Friday 5 September 2008

 

The latest culture as recommended by our staff

Clemency Burton-Hill
Clemency Burton-Hill

Clemency suggests


Modernism: The Lure of Heresy

Lives less ordinary

Peter Gay
Heinemann, 640pp, £20,
Rupert Christiansen
Wednesday, 21st November 2007

Rupert Christiansen

Peter Gay opens his survey of the culture of Modernism with a discussion of Baudelaire’s call to artists to draw their inspiration from contemporary urban realities, and closes it with some sort of ironic ne plus ultra, as Damien Hirst roars with laughter after a ‘pile of organised chaos representing the detritus of a painter’s studio’ that he presented as an installation is mistakenly swept into a bin bag by an innocent cleaner assuming it to be bona fide rubbish.

In between, Professor Gay travels through 150 years of the history of the visual arts, literature and music. It must have been an exhausting journey for this distinguished Yale-based chronicler of the Enlightenment and German intellectualism, now in his mid-eighties. Yet nothing fazes him: he confronts this maelstrom of artistic activity, much of it the product of extreme neurosis and persecution, with calmly measured lucidity and authoritative accuracy (the only significant errors I spotted were a confusion of Virginia Woolf’s The Years with The Waves and the entirely false notion that Wagner ‘ ultimately did not challenge traditional tonality’.)

1 | 2 | 3  Next page 

Subscribe now

Post this entry to:   del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

Comments

Post a comment


Your comment:*

Your name:*

Your email address:*
(We won't publish this)

*Required information

Please click the button only once - your comment will not be published immediately

JOMO

March 3rd, 2008 9:10pm

media is the message

Related articles

Brave new writing

Richard Bradford

Fifty years ago, Alan Sillitoe’s first novel, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, changed the history of English fiction. Richard Bradford explains how.

The châtelaine and the wanderer

Anne Chisholm

In Tearing Haste: Letters between Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor, edited by Charlotte Mosley

Rekindling life in a dead frame

Caroline Moore

The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein, by Peter Ackroyd

A far cry from Paradise

Anita Brookner

The Gate of Air: A Ghost Story, by James Buchan

The iceman cometh

Sara Wheeler

True North: Travels in Arctic Europe, by Gavin Francis

Spectator recommends

Sky - Official Site

Build your own Sky package online. Sky TV, Broadband & Talk only £16.

Sky TV, Broadband & Talk from £16 a Month

Sky TV & free broadband packages available from £16 a month. Choose from a standard free sky box, sky plus...


Spectator classifieds

ROME CENTRE

PORTA METRONIA, ROME Standing high on the top of one of the seven hills of Rome- the Coelian- this unique

City Breaks. ROME and PARIS

ROME and PARIS: over 350 holiday rentals apartments listed: visit  www.romanreference.com  and  www.parisreference.com or call +39 0648 903612.

Jewellery. RUFFS (Estd. 1904).

Goldsmiths by Design Welcome to Ruffs!  You have found a company of Goldsmiths that specialises in the manufacture, amongst other