In Le surmale (1902), the book’s hero wins a 100,000-mile bike race and then celebrates with an act of love-making that makes one character exclaim, “This is not a man, but a machine!” The idea that cars, planes, and bicycles were turning people into “machines” was most entertainingly summarized by a 1905 article in the journal Je sais tout (“I know all”), which calculated just how tall a human being would have to be to naturally walk at the pace that our new machines traveled. The modern phrase that the object of art is indifferent, if abused here in a truly malevolent way... What is presented to us breathes the poison breath of the darkest places of vice of the big city and shows the constitution of the artists, which can only be understood in terms of pathology. Picasso’s 1907 classic Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is “a large canvas of brutal and disturbing bluntness.” While Picasso was indifferent to the actual “significance and symbolism” of the African styles he drew on, Blom writes, critics have said his aim was to represent the “unchanging structure of the human condition” in the face of civilizational change.
Author: Derek Thompson
Published at: 2025-08-10 20:48:46
Still want to read the full version? Full article
