Modernism: The Lure of Heresy - Softcover

Gay, Peter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393333965 ISBN 13: 9780393333961

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010

Synopsis

“Rich, learned, briskly written, maddening yet necessary study.”―Lee Siegel, New York Times Book Review

Peter Gay explores the shocking modernist rebellion that, beginning in the 1840s, transformed art, literature, music, and film. Modernism presents a thrilling pageant of heretics that includes Oscar Wilde, Pablo Picasso, D. W. Griffiths, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Walter Gropius, Arnold Schoenberg, and (of course!) Andy Warhol. 16 pages of four-color illustrations and 92 black-and-white illustrations throughout

About this title

About the Author:

Peter Gay (1923―2015) was the author of more than twenty-five books, including the National Book Award winner The Enlightenment, the best-selling Weimar Culture, and the widely translated Freud: A Life for Our Time.

From The Washington Post:

Reviewed by Michael Dirda

Now in his mid-80s, Yale professor Peter Gay has been one of our chief chroniclers of "the modern" for more than 50 years. As a young scholar, he specialized in studies of the 18th-century Enlightenment. In the late 1970s and '80s, he brought out several books about Sigmund Freud, including a major biography. From the late '80s through the '90s, he focused his seemingly tireless scholarly energy on The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, a five-volume study of 19th-century thought and culture. Several of his other books, both early and late -- Weimar Culture (1968) and Schnitzler's Century (2001), in particular -- can now be seen as steps toward Modernism, this long, ambitious survey of innovative art in the 20th century.

As he did in The Bourgeois Experience, Gay approaches his subject as an intellectual historian, not a critic. That means you won't find close readings of Eliot's poetry here, or detailed interpretations of Picasso's "Demoiselles d'Avignon," Joyce's Ulysses or Schoenberg's Second String Quartet. Instead, Gay emphasizes the general character and importance of an artist's achievement, relying heavily on the work of specialist scholars and biographers. He is, in this sense, a superior popularizer and makes no secret of it: Many of his books include an extended bibliographical essay in which he briefly discusses the works he has learned from. Such an approach, which mixes concise biography with a developing argument, allows Gay to cover a great number and variety of figures -- in this case, Proust and Woolf, Le Corbusier and Jackson Pollock, Mahler and Orson Welles -- but at some cost: A reader may feel that he's been told the general significance of an artist's work but largely missed even a taste of the work itself. One yearns for more quotations and pictures, and for more sprightliness and crackle from Gay's narrative itself.

What is modernism? For Gay, the modernists shared two defining attributes: "first, the lure of heresy that impelled their actions as they confronted conventional sensibilities; and, second, a commitment to a principled self-scrutiny." In other words, the modernists were artistic rebels and psychological explorers: They broke with established or conventional forms and they probed deeply into their inner selves. Their work explodes with a libidinal, swashbuckling energy, unbounded by the constraints of 19th-century realism. The resulting novels and paintings and ballets shocked genteel sensibilities not only by making art new, but often by making it ugly, noisy and rude. In this, the modernists would argue, they were reflecting the character of the industrial age.

As in earlier books, Gay also emphasizes that modern art needs the freedoms allowed by a modern democratic state, just as it needs the bourgeois consumer -- as an uneasy audience, a source of patronage or a convenient target. One could hardly imagine Dadaist antics making sense if nobody found them shocking. In fact, Gay concludes that Pop Art signaled the end of modernism because its merging of high and low forms of art "energetically assailed what gave life to modernism: its subversive and quality-minded discriminations between the two domains, a separation that rescued innovative artists and writers from common bad taste." Moreover, Pop Art -- and its successors -- merely played with surfaces, eschewing any artistic journey into the interior of the self: Compare a Van Gogh landscape with a Warhol Brillo Box.

At its best, Modernism conveys the almost superhuman creative energies at large in the early and mid-20th century. Gay sees Picasso, Joyce, Stravinsky and Balanchine as the greatest masters of, respectively, image, word, sound and movement. But Marcel Duchamp -- who once exhibited a urinal and labeled it "Fountain" -- may be even more significant as a visionary: He is modernism's key subversive, undercutting everything we once believed about creativity and beauty, and consequently pioneering the more extreme forms of artistic expression. It is only a baby step from Duchamp's mustachioed Mona Lisa to Andres Serrano's "Piss Christ."

