A seminal reading experience, mixing art criticism with history and biography
Review of Modernism: The Lure of Heresy, From Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond by Peter Gay
Since my high school infatuation with surrealism, I have been fascinated with every aspect of modernism. What caused such an explosion of experiment and rebellion? What, if anything, did the various disciplines have in common? What linked Monet and Picasso to Ravel, Hemingway, Frank Lloyd Wright, and even Sigmund Freud? Somehow, it seemed all of a piece, yet the only treatments I could find were separated into hermetic categories. This synthesis is the first I have found that enabled me to see modernism as a whole.
According to Gay, there are 2 elements to modernism. First, its practitioners wanted to shock the bourgeoisie by rejecting traditional forms and conventions. Second, they were expressing their inner lives, examining their emotions and perceptions of the world, that is, they concentrated on their own subjectivity as the principal theme in their work.
In many cases, the traditions that the modernists rejected had been dominant since the Renaissance. For example, painting was based on specific techniques developed by Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael; their subject matter ranged from quasi-scientific observation to heroic and nationalistic themes. The first great modernist innovator was Manet, who created entirely new techniques for his painting style, which led directly to Impressionism, emphasizing the perception and mood of the scenes that they painted. The same overall pattern applies to all the other disciplines. The breadth of Gay's coverage is phenomenal, but how he synthesizes all the disparate threads is a wonder.
Gay also ventures some explanation for the emergence of modernist experiments. The traditional arts were, he says, supported for centuries by aristocrats and occasional royals, who were the sole dispensers of patronage. These were extremely rarified and refined productions for the super elite, of high quality no doubt, but requiring a classical education and cultural immersion from a young age. This changed with the appearance of the middle class during the industrial revolution. The bourgeois could pay for mass manufactured goods of lesser quality than, say, artisanal luxury fashion; they also created the first mass market for art, scorned by the creative classes as kitsch of pedestrian taste, an attempt to imitate the taste of their betters. The modernists set out to create their own modes of expression and if it offended the bourgeoisie, so much the better.
This led to an explosion of experimentation as artists and intellectuals branched out, trying both to shock with the new and invent techniques that would express their inner lives. Schoenberg challenged the tonality and scales of previous composers, opening a huge new arena that is being explored to this day. Impressionism fed into Expressionism and then Kandinsky's abstract art. The Wiener Werkstätte and then Bauhaus used new materials for their craftsmanship. From Frank Lloyd Wright to Frank Gehry, architecture has rebelled against the classical forms – based on circles and symmetric rectangles – producing irregular angles and finally, Gehry's Museum of Bilbao, for which an entire new infrastructure was required. Finally, the dadaists questioned the notion of what was or wasn't art, as exemplified by Duchamp's submission of a urinal to a New York exhibition. All of it was intended for the new elites who were tuned into it, an audience that they were forming around their experiments.
As Gay sees it, this extraordinary movement may have ended with the Pop Art of the 1960s. Rather than an expression of inner life, it was purely about surface appearances and had no greater motive than to make money for its practitioners. Of course, it could be seen as derivative of the dadaists, who sought to bring down all traditions that were accepted into the "canon".
What Gay does not explain to my satisfaction is why artists and indeed scientists like Sigmund Freud were turning inward at that time. There are many possible explanations for this. Realism may have reached its limits, in particular with the recent creation of photography – as painters were no longer needed for life-like portrayals, they turned to expressing their inner lives and emotion. It can also be seen as an extension of the Romantic Movement, concentrating as it did on self-expression and holistic vision of the self and how it fit into the world. Finally, there were Freud and Max Weber, who sought to break the philosophical deadlock between positivism and idealism, in the process developing methodologies that decisively separated the social sciences from philosophy. Freud also supposedly discovered hysteria in his patients, a kind of neurotic suppression of sexuality and questioning due to the bourgeois compulsion to mimic aristocrats. What ties all of this together remains a mystery for me.