War and Art

The epochal (500 year) paradigm shift of 1912 which affected all art,  science and politics was deeply affected by black emancipation penetrating the lapsed Enlightenment project in Europe i.e. the U.S. Civil War, six hundred thousand white men and thousands of black men die in order to acknowledge a non-white culture as citizens rather than property.  This potent event revitalized art and science that had been exhausted by the urban nightmare of nineteenth and early twentieth century labor abuse.  How to explain the fifty year delay?  It can take Europeans at least one generation to absorb the astounding drama and forcefulness of the reifications of the American character.  Declaration of Independence 1776 - French Revolution 1789.   Picasso celebrates Lincoln in “Le Demoiselles d’Avignon”