Modernism: The Lure of Heresy (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Putting a Freudian view of life as an arena of conflict at the center of a view of modernism, this outspoken study tracks the avant-garde across a wide array of high culture—literature, music and dance, painting and sculpture, architecture and film. Conventional Victorians, according to Gay, found the belief in art for art's sake of libertine and aesthete Oscar Wilde as much a perversion as his homosexuality. But even fans often get it wrong, says Gay, embracing Edvard Munch's most famous painting, The Scream, as the quintessential symbol of modern angst, while Munch meant his nightmarish vision as a confession of his own inner state. And thanks to generous patrons, the oeuvre of anti-artist Marcel Duchamp, an enemy of museums, is featured prominently at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Modernism isn't a single style, Gay shows: in literature, Ulysses's wordy, sensual world stands in direct opposition to Virginia Woolf's in Mrs. Dalloway, spare and cool. This latest from Gay (National Book Award winner for The Enlightenment) isn't a monumental or definitive treatise but a highly personal, arbitrary and invigorating collection of mini-essays that view a variety of artistic works from a fresh perspective. 16 pages of color, and b&w illus.. (Nov.)
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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.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 640 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 1St Edition edition (November 12, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393052052
• ISBN-13: 978-0393052053
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.6 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #94,106 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

53 of 58 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Perfect Intro, November 4, 2007

By	Charlus "charlus" (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews

The history of Modernism will never be written; we know too much about it (apologies to L.S.). Yet time and again some intrepid soul takes up the challenge and plunges ahead.

I am happy to report that Peter Gay, while by no means having written that elusive definitive opus, acquits himself splendidly and has produced a compulsively readable introduction to this vast topic. Discussing both the usual suspects in concise chapters (Baudelaire, Picasso, Cezanne, Duchamp, Joyce, Schoenberg, etc) and some less so (Ensor, dealer Durand-Ruel, museum curator Lichtwark), Gay weaves multiple stories together to make a seamless whole that carries the reader across Modernism's multiple manifestations: dance, sculpture, architecture, music, film as well as painting and literature.

Apt illustrations punctuate the text and the book's production as a whole is lovely. I would only criticize the dearth of illustrations when discussing paintings: verbal description can't do the visual arts justice. And like much of Gay's previous writing, Saint Sigmund hovers over the entire enterprise, thankfully never becoming too intrusive.

Having written definitive explorations of European culture in the 18th and 19th Centuries, it is a pleasure that Gay has brought readers into the 20th with this new volume, certain to be one of the most accessible introductions to Modernism for some time to come.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Modernism Lite, May 24, 2008

By	Randall L. Wilson "Randy Wilson" (San Francisco) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I recently took a course on Joyce's Ulysses and I've been studying Eliot's "The Waste Land" both of which were published in 1922 and serve as defining modernist texts. I looked forward to reading Peter Gay's "Modernism" for insights into the movement's complex nest of heretical ideas, conflicted cultural displays and artistic expressions.

I feel let down. He focuses on the usual suspects; Joyce, Picasso, Balanchine, Stravinsky etc. and tells their stories with verve and enthusiasm. He dates the beginning of modernism from Baudelaire's publication of Les Fleurs du Mal in 1857. These poems offered up the twin defining characteristics Gay assigns to the movement; the breaking of conventions that elicit passionate revulsion and a subjective, psychological, inward focus by the artist. The book then follows painting, drama, music and architecture in a chronological progression through the male canon (except for Virginia Woolf) praising their distinctive takes on modernism as he has defined it.

He pulls the curtain down on the movement in 1960 with the advent of Pop Art. He ends the book with a rather perplexing claim that modernism is the great undead of movements, finding the novels of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and the architecture of Frank Gehry worthy of inclusion despite their work post-dating the movement's death knell by more than a generation. He does this by violating his own rule which is, "the lure of heresy." He doesn't claim that either Marques or Gehry were treated as heretics. They were grandly praised and understood immediately upon the appearance of their work. Isn't modernism dead when there is no shock?

This paean to the Marquez and Gehry points to a key weakness of the book in terms of providing an intellectual framework for the movement. It feels like he is far more interested in doling out the label of modernism to favorite artists than in grappling with the deep and ongoing issues that modernism evokes.

I don't claim any expertise on this subject but I think that to ignore western culture, to not even mention the Greek, Jewish, Christian traditions that modernism was reacting against and which Joyce and Eliot, in particular, engaged even as they exploded, is to miss the challenge modernism poses to our lives still. For example, Gay never mentions post-modernism as a movement and how it contrast and endangers or extends modernism. Perhaps it is a dead end, a stale rehash but can it be ignored altogether?

To me, these questions matter, modernism matters because it suggests a crisis in how we celebrate and express our collective identity. If modernism is dead or if it's merely a tradition of breaking rules and looking inward where are we now? How will we nourish our souls, define and share in a common sense of beauty and truth? However useful Gay's book will be for college freshman, it doesn't address the larger question of how a civilization picks up the pieces of all its broken icons.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Sweeping Survey, May 26, 2008

By	Richard B. Schwartz (Columbia, Missouri USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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Peter Gay has written a sweeping survey of Modernism that is lucid, highly readable, amply illustrated, beautifully designed, and remarkably complete. He has, essentially, written a survey of 120 years of cultural and aesthetic history. This is not a task for the faint of heart, but Gay has never suffered from that malady, his array of works spanning multiple centuries. His two-volume history of the Enlightenment remains a very important study and his work on Freud and on 19thc sensibility equally so.

The problem with Modernism is that there is so much of it, particularly if you set out to write about poetry and fiction, music, architecture, painting, pop culture, and the many movements and sub-movements attending them. And of course, he is not bounded by any national borders. This is history with a capital H. That means that he has relatively little space (4-6 pp., usually at the outside) for each major figure. Thus, the book is a sweeping survey, an excellent introduction to the subject. Theory is kept to a minimum. He focuses on two aspects of Modernism--its penchant for aesthetic heresy and its stress of subjectivism.

The book is also scrupulously fair, recognizing silliness and extremism where they are found and recognizing the important realities that work designed to shock the middle class cannot exist without a middle class prepared to consume it and a society sufficiently free and stable to protect the shockers and provide them a safe place in which to work.

Personally, I would like to have seen a little more discussion of individuals who distinguished themselves but who did not subscribe to the Modernist agenda, writers such as Graham Greene or George Orwell and any number of individuals who produced magnificent work within the constraints of traditional forms. This is a book about Modernism, of course, but that could be contextualized with sharper contrasts. Gay is a believer, though a balanced one. Still, he sees grandeur in the international style of architecture and tends to overlook the ugliness of fifties' boxes with smudged glass and drip stains from flat roofs. I did not expect him to take Tom Wolfe's stance on the Bauhaus or on abstract expressionism, but Wolfe's (much-maligned) stance is shared by many. The book concludes with a survey of contemporary Modernism, with Gehry's Bilbao Guggenheim and Marquez's fiction. Gay sees the world of fiction as relatively flat, though there are many skilled practitioners. It is only flat, in my opinion, if you confine yourself to Modernist writing. Pynchon, e.g., does not fit his template and is thus not considered, though he is a towering figure. This is a small quibble in light of the book's accomplishments, however. I highly recommend it as an introduction to the subject and as an instructive, entertaining, well-written book.