In the early years of the twentieth century, artists forged a radically new image of the world.

The everyday experience of urban life was being transformed by innovations in science and technology. Trains, cars and aeroplanes introduced a greater sense of speed, while the popularity of film, radio and the phonograph similarly emphasised change, dynamism and movement. The French philosopher Henri Bergson suggested that these developments demanded a new understanding of existence, and that the simultaneous combination of multiple perceptions and memories was one of the essential characteristics of modern life.

Cubism, especially in the form developed by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso between 1909 and 1914, offered a revolutionary response to this new experience. Rejecting the need for realism, painters shifted to a re-conception of the world around them. Picasso and Braque embarked on a period of austere, almost monochromatic paintings in which objects and figures were constructed from fragmentary planes and facets. Their works of 1910-11 reached the verge of total abstraction.

Artists and public alike were outraged by Cubism, but the geometrical fragmentation of form was soon taken up in artistic centres across Europe as a sign of modernism. For the Italian Futurists, it became part of a campaign against cultural and political stagnation in a rapidly industrialising country. The British Vorticists hailed the ‘vortex’ as an abstract image for the energy of modern life.

The unprecedented death toll of the First World War cut these international lines of cultural exchange in 1914 and left survivors literally shell-shocked by the dark side of modernity. Nevertheless, extensions of the new vision continued in the functional machine aesthetic of the 1920s and the artistic revolution of Cubism and its allies proved fundamental to subsequent developments.

Curated by Matthew Gale