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Modernism: The Lure of Heresy

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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.

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.

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.

Just read this in Spengler's Decline of the West, the book I'm reading after this one: "No one has seriously considered the possibility that arts may have an allotted span of life and may be attached as forms of self-expression to particular regions and types of mankind, and that therefore the total history of an art may be merely an additive compilation of separate developments, of special arts, with no bond of union save the name and some details of craft-technique."

Well, Gay does consider this about modernism in his intro, but rejects it. He claims that the urge to talk about "modernisms" instead of one coherent movement is misguided, and yet basically does so himself throughout his survey (and that's really all it is) of a hugely disparate collection of artists and artworks. Instead of building a case for why everyone from Picasso to Knut Hamsun to Eliot are really members of a single coherent approach or worldview, he lapses into an encyclopedic collection of artist biographies (which all seem to include the "so-and-so was born to parents of such-and-such type" trope) with thin connective tissue bringing them together in anything more than a motley crew of once-marginalized, now-highly regarded mavericks. He does posit the thesis statement that what everyone in modernism shares is a devotion to innovation and the psychological, but this doesn't seem like enough to hang 500 pages on. He also claims in the intro that he is going to use Freudian-type methods to dig into the drives of these characters, but does nothing of the sort. I learned some facts about the titans of modern art that I might be able to drop at the MOMA and sound semi-familiar with whoever I'm looking at, but not much else. I also agree with another reviewer that he missed the big picture in a major way by ignoring postmodernism...this is museum catalog blurbage masquerading as cultural/intellectual analysis.

For me to say that Peter Gay's 'Modernism' is or isn't a good book on the subject presupposes that I know what a good book on the subject might look like, and I don't think I can claim that position. On the other hand, I do know that, as someone unfamiliar with many of the particulars associated with this artistic movement, I found Mr. Gay's book highly instructive, intelligently presented, and, most often, very engaging.

Mr. Gay begins with a brief overview - what the different artists who fall into the modernist category have in common and how the political and economic situation of the mid-Nineteenth Century made the entire movement possible. Part I highlights Founders of Modernism, such as Charles Baudelaire with his 'Les Fleurs du Mal', Oscar Wilde and Claude Monet, and uses their mini-biographies (along with a few others) to illustrate the progression in the early years. Part II, the majority of the book, concentrates on Classics, or artisans that are, in Mr. Gray's opinion, exemplary representatives of their field of the entire movement. Last, he looks at Modernism's role (or lack thereof) in contemporary times.

Other than his introduction, Mr. Gay primarily relies upon short biographies of the artists, writers, sculptors, composers and architects that made up the modernist movement to chronicle its rise and its history. For me, this method was effective - it helped me to contextualize many of these personalities with the times in which they were working. Each section in the weighty Part II dealt with a different medium, and I thought that by compiling four or five artists' life stories next to each other, the author amply illustrated the ideas and world events that shaped the movement as a whole as it pertained to that particular field.

The weakness inherent in this approach is for those who are already quite familiar with the personalities involved in Modernism (especially as the author picks out the heavyweights to outline his history). As an interested layman, it worked well for me - while there are a few artists I may look for in the future, I feel that I'm armed with at least a superficial understanding of the movement, which is enough to help my overall understanding of the times. I have no doubt I'll be mentally referencing some of the points made here to help analyze text and artwork I see in the future.

Still, I can see that if someone were looking for more than simply a _history_ of Modernism, they would likely be disappointed. Add also that there were times when biography after biography became a little bit tedious. Recommended for the general reader who enjoys cultural history, but probably of little use to the advanced student of the arts.

Now that Modernism is seen as a historical moment in the arts, it is useful to look at its full artistic context. This is also a big undertaking. The author seeks to capture the nature of Modernism in visual arts, dance, literature and so on. This is bound to be an uneven treatment. Who can be equally conversant with such a broad array of disciplines? The reader faces an equal problem. To fully understand the analysis of Modernism in the work of a particular writer or artist one must be already quite familiar with this person's work. The real specialist, however, may find the analysis covers familiar (and not necessarily new)territory.
Having said this, I still feel that this is a worthwhile book for anyone trying to rethink the significance of the Modernist movement and its relevance today. Some will take issue with the choice of a particular composer or architect, but this can be the springboard for interesting discussion.

I have not yet finished this book, but its content matter has inspired me to write a review anyway. Peter Gay has simply done a phenomenal job here. Of course he is famous for his biography of Freud, among other things. I consider myself a traditionalist, in belief if not in practice, and thus was a little hesitant to buy this book. But about ten pages in I realized I had made a good purchase. I began reading "The Picture of Dorian Gray" at just about the same time I did Gay's work and must say I think I have a greater understanding of what Wilde was doing in his work, thanks to Gay.

I've never understood Modernism really, always just sort of shyed away from it because I did not understand it:ignorant really. And though I will not say I have a new appreciation of Modern Art, I still loathe it mostly, I can at least understand the roots of it, (keep in mind I have not finished this work yet.) Peter Gay's work is very easy to follow, one may say fairly, I think, that it was written for the layman. What is better, it is enjoyable, and the combination of these two aspects makes it a welcome edition to any library...