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This past summer, I was in Ottawa at the National Gallery of Canada's summer show "The Making of the New Man", where works from important artists of the turn of the 20th century such as Kandinsky, Max Ernst, Salvador Dali and many others, were exhibited showing their version of "The New Man."
What was intriguing about these visions was that they were almost all of them deformed in some way or other. Max Ernst, in his meticulous paintings, perhaps articulated this best. His "new man" was an amalgam of parts, some imaginatively created by Ernst himself, others he appropriated from animals or other familiar sources. But in the end, his "new man" was a monster.
In an article entitled "Listening to Frankenstein", The Center for Vision and Values' Andrew J. Harvey writes about the monster that Mary Shelley's main character, Victor Frankenstein, creates. This creature was never given a name, but we know him as "Frankenstein."
Harvey describes Victor's mindset as that of the modern scientist, and especially today's research scientist, where the pursuit of pure knowledge without its ethical or moral implications can land us with many Frankensteins.
Since this is an art blog, I will just briefly focus on art. Max Ernst's monsters were also created in the pursuit of pure art, where the artist becomes the creator and uses his inner imagination to design his own unique world. Just as the scientist can use his knowledge to make his world - three-legged chicken, tomatoes from green beans - so can the artist create his own by just using his palette and his imagination.
Modern artists who searched into the depths of their imagination, and who believed that they have it within them to make new and great creations, found either an emptiness, as Rothko realized. Or, they found monsters and inhuman concoctions, just as Max Ernst demonstrated. The idea that artists can create something out of nothing - by simply using their imagination - is a modern phenomenon. Previous generations used nature, the Bible and myths and stories to create their paintings to much better success.
There is no "new man", as the scientist Victor found out. But modern artists are slow to catch on, even though Mary Shelley wrote Victor's experiment as a novel rather than as a scientific document.