The Avant-Garde Pioneer (OEMN)

Your sense of beauty

A bold, forceful impact that breaks through the existing frame. But what truly draws you is not destruction in itself; it is the fine rule of reconstruction underneath. When you meet expression in which settled perspective and orderly rhythm have first been taken apart and then reassembled by an entirely new geometric calculation, you feel a shock that clears the mind. In the attempt to observe things from many angles and recombine sound and form dynamically, you sense the true beauty that opens an era.

What moves you

Being overwhelmed by an orchestral performance where meters switch one after another and fierce accents shake the body. Or standing before a painting where a dismantled figure has been rebuilt on the canvas and gives off a powerful presence.

The beauty you tend to overlook

The flavor that lives inside a plain, protective practice handed down from long ago, with no experiment in it at all. Turn your gaze now and then to the quiet worth of repeating an unchanging form with care, causing no great change at all.

The composer in tune with you: Igor Stravinsky

In The Rite of Spring of 1913, Stravinsky laid irregular changing meters throughout the score, dismantling and rebuilding rhythm geometrically and remaking the history of music. Then, in Pulcinella in 1920, he reinterpreted Baroque music and opened the way to a new classicism. That stance — taking apart an existing grammar to make a new structure — resonates deeply with your sense of beauty.

The painter who resonates with you: Pablo Picasso

Through Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and the Cubist movement, Picasso dismantled the traditional Western perspective and rebuilt on the canvas the planes and lines observed from many viewpoints. For the 1920 ballet Pulcinella he designed the sets and costumes to Stravinsky's music. A manner of painting that breaks form down geometrically and sets up a new beauty resonates strongly with your sensibility.

What links the two

The two collaborated directly on the 1920 ballet Pulcinella. They share an avant-garde spirit of dismantling traditional form and rebuilding it as a new geometric structure.

Three paintings for you

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon

Pablo Picasso

Three Musicians

Pablo Picasso

Portrait of Igor Stravinsky

Pablo Picasso