Abstract
In the first decade of the 20th century we see, on the one hand, a fascination with life and its dynamics, with ground-breaking discoveries in science and engineering, and, on the other hand, a fascination with mysticism, anthroposophy and the teachings of various hermetic heresies. The demand for a new "technological art" as formulated in the February 1909 Manifesto of Futurism of coincides with the pittura metafisica of Chirico's paintings, whose oneiric melancholy was meant, by offering a static and reflective depiction of the world, to be the antithesis of dynamic and iconoclastic Futurism.
Standing in opposition to the denial and "forgetting" of the past there was now a new model of culture and art - besides pittura metafisica also aspects of Cubism and Expressionism - of which memory, myth and a new perception of tradition are the main constituents. The notion of a break, rupture sits happily with those of explosion and disintegration.
In his theory of cultural dynamics - and the dynamics of cultures - Yuri M. Lotman contemplates two fundamental mechanisms of the dynamics of cultural history: evolution and explosion.