Art & Physics 8: The Beginnings of the Modern Age II 1

Art & Physics

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The artist is always engaged in writing a

detailed history of the future because he
is the only person aware of the nature of
the present.
Percy Wyndham Lewis (1884-1963)
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It was not until the 19th century that three
mathematicians discovered alternatives to the geometry
of Euclid.

Karl Friedrich Gauss Nikolai Lobachevsky Janos Bolyai

(1777-1855) (1792-1856) (1802-1860)
German Russian Hungarian
mathematician mathematician mathematician
They discovered a geometry in which the angles of a triangle add up to less than 180°
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In 1854, Riemann proposed a non-Euclidean
geometry in which the sum of the angles of
any triangle are greater than 180°, there are
no parallel lines and the shortest distance
between two points is an arc.
Euclid
Space is flat, unbounded & infinite. Georg Riemann
An explorer travelling in a straight (1826-1866)
line would continue for ever.
Riemann
Space is curved, bounded & finite.
An explorer travelling in a straight line
would arrive back where he started. In elliptical geometry,
the angles of a triangle
can add up to 270°
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What would the world be like in curved space?
Objects in curved space could not maintain their form
but would change depending on their location.
Is the space we inhabit curved? There are 3 possible geometries.

+ve curvature no curvature -ve curvature

angles >180° angles =180° angles <180°
parallel lines may cross parallel lines never cross parallel lines may diverge
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To imagine the shape of objects in a non-Euclidean world, you
have to visualize distortions not present in our Euclidean world.
This is what the Impressionists were doing in the 19th century.

In the middle of the 19th century, France was the centre of the art
world and the Academy dictated what constituted art. Their
decision on whether an artist’s work was acceptable for exhibition
in the official salon determined whether or not an artist would
enjoy commercial success.
One of their basic requirements was that art had to be understood.
One group of artists decided to rebel against this conformist
attitude and in 1863 organized their own exhibition known as
the Salon des Refusés.
Many art historians regard this event as marking the beginning
of modern art, and the painting that started it all was...
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Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (Édouard Manet, 1863)

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Defied perspective
No clear vanishing point
No middle ground
Defied light & shadow
No logical consistency
No story
Not picturesque
No mythology
No easy interpretation
Challenged Euclidean space
and Aristotelian time
Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, 1863 (Édouard Manet, 1832-1883)
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Concert champêtre (c. 1508) - Giorgioni (Givanni Bellini, 1478-1510),

Titian (Tiziano Vecellio, 1488-1576)
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Déjeuner sur l’herbe (Pablo Picasso, 1962)

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Music in the Tuileries (Édouard Manet, 1862)

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In Music in the Tuileries (1862) we note:
• a chaotic scene with no central character or focus
• no clear vanishing point
• no perpendicular lines (no horizon, no vertical lines)
• the tree trunks are all curved (though in reality they are not)

Manet’s
intention seems
to be to
challenge (and
perhaps change)
the viewer’s
notion of space.
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horizontal
horizon (curved)
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Manet was the first artist in the Western world of art to curve the horizon.

The Beach at Sainte-Adresse (Édouard Manet, 1867)

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On the Beach (Édouard Manet, 1873)

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Eventually he removed the horizon and vanishing point completely from the
picture.

Boating (Édouard Manet, 1874)

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(Édouard Manet, 1862)

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While Édouard Manet was

experimenting with the
perception of space, Claude
Monet began experimenting
with the perception of time.
1840-1926

To show how an object changes with time, Monet began painting

scenes viewed from the same position, but at different times of the
day, even at different seasons. He called the style Instantaneity.

Among the time series he produced are:

Rouen cathedral (40 paintings at different times of the day)
Haystacks in Giverny (20 paintings at different times of the year)
Gare St.-Lazare
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Rouen Cathedral in dull weather 1894 Rouen Cathedral in full sunlight

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Gare Sainte-Lazare 1877

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In Monet’s scheme of painting, an object must have duration as well
as three extensions in space.
Such ideas were also being discussed in literature:
“Clearly, any real body must have extension in four
directions: it must have length, breadth, thickness and
duration…There are really four dimensions, three of
which we call the three planes of space, and the fourth,
time.”
H.G. Wells (The Time Machine)
A mathematical line cannot exist.
A mathematical plane cannot exist.
Can a cube with length, breadth and width exist?
Only if it has duration as well.

An instantaneous cube cannot exist.

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In 1881, Monet retreated to his house at Giverny, where he spent
the rest of his life painting his garden - especially the water-lily
pond.
He became interested in what was in the water, on the water and
reflected upon the water - the distinction being increasingly blurred
with time until they became almost totally abstract.
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Japanese Bridge at Giverny (1900)

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Monet was not so much concerned with the geometry of shapes and
forms as with the massing of colours to gain an “impression” of the
scene.

Rather than trying to

reproduce the nature
of light within a
studio, Monet
captured the nature of
light en plein air.

Monet Working in His Boat (Édouard Manet, 1874)

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Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) took the opposite approach from Monet and abandoned the
convention of linear light. Consequently, his paintings are timeless - you cannot tell at
which time they were painted.

The source and direction

of light are not discernible.
The light suffuses the
painting rather than shines
across it.

• No gray days
• No foggy days
• No seasonal effects
• etc..

In Cézanne’s paintings,
light is not an optical
phenomenon to be
investigated. Rather, it is a Mont Sainte Victoire
uniform and enduring light. Paul Cézanne (1902-4)
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Instead of eliminating the single-point perspective, Cézanne
introduced the revolutionary multi-point perspective.
Objects were portrayed as if seen from different viewing positions.

His intention was to show how our

visual perception of the world is
composed of interlocking planes.
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Manet curved space; Cézanne fractured space.

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This idea destroyed the notion of a single privileged frame of reference
(and thus visually pre-figured the basis of Einstein’s later theory of
relativity which banned the concept of an absolute frame of reference).

Table, napkin and fruit (1895-1900)

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In science at that time space was considered as empty and had no
effect on matter (or vice versa).
In Cézanne’s paintings, matter (mass) and space fuse interactively
together.

The Garden at Les Lauves, 1906

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1885-95 Mont Sainte-Victoire 1900

1897-98 1902-04
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1901 Mont Sainte-Victoire 1902

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1885-7 1897

1886 Mont Sainte-Victoire 1904

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Cézanne’s paintings, with their attack on

the conventions of perspective and the
accepted views of space and time,
showed that the Euclidean approach was
not the only way to view the world.

Once people began to see space in a non-

Euclidean way, they could then begin to Self portrait 1879-82
think about it in a new way too…..
…which is what scientists began to do at
the turn of the century.

Self portrait 1894

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Creation (Michelangelo Buonarroti, 1475 - 1564)