20.7: Modernism

Modernism expressed a set of common attitudes and assumptions that centered on a rejection of established authority. It was a movement of skepticism toward the post-Victorian middle class, an overhaul of the entire legacy of comfort, security, paranoia, rigidity, and hierarchy. It rejected the premise of melodrama, namely clear moral messages in art and literature that were meant to edify and instruct. Socially, it was a reaction against the complacency of the bourgeoisie, of their willingness to start wars over empire and notions of nationalism.

Modernist art and literature sometimes openly attacked the moral values of mainstream society, or experimented with form itself and simply ignored moral issues. Also known as the era of l’art pour l’art ("art for art's sake”) of creation disinterred from social or intellectual duty. Artists broke with the idea that art should “represent” something noble and beautiful. Instead, many indulged in wild experiments and deliberately created disturbing pieces meant to provoke their audience. Sometimes, modernists were really “modern” in glorifying industrialism and technology.

Futurism

Starting in Italy before World War I, Futurism was a movement of poets, playwrights, and painters who celebrated speed, technology, violence, and chaos. Their stated goal was to destroy the remnants of past art and replace it with the art of the future, an art that reflected the modern, industrial world. Futurism sought something new and better than what the Victorian bourgeoisie had created: something heroic.

In 1909, F.T. Marinetti, the movement's founder, wrote the Futurist Manifesto. In it, he thundered that the Futurists wanted to “sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness,” and that “poetry must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown.” The Manifesto went on to proclaim, ominously, that “we want to glorify war - the only cure for the world” and that the Futurists were dedicated to demolishing “museums and libraries” and sought to “fight morality, feminism, and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice.” In short, The Manifesto was a profound expression of dissatisfaction with the mainstream culture of Europe leading up to World War I, and its proponents were proud partisans of violence, elitism, and misogyny.

Futurist art was often bizarre and provocative. For example, one Futurist play consisted of a curtain opening to an empty stage, the sound of a gunshot and a scream offstage, and the closing of the curtain. Futurist paintings often depicted vast clouds of dark smoke with abstract images of trains and radio towers, or sometimes just jumbles of color. While their politics were as murky, most of the Futurists embraced fascism, seeing it as a political movement that reflected their desire for a politics that was new, virile, and contemptuous of democracy.

The Futurists were just one branch of modernism in the visual arts. Other schools existed, including Vorticism in England, Expressionism in Austria, and Cubism in France. Pablo Picasso (1881 - 1973), the major cubist painter and sculptor, portrayed objects, people, and works of past masters from several different perspectives at once. Meanwhile, the English Vorticists attempted to capture the impression of motion in static paintings, not least by depicting literal explosions in their art.

Expressionism

The Austrian expressionists were the most striking, sometimes beautiful, but other times grotesque images associated with modernism. The major point was to display the artist's inner life through abstract, often disturbing images. The governing concept was not to depict things "as they are," but instead to reflect the disturbing realities of the artist's mind and spirit. The greatest Austrian expressionist was Gustav Klimt (1862 - 1918), who created beautiful but haunting and often highly eroticized portraits, including the quintessential dorm room decorations of collegiate U.S. - The Kiss.

Figure 20.3.1: Klimt’s The Kiss from 1908.

In 1901, the University of Vienna commissioned Klimt to create paintings to celebrate the three great branches of traditional academic scholarship: philosophy, medicine, and law. In each case, he painted frightening images in which the nominal subject matter was somehow present, but was overshadowed by the grotesque depiction of either how it was being carried out or how it failed to adequately address its subject. For example, philosophy depicts a column of naked, wretched figures clinging to one another over a starry abyss, with a sinister, translucent face visible in the backdrop. The paintings were beautiful and skillfully rendered, but also dark and disturbing. The Nazis would destroy the originals during the occupation of Austria. (Modernism was considered “degenerate art” by the Nazi party).

Figure 20.3.2: Klimt’s Philosophy, from 1907.

Music

In the first few decades of the 20th Century, some composers and musicians sought to shatter musical traditions, defying listeners' expectations by altering the very scales, notes, and tempos that western audiences were used to hearing. Many of these pieces eventually became classics, while others tended to become part of the history of music.

Russian Igor Stravinsky (1882 – 1971) was one noteworthy modernist composer. The Rite of Spring was a ballet depicting the fertility rites of the ancient Scythians, the nomadic people native to southern Russia in the ancient past. Staged by classical ballet dancers, the Rite of Spring completely scandalized its early audiences. At its first performance in Paris, members of the audience hissed at the dancers, and pelted the orchestra with debris, while the press described it as pornographic and barbaric. The dancers lurched about on stage, sometimes in an overtly sexual manner, and the music changed its tempo and abandoned its central theme. Within a few years, however (and following a change in its wild choreography), the Rite became part of ballet’s canon of great pieces.

