Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1914 edition. Excerpt: ...with the creed that he and Picasso so signally set forth in 1908. His pictorial inventions have grown constantly richer with the years; innately French, they curiously recapture the Louis Quinze feeling for squat and formal elegance. With the bursting open of the power plants of the world in 1914, when with frightful suddenness the sense of power as power could no longer be humanly sustained, a new directional influence was found actuating the general scheme of affairs. A period of power-put-to-use sets in, a period of penetration, with earth and sea and sky and time and space as new and more enticing targets to aim at. Penetration goes forward in the perfection of the radio; in improved forms of communication; in the rapid conquest of the air; in stratospheric and bathyspheric experiments; in the evolution of more resilient metals; in new conditioning of light and in ever more dire explosives; in increasingly powerful telescopic ranges; in television; in the new photography that pierces solid matter and fog; in the creation of the cinema, an art form for the many and not the few, and the first attempt to link together three such dissimilar elements as science, art, and commerce, without any one of which the cinema as we know it in its broadest sense today would cease to function, --to mention some of the outstanding marvels of the electrical pageant that our century has seen come to pass, a picture certainly that for sheer audacity and swift seizure of fresh opportunity through skill and daring has had no counterpart in history. And what is the counter record of this period of penetration in the course of contemporary art? One has only to glance through the pages of Art Now with its dizzy assortment of modernly minded pictures to see just..
