Even at the age of almost nineteen Picasso had already made a promising beginning. A somewhat sentimental picture by him, Last Moments, hung in the Spanish pavilion of the great Exposition Universelle of 1900, in effect a world’s fair held in both the Grand and the Petit Palais in Paris to celebrate the new century.55 Occupying 260 acres, the fair had its own electric train, a moving sidewalk that could reach a speed of five miles an hour, and a great wheel with more than eighty cabins. For more than a mile on either side of the Trocadero, the banks of the Seine were transformed by exotic facades. There were Cambodian temples, a mosque from Samarkand, and entire African villages. Below ground were an imitation gold mine from California and royal tombs from Egypt. Thirty-six ticket offices admitted one thousand people a minute.56 Picasso’s contribution to the exhibition was subsequently painted over, but X rays and drawings of the composition show a priest standing over the bed of a dying girl, a lamp throwing a lugubrious light over the entire scene. The subject may have been stimulated by the death of Picasso’s sister, Conchita, or by Giacomo Puccini’s opera La Bohème, which had recently caused a sensation when it opened in the Catalan capital. Last Moments had been hung too high in the exhibition to be clearly seen, but to judge by a drawing Picasso made of himself and his friends joyously leaving the show, he was pleased by its impact.57
To coincide with the Exposition Universelle, many distinguished international scholarly associations arranged to have their own conventions in Paris that year, in a building near the Pont d’Alma specially set aside for the purpose. At least 130 congresses were held in the building during the year and, of these, 40 were scientific, including the Thirteenth International Congress of Medicine, an International Congress of Philosophy, another on the rights of women, and major get-togethers of mathematicians, physicists, and electrical engineers. The philosophers tried (unsuccessfully) to define the foundations of mathematics, a discussion that floored Bertrand Russell, who would later write a book on the subject, together with Alfred North Whitehead. The mathematical congress was dominated by David Hilbert of Göttingen, Germany’s (and perhaps the world’s) foremost mathematician, who outlined what he felt were the twenty-three outstanding mathematical problems to be settled in the twentieth century.58 These became known as the ‘Hilbert questions’. Many would be solved, though the basis for his choice was to be challenged fundamentally.
It would not take Picasso long to conquer the teeming artistic and intellectual world of Paris. Being an angel and a devil, there was never any question of an empty space forming itself about his person. Soon Picasso’s painting would attack the very foundations of art, assaulting the eye with the same vigour with which physics and biology and psychology were bombarding the mind, and asking many of the same questions. His work probed what is solid and what is not, and dived beneath the surface of appearances to explore the connections between hitherto unapprehended hidden structures in nature. Picasso would focus on sexual anxiety, ‘primitive’ mentalities, the Minotaur, and the place of classical civilisations in the light of modern knowledge. In his collages he used industrial and mass-produced materials to play with meaning, aiming to disturb as much as to please. (‘A painting,’ he once said, ‘is a sum of destructions.’) Like that of Darwin, Mendel, Freud, J. J. Thomson and Max Planck, Picasso’s work challenged the very categories into which reality had hitherto been organised.59
Picasso’s work, and the extraordinary range of the exposition in Paris, underline what was happening in thought as the 1800s became the 1900s. The central points to grasp are, first, the extraordinary complementarity of many ideas at the turn of the century, the confident and optimistic search for hidden fundamentals and their place within what Freud, with characteristic overstatement, called ‘underworlds’; and second, that the driving motor in this mentality, even when it was experienced as art, was scientific. Amazingly, the backbone of the century was already in place.
* The 3:1 ratio may be explained in graphic form as follows:
where Y is the dominant form of the gene, and y is the recessive.
* This is also the basis of the television tube. The positive plate, the anode, was reconfigured with a glass cylinder attached, after which it was found that a beam of cathode rays passed through the vacuum towards the anode made the glass fluoresce.
2
HALF-WAY HOUSE
In 1900 Great Britain was the most influential nation on earth, in political and economic terms. It held territories in north America and central America, and in South America Argentina was heavily dependent on Britain. It ruled colonies in Africa and the Middle East, and had dominions as far afield as Australasia. Much of the rest of the world was parcelled out between other European powers – France, Belgium, Holland, Portugal, Italy, and even Denmark. The United States had acquired the Panama Canal in 1899, and the Spanish Empire had just fallen into her hands. But although America’s appetite for influence was growing, the dominant country in the world of ideas – in philosophy, in the arts and the humanities, in the sciences and the social sciences – was Germany, or more accurately, the German-speaking countries. This simple fact is important, for Germany’s intellectual traditions were by no means unconnected to later political developments.
One reason for the German preeminence in the realm of thought was her universities, which produced so much of the chemistry of the nineteenth century and were at the forefront of biblical scholarship and classical archaeology, not to mention the very concept of the Ph.D., which was born in Germany. Another was demographic: in 1900 there were thirty-three cities in the German-speaking lands with populations of more than 100,000, and city life was a vital element in creating a marketplace of ideas. Among the German-speaking cities Vienna took precedence. If one place could be said to represent the mentality of western Europe as the twentieth century began, it was the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Unlike other empires – the British or the Belgian, for example – the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy, under the Habsburgs, had most of its territories in Europe: it comprised parts of Hungary, Bohemia, Romania, and Croatia and had its seaport at Trieste, in what is now Italy. It was also largely inward-looking. The German-speaking people were a proud race, highly conscious of their history and what they felt set them apart from other peoples. Such nationalism gave their intellectual life a particular flavour, driving it forward but circumscribing it at the same time, as we shall see. The architecture of Vienna also played a role in determining its unique character. The Ringstrasse, a ring of monumental buildings that included the university, the opera house, and the parliament building, had been erected in the second half of the nineteenth century around the central area of the old town, between it and the outer suburbs, in effect enclosing the intellectual and cultural life of the city inside a relatively small and very accessible area.1 In that small enclosure had emerged the city’s distinctive coffeehouses, an informal institution that helped make Vienna different from London, Paris, or Berlin, say. Their marble-topped tables were just as much a platform for new ideas as the newspapers, academic journals, and books of the day. These coffeehouses were reputed to have had their origins in the discovery of vast stocks of coffee in the camps abandoned by the Turks after their siege of Vienna in 1683. Whatever the truth ofthat, by 1900 they had evolved into informal clubs, well furnished and spacious, where the purchase of a small cup of coffee carried with it the right to remain there for the rest of the day and to have delivered, every half-hour, a glass of water on a silver tray.2 Newspapers, magazines, billiard tables, and chess sets were provided free of charge, as were pen, ink, and (headed) writing paper. Regulars could have their mail sent to them at their favourite coffeehouse; they could leave their evening clothes there, so they needn’t go home to change; and in some establishments, such as the Café Griensteidl, large encyclopaedias and other reference books were kept on hand for writers who worked at their tables.3