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Monday 1 December 2008

Modernism: The Lure of Heresy

Lives less ordinary

Rupert Christiansen

The book is classically organised. An introduction attempts a definition and outlines the basic issues, followed by chapters on 19th-century founders and precursors (chiefly the Impressionists). The heart of the book deals with the first half of the 20th century: Picasso, Dada and Expressionism in the visual arts; Joyce, Kafka, T. S. Eliot in literature; Stravinsky, Schoenberg and the Ballets Russes in music; Corbusier and Lloyd Wright in architecture; Jarry, Strindberg and Griffith, Chaplin, Einstein and Welles in drama and the cinema.

Then follow studies of several maverick right-wingers — Eliot, Ives and Hamsun — and a consideration of the attitude of Nazi, Stalinist and fascistic regimes towards modernism. A section devoted to the post-war era covers Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, Existentialism and Absurdism, with a coda appreciative of the genius of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Frank Gehry.

There are some contentious omissions — Man Ray, Borges, Boulez, Bacon and Gertrude Stein are altogether invisible, while Webern, Rilke and Brecht are barely mentioned. The dubious concept of post-modernism is not addressed, and significant art forms such as opera and photography get less than their due. In other respects this is a sound floorplan, and one could recommend the book wholeheartedly to a bright A-level student or undergraduate in search of a broader picture.

But that’s about it. There’s nothing more for anyone with a bit of knowledge to bite on — nothing controversial, original or even striking in interpretation. Part of the problem is that the scope is so wide — splurging into other equally indefinable movements, such as Romanticism and Realism — that Gay never brings Modernism into any sharp focus, and he gives himself so much ground to cover that he never stops anywhere long enough to develop a point or stick his neck out.

‘Modernism is far easier to exemplify than to define,’ he says, quoting the judge who remarked of pornography that he couldn’t say what it was, but knew it when he saw it. An intensive self-scrutiny may be a feature, but Gay will not ‘venture to offer a psychoanalysis of modernism’. As he is a distinguished Freudian, one rather wishes he had, because the succession of potted biographies isn’t otherwise very animated and his struggle to find a common denominator produces only banalities: the subtitle, ‘The Lure of Heresy’, amounts to little more than the assertion that ‘one thing that all modernists had in common was the conviction that the untried is markedly superior to the familiar, the rare to the ordinary, the experimental to the routine’.

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