Books: Going Against the Grain
December 2007
Modernism:The Lure of Heresy
By Peter Gay
W. W. Norton, $35
Wassily Kandinsky discovered the future of painting in a corner of his studio late one afternoon around 1909. "I saw an indescribably beautiful canvas soaked in an inner glow," he later wrote. He didn’t notice at first that the painting was his own, for the stretcher was propped on its side, rendering his picture unrecognizable. His befuddlement lasted only a moment, though, before he compensated for the accident by utterly reorienting his way of thinking, disavowing millennia of artistic depiction in favor of pure abstraction. "[T]he aims (and thus the means) of nature and art are essentially, organically, and by universal law different from each other," he concluded, never again admitting the outside world into his paintings.
One of the greatest modernists, Kandinsky was also one of the most characteristic, an iconoclastic visionary on a personal quest for the absolute. This distinction earns him a major role in Modernism, cultural historian Peter Gay’s earnest attempt to trace the movement, across all the arts, in terms of "its rise, triumphs, and decline."
That Kandinsky’s accomplishments are condensed to a mere six pages of text suggests both the immensity of Gay’s subject and the challenge of capturing its essence in one book. Modernism is necessarily perfunctory, superficial in its treatment of specifics, yet engrossingly expansive as a work of historical synthesis.
Gay begins his study with a compelling premise. "For all their palpable differences, modernists of all stripes shared two defining attributes," he writes, "first, the lure of heresy that impelled their actions as they confronted conventional sensibilities; and, second, a commitment to a principled self-scrutiny."
Clearly applicable to Kandinsky, these criteria are no less effective when applied to Paul Cézanne or Jackson Pollock, and operate across genres as well as eras, encompassing T. S. Eliot, Frank Lloyd Wright and Igor Stravinsky. Many exemplars would have shunned each other—for instance, Wright was notoriously antagonistic toward modern art—yet from the broader vantage of history, they each played a vital role in a crucial cultural resistance.
What were they resisting, and why was it so crucial? "[M]odernism amounted to a double psychological liberation, for consumers of high culture as much as for its producers," writes Gay. "It provided artists with a license to take their insubordinate fantasies seriously, to look unblinkingly at the canons that had for so many centuries dictated their subject matter and their techniques, to decide whether a modification—or, more radically, an overthrow—of reigning standards was called for."
The Impressionists are an obvious example of this radicalism, as even a cursory glance at their initial critical reception in the 1870s will attest. Traditionalists found them technically inept or visually crippled. More telling, as Gay points out, the Impressionists were alternately called Intransigents and defamed accordingly: "The Intransigents in art are holding hands with the Intransigents in politics," claimed a conservative journalist in Le Moniteur Universal in 1876.This was not strictly accurate, because some Impressionists were politically reactionary—Degas sided with the French government in the Dreyfus Affair—yet the journalist’s assessment was prescient in a broader sense. If the visual interpretation of seascapes or haystacks was subjective, official opinions on nationhood or race or religion might also bear personal consideration. Few people, relatively speaking, have had the inclination or aptitude to become modernists, yet as each modernist heresy is confronted by the multitudes—and often ultimately assimilated—old orthodoxies are upset anew.
Of course, no heresy, even Kandinsky’s pure abstraction, is universal or eternal; novelty is always evolving and old heretics often fall into their own orthodoxies. Gay notes the example of Mary Cassatt, unable to accept the fauvist upheavals of Henri Matisse. Calling him a fraud, she advised the wealthy collector Louisine Havemeyer that "it is not alone in politics that anarchy reigns."
As for artists, so for historians: At the age of 84, and with a formidable reputation as a scholar of Weimar Germany and Sigmund Freud, Gay is able to follow modernism only so far before his tolerance for new outrages falters and myopic self-contradiction closes in. According to Gay, the decline began in the 1960s, when Pop artists subverted "the modernist ideal by reconciling the irreconcilable, assimilating two essentially distinct areas of art, high art and low, which modernists had thought it crucial to keep apart."