Like a good comparatist, Gay casts a wide net, covering Northern masters such as the Scandinavians August Strindberg and Edvard Munch, along with less familiar figures, such as the Russian Vladimir Tatlin and the German Georg Kaiser. He notes, too, that modernists come in every political stripe -- the arch-conservative T.S. Eliot, the elitist Schoenberg, the anarchist-yippie Alfred Jarry, the Confederate nostalgist D.W. Griffith, the Marxist Sartre. Many important innovators were Jewish (Kafka, Walter Gropius, Proust, et al.), and Gay writes at length about the effects of the regimes of Hitler and Stalin on the arts. In many instances, the United States proved the beneficiary -- émigré Jewish scholars re-energized our universities, the composers Stravinsky and Schoenberg ended up virtual neighbors in Los Angeles.

Gay also analyzes the vexing case of Nobel Prize-winning novelist Knut Hamsun, a brilliant and subtle portraitist of inner states who became an ardent Nazi supporter. With some courage, Gay insists that Hamsun's reprehensible later views do not invalidate the beauty and power of his early novels, such as Hunger and Pan. Being profoundly influenced by Freud, Gay at times approaches psycho-biography, as when he explains Mondrian's coolly geometric paintings as resulting, at least in part, from a repressed sexuality or when he speculates about the consequences of composer Charles Ives's fear of effeminacy. When he discusses human psychology, Gay -- often a rather diffuse prose stylist -- can also rise to real eloquence. Here, for example, he comments on what Proust called "the intermittences of the heart":

"The expression tersely epitomizes one of Proust's most disheartening, and most irresistible, conclusions about the vicissitudes of existence: the human heart fails when its endurance and judgment are most needed. Life is many things, to be sure, but most conspicuously it adds up to a vast array of mistakes, of mismatches, of sentiments out of phase with realities, of experiences not reflected in feelings. We get experiences wrong; everyone gets experiences wrong. . . . Life, therefore, is a perpetual act of revising, of correcting, what we think we know; it is a school for disenchantment."

Gay ends his study with reflections on novelist Gabriel García Márquez and architect Frank Gehry as late modernists. I think he's stretching here, trying to bring the movement up to the present moment or to suggest that it's not entirely done and over with. But I don't think modernism survived World War II. After the explosions and horrors of the first half of the century, artists grew wary of grandeur and excess, preferred the cooler and classical, the less ambitious and more playful.

So Gay may be right that Pop Art put paid to modernism by dissolving the barriers between high and low. Yet, this very breakdown now fuels creativity. We don't simply draw artistic energy from comics (as Roy Lichtenstein did); comics have become one of our art forms. The International Style, used to describe much 20th-century architecture, might now describe much 21st-century writing: Our favorite authors are Japanese and Indian and Argentine. Apart from Virginia Woolf and Martha Graham, no women artists appear in Modernism; other than the dancer Arthur Mitchell, no black ones do, either. That sort of sexual and racial chauvinism is vanishing. What's more, the computer and electronic media are reinvigorating the way we think about creativity. All our horizons are expanding. The modernists are now our classics.

For all its ambition, Gay's book necessarily leaves out a lot. It passes over Faulkner, Cummings, Celine and Pound, never mentions Artaud and Pirandello (except in the bibliographical essay), overlooks the Russian literary renaissance of the 1920s, and fails to discuss such crucial literary magazines as the Dial and La Nouvelle Revue Française or influential critics such as Edmund Wilson. For this reason, Gay's survey really must be supplemented by -- to name three invigorating favorites -- Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era, Peter Conrad's Modern Times, Modern Places, and William R. Everdell's The First Moderns. That said, all such histories matter only if they send us off -- for the first or 100th time -- to listen to the pounding rhythms of "The Rite of Spring," to hold our breath before Brancusi's delicate "Bird in Space," to read To the Lighthouse or to visit Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater. It is because of such imperishable works that modernism still matters -- and always will.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0393333965
• ISBN 13: 9780393333961
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 640