n°35 — An eye: artists’ view of the modern world 1911 – 1938. Author: Sonia de Puineuf

The image of the eye appears in a recurring fashion within the graphic production of modern artists. It is often treated as an autonomous motif, detached from the rest of the face, combined with inscriptions and typographic signs. These works are then to be considered as a composition of one’s view. 

          From the poster for the Internationale Hygiene Exhibition in Dresden, designed by Munich native Franz von Stuck (1911), to the cover of the book Écriture et photographie in the advertisement phototypeset by Czechoslovakian Zdeněk Rossmann (1938), by way of Francis Picabia’s iconoclastic The Cacodylic Eye (1921) that is a painting with no paint, this rich corpus testifies to a notable evolution of sensitivity within the avant-garde and a questioning of the accuracy of the vision of the artist in the face of the technological developments of the modern world.