Saint Sebastian

In 1912 the young Czech painter Bohumil Kubišta was doing something the Paris cubists around Picasso and Braque never did. He poured religious feeling into the fractured geometry. He took the martyr Saint Sebastian, the saint shot full of arrows, and built the head around a hard right-angled triangle, using green, a colour he tied to death, and sharp angular shapes for everything beyond the physical body. It was also a disguised self-portrait. Kubišta thought of himself as a martyr of modern art, misunderstood and poor. He had little time to prove otherwise. Six years later, serving as an officer in the Austro-Hungarian army, he caught the influenza then sweeping Europe and died at 34.