oneself free of the school and indeed of all schools.” “The real and immense study,” he wrote to Bernard two years before his death, “that must be taken up is the manifold picture of nature.”

The problem for the artists who gathered around Marinetti before World War I was how to translate this kind of vision into paint. The first possibility seemed to be the technique of breaking light and colour down into a field of stippled dots, which derived from French neo-Impressionism and had been worked into a system under the name of Divisionis

tease, while the Bachelors’ fate is endless masturbation.

To make “socialist” art, one must stop depicting ownable things: in short, go abstract. (Tatlin would have considered today’s art market nothing less than an atrocity.)

What these “constructions” might be remained, for the moment, vague. In Malevich’s case, they took two forms. One was the kind of pure, geometrical abstraction to which, because it represented a final disengagement of painting from reality and marked its entry into the exalted realm of pure thought, he gave the name “Suprematism;” its banner and ma

In 1915, Kazimir Malevich, who (with Kandinsky) was the most spiritually oriented of the Russian avant-gardists, wrote an ecstatic incantation to this “heroism of modern life:”

One of the aims of Morris Louis (1912–62) and Kenneth Noland (b. 1924) was to produce a surface which would be both impersonal and wholly decorative, in the Matissean sense of that word: that is to say, august and “life-enhancing,” but offering no commentary on the contingencies of life.

The definitive mechano-sexual metaphor, however, was created by Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968). In the years before he gave up the public production of art in favour of chess (and the secret construction of his last work, Étant Données, 1946–66), Duchamp ran variations on the available styles of the French avant-garde, without contributing much to them

It meant lightness, transparency, structural daring. It was the diametric opposite of stone or brick. It suggested a responsive skin, like the sensitive membrane of the eye, whereas brick and stone were impervious, a crust against the world.