JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2130  

This graphic from Nature magazine (volume 76, page 670, 1908) features a host of early flyers from five years or so following the first Wright powered flight.  The diagram, which was also made in the first few years of the Cubist movement (and only a year after Picasso’s Demoiselles), has a certain geometrical semi-proto-Cubist feel to it.  The slickee, hard-edged approach to depicting the flying machines and placing them on the single sheet gives the work a modernist artistic feel to it in the earliest period of 20th c modernism in the first movement of abstract art. 

The other thing is that so far as I can tell no major Cubists used the airplane as a subject matter in a painting in the first few years of the movement–which seems a little odd to me, given that it was such a major technological advance that took place in about the same time period as Cubism. 
Just a year later another collective.montage appears ina quite different form;

[Source, Nature, volume 81, page 399, 1909. And the detail, below:]

And speaking of precursors, now that I have mentioned the Picasso I should also say something about El Greco’s The Opening of the Fifth Seal (or The Fifth Seal of the Apocalypse or The Vision of Saint John), painted three hundred years before the Demoiselles.  El Greco (1541 – 7 April 1614) was not of his own time, not really…