Crimes of Paris_ A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection - Dorothy Hoobler [89]
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One of Apollinaire’s great gifts was the ability to rapidly absorb the intellectual currents that swarmed around him. Paris at the turn of the twentieth century was a ferment of ideas and theories — not merely artistic, but scientific, and often the two worlds overlapped. Shattuck called Montmartre at this time a “central laboratory,” 14 where collaboration gave birth to radically new kinds of art. Experimentation was the order of the day, part of a shift in thinking that heralded the true beginning of the twentieth century. The dominant intellectual spirit of the nineteenth century had been positivism, the philosophy that posited that the only knowable reality was what could be observed. Yet even before the old century wound to a close, an increasing number of people were rebelling against that notion. The poet Paul Claudel wrote, “At last we are leaving that hideous world… of the nineteenth century, that prison camp, that hideous mechanism governed by laws that were completely inflexible and, worst of all, knowable and teachable.” 15
In science the new trend manifested itself through the work of such men as Max Planck, who in 1900 formulated the quantum theory, and Albert Einstein, who in 1905 extended Planck’s insight in a series of groundbreaking papers, one of which (his doctoral thesis) offered a proof for the reality of atoms and molecules. 16 These and other discoveries revolutionized the science of physics, establishing the fact that there was a whole world of unseen particles beneath the level of ordinary vision. Awareness of such theories was not confined to a narrow circle. Henri Poincaré, France’s leading scientist, gave public lectures and wrote pamphlets that were intended to make high-level mathematics and science accessible to the average person. These ideas, even if not fully understood, made their way to the cafés where Picasso and his friends met. Poincaré wrote, “A scientist worthy of the name, above all a mathematician, experiences in his work the same impression as an artist; his pleasure is as great and of the same nature.” 17
That held true in reverse for many of the avant-garde artists living in Paris at the beginning of the twentieth century. The great achievement of Renaissance art had been the discovery of perspective, which allowed artists to portray three-dimensional scenes and objects realistically. However, the invention of photography by two Frenchmen, Nicéphore Niépce and Louis Daguerre, around 1840, made it possible for anyone to accomplish that perfectly. Though academic artists continued to work in the old tradition, others began the quest for a new kind of art that would reveal more than photography could. Manuel “Manolo” Hugué, a sculptor and fellow Spaniard who had known Picasso for years, said, “Picasso used to talk a lot then about the fourth dimension and he carried around the mathematics books of Henri Poincaré.” 18 (These were not textbooks, but books that Poincaré had written at a popular level for ordinary people to read.)
Picasso was not alone in his fascination with the fourth dimension. Inventions such as the telephone, wireless communication, and the airplane had revolutionized people’s experience of time and space. One could be there without being there. (In Paris, people with telephones sometimes connected them to a line that allowed them to listen to performances at the opera without leaving home.) Now, people speculated on the possibility of traveling through time as easily as one moved through space. If time was merely a dimension, as some scientists were already claiming, then it could be traveled. The publication of H. G. Wells’s popular novel The Time Machine in 1895 further brought the idea into the public consciousness.
As originally proposed, the fourth