Languages of Art and Languages of ScienceMarek H. Dominiczak*

At the turn of the 19th century, new inventions andtechnologies, such as the railways, the internal com-bustion engine, the motor car, and the airplane beganto change human visual experiences.

Karl Benz’s Motorwagen was launched in 1886,and the Ford Model T car began to be made in 1908.The Wright brothers flew their airplane in 1903, andLouis Bleriot made his air journey from Calais to Doverin 1909. Riding the fast-moving machines providedpreviously unknown views, such as the blurred per-spective seen from a speeding car. Furthermore, pho-tography, and later film, enabled analysis of serialimages. The surroundings in cities also changed dra-matically, becoming man-made to a greater extent—tomention only the impact of gas and then electric light-ing. A striking example of the new architectural possi-bilities was the iron structure of the Eiffel tower, built in1889 for the Paris World’s Fair Exhibition. Perhapssymbolically, its designer, Gustave Eiffel, was an engi-neer, not an architect (1 ).

There also were changes in the intellectual frame-work for perceiving the world. From 1905 to 1911 Al-bert Einstein introduced the theory of relativity, whichshook the “fixed” world of Newtonian physics. HenriBergson’s philosophy of human experience, which em-phasized process and change, followed similar lines.

Between 1900 and the beginning of the First WorldWar in 1914, art also became permeated with the spiritof change. Its languages started to transform. PaulCezanne (1839 –1906) developed his unique geometriccanon. His retrospective in 1907 was profoundly influ-ential. In 1905, the exhibition of Fauvists, with HenriMatisse (1869 –1954) being the most important amongthem, introduced the use of nonnaturalistic color toexpress emotions.

The most revolutionary change in pictorial lan-guage, however, was Cubism. Its development is cred-ited to Pablo Ruiz Picasso (1881–1973) and GeorgesBraque (1882–1963).

Picasso was born in Malaga in Spain (2, 3 ). Hemoved to Barcelona when he was 15, trained for a short

time in Madrid, and settled in Paris in 1904. There hemet the poets Guillaume Apollinaire and GertrudeStein, and through Stein, Matisse. During his early Blueand Rose periods, his painting remained figurative in arelatively conventional way. Later, his esthetics becameinfluenced by the ancient art of Etruscan sculpture andGreek vases, which he had seen in the Louvre. Otherinfluences were the ancient Iberian stone heads and—importantly—African art. These influences are evidentin his most important work of the period, a paintingthat shocked the art world, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,which was a picture of prostitutes from a brothel inBarcelona that he painted in 1907 and publicly exhib-ited only in 1916.

Georges Braque trained as a house painter anddecorator (4 ) and studied art in Le Havre in 1897 to1899. He was influenced by Cezanne. Braque was in-troduced to Picasso by Apollinaire. Picasso andBraque, working very closely together, developed Cub-ism between 1908 and 1913 (5, 6 ).

Cubism focused on the construction of a picture asopposed to its subject. Picasso later described it as “artdealing primarily with forms” (7 ). In its first phase,Cubist forms were Cezannesque. The main differencebetween Cubism and traditional painting was that itdid not comply with the principles of conventional per-spective. Instead, it adopted simultaneous views andfragmentation of images into different planes. At thisstage it became known as Analytical Cubism. In a Cub-ist painting, the depth of the picture is shallow, and thedepth of a picture is frequently compressed, so that itlooks flat. The color palette is relatively narrow. Sub-jects included everyday objects, such as newspapers,food, and bottles of wine, although there were also fig-urative paintings, particularly by Picasso.

Braque’s picture of the fishing boats shown in Fig.1 is an example of Analytical Cubism. The subject is avillage on the Normandy coast. One can see both theclearly geometric component forms and the flatteningof picture depth. Also note how the traditional rules ofperspective have been abandoned. Finally, there isBraque’s characteristic monochromatic palette ofbrowns, grays, and yellows.

The Cubist language extended beyond painting,and this extension has had lasting influence on the artof the 20th and 21st centuries (6 ). Picasso inventedcollage, a technique of gluing unrelated objects to apainting, and Braque introduced papier colle, the join-

College of Medical, Veterinary and Life Sciences, University of Glasgow, Glasgow,UK.* Address correspondence to the author at: Department of Biochemistry, Gart-

navel General Hospital, Glasgow G12 0YN, UK. Fax �44-141-211-3452; e-mailmarek.dominiczak@gla.ac.uk.

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ing of paper fragments to a painting. Cubist sculptureabandoned the concept of a “solid” form. Later, start-ing in 1912 and extending into the 1920s, Cubism en-tered its Synthetic phase, which emphasized construct-ing images from diverse components, rather thananalysis.

Cubism was taken up by other artists, perhaps themost important being Juan Gris (1887–1927) and Fer-nand Leger (1881–1955). It spread across Europe after1911 to influence, in particular, the development ofabstract painting. Cubism itself, interestingly, neverprogressed to complete abstraction.

These changes in art were parallel to, rather thanconvergent with, science. The common denominatorwas the move from relative conservatism to the newmeans of expression and the accelerated pace of

change. Picasso, in his interview with Marius de Zayaspublished in The Arts in New York in 1923, vehementlydenied being engaged in deliberate “research,” whichmakes these parallels even more interesting (7 ).

In extrapolating all this to biomedicine, the equiv-alent changes in scientific language were, I suppose,changes in the prominence of different methodologicapproaches, and thus different disciplines. Thus, thephysiological language of Claude Bernard changed tothe biochemical one of Hans Krebs and others. Theclinical chemists then inserted the chemical languageinto medicine, and, most recently, that languagestarted to evolve into that of molecular biology, genet-ics, and systems biology. Of course, like in the arts, thesetrajectories of change require constant—and complex—readjustment of balance between established knowl-edge and new developments, and in medicine, reassess-ment of their importance for patient care.

Author Contributions: All authors confirmed they have contributed tothe intellectual content of this paper and have met the following 3 re-quirements: (a) significant contributions to the conception and design,acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data; (b) draftingor revising the article for intellectual content; and (c) final approval ofthe published article.

Authors’ Disclosures or Potential Conflicts of Interest: No authorsdeclared any potential conflicts of interest.

Acknowledgment: The author thanks Jacky Gardiner for excellentsecretarial assistance.

References

1. Hughes R. The shock of the new: art and the century of change. Updated andenlarged ed. London: Thames and Hudson; 1991.

2. PabloPicasso.org. Pablo Picasso: his artworks, quotes and biography. http://www.pablopicasso.org/ (Accessed May 2012).

3. Leal B, Piot C, Bernadac M-L. The ultimate Picasso. New York: Harry N.Abrams Incorporated; 2000.

4. GeorgesBraque.org. Georges Braque: biography, paintings, quotes. http://www.georgesbraque.org/ (Accessed May 2012).

5. Rubin W. Picasso et Braque. L’invention du Cubisme. Paris: Flammarion; 1990.6. Arnason HH. A history of modern art: painting, sculpture, architecture, pho-

tography. 4th ed. Prather MF, revising author. London: Thames and Hudson;1998. p 181–216.

7. Harrison C, Wood P, eds. Art in theory 1900-1990: an anthology of changingideas. Oxford: Blackwell; 1992. p 210–3.

DOI: 10.1373/clinchem.2012.182014

Fig. 1. Georges Braque.

Fishing Boats (Barques de peches), 1909. Oil on canvas, 361/4 � 28 7/8 in. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; gift ofAudrey Jones Beck. ©2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS),New York / ADAGP, Paris. Reproduced with permission.

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