Apparently baffled by art after Pollock, Gay forgets the very diversity of modernism, the range of modernist positions, that is the essence of his book. While Kandinsky probably wouldn’t have appreciated Warhol’s soup cans or Lichtenstein’s comic strips, Picasso and Braque significantly incorporated "low" materials such as newsprint into their impeccably modernist Cubist compositions. And what was the poetically revolutionary use of obscenity by Baudelaire—whom Gay calls "absolutely indispensable ... for the history of modernism"—if not a subversive reconciling of the irreconcilable?
Unable or unwilling to confront this aesthetic continuum, Gay insists that modernism was possible only in a socio-economic framework that passed with the success of Pop art: Pop, and the art that has followed, has not been sufficiently marginalized. "[T]he commercial manufacture of culture has become ever more influential an activity," he writes.
But to critique that commercial manufacture, as Pop art powerfully did, surely was heretically self-aware, and the escalating auction prices on Pop works has been retrospective, no different from the market success of Impressionism.
More damaging still, Gay’s blind disdain for contemporary art makes no distinction between the popular and the marginal, extending to works as visually, conceptually, and historically diverse as Hermann Nitsch’s sadistic performances and Carl Andre’s minimalist floors. Describing Yves Klein’s sublime "Anthropometries" (paintings in which the model’s body was used as a brush) Gay writes that "this is modernist freedom reduced to absurdity." Cassatt, at least, would have agreed.
Predictably, Gay, among many others, blames all of today’s art woes on Marcel Duchamp, "the most quoted prophet—and agent—of art’s pitiable future," whom he nevertheless (also predictably) includes in modernism’s pantheon. In fact, Duchamp is the prophet of Gay’s pitiable frustration, the agent of minimalism’s eternal rejuvenation. The very urgency of modernism in its many guises inevitably pits future against past. Wassily Kandinsky’s canvases retain their inner glow, momentarily aligning us with his non-objective ideal. But it was Duchamp who gave modernism the heretically self-aware independence to constantly reinvent itself.
Art&Antiques San Francisco correspondent Jonathon Keats is a conceptual artist, the art critic for San Francisco magazine and author of two novels.BOOKS FOR HOLIDAY GIFTS
Art for Art’s Sake: Aestheticism in Victorian Painting by Elizabeth Prettejohn. Yale, $65. An illustrated study of how Rossetti, Whistler, Leighton and others searched for ways to define and create art independent of the moral and political concerns of late 19th-century England.
Dutch Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art by Walter Liedtke. Yale, $175. Two volumes presenting the Met’s 229 Dutch works from 1600–1800.
Saul Leiter: Early Black and White, introduction by Martin Harrison. Steidl, $50. Best known for his pioneering color work of the 1950s, Leiter was making urban poetry in monochrome in the ’40s. The book offers 100 remarkable images from that period.
Lisette Model, preface by Berenice Abbott. Aperture, $55. Reissue of a collectible 1979 monograph on the Viennese-born photographer whose work influenced a generation of students including Diane Arbus.
Lucien Freud: The Painter’s Etchings, text by Starr Figura. MoMA, $40. Based
on an exhibition, this book examines the portraitist’s unconventional efforts in printmaking, reproducing some 75 works.
Memories of a Collector by Giuseppe Panza. Abbeville, $50. The story of a great art collection, told by an Italian real estate magnate who bought Abstract Expressionism before it was cool and continued broadening his tastes over the next half-century.
Message from the Darkroom by Carlo Mollino. Adarte, $240. The great Italian furniture designer believed passionately in the artistic power of the camera and created one of the most unusual and sought-after books in the history of photography. This gorgeous facsimile of the 1949 original includes tipped-in hand-pasted color plates, just as Mollino wanted.
Sculpture Today by Judith Collins. Phaidon, $69.95. A massive, profusely illustrated survey of a medium that is being redefined by contemporary art.
The Art Book for Children, Book Two. Phaidon, $19.95. This sequel to an internationally successful book is designed to help open young eyes (ages 7–11) to art and teach young minds to ask questions about it.
—John Dorfman