From Otis elevators and skyscrapers to ultra-modern bathrooms and steel combs, "all the great modern things", as Andy Warhol was to call them, were already in place in America in 1915 when Marcel Duchamp arrived there. While Europe was struggling with the collapse of its old Empires in The Great War, Duchamp experienced an unparalleled intellectual freedom, an alienated liberation and an almost sci-fi view of the future.
His experience was to foreshadow a century of creative dislocation for artists, as war and politics made refugees out of them and they forged their artistic ideas in foreign languages and places. For example, the Russian artist, Wassily Kandinsky, left Revolutionary Russia for Germany, was forced out when the Nazis closed the Bauhaus as “degenerate” and spent the rest of his life in France. His work is an incredible alchemy of cosmopolitan and apocalyptic influences which led to his creation of abstract expressionism.
But the 20th century had more challenges to come for the world of art: from the first explosions of atom bombs to the first sight of earth from space, from the Women’s Movement to consumer politics, artists were required to view their world in new ways.
The 21st century in the West is as much of a challenge: what are artists doing to confront the problems facing us today?