Modern times
Michael Gavin
Modern times
Gareth Jenkins looks back at a fantastic century of change and new
developments within art
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One hundred years ago few could have predicted the extraordinary changes
that would take place in the arts. Novels, poems, plays, sculpture and
music still used traditional forms even if the content was new and
sometimes startling. Cinema had yet to be born moving pictures were no
more than a technological curiosity.
Yet within a dozen years a revolution was under way. Painters like Pablo
Picasso brought hundreds of years of traditional ways of representing
the human figure to an end. Cubism abolished the idea of perspective and
fractured the human face into a set of clashing, distorted planes.
Painting came to reflect more of an inner world of intense and turbulent
emotion. Some of the avant-garde particularly in Russia abandoned
representation altogether, experimenting with pure abstraction.
Similar changes radicalised music. Advanced composers such as Schoenberg
developed the luxuriant musical vocabulary of Richard Wagner's operas to
the point at which music lost all sense of tonality. The extreme
dissonance of their music reflected a new sense of anguish and inner
tension. Other experimentalists in music were influenced by non-European
forms of music. Stravinsky's ballet "The Rite of Spring", with its
primitive, jagged dance rhythms, caused a riot at its Paris premiere in
1913. Poets such as the Italian Futurist Marinetti provoked fights by
telling audiences that poetry should be nothing but 'violence, cruelty
and injustice'.
Linking all these radical changes in the arts was a sense that no one
could go on being an artist in the old sense. Machines, and the speed of
the machine, were destroying old ideas about continuity in time and
space. Violent juxtaposition of different experiences was now becoming
the basis for new forms of art and writing. But the advent of new
technologies is insufficient to explain the crisis in the arts. More
crucially, the growing instability of bourgeois society which was to
lead to imperialist war in 1914 began to make itself felt. The dominant
ideology of liberalism was under pressure from both working class
socialist internationalism and from more general questioning of the idea
of progress, reason and morality. Sexuality and the dark side of the
mind were explored by Freud. Not surprisingly, artists themselves
questioned the role of art, its subjection to the market and its
relationship to the audience.
How to make sense of the postwar Europe whose social order had tottered,
or in some cases collapsed, was the problem many artists faced. Some,
such as the American-born T S Eliot, saw the world as a wasteland (the
title he gave his most influential poem), full of fragments of an
exhausted 'high' culture which, for a select few, could act as a bulwark
against the slide into social chaos. The complexity and obscurity of his
writing reinforced this sense of elitism which for many was also a
reactionary position. Other writers responded more positively, even if
the density of their language made their work relatively inaccessible.
One such was the Irish writer James Joyce. His novel "Ulysses" is
equally fragmentary in composition and uses myth to structure its
apparent formlessness. But it ends on a note of celebration of ordinary
life which is quite alien to Eliot.
Russia's revolutionary art
In countries where social upheaval provided the vision of a brighter
future, artists hoped that radically changed conditions would give birth
to a radically changed art. Nowhere was this truer than in Russia, where
artists hitched their revolt to the motor of working class revolution.
They put themselves at the service of the revolution, seeking to break
down the division between art and life. They produced exciting
propaganda posters for mass consumption. They applied artistic standards
to the production of everyday objects, such as clothes and china. Art
itself would be stripped of its mystique, and the machine would be a
source of creativity. Film, in the hands of Soviet artists of the 1920s,
showed what that most mechanical of modern arts was capable of
producing. The Odessa steps sequence of Eisenstein's film "Battleship
Potemkin" (1925), where tsarist troops gun down supporters of the
mutineering sailors, was radical in editing technique and its ability to
convey political emotion. Its international impact was enormous.
The radicalisation of modern art was not confined to Russia. In Germany,
Soviet-inspired architects and designers founded the Bauhaus, whose aim
was a new style using modern materials (steel, concrete) and emphasising
clean and uncluttered lines which would integrate every aspect of a
building's function and design. In France, architects such as Le
Corbusier talked of how construction projects, planning a total
environment, could become 'machines for living'.
Germany in the 1920s also saw the rise of a new type of theatre. Bertolt
Brecht, who became a Marxist under the impact of the world crisis, was
determined to create drama which was radical in method, politically
committed and open to its audience. His "The Threepenny Opera" of 1928,
with its catchy, cabaret songs most notably, "Mack the Knife"
cynically comparing criminals to big business, was a roaring success.
During his Nazi-enforced exile plays such as "Mother Courage" (1938-39)
captured the fate of 'little people' crushed by a war-ravaged world they
refuse to understand.
As with Stalin in Russia, the triumph of Hitler put an end to radical
experimentation in the arts. The best of modernism migrated to the US
after the Second World War and created startling skyscrapers in cities
like Chicago but mostly as a monument to corporate power. Elsewhere,
it degenerated into monotonous, soulless tower blocks. This caricature
became the excuse for a motley crew of opponents, from Prince Charles to
the postmodernists, to dismiss what had been truly exciting and radical
about modern art and architecture.
