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dreams, somnambulism, hypnotism and hallucinations was being explored and described by the new discipline of psychology. French scientists were studying the effects of shapes and colours on the nervous system and unconscious mind. Physics was demonstrating a series of dynamic processes—invisible waves, force fields, electrically charged particles. X-rays were discovered in 1896, and in the following year a British physicist destroyed the concept of the atom as an indivisible unity by demonstrating the electron to be a subatomic particle.
    New forms of artistic expression developed as the European art world responded to these discoveries. Conventions established and perfected in the Renaissance were replaced by more personal strategies of representation. Tradition and parochialism came under assault as young painters, believing a breach with the past necessary for art to move forward, seceded from official art academies. Manifestos flew and new journals were founded. In 1898 the architect August Endell, a Berliner, had prophetically declared, “To those with understanding . . . we are not only at the beginning of a new stylistic phase, but at the same time on the threshold of the development of a completely new Art.” 6
    Berlin had been in the vanguard of the new approach to art for more than a decade. By the early 1890s the city was home to an avant-garde led by the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch and the Swedish writer August Strindberg. Munch was one of the great bellwethers of European modernism. In 1892, then twenty-nine and known in his native Norway as “Bizzarro,” he was invited by the Society of Berlin Artists, a private association, to exhibit fifty-five of his paintings and etchings at their autumn exhibition at the Architektenhaus. Bitter controversy ensued over Munch’s obsessive meditations on love, sex, melancholia and death: a Frankfurt newspaper called on “true believers” to rise up and condemn “that Nordic dauber and poisoner of Art.” 7 The members of Berlin’s Academy of Arts, a more conservative body of professional artists, ordered the show to be closed down after only a week—an edict that prompted Munch to mock his enemies as “a lot of terrible old painters who are beside themselves at the new trend.” 8
    One of Munch’s strongest supporters proved to be Franz Skarbina, then forty-three. A Berlin native, Skarbina had taught anatomical drawing and the science of perspective at the Academy of Arts but resigned his post in protest against Munch’s treatment. With a number of other disgruntled artists he founded the Gruppe der Elf (Group of Eleven), a collective that staged independent exhibitions and tried to foster a more understanding public for modern art. Its members were accused by Emperor Wilhelm ii —an arch-conservative when it came to matters artistic—of “poisoning the soul of the German nation.” 9 In 1896, however, a critic for the avant-garde journal Pan declared that the Group of Eleven had “helped the cause of modern art more than anything else that has been done to introduce modernity to Berlin—no small achievement, considering the lazy and stupid trust in the conventional that resists anything new, young and forceful.” 10
    Two years later, in 1898, the Group of Eleven expanded to become the Berlin Secession, a revitalizing force in German art that attracted many young painters into the city and staged controversial exhibitions. Over the next few years the Secession introduced Berliners to the work of Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Wassily Kandinsky and Vincent Van Gogh. In 1902 Munch joined the Secession and exhibited, for the first time, the entirety of his Frieze of Life.
    Harris was undoubtedly aware of developments within the Continental avant-garde thanks to his studies with Munch’s champion Skarbina, who served on the executive committee of the Berlin Secession. He also saw their