In contrast, the Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874 - 1951) invented a form of orchestral music that remains an important influence on avant-garde musicians and composers. His major innovations consisted of experiments with atonality - music without a central, binding key - and a newly-invented twelve-tone scale of his own creation. Schoenberg was among the first to defy the entire tradition of western music in his experiments. Since the Renaissance, western musicians had worked in basically the same set of scales. As a result, listeners were “trained” from birth to expect certain sounds and certain rhythms in music. Schoenberg deliberately subverted those expectations, inserting dissonance and unexpected notes in many of his works.

Literature

Modernist literature created new approaches to poetry and prose. Authors like Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, and James Joyce wrote stories where the nominal plot was less important than the protagonist’s inner life and experiences of his or her surroundings and interactions. Joyce's novel Ulysses describes a 'single unremarkable day in the life of a man in Dublin, Ireland, focusing on the vast range of thoughts, emotions, and reactions that passed through the man’s consciousness rather than on the events of the day itself'. Proust and Woolf focused on the inner life rather than the outside event. Kafka’s work brilliantly, and tragically, satirized the experience of being lost in the modern world, hemmed in by impersonal bureaucracies and disconnected from other people. In his most famous story, Metamorphosis, a young man awakens one day to discover that he has become a gigantic insect, but whose immediate concern is that he will be unable to make it into his job.

Ultimately, artistic modernism in the arts, music, and literature questioned the (post-)Victorian obsession with traditional morality, hierarchy, and control. The inner life was not straightforward. Rather, it was a complicated mess of conflicting values, urges, and drives. Traditional morality was often a smokescreen over a system of repression and violence. Certain modernist artists attacked the system, while others exposed its vacuity, emptiness or shallowness, against the darker, more complex reality they thought lay underneath.

Psychology

Sigmund Freud (1856 - 1939) was the forefather of the concept of modern therapy. Mostly rejected in terms of empirical accuracy, his theories exerted tremendous influence in the early days of psychology. A brilliant scholar who happened to be Jewish, living in a society rife with anti-Semitism, he sought to understand the inner psychological drives that led people to engage in irrational behavior.

Freud's greatest accomplishment was diagnosing the essential irrationality of the human mind. He believed that the mind itself "evolved" from childhood into adulthood in a fundamentally hostile psychic environment. The mind was forced to conform to social pressure from outside while being enslaved to its own unconscious desires (the "drives") that sought unlimited power and pleasure. Freud wanted to be the "Darwin of the mind," the inventor of a true science of psychology that could explain and, he hoped, cure psychological disorders.

Building on the work of an earlier psychologist, he employed the "talking cure", which was the process by which the therapist and the patient recounted memories, dreams, and events, searching for a buried, suppressed idea that caused physical symptoms. Over time, he identified a series of common causes tied to childhood traumas that seemed remarkably consistent. He extrapolated those into “scientific” truths, culminating in Three Essays in the Theory of Sexuality (1905).

Ultimately, Freud’s most important theories had to do with the nature of the unconscious mind. The thoughts and feelings we experience and can control are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Most thoughts and feelings are buried in the unconscious. Within the unconscious are stored repressed memories that trigger responses, verbal slips, and dreams, symptoms of their existence. It is always terribly difficult to reconcile one's desires and the requirements of socialization (of living in a society with its own rules and laws), which inevitably leads to inner conflict. Thus, people form defense systems that may protect their emotions in the short term, but return later in life to cause unhappiness and alienation.

According to Freud, three basic areas or states exist simultaneously in the human mind.

• the unconscious “Id:” the seat of the drives for pleasure (sexual lust, power, security, food, alcohol, and other drugs, etc.) and for what might be considered "obsession" - the seemingly irrational desires that have nothing to do with pleasure per se (pyromania, kleptomania, or seemingly self-destructive political activity).
• the unconscious “Superego:” the social pressure to conform, the confrontation with outside authority, and the overwhelming sense of shame and inadequacy that can, and usually does, result from facing all of the pressures of living in human society.
• the conscious “Ego:” the embattled mind forced to reconcile the drives of the Id and Superego with the "reality principle," the knowledge that to give in to one's urges completely would be to risk injury or death.

Figure 20.4.1: Freud’s personality theory (1923) saw the psyche structured into three parts, the id, ego, and superego, all developing at different stages in our lives.

During the 19th Century, optimistic theorists believed that proper education and rational politics could create a perfect society. By contrast, Freud cautioned that no one is completely rational and that politics could easily follow the path of the Death Drive and plunge whole nations, even whole civilizations, into self-destruction.