Movements such as Surrealism attempted to carry through the revolution
in different ways. The Surrealists, who included both writers and
painters, wanted a revolution of the imagination, as part of the revolt
against society. The question of political commitment produced a crisis.
Some, such as the Spanish painter Salvador Dali, finished up supporting
Franco. His distinctive style became lucrative rather than subversive.
In comparison, the poet and dramatist Frederico Garcia Lorca, though not
a Surrealist, paid heavily for his commitment to an art whose intensity
acted as an appeal for liberation from repression. He was murdered by
nationalists early on in the Spanish Civil War. Other Surrealists took
political commitment to mean adherence to the Stalinised Communist
Party. Only André Breton turned to the beleaguered revolutionary
tradition represented by Trotsky. Together with him and the Mexican
muralist Diego Rivera, they published a manifesto calling for a free art
a necessarily revolutionary art which would be neither subordinate to
Stalinist bureaucratic command nor prostituted by the 'free market'.
Radicalism could also be found amongst the many writers reworked
traditional forms in ways that gave radical insights into the world.
Some novelists felt a documentary-like responsibility to report
realistically on the world. Christopher Isherwood's Berlin novels
capture something of the political and sexual turmoil of life at the end
of the Weimar republic. And Graham Greene's long novelistic career from
the 1930s to the 1980s celebrated the sinner rather than the saint, the
outcast rather than the insider, the anti-imperialist struggle rather
than the status quo.
The realist tradition produced some of its finest work in the cinema.
The sense that film should be true to the lives of ordinary people and
their hopes and fears informed the work of film makers like Jean Renoir
in the Popular Front France of the 1930s, the neo-realists of postwar
Italy, the French New Wave of the 1960s and the Indian film maker
Satyajit Ray. All these achievements were in response to new patterns of
social discontent.
The politics of cinema
The pressure to make sense of a world gone mad even made its way into
the commercial world of Hollywood. One dramatic instance is the films of
Charlie Chaplin. Originally a music hall artist who became phenomenally
successful (and rich) in the expanding Hollywood industry after the
First World War, Chaplin quickly came to use his comic gifts to satirise
'modern times' the title he gave his 1936 film attacking the
alienation of the 'little man' at the mercy of the industrial machine.
He, like many others, eventually fell foul of McCarthyism. Other
cinematic talent to be strangled by the system included Orson Welles.
The pervasive, if muted, influence of left wing politics shaped the 1941
film that made his name, "Citizen Kane". But his later, and in many ways
more interesting and ambitious, work, such as "Touch of Evil" (1957),
which explored racist tensions on the American-Mexican border, was
savaged by the Hollywood studios, determined to tame Welles to
manageable box office proportions.
Even in the world of the long postwar boom where it seemed, in the words
of Jimmy Porter, the angry young man of John Osborne's play "Look Back
in Anger" (1956), that 'there are no good causes left any more', new
forms of culture could be the source of radical art. Television seemed
to many in the 1960s little more than a means to indoctrinate the
masses. Yet writers like Dennis Potter were able to write popular yet
artistically and politically challenging plays.
The postwar boom also prepared the way for an extraordinary mixing of
different cultures on a global scale. Marx's prediction in The Communist
Manifesto, that a world literature would arise as the intellectual
creations of individual nations become common property and national
exclusiveness breaks down, was becoming true, particularly as far as the
novel was concerned. One example of this can be found in 'magic
realism', most strongly identified with the novel "One Hundred Years of
Solitude" (1967) by the Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Like
Surrealism, magic realism mixed the fantastic and the natural without
distinguishing between them. One Hundred Years of Solitude explored the
combined and uneven development of his country's history, becalmed in
its Spanish colonial past but simultaneously thrown open to the impact
of modern US imperialism. Salman Rushdie's "Midnight's Children" (1981)
did for India what Garcia Marquez had done for Latin America. The life
story of a single individual, born at the exact moment of India's
independence, re-enacts the fantasy of Indian unity, born out of
antagonistic bits of British, Hindu and Muslim culture, and its
subsequent disintegration.
Postmodernism has tried to claim such developments for itself, along
with developments in architecture. But having written off the
transformation of reality itself, it has also written off any genuinely
radical forward looking art as well. The last 100 years have shown that
art has only realised its liberatory potential in so far as it has
responded, however indirectly, to the working class, anti-fascist and
anti-imperialist struggles that have marked our epoch. As a crisis-prone
capitalism staggers out of our century, fresh struggles will transform
the arts in the century to come.
Issue 236 of SOCIALIST REVIEW
Published December 1999
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