Modernism

• 1. Introduction

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  "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold." That line from W. B. Yeats's poem "The Second Coming" is how literary scholars often sum up Modernism, an early 20th-century movement that swept through literature, visual arts, performing arts, and music. It prized experimentation, abstraction, and subjective experience. Behind the slogan sat a darker mood. Modernism centered on a sense of "growing alienation" from prevailing "morality, optimism, and convention." It carried a desire to change how "human beings in a society interact and live together." The movement emerged in the late 19th century, as secularization and the growing influence of science reshaped Western culture. Why did a generation of artists turn against tradition itself? What made painters abandon a single point of view, composers throw out tonal harmony, and novelists chase the drift of an unconscious mind? And how did a trench war and a revolution turn a minority taste into the dominant view of reality?

• 2. Falling Centre

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  David Hume, the Scottish philosopher who lived from 1711 to 1776, argued that one never actually perceives one event causing another. Hume also claimed that we never know the self as object, only the self as subject, leaving us blind to our true natures. If we only know through sensory experience, then we cannot make metaphysical claims at all. This is the collapse of metaphysics that Modernism inherited. Modernism, by this account, can be driven by a desire for metaphysical truths while understanding their impossibility. Characters carry that contradiction. Marlow in Heart of Darkness and Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby believe they have encountered some great truth about nature or character. The novels treat those truths ironically and offer more mundane explanations instead. Wallace Stevens wrote poems split into two patterns. In some, the speaker denies that nature has meaning, only for nature to loom up by the end. In others, the speaker claims nature has meaning, only for that meaning to collapse by the end. This is why some scholars call Modernism the apotheosis of Romanticism. As August Wilhelm Schlegel, an early German Romantic, framed it, Romanticism searches for metaphysical truths about character, nature, and higher power. Modernism yearns for that same center but finds only its collapse.

• 3. Breaking The Single Viewpoint

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  Pablo Picasso's 1907 painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon refuses to present its subjects from a single point of view. Instead it offers a flat, two-dimensional picture plane. His work "The Poet" of 1911 is similarly decentered, presenting the body from multiple points of view. As the Peggy Guggenheim Collection puts it, "Picasso presents multiple views of each object, as if he had moved around it, and synthesizes them into a single compound image." Western art had run on different rules. From the Renaissance up to the middle of the 19th century, it was underpinned by the logic of perspective and an attempt to reproduce an illusion of visible reality. Modernists rejected the absolute, the idea of "Creatio ex nihilo," creation out of nothing, which both realism and Romanticism had upheld. In its place came collage, reprise, incorporation, rewriting, recapitulation, revision, and parody. Cubism pushed this furthest. In Cubist artwork, objects are analyzed, broken up, and reassembled in abstract form. A major influence was the late work of Paul Cezanne, shown in a retrospective at the 1907 Salon d'Automne. Cubism reached the general public in 1911 at the Salon des Independants in Paris, held between the 21st of April and the 13th of June. Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Henri Le Fauconnier, Robert Delaunay, Fernand Leger, and Roger de La Fresnaye hung together in Room 41 and provoked a scandal. In 1912, Metzinger and Gleizes wrote the first and only major Cubist manifesto, Du "Cubisme."

• 4. Sound Without A Centre

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  Arnold Schoenberg believed he had discovered a wholly new way of organizing sound, based on the use of twelve-note rows. He rejected traditional tonal harmony, the hierarchical system that had guided composition for at least a century and a half. Yet the technique's origins trace back to earlier composers such as Franz Liszt, Richard Wagner, Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, and Max Reger. His String Quartet No. 2 in F sharp minor of 1908 was his first composition without a tonal center. A few years earlier, in 1903, Wassily Kandinsky had begun the Expressionist paintings that would lead to his first abstract work. Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, and Kazimir Malevich all believed in redefining art as the arrangement of pure color. Photography, which had rendered much of the representational function of visual art obsolete, pushed them further in that direction. Igor Stravinsky took dissonance into the concert hall. In 1913 he composed The Rite of Spring, a ballet that depicts human sacrifice, with a score full of dissonance and primitive rhythm. Its first performance in Paris caused an uproar. That same year crowded with firsts. It saw Edmund Husserl's Ideas, Niels Bohr's quantized atom, Ezra Pound's founding of imagism, the Armory Show in New York, and in Saint Petersburg the "first futurist opera," Mikhail Matyushin's Victory over the Sun.

