Modernism

Modernism: The Lure of Heresy: From Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond by Peter Gay, 510 pages

Modernism is an amorphous category with many definitions.  It is reasonable to argue that it should not be used as a label at all, having too little meaning.  Peter Gay argues that it does have a meaning, and that the cultural movement by that name has a coherent past, and possibly a future.

Unfortunately, he fails to establish this convincingly.  The subject is too large and the book too small.  Gay never explicitly defines modernism, vaguely describing it as a set of attitudes involving the search for total independence of artistic expression, the resulting rejection of history and tradition, the quest for inwardness, and an unwavering hostility towards the bourgeois masses.  Understandably, he chooses to break the subject down into subsets - painting, literature, music, architecture, film - and discuss each individually, but in practice this lack of a unitary narrative produces repetition and confusion, as when the story of the birth of Dada is told twice, once under painting and once under drama.  Not that this is avoided within the chapters, either - Waiting for Godot is summarized in the discussion of the Theater of the Absurd and again in the very next paragraph when introducing Beckett as an author.

Nor is Gay consistent in his definitions.  Repeatedly the reader is told that Modernism transcends politics and morality, but views that violate certain norms - Strindberg's virulent misogyny, for example - are nonetheless presented as definitely outside the Modernist pale.  Worse, despite the obvious ways in which modernism, with its rejection of real history, tradition, and morality, its cult of novelty, obsession with progress, and hatred of the unenlightened masses, prepared the way for totalitarianism, and the fact that many of the modernists who, in Gay's own words, "were proclaiming an overwhelming need for, and prophesied the coming of, a New Man in a culture that seemed naked without ideals", found that New Man in Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and especially in the Soviet Union, the modernist celebrations of those regimes are treated as secondary to the dictatorships' hostility to modernist art.  True, Knut Hamsun's support of Hitler is thoroughly discussed and justly condemned, but Picasso's enthusiasm for Stalin and Kim Il Sung is not mentioned at all.

There are a few positives.  Gay's account of the importance of artistic middlemen - dealers and brokers, publishers and directors - in the development of art that, by its very nature, had to fight for an audience, could be the seed of a good book, but it is not this book.  Near the end, when criticizing Pop Art and celebrating Gehry's Bilbao Guggenheim, Modernism becomes more interesting, but it is too little, too late.

Overall, the treatment of individual figures is superficial, and the treatment of great themes hopelessly muddled.  Modernism does not succeed in compellingly describing either small details or the big picture.