ewspapers and journals that embodied the cultural party line of the moment. This was hardly an incentive for creative freedom, and explains the irresistible attraction of free-wheeling, tolerant, permissive Paris for generations of aspiring artists withering away in the stuffy atmospheres of the provinces all over Europe.
The Impressionists fit Ortega y Gasset's change of viewing surface notion, but the motivations for their apparent distortions were creative, emotional, and spiritual in nature, not purely technical and optical.
World War I was the watershed for the smug Victorian colonial era. Advertised in the propaganda campaigns of the Allies as the war to end all wars, the war to make the future safe for civilization, it instead showed that the white Europeans who had so condescendingly criticised the low morals of the indigenous peoples they had overrun so easily between 1870 and 1905 were even more barbaric than those they balled barbarians. After millions were killed on all sides for no apparent reason, the poets, painters, and o
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