Modernism: The Lure of Heresy [Paperback]

Peter Gay (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 16, 2010

“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

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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Review

“It’s done so gracefully, and engagingly, that even as I raced to finish before our interview, I couldn’t make myself skim.” (Katie Bolick - Boston Globe )

“A masterful work of cultural history . . . and it’s truly a pleasure to read.” (Mia Fineman - Slate )

“A sweeping survey . . . offering shrewd analyses.” (William Grimes - The New York Times )

“Peter Gay is perhaps our leading historian of culture and ideas.” (Tim Rutten - Los Angeles Times )

“An ambitious survey . . . [by] a superior popularizer.” (Michael Dirda - Washington Post )

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Product Details

• Paperback: 640 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 1 Reprint edition (August 16, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393333965
• ISBN-13: 978-0393333961
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.1 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #285,242 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

61 of 67 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

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This review is from: Modernism: The Lure of Heresy (Hardcover)

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.

30 of 35 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
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This review is from: Modernism: The Lure of Heresy (Hardcover)

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 contrasts 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.

8 of 8 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
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This review is from: Modernism: The Lure of Heresy (Hardcover)

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.