The French artists who finally broke the mould
Review of The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I by Roger Shattuck
For anyone who is fascinated by the multifaceted artistic flowering of culture that began in the late 19th century, this book is a must read. It is about the emergence in France of an avant-garde, which began soon after the Impressionists and culminated later in Modernism and Surrealism. Shattuck attempts to explain this through 4 artists (Satie, Rousseau, Apollinaire, and Jarry).
What the 4 artists had in common was that they created a movement that was entirely self-referential rather than embedding itself in known (or expected) forms of discipline. Each of their visions was subjective, based on their inner worlds more than observation or traditional standards of the outside world. Anyone who looked at, listened to, or read their work would encounter their personalized vision. Each artist expressed emotion, knowledge and projection of self with its own particular beauty. What they expressed was knowable in a single instance: they did not depend on conventional processes, but each part was a whole unto itself, to the point that often there wasn't a beginning and end, just the present perception of the work.
This is best exemplified, I think, in Satie's later music. In stark contrast to traditional forms, which followed an introduction, buildup, and climax, Satie strove to evoke a mood at each instant. You don't have to listen to the whole piece as it unfolds, but merge with the emotion he is expressing at that moment. Apollinaire did similar things with his poetry, Jarry with his alter-ego persona in prose, and Rousseau with the naive primitivism of his paintings. If I understand it properly, this is similar to, but a step beyond, Impressionism, in that it is not about perception of the outside world, but a direct link to the artist's unconscious mind. The 4 artists were coeval with the Symbolists, the Cubists who emerged slightly later, and their work came to an abrupt end with World War I, during which other artists continued to work out their ideas with dadaism and other radical refinements of their original visions. From another angle, Freud was analyzing all this from a clinical perspective in Vienna.
The book is uneven. There are many biographical details that I found interesting, but was not sure of their relevance to the principal arguments, which were never succinctly stated. Much of this remains unclear to me, which is perhaps not a fault of the book, but I do feel I have to seek clearer ideas of how all these movements are inter-related. It didn't help that the only artist of the 4 whose work I truly love was Satie's, and as I discovered, I like his earlier work, which is not even part of the avant-garde that Shattuck purports to explain. I never liked Rousseau's work, Apollinaire seems obscurantist to me, and Jarry I had never heard of. This book is not for everyone, but even non-academics who have a deep interest in the period will find it very worthwhile.
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