Modernism or Anti-Modernism?
To plunge into the depths of the Abyss, to Heaven or
Hell, who cares? To the bottom of the Unknown in order to find something new! – Baudelaire, 1859
That evocative phrase ‘the modern breakthrough’ is attributed
to Scandinavian controversialist critic and exponent of cultural radicalism, Georg
Brandes. Like all such tectonic shifts, however slight, the Modern Breakthrough
was – and still is – somewhat divisive; expect a backlash of stereotypical
reactions: panics, outrages and counter-movements. For some time it has been
clear that one focus of reaction to Modernism and Modernity is the
interrelationship between technology, the mass media and the arts. The period
1870-1914 is often considered the era of the Second Industrial Revolution: a
time that saw the introduction of electric power, light bulbs, the telephone,
aviation and the motor car, not to mention an incipient leisure class, mass
circulation journalism, advertising, the beginnings of conspicuous consumption
and celebrity culture.
It is self-evident that our contemporary,
secularised mass media – especially media based on visual images –is inseparable
from various forms of recording technology. Yet such technologies and cultural
innovations find their origins in the pre-history of Modernity. One must agree
with Walter Benjamin that it was the nineteenth century diorama ‘which
signalled a revolution in the relationship of art to technology’. Here we can
discern the first signs of an emergent historical phenomenon that, by the 1950s,
would overthrow age-old aesthetic standards and compromise, or, at least,
complicate, more recent ideas of ‘revolutionary’ or avant-garde Modern Art.
If the formative era of mass media reached its
zenith in 1905 with the opening of the Pittsburgh Nickelodeon, subsequent waves
of development have proved equally momentous. Fears about the insidious manipulative
power of entertainment and advertising raised by Cultural Marxists like Adorno
and Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment
(1947), or by more popular social commentators such as Vance Packard in The Hidden Persuaders (1957) or
Christopher Booker in The Neophiliacs (1969)
have been further amplified in more recent times.
Although the
shared social concerns of both Cultural Marxists and anti-modernist Cultural
Conservatives resurfaced in the mid-1970s, as can be seen by the popularity of
such ‘explosive’ best-sellers as The
Culture of Narcissism (1979) by historian Christopher Lasch, these worries
have been heightened even further since the 1980s. This is mainly caused by the
emergence of global ICTs (Information and Communications Technologies: the
Internet, electronic financial markets that function beyond the control of the
state and so forth) and associated methodologies such as Hypertext, invented in
1965 by computer scientist Ted Nelson who also coined the term ‘Hypermedia’.
Anti-modernists find the Internet particularly threatening because, for the
time being at least, its global reach, speed of access and decentralised
architecture denies the possibility of assimilation into traditional power
structures, hence the recurring outbursts of moral panic associated with access
to harmful, deviant or subversive content and paranoid fears about the
perceived deleterious effects of Social Media. For disciples of Lasch and
others the socio-cultural effects of global hyper-technology have amplified
perennial conservative fears centred on the quasi-mythical theme of ‘lost
innocence’; often defined as a continuing and specifically modern degradation
of ‘spontaneous feeling’ and other emotive idealisations beloved of moral
vigilantes.
The evolutionary processes of cultural change are
rendered complex by infinite socio-economic variations and geographic factors.
Such complexity can cause cultural ‘time lag’ and related temporal phenomena
such as resurgences or revivals. For instance, due to the politics of the era,
French Romanticism found acceptance in its home country much later than German
or English. While the ‘Neo-Classicism’ of the eighteenth century is perceived
as a revivalist phenomenon, it will be seen that, in the later part of the
nineteenth century and into the twentieth century there were periodic revivals
of ‘Neo-Romanticism’, in various guises, including forms of ‘Gothic’ which can
be interpreted as the dark side of the Romantic movement. It has been argued
that Modernism itself is, in essence, an extension of the Romantic impulse – an
impulse viewed as intrinsic to the human condition.
Again, for obscure reasons, cultural
tendencies can reach high points of ‘intensity’ or peak moments of heightened
activity that may vary depending upon locale. The period in Europe between, say
1890 and 1914 may, for many, epitomise the apogee of ultra-Modernism. This was
an era when all art forms and genres appeared to exhibit an inter-related set
of crucial developments and continuities: Cubism, Futurism, ‘pure
architecture’, ‘open field’ poetry, the interior monologue, Expressionist
theatre, vers libre, Atonal Music,
the Free Dance and Expressionist dance innovations of Loie Fuller, Ruth St Denis, Isadora Duncan,
Mary Wigman and Rudolf von Laban. To some observers it appeared that there was
a clear trajectory of innovation from Canova’s ‘Three Graces’ (1817) via
Manet’s ‘Olympia’ (1863) to Picasso’s ‘Les Demoiselles d'Avignon’ (1907).
