There is a fun argument – which seems plausible to me – that there must have been a highly secret group who agreed that, from 1860 or so, all public commissions in the Empire would be for incredibly lavish, hot-house and over-ornate buildings, statues and frescoes. These would end up putting such overwhelming intellectual and aesthetic pressure on the Empire’s genuinely creative artists that modernism would be forced into existence, the result of a near-cosmic aesthetic struggle-session whereby if you heaped up so many tons of malachite and/or allegorical girls representing the Vistula River,
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