ABSTRACT
Ehrenzweig arrived at his account of the oneness of painters with their emerging paintings in articles first published in the late 1940s. In these articles he drew on Klein’s then relatively recently published accounts of ‘depressive’1
and ‘paranoid-schizoid’2 states of mind. His articles began, however, with the seeming revolutionary oneness of different shapes, forms, and perspectives achieved by Picasso in his painting, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, and in cubist paintings beginning with those by Braque in 1909. Later commentators have argued that Picasso was indirectly influenced in helping bring about this revolution in art by the mathematician, Henri Poincaré, and his suggestion that the fourth dimension can be envisaged in terms of uniting a succession of images each seen from a different perspective. Picasso’s revolutionary move involved demonstrating, according to one commentator, ‘that the different perspectives should be shown in spatial simultaneity’.3