Having reached this evolutionary apex all subsequent developments must be
characterised by a sense of diminution or of failing momentum. From such a
‘high point’ there is nowhere to go but down: Modernism, or the avant-garde
inflexion of the Modernist trend, entered a long, slow, if irregular, fade-out
due to natural dissipation of energy and loss of motive power.
However there is an apocalyptic slant to
much talk about ‘the modern world’ and Modern Art. This ensures that almost any
‘era’ can be defined as an age of crisis, an ‘age of anxiety’, a time of the
absolutely different, or an Age of the New (the New Novel, the New Drama, the
New Woman) separated from the past by a vertiginous abyss. Perhaps, between the
‘Three Graces’ and ‘Les Demoiselles d'Avignon’, there is no connecting thread
of continuous development at all. Perhaps the difference between the two works
reveals an unbridgeable gulf in sensibility – a disconcerting black hole in the
fabric of ‘culture’, one of those ‘unexpected solutions of continuity’
identified by Joseph Conrad in his prescient terrorist novel The Secret Agent (1907). Perhaps it
might be the case that an underlying indeterminacy ensures that both
possibilities are viable, depending upon the analytical perspective of the
observer.
Roland Barthes isolated the
mid-nineteenth century as the moment when a distinctively ‘modern’ tendency
arose in European culture. In literature he notes a qualitative difference
between the literary style (ecriture)
of Balzac and that of Flaubert whose novel Madame
Bovary caused controversy in 1857. For Barthes this transition in French
literature from Balzac to Flaubert represents a Conradian sudden hole in space
and time, une rupture essentielle.
For art historians the transition from Romanticism to Realism in the works of
Courbet and the theories of Champfleury may mark a similar rupture or divide in
the fabric of cultural life.
Different chronological profiles can be
ascribed to the historical phenomenon of Modernity.
It has been said that both the
Impressionists and the Post-Impressionists are the true initiators of ‘the New’
in art. In the 1850s the caricaturist and photographer Nadar launched his Pantheon-Nader portraits of celebrated
contemporaries thus, for some commentators, inaugurating a new style of
celebrity culture. Nadar was also a pioneer of aerial photography. For Georg
Brandes, as for Andre Breton, the point of departure, or the ‘modern
breakthrough’ occurred in the 1870s, the period of the Franco-Prussian War and
the heyday of the actress Sarah (the ‘divine Sarah’) Bernhardt, one of the
first ‘modern’ celebrities. In 1873 it was Rimbaud who wrote in A Season in Hell that ‘one must be
absolutely modern’.
Alternatively, for Victorian sage John
Ruskin (Modern Painters, 1843) the
authentic voice of Modernity in painting was that of Turner, a master of
turbulent atmosphere, a pioneer of English Romanticism, while, for other
critics ‘La Musique aux Tuileries’ (1862) by Manet may count as the first
‘truly modern’ painting because of a sense of detachment which appeared to one
commentator (Sandblad) to exemplify the urban ‘realism of the flaneur’. The image also included a
portrait of Baudelaire among the crowd signifying how Manet, along with Guys,
quickly came to embody ‘the painter of modern life’ as expounded in the poet’s
aesthetic theories.
For historians of the theatre the modern
era began with Ibsen’s plays A Doll’s
House (1879) and Ghosts (1880).
For cultural historian Roger Shattuck the modern era began with the death of
Victor Hugo in 1885, and was actualised during la Belle Époque, between 1890 and 1914. For Shattuck the
pre-eminent symbol of Modernism was the Eiffel Tower (1889) whereas, for
Jacques Barzun, writing in 1943, Modernity in ‘the contemporary sense’ dated
from the Armistice of 1918. For other cultural historians the high watermark of
‘the modern’ is the Roaring Twenties, the Jazz Age of Art Deco symbolised by
the triumph of the moderne style at
the 1925 Paris Exposition Internationale
des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Moderne.
