It's an interesting idea. There's probably a lot to say about the intuition of everything in movement and the growth of 20th century physics, but I will leave this to others.

But actually, free-associating with modernity, what this series of paintings reminded me of was the sensibility of the paragraph I read yesterday in Whitehead (1933):

"The qualities entertained as objects in conceptual activity are of the nature of catalytic agents, in the sense in which that phrase is used in chemistry. They modify the aesthetic process by which the occasion constitutes itself out of the many streams of feeling received from the past.... The operation of mentality is primarily to be conceived as a diversion of the flow of energy."  (end of last lecture, Modes of Thought)

The man, those stars -- can't you just see them, bursts of conscious thought diverting the massive flows of energy as the world continually recreates itself? It's a curious kind of aesthetic sense, but they both have it, Whitehead and van Gogh. I'm guessing no one has ever juxtaposed those two before. 

Also in Whitehead's words: "...factors in our experience are `clear and distinct' in proportion to their variability... The necessities are invariable, and for that reason remain in the background of thought, dimly and vaguely."

Just wanted to say thanks for this, Art, I think it's a brilliant idea -- both the loss of orientation, and the emphasis on the strokes, the particles out of which everything is made. Solveig, the quotes surprised me but were very apropos: I certainly see what you mean.

What also strikes me in this link you made, Art, is a certain similarity between the modern and the medieval, though the medieval aesthetic has more of a disregard for orientation than a disorientation, perhaps.

With respect to just the first picture, the portrait: It makes you wonder whether people (I'm being somewhat intentionally vague, of course there were many different ideas) in the intervening centuries who painted backgrounds flat and immovable actually felt a certain solidity there, or whether they simply thought of it as a decorative constant rather than really part of the subject of the painting. I.e. is the contribution of modernity to notice how the world whirrs, or to worry that human life and the human body is inextricably caught up in this whirring.

Just a remark, thinking about this discussion, and Mia's question about whirring, in relation to the film of Feuillade. As you say, Arthur, "it's not an accident that at this moment cinema was invented".

I was once at a screening of some silent film (it was Chaplin), run by a university organization of some sort.  A student had volunteered to play piano for the screening. The film starts, and the piano music is excellent; the film is engaging, people are laughing, whispering to their neighbors, the usual noises of life... But at some point the pianist urgently has to use the toilet. So he simply stops playing and rushes out of the room. All of a sudden we are all left in this eerie silence full of a loud whirring, and the echo of a laugh or two.

After about a minute and a half the pianist returned and resumed playing. The effect lingered, but only for awhile; soon enough the hole in the world was patched up, and everyone began to shuffle about and laugh again.