Modernism: The Lure of Heresy (Hardcover)

by Peter Gay (Author)

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's Book World/washingtonpost.com

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;