But, by 1960, or so Barzun claimed, the term
‘Modernism’ was beginning to sound rather archaic; it was ‘beginning to acquire
the tone of the past’. It is certainly the case that some emerging features of
‘postmodernism’, or Post-Modernism, can be found in both the mainstream culture
and the ‘counter-culture’ of the Sixties, even though its roots can be traced
back at least as far as the Cabaret Voltaire (1916). Historian Arnold Toynbee,
writing in the late thirties, dated the ‘Post Modern Age’ from the schism or
cultural rupture of the First World War.
It was the 1850s that saw not only the
rise of Realism in both literature and painting, but also a new ‘heroism of
modern life’.
This vision of ‘the new’ was exemplified
both by the aesthetics and poetry of Charles Baudelaire (Les Fleurs du Mal, 1857) and by the first stirrings of modern
architecture in the prefabricated glass and steel of Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace (1851) famously derided
by anti-modernist Dostoyevsky in his Notes
From Underground (1864) and elsewhere as a pagan totem (the god Baal) of
bourgeois materialism. It is, perhaps fitting that one of the most sensational
scientific publications of the modern age, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, appeared in 1859 at the close of this
mid-century watershed decade. Like the writings of Darwin, works by Flaubert,
Courbet and Baudelaire attracted that particularly modern phenomenon – the
cultural, literary or artistic scandal. It may be that the essential rupture in
the edifice of ‘culture’ apparently caused by such ‘radical’ images as The Funeral at Ornans (by Courbet, 1850), or by such ‘scandalous’
poetical works as Les Fleurs du Mal or
architectural outrages such as Crystal
Palace helps to create a climate of moral panic. A climate that is still
with us, as may be judged from the hysterical media ‘outcry’ against plays like
Sarah Kane’s brutalist ‘in yer face’
drama Blasted (1995), or the
synthetic ‘fury’ directed at films such as Cronenberg’s Crash (1996). Of course this is nothing new. In the modern world,
the intellectual, or the artist, or the entertainer or the subcultural outsider,
may soon become a folk-devil; back in 1937 Duke Ellington found it necessary to
defend ‘hot’ jazz against the accusation that it incited sex crimes among the
young, while guardians of propriety railed against the salacious implications
of the Shimmy or Little Egypt’s Hootchie-Kootchie.
It is also typical of this ethos of
manufactured scandal that a defender of The New may, in time, become an
opponent of innovation – such was the career path of John Ruskin.
Ruskin, who championed Turner in the
1840s, attacked Whistler’s Nocturne:
Black and Gold – The Falling Rocket (1875) in 1877, much to his discredit –
as readers of Whistler’s The Gentle Art
of Making Enemies (1890) will no doubt agree. In an instance of Jungian
enantiodroma, a champion of the ‘modern’ was transformed into a reactionary
anti-modernist, who, insofar as he was unable to appreciate the new aesthetics
of Impressionism or Whistler’s semi-symbolist, proto-impressionist, semi-abstractionist
technique, soon appeared ridiculously ‘Victorian’ and ‘out of touch’. On the
other hand Whistler’s notion that ‘painting was the poetry of sight’ and that
subject matter has ‘nothing to do with harmony of sound or colour’ sounds
prophetic, confirming his aesthetic radicalism. In 1859 Whistler moved from
Paris to London and began to put into practice the ‘realism of the flaneur’ with a series of images
depicting life on the Thames Docklands, including ‘Black Lion Wharf ‘and
‘Rotherhithe’, and a key painting in the genre entitled ‘Wapping’ (1864). Even
before the Ruskin affair, these urban modernist subjects (the ‘profound and
intricate poetry of a vast capital’ to quote a review in Le Boulevard by Baudelaire himself) attracted much negative
reaction from guardians of propriety apparently scandalised by depictions of
Social Evil and moral degradation. A similar outcry greeted the painting ‘On The
Thames’ (1876) by society painter James Tissot showing a (presumably)
promiscuous threesome lounging in a boat depicted with exact realism but which
was condemned as a scene of questionable virtue when first exhibited. One more
recent critic noted, however, that Tissot had managed to penetrate beyond the
fashions of his era and seduce the viewer with the ‘ambivalence of modernity’.
The same might also be said of Whistler’s images of Docklands life.