• 5. Machines For Living

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  Le Corbusier thought that buildings should function as "machines for living in," analogous to cars, which he saw as machines for traveling in. Just as cars had replaced the horse, modernist design should reject styles inherited from Ancient Greece or the Middle Ages. Following this machine aesthetic, modernist designers typically rejected decorative motifs. They preferred to emphasize the materials used and pure geometrical forms. The roots ran back through an age of iron and glass. The Crystal Palace, a huge cast-iron and plate-glass exhibition hall, was built for the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London. The same monumental style shaped King's Cross station in 1852 and Paddington Station in 1854. These advances spread abroad, leading to the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883 and the Eiffel Tower in 1889, which broke all previous limitations on how tall man-made objects could be. The skyscraper became the archetypal modernist building. The Wainwright Building, a 10-story office building completed in 1891 in St. Louis, Missouri, is among the first skyscrapers in the world. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building in New York, built from 1956 to 1958, is often regarded as the pinnacle of this modernist high-rise architecture. Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright shared the conviction that new technology had rendered old styles of building obsolete.

• 6. The Inward Turn

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  Sigmund Freud, who lived from 1856 to 1939, placed the unconscious mind at the center of mental life. In his thinking, all subjective reality rested on interactions between basic drives and instincts. His first major work, Studies on Hysteria, written with Josef Breuer, appeared in 1895. Henri Bergson took a different inner measure. He emphasized the difference between scientific, clock time and the direct, subjective human experience of time. His work "had a great influence on 20th-century novelists," especially those who used the "stream of consciousness" technique. The technique has a contested birth. It has been suggested that Arthur Schnitzler was the first to make full use of it, in his 1900 short story "Leutnant Gustl." Dorothy Richardson was the first English writer to use it, in the early volumes of her novel sequence Pilgrimage, published between 1915 and 1967. James Joyce employed it in Ulysses in 1922, and Italo Svevo in La coscienza di Zeno in 1923. Marcel Proust is often cited but resists the label. The first volume of his sequence A la recherche du temps perdu appeared in 1913. Robert Humphrey argued that Proust "is concerned only with the reminiscent aspect of consciousness" and was "deliberately recapturing the past for the purpose of communicating," so he did not write a stream-of-consciousness novel.

• 7. Trenches And Revolution

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  Millions died fighting over scraps of earth in the Great War of 1914 to 1918, and the failure of the old order seemed self-evident. Before 1914, it had been argued that no one would fight such a war, since the cost was too high. The Russian Revolution of 1917 cast further doubt on the beliefs and institutions of the past. A realistic depiction of life seemed inadequate against the fantastically surreal nature of trench warfare. The view that mankind was making steady moral progress now seemed ridiculous. That mood surfaces in works such as Erich Maria Remarque's 1929 novel All Quiet on the Western Front. Modernism's view of reality, a minority taste before the war, became more generally accepted in the 1920s. Some modernists tied their art to political revolution. In Russia after 1917 there was a burgeoning of avant-garde activity, including Russian Futurism. Others rejected conventional politics entirely, holding that a revolution of political consciousness mattered more than a change in political structures. Surrealism became, in the public eye, the most extreme form of Modernism. The word "surrealist" was coined by Guillaume Apollinaire and first appeared in the preface to his play Les Mamelles de Tiresias, written in 1903 and first performed in 1917. By 1930, Modernism had won a place in the political and artistic establishment, even as the movement itself had changed.

• 8. Banned And Reborn

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  Degenerate Art was the title of an exhibition the Nazis mounted in Munich in 1937, a term the regime adopted for virtually all modern art. Such work was banned as un-German or Jewish Bolshevist in nature. Degenerate artists were dismissed from teaching positions, forbidden to exhibit or sell, and in some cases forbidden to produce art at all. The pressure ran on multiple fronts. From 1932, socialist realism began to oust Modernism in the Soviet Union, and in 1936 Dmitri Shostakovich was attacked and forced to withdraw his 4th Symphony. Arnold Schoenberg fled to the United States when Hitler came to power in 1933, because of his atonal style and his Jewish ancestry. The persecution scattered artists across the Atlantic. Max Beckmann and scores of others fled Europe for New York, where a new generation led by Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning was coming of age. The 1940s in New York City heralded the triumph of American Abstract Expressionism. During the late 1940s, Jackson Pollock placed unstretched raw canvas on the floor where it could be attacked from all four sides. He dripped and threw linear skeins of paint, drew, stained, and brushed. Pollock realized that the journey toward making a work of art was as important as the work itself. That breakthrough opened the floodgates to Pop Art, where the New Realists exhibition of 1962 at the Sidney Janis Gallery brought consumer culture onto the canvas for the New York School.