432 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1951 



Investigation of this problem was immediately undertaken by nu- 

 merous scientists, and by 1903 Lenard in Germany had proved to his 

 own satisfaction that cathode rays could pass through thousands of 

 atoms without disturbing their internal organization. The conclu- 

 sion he reached was that the greater part of the atom must be empty 

 space, only about 1,000 millionths of the whole being solid matter. 

 Lenard's experiments, however, were not accepted as conclusive, and 

 the investigations were continued by others, finally culminating in 

 1911 when Kutherford published his well-supported findings that the 

 atom was in effect constituted on a solar-system basis — tiny electrons 

 revolving around a nucleus as the planets revolve around the sun, 

 with the empty spaces between these elements proportionately as huge 

 as the empty spaces of the solar system. 



These dramatic and revolutionary discoveries not only shook natural 

 science to its foundations but also aroused the greatest interest outside 

 the narrow world of the physicists. As Eddington has expressed it in 

 "The Nature of the Physical World" : 



When we compare the universe as it is now supposed to be with the universe 

 as we had ordinarily preconceived it, the most arresting change is not the re- 

 arrangement of space and time by Einstein but the dissolution of all that we 

 regard as most solid into tiny specks floating in void. That gives an abrupt 

 jar to those who think that things are more or less what they seem. The revela- 

 tion by modern physics of the void within the atom is more disturbing than the 

 revelation by astronomy of the immense void of interstellar space. 



The atom is as porous as the solar system. If we eliminated all the unfilled 

 space in a man's body and collected his protons and electrons into one mass, the 

 man would be reduced to a speck just visible with a magnifying glass. 



The repercussions in the field of the plastic arts were immediate, 

 the first parallel artistic development being analytical cubism. 



In 1907, following Lenard's announcement and while Eutherford 

 was still engaged in experimental work, Picasso painted his famous 

 "Demoiselles d'Avignon," in which for the first time he portrayed parts 

 of forms and objects as irregular receding and protruding angular 

 planes. This development was continued in 1908 and 1909 by Picasso 

 himself, and by Braque with paintings composed largely of the facets 

 of blocklike forms. In 1908 the name "cubism" was first applied to 

 this new manner wherein angular planes definitely suggest the project- 

 ing facets of solid sculptural cubes partially embedded in the canvas. 

 In the portrait of Braque painted toward the end of 1909, however, 

 this sense of solidity begins to give way. To quote Alfred Barr in 

 "Picasso" (1946), "not only the surface is broken into facets but the 

 facets themselves begin to slip so that the sense of solid sculptural form 

 so clearly preserved in the 'Fernande' seems on the point of disinte- 

 gration. For the first time the integrity, the unity, of the object is 

 seriously threatened." In the "Portrait of Kahnweiler" and the 

 "Nude" of 1910, this tendency has enormously increased. The facets 



