Logically, if the flower of youth had been cut down in Flanders, the survivors were not the flower: the dead were superior to the traumatized living.

So the drift away from encouraging the new art began well before Lenin’s burial; whereupon Stalin made anything that was not mass art a State crime. In his eye, the Constructivists were bourgeois formalists – specks of free imagination in the ocean of his new Russia. Some died in the purges, the rest were deprived of work by his apparatchiks; and

we are offered a metaphor of human relationships working as smoothly as a clock, all passion sublimated, with the binding energy of desire transformed into rhymes of shape.

Any sight is a sum of different glimpses.

If you ask where is the Picasso of England or the Ezra Pound of France, there is only one probable answer: still in the trenches.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938), a former architecture student in Dresden, transposed Munch’s social pessimism into the colour of van Gogh and the Fauve Matisse. Kirchner was the leader and most gifted member of a group of artists, all under thirty, which took the name of the Künstler-Gruppe Brücke or “Artists’ Group of the Bridge,” meaning a

a highbrow version of the popular “impossible machines” that were being drawn, at the time, by Rube Goldberg. The notes Duchamp left to go with it, collected out of order in the Green Box, are the most scrambled instruction manual imaginable.

The idea of Cézanne as the father of abstract art is based on his remark that one must detect in Nature the sphere, the cone, and the cylinder.

The metaphor was one of dynamism and dialectical change. To begin with, the tower contained three chambers. A cubic hall at the lowest