Left alone with bare volumes, the architects, however, did not turn out to be theoretically unarmed. What to do with the undisguised decor of the form was already well known.
While still getting acquainted with Welflin, we saw that by the end of the XIX century in European art there was a growing interest in “pure form”, not disguised by the desire to portray something reliably (this is especially noticeable in painting: with the advent of photography, artists could no longer do what the camera coped with perfectly, and it was possible to work in large strokes, generalize or distort the forms of the real world; thus, the invention of “light painting” liberated the painters, freed them from the obligation to “verbatim” follow reality).
People now no longer wanted to repeat what they themselves see, but to understand the structure, the construction of the world given to them; and if scientists sought to penetrate deep into matter, then artists had no choice but to explore its external manifestations. The beginning was laid by the French painter Paul Cezanne (1839-1906), and the Cubists continued, primarily Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and Georges Braque (1882-1963). The essence of their method was to analyze the shape and decompose it into the simplest geometric shapes – spheres, cubes, cylinders… (Isn’t it true that there is something akin to the search for Bulle and Ledoux?
Both of them acted in anticipation of epochal changes. As we have already said, it is probably at such times that interest in the very essence of things becomes more acute, to something of the most important, the grandeur of the scale that makes vain small details unimportant.) However, this was only the first step. Each isolated element had to be studied from all sides, including from the inside. On the canvas plane, this usually looks like a complex scan, when all the faces of the object can be seen at the same time, including those that should be hidden according to the rules of direct perspective. This created the effect of gradual study – traveling around the form and penetrating inside. The flow of time was included in the easel work.
