THE ARTIST AND THE ATOM — BLANC 433 



have "slipped" very definitely, opening up a complex of hollows and 

 spaces within the object. By 1911 — the year in which Rutherford 

 announced his conclusion that the atom is in fact almost completely a 

 void — Picasso was painting objects which, though still recognizable 

 as familiar solids, were represented as largely composed of empty 

 space. 



Again, it is not the writer's intent to establish that the cubists de- 

 liberately and consciously sought to exploit or adapt the findings of 

 contemporary science to their painting. Indeed Picasso has hotly 

 denied any such intention. But the parallelism of their vision of 

 matter and the image evoked by contemporary scientific findings, and 

 the extraordinarily exact chronological coincidence of the develop- 

 ments, speak for themselves. No man can assert with assurance that 

 his conscious actions have not been in part provoked by unconscious 

 considerations, and it is natural to believe that sensitive artists living 

 in the first decade of the twentieth century were at least subconsciously 

 influenced by the profoundly disturbing revelations of contemporary 

 science, provided that they were aware of them. And there is evi- 

 dence to establish this awareness. It is the testimony of Guillaume 

 Apollinaire, spokesman of the cubists, that current scientific develop- 

 ments preoccupied these artists, and that some members of the group, 

 at any rate, pored over scientific works. Writing in 1913, while the 

 cubist movement was still strong, Apollinaire said: 



Today, scientists no longer limit themselves to the three dimensions of Euclid. 

 The painters have been led quite naturally, one might say by intuition, to pre- 

 occupy themselves witli the new possibilities of spatial measurement which, in 

 the language of tlie modern studios, are designated by tlie term : the fourth 

 dimension. 



The criterion of pure palntiiuj: ahstruct space. Regarded from tlie plastic 

 point of view, the fourth dimension appears to spring from the three known 

 dimensions: it represents the immensity of space eternalizing itself in all di- 

 rections at any given moment. It is space itself, the dimension of the infinite. 

 . . . Finally, I must point out that the fourth dimension — this ut()i>ian expression 

 should be analyzed and explained, so that nothing more than historical interest 

 may be attached to it — lias come to stand for the aspirations and premonitions 

 of tlie many young artists who contemplate Egyptian, J^egro, and Oceanic 

 sculptures, meditate on various scientific works, and live in the anticipation of 

 sublime art. [The Cubist Painters: Aesthetic Meditations.] 



This preoccupation with space seems very natural in a world whose 

 inhabitants have just been informed that all the familiar objects which 

 they have habitually considered to be concrete and solid — including 

 even their own persons — are chiefly constituted of empty space. 



But cubism was not the only new art form to develop in this critical 

 period. The development of nonobjective painting dates from 1912. 

 The Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky was the first artist who de- 

 liberately sought to eliminate recognizable objects from the contents 



