Often issues dealt with in science are simultaneously dealt in music painting art in general and in a indipendently way

The impact of relativity is evident in works such as Wassily Kandinsky’s essay Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Igor Stravinsky’s article entitled Poetry of Music, Friedrich Nietzsche’s book Beyond Good and Evil, T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land, and Pablo Picasso’s painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. To illustrate the influence that the idea of relativity has had on modern works of art and to show how it has vastly transformed the styles that many artists have used to create their art, we will first examine Wassily Kandinsky’s work. In his essay Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky refers to relativity when he argues that absolute freedom must be given to the artist. Artists before Kandinsky only tried to express themselves by imitating nature to convey their message. However, Kandinsky says that the artist should be free from being forced to fit his expression into the mold of nature. He should be free to paint what he is really trying to express. In other words the objects and colors of the picture are relative. In Concerning the Spiritual in Art Kandinsky discusses what is good painting and drawing and he tells us that good drawing cannot be altered without destroying its inner value, irrespective of its correctness as anatomical or natural structure. He then has the reader question not the violation of natural form, but the need of the artist for such a form. He says the artist is not only justified in using, but is actually obligated to use only those things that are absolutely necessary to his painting. Specifically, Kandinsky says, “colors are not to be used because they are true to nature but because they are necessary to the particular picture” (Kandinsky, 535). The entire purpose of the picture is to convey a message that the artist is trying to communicate by use of an image. To mottle both the picture and the message by adding unnecessary form or structure, or needless color, defeats the very purpose of the picture in the first place. The communication is lost to convention. Everything that the artist puts into his painting must be for a purpose and be a part of the complete conveyance. The colors in a work of art are only relative to the message, not to the form of nature itself. Kandinsky was one of the first artists to argue that there was no need to copy nature or physical form but rather only the shapes and colors necessary to the art should be used. Igor Stravinsky’s article Poetics of Music is another example of relativity greatly influencing a 20th century artist. Stravinsky produced a vastly different style of music by applying the principles of relativity to music. Relativity in music is not abandoning all rules and form, but rather imposing rules that may be different than what others in a different frame of reference may be used to. In his article he explains that the more constraints one imposes on themselves, the more free they will become from the chains that shackle their spirit. He is telling us that one must have some sort of rules and guidelines that govern that individual’s creation of art. Earlier in the article Poetics of Music Stravinsky says, “My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles” (Stravinsky, 547). Here he explains to us that one may only reach the furthest points of creativity by building upon a foundation and taking the art further than it has previously been. This kind of progress and structure cannot be attained by randomly throwing pieces together but rather it must be the product of a purposeful work carefully constructed together to enable the artist to fully express his intentions. Art must be bound by rules, though those rules are not always the same rules that are accepted as common practice. To create art that is random and chaotic is to limit one’s creativity to mere chance. The rules that Stravinsky used were actually much stricter that the common musical rules of the day. However, in imposing on himself a more rigorous set of rules, relative to his own ideas, he was able to actually create more. Another example of relativity in literature is Friedrich Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil. Nietzsche demonstrates the idea of relativity in his description of how the master moralist determines value. From part nine of Nietzsche’s work, subtitled “What is Noble?” he describes for us the vast difference between the noble, or master, moralist and the slave moralist. The slave, he says desires only comfort and will conform to the morals and values of those around him. He simply seeks safety from the hardships in life. The master however has a completely different viewpoint. The master is willing to take risks and suffer hardship, so that he may learn from them and overcome. He does not just ignorantly accept the values of those around him, but rather he seeks to create his own values from his experiences and judgment. Unlike the slave who seeks only comfort, the master desires more, he desires true self-satisfaction. Nietzsche tells us, “The noble kind of man experiences himself as a person who determines value and does not need to have other people’s approval. He makes the judgment ‘What is harmful to me is harmful in itself.’ He understands himself as something which in general first confers honor on things, as someone who creates values” (Nietzsche, 5). In this text Nietzsche explains how the values of the master are not determined by other people. The noble man creates his values from the lessons he has learned in overcoming the hardship that he has faced. He understands that the values he holds are not objective truths that are always true. They are relative only to the time and place which he is currently in. The values, though still important, are not eternal and not the same for all men all the time. In T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land, he demonstrates relativity in the way in which throughout the poem he abruptly switches both the character speaking and time frame. In this poem Eliot talks about the decline and desperate times of people. It breaks from many poems of an earlier time, which are commonly fluid and story-like, by unexpectedly changing speaker, location and even time frame. In the first part of T.S. Eliot poem, subtitled “The Burial of the Dead” he writes, "Summer surprised us, coming over the StarnbergerseeWith a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s,My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,And I was frightened. He said, Marie,Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.In the mountains, there you feel free.I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter."(Eliot, 1) In this excerpt he takes on the persona of a girl, presumably Marie, and talks first about sitting around a lake, drinking coffee. The speaker then fades into her childhood, remembering with fondness how her cousin took her out sledding. She remembers being scared and then going down anyway. Then abruptly the speaker changes topics again and goes off on a different tangent. This is a prime example of how relativity has influenced T.S. Eliot in the way in which he is able to frame and write this poem. It departs from the common fluid, single event poetry and changes speakers and topics almost as if remembering a flash of a life, catching only pieces of each memory along the way. Finally, Pablo Picasso is the archetype of relativity demonstrated in art. Relativity in Picasso is related to visual perspectives and the meaning of objects, deeper than just their physical structure. He painted many different styles, one of the most notable of which is Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, painted in 1907 during the African-influenced period of his life. In Les Demoiselles d’Avignon Picasso paints a picture of five prostitutes, one sitting and four standing. The two women on the right are wearing African-style masks. The woman sitting has her head turned toward us while her body is seated the opposite way and the woman on the far left has a face much darker than the rest of her painted skin tone. The spaces between the women also jut out in sharp pointed pieces rather than fade back behind the women as one would expect them to. Also the prostitutes themselves, though naked, are not depicted with sensuous curves and depth, but as flat plains. Each section or plain of this picture is in a different perspective than those that surround it. Some have shadows darkening the opposite sides and the faces of the women are asymmetrical. Picasso seems to have been trying to show the relativity of each perspective is different and paint all different viewpoints on one single image. And the fact that prostitutes are wearing tribal spiritual masks certainly conveys more of who the women are rather than just what they look like. This Picasso painting is the visual representation of what relativity is. In Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art, relativity was seen in his argument that colors and shapes were only necessary when they were essential to the art, not simply to reproduce nature. Similarly, Stravinsky said in Poetics of Music that art is defined by its rules and no art can be void or structure, however the rules one artist uses may be completely different than that of another. In Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche explains that the values the master moralist holds are not objective truths that are always true. They are relative only to the time and place which the master is in and those values, though still important, are not eternal and not the same for all men all the time. T.S. Eliot in The Waste Land showed relativity by abruptly changing speakers, locations and times. And Picasso applied the idea of relativity to his painting in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon showing several perspectives and viewpoints all in a single image. It has been necessary to understand the Theory of Relativity and how it has been applied to the many different styles of literature, art and music that came about in the early twentieth century. That idea alone has completely reshaped art, music and literature and had a profound impact upon how artists, authors and musicians create and convey their works of art.