image
By the early twentieth century, industrialization had come to touch every aspect of life, from entertainment to warfare. In The Twittering Machine, from 1922, by Swiss-German artist Paul Klee (1879–1940), singing birds are attached to a crank apparatus. Is the image a message about the mechanization of music, or does its living song challenge the machine? Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY.