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| Pablo Picasso Harlequin with mirror 1923 oil on canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
"The gifts of an imaginative artist are often the outriders of the gifts of his period. Frequently the new abilities and attitudes become recognizable in art and are given a name before their existence in life has been appreciated. ... What happens to an artist's gifts may well reveal, in a coded or cyphered way, what is happening to his contemporaries. The fate of Van Gogh was the partial fate of millions. ... And so it is with Picasso. The waste of his genius, or the frustration of his gifts, should be a fact of great significance for us. Our debt to him and to his failures, if we understand them properly, should be enormous. ... The example of Picasso is not only relevant to artists. It is because he is an artist that we can observe his experience more easily. His experience proves that success and honor, as offered by bourgeois society, should no longer tempt anyone. It is no longer a question of refusing on principle, but of refusing for the sake of self-preservation. The time when the bourgeoisie could offer true privileges has passed. What they offer now is not worth having."
– John Berger, from The Success and Failure of Picasso (1965)
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| László Moholy-Nagy Circle segments 1921 tempera on canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
"Thursday March 9, fine afternoon, I go out to buy some paints (Sennelier inks) – bottles of pigment: following my taste for the names (golden yellow, sky blue, brilliant green, purple, sun yellow, cartham pink – a rather intense pink), I buy sixteen bottles. In putting them away, I knock one over: in sponging up, I make a new mess: little domestic complications ... And now, I am going to give you the official name of the spilled color, a name printed on the bottle (as on the others vermilion, turquoise, etc.): it was the color called Neutral ..."
– Johanna Burton, from Rites of Silence (2008)
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| Fernand Léger The Bridge 1923 oil on canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
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| Yves Tanguy Death watching his family 1927 oil on canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
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| Joan Miró Painting on a white ground 1927 oil on canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisa, Madrid |
"In irony, however, since everything is shown to be vanity, the subject becomes free. The more vain everything becomes, all the lighter, emptier, and volatilized the subject becomes. And while everything is in the process of becoming vanity, the ironic subject does not become vain in his own eyes but rescues his own vanity. For irony, everything becomes nothing, but nothing can be taken in several ways. The speculative nothing is the vanishing at every moment with regard to the concretion, since it is itself the craving of the concrete, its formative impulse; the mystic nothing is a nothing with regard to the representation, a nothing that nevertheless is just as full of content as the silence of the night is full of sounds for someone who has ears to hear. Finally, the ironic nothing is the dead silence in which irony walks again and haunts (the latter word taken altogether ambiguously)."
– Søren Kierkegaard, from The Concept of Irony (1841), translated by Howard and Edna Hong (Princeton, 1989)
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| Arthur Segal Still life with candelabrum and box 1925-26 oil on cardboard, with painted frame Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
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| Victor Servranckx Opus 30 1922 (Factory) 1922 oil on cardboard Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
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| František Kupka The Machine Drill ca. 1927-29 oil on canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
"Knowledge is assembled by living organisms in order to organize the actual shapeless flow of experience as far as possible into reproducible experiences with relatively reliable connections between them. This means that the 'real' world only manifests itself when our constructions fail. But as we can always only describe and explain the failure in those terms, which we have used to build the failed structures, a picture of the world, which we could make responsible for the failure, could never be conveyed to us. Somewhat more metaphorical would be the following analogy: the captain of a ship has to cross straits he does not know and does not have a chart for nor navigational help such as a beacon, etc. on a stormy, dark night. In the circumstances only two things are possible: Either he sails into a cliff and loses his ship and his life; in the last moment of his life he realizes that the reality of the straits was not as he imagined and his course did not correspond with the actuality of the straits. Or he reaches the open sea; then he knows only that his course was accurate but no more. He does not know whether there could have been easier, shorter crossings than the one he blindly chose. And he does not know what the real condition of the straits was."
– Ernst von Glasersfeld, from Radical Constructivism (1995)
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| Theo van Doesburg Composition XX 1920 oil on canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
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| Joaquín Torres-García Wood planes of color 1929 painted wood Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
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| Paul Klee Still life with dice 1923 watercolor on paper Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
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| James Ensor Jardin d'Amour ca. 1925 oil on panel Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
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| Henri Matisse Conversation under the olive trees 1921 oil on canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
I am grateful to Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza for the excellent reproductions.