The prototype in 20th-century art

Abstract

This article examines the complex relation between science, technology and art at the close of the 19th century, which provoked a critical engagement with the notion of the prototype among modernist artists such as Duchamp, Klee, Kandinsky and Vasareli, among many others. Little attention has been given so far to the extent to which the prototype featured both as physical model and as conceptual strategy, and the way it traverses the artistic landscape of Europe in the first half of the 20th century. By drawing attention to the conscious investment of the prototypical in the art of the early 20th century, this article reflects on the concept of the prototype, whose emergent beauty signalled its impending irrelevance.

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