The seeds of this cultural shift in
values have always been part of the Modern project. They have been present from
the earliest days of the Proto-Modern into the Nineteenth Century. This was
period that saw alarming new descriptions of the human condition – derived not
only from Darwin, but also from Marx, Nietzsche, Freud and sociologists such as
Durkheim and Weber or, even earlier, from Hutton’s Theory of The Earth – exert a drastic influence on the
socio-cultural climate. These new doctrines heralded a new culture, a culture
‘with no visible means of support’, no foundations and no centre; a culture
that rejects the hegemony of any particular perspective, a culture without a
‘moral compass’. According to Durkheim, in a statement that sounds very similar
to principles developed by Freud, ‘social life should be explained not by the
conceptions of those who participate in it, but by profound causes which escape
consciousness…’
This is the nightmare of the
anti-modernists, of all those socio-political elements who, after the seismic
shock of the proclamation of the Goddess of Reason (1793), metamorphosed from
advocates of the counter-Reformation into counter-revolutionaries. Opponents
would stigmatise the counter-revolution as anti-progressive and reactionary,
but the anti-modernists – as defenders of the old order and the strong state, as
opponents of mob rule and the machine age, as promoters of monarchic
restoration, as ‘ultras’ or theocrates
– would take up their position on the moral high ground. This wave of
anti-modernism was represented in Victorian England by cultural commentators,
those revered ‘sages’ or ‘prophets’, such as Thomas Carlyle and Matthew Arnold,
who expended considerable effort trying to reconcile the horrors of the machine
age with traditional moral precepts of the good and the beautiful and with
notions of the just society.
In 1829 Pope Leo XII had forbidden
vaccination against small pox; by 1864 the Vatican had consolidated its view on
Modernism, and, in the Encyclical Quanta
Cura (‘The Syllabus of Errors’), denounce all those features of the modern
world to which it was implacably opposed. These included Socialism, Pantheism,
Rationalism, Natural Ethics, Modern Liberalism and other matters of concern or
threat to the hierarchy. The pontiff assured the faithful that he would never
‘reconcile himself to, and agree with, progress, liberalism and modern
civilisation.’ By 1910, two years after Adolf Loos, one of the pioneers of Pure
Architecture, had, in a semi-satirical article, condemned all ornamentation as
crime, Pope Pius X required all new priests to take an oath against Modernism,
the Sacrorum Antistitum. This oath
remained in place until 1967 and still defines the Anti-Modernist worldview of
the priesthood even today.
Alongside this ‘official’ Anti-Modernism
flourished the occult underground. This was a subculture that overlapped both
‘the fantastic’ and artistic bohemia. From Swedenborg (via Blake) to Theosophy
(via Mondrian), occultism influenced the course of Modern Art in a subterranean
way. The nineteenth century Occult Revival started in the Year of Revolutions
(1848) with the Spiritualist ‘rappings’ at Hydesville in the USA. Subsequently
this neo-spiritual, occult tendency manifest a number of developmental peaks,
from the writings of Eliphas Levi in the late 1850s to the founding of the SPR
(Society for Psychical Research) in 1882 and the Hermetic Order of the Golden
Dawn (1888). In France the Rose-Croix
Kabbalstique (1888) of Guaita and Peledan was founded at the same time.
Occult ideas such as universal analogy, the hidden geometry of reality, the
meaning of symbols, initiation, the astral plane, the Hermetic androgyny and
the mediumistic dictation of spirit writing, permeated the avant-garde on
various levels, providing an impetus for the development of Abstract Painting
(Hilma af Klint) and, via Strindberg, artistic techniques of ‘automatism’.
Select Bibliography
Baudelaire, Charles, The Complete Verse, Anvil Press, 1986
Baudelaire, Charles, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. Phaidon Press, 2006
Benjamin, Walter, The Work Of Art in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936), in Blackwell, 1993
Breton, Andre, Manifestos of Surrealism, University of Michigan, 2007
Conrad, Joseph, The Secret Agent, Oxford University Press, 2004
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, Notes from Underground, Penguin Books, 2009
Harrison, Charles/Wood, Paul, Art in Theory 1900-1999, Blackwell, 1993
Koval, Anne, Whistler in His Time, Tate Gallery, 1994
Lasch, Christopher, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations, Abacus, 1980
Sassen, Saskia, A Sociology of Globalization, W. W. Norton, 2007
Shattuck, Roger, The Banquet Years The Origins of The Avant Garde in France 1885 to WW1, Random House 1968
Illus: Waveform Fantasy, 2001
