running on a mythical fuel of his own invention called “Love Gasoline,” which passed through “filters” into “feeble cylinders” and activated a “desire motor” – none of which would have made much sense to Henry Ford. But the Large Glass is a meta-machine; its aim is to take one away from the real world of machinery into the parallel world of

The mechanics of sex have prevailed over sentiment.

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.

Perhaps the Futurists would not have loved the future so much if they did not come from a country as technologically backward as Italy. “Multicoloured billboards on the green of the fields, iron bridges that chain the hills together, surgical trains that pierce the blue belly of the mountains, enormous turbine pipes, new muscles of the earth, may

What most of their projects had in common was an alarming obsession with social hygiene. In future, instead of lurking on streets and squares and alleys, the human beetle would be made to live in tower blocks, to commute by monorail or biplane or moving pavement, to scuttle about in allotted green space between the

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

One is reminded of the mediaeval argument for the immortality of the soul: since the soul is not composed of parts, it cannot be separated into parts and thus cannot undergo dissolution.

The fox, as Isaiah Berlin has said, knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.

In one sense the Large Glass is a glimpse into Hell, a peculiarly modernist Hell of repetition and loneliness. But it is also possible to see it as a declaration of freedom, if one remembers the crushing taboos against masturbation that were in force when Duchamp was young.