a staircase, Rush-hour in the subway”.