THE ARTIST AND THE ATOM — BLANC 435 



This discovery struck me witli terrifSc impact, comparable to that of the 

 end of the world. In the twinkling of an eye, the mighty arches of science lay 

 shattered before me. All things became flimsy, with no strength or certainty. 

 I would hardly have been surprised if the stones would have risen in the air 

 and disappeared. To me, science had been destroyed. [Quoted by Hilla Rebay, 

 In Memory of Wassily Kandinsky, p. 53, New York, 1915.] 



And so Kandinsky, impelled by discoveries concerning the atom, 

 became the father of nonobjective painting. 



Thus we find the two great developments of twentieth-century 

 painting, abstraction and nonobjectivism, coming into being almost 

 simultaneously with science's revelation of the void within the atom — 

 abstraction achieving its first flower in the work of the analytical 

 cubists in 1911, the very year of Rutherford's disclosures, and non- 

 objective painting making its first appearance in the work of Kan- 

 dinsky in 1912. It is hardly surprising to find that a third 

 development, this time in the field of sculpture, followed hard upon 

 the others. 



It is generally considered that the constructivist movement in 

 sculpture, characterized by the substitution of openwork forms in 

 place of the closed monolithic form of the sculpture of the past, began 

 in 1913. Boccioni, Italian painter and sculptor, declared in the 

 futurist manifesto of 1914: "The circumscribed lines of the ordinary 

 enclosed statue should be abolished. The figure must be opened up 

 and fused in space." Naum Gabo, one of the earliest and best-known 

 constructivists, has stated this even more simply : "Older sculpture 

 was created in terms of solids; the new departure was to create in 

 terms of space." 



Although the new conception of sculpture lagged somewhat behind 

 painting and unquestionably was derived at least in part from the 

 cubists, whose work was familiar to both Gabo and his brother, Pevs- 

 ner, another of the constructivist leaders, Gabo's own interests lay in 

 science as well as art. He had studied mathematics, physics, chem- 

 istry, and engineering at the University of Munich in the years 1909 

 to 1912. Consequently there can be no doubt that he was well ac- 

 quainted with the developments in atomic theory that occurred in 

 this period. Thus it would appear that the constructivist movement 

 in sculpture, like cubism and nonobjective painting, was carried out 

 by artists who had access to and were interested in current scientific 

 discoveries. Under these circumstances, even in the absence of such 

 direct testimony as Kandinsky 's, the coincidence of three most im- 

 portant innovations of modern art with the revelation of the Ruther- 

 ford atom cannot be passed over as accidental. 



The theory of atomic matter was not to stand on Rutherford's con- 

 clusions, however, for by 1925 the Rutherford solar-system atom had 

 broken down in the light of observed phenomena. In its place 



