Modernism: Rise of the 'man-god'
Modernists working at the turn of the twentieth century – in musical, literary and visual forms alike – quickly applied the notion of the ‘man-god’ to their Art, proving eager to make the most of what, for Dostoevsky, had been an unambiguously dire situation.
If there was no god, so be it – the true artist never needed him anyway. Just as he’d killed god and overturned all Truth and Meaning he’d once bestowed, the man-god would now turn his attention to Art and bring to bear on it the full force of his newfound omnipotence.
It was a new world, and for the first time in history, man was free. Having long feuded with his godly father, long rebelled against his authoritarian ways, he’d finally cut all ties and left his paternal home. He was dazed and confused, yes, but independent; no longer accountable morally to anyone but himself. Across all major Art forms, this brand of Nietzschean Übermenschheit found direct and unequivocal expression. For if there were no universal values in life, how could there be any in Art? If in life, the freedom afforded by the existential void was total, what could stop this absolute freedom from extending also to painting, music and literature?
In 1908, composer Arnold Schönberg premièred his atonal Second String Quartet to a dumbfounded Viennese public. Eight years later, maverick painter Pablo Picasso presented his Demoiselles d’Avignon in that other European capital of culture, Paris. The two works, perfectly parallel in social significance and impact, shocked the bourgeois and kick-started the modernist revolution.
Picasso’s five demoiselles are angular and otherworldly. Their faces range from benignly deformed to outright demonic. On and around them, perspective is twisted in typical cubist fashion; their limbs are unnaturally contorted and their bodies, eerily out of proportion. They seem to stand against a vortex in which time and space are refracted, and in contemplating it, we may be forgiven for thinking our senses are being duped.
Schönberg’s work is similarly mind-bending. The Quartet starts innocuously enough, in a form of diatonicism pushed to its outer limits; noticeably more jarring than the Strauss of the Sinfonia Domestica, but nonetheless palatable for the contemporary audience. Twenty-three minutes in, however, the music takes a dark and unexpected turn. A soprano intones the sombre verses of poet Stefan George: “Tief ist die trauer die mich umdüstert”. The music looses its tonal bearings, and embraces a hitherto unheard chromatic dissonance. The result is a thoroughgoing atonality that affords the ear no anchor to latch onto, and proves most apt at conveying the moral ambivalence of the time.
In both Les Demoiselles and the Second Quartet, the man-god is clearly at work. Empowered by the freedom granted by the nihilistic Zeitgeist, Picasso and Schönberg had become charged, at the dawn of the new century, with an irrepressible iconoclastic fervour. They had come to look upon the ancient conventions of their respective forms with skepticism; as no longer sacred and infallible, but fluid and imminently subjectable to change.
Visual realism and diatonicism, which since the dawn of modern Art in the Renaissance had been sturdy pillars of Western painting and music, were made the object of a comprehensive re-evaluation. The modernist revolution had not come from nothing, to be sure. In music, the meandering and ambiguous harmonies of Wagner’s Tristan and, in painting, the shimmering impressionism of Claude Monet’s Sunrise (1874) had paved the way for it. But it was Picasso and Schönberg who would dive headfirst into the abyss, consigning, by means of a few thousand brush strokes and quavers, centuries of achievement in Western Art to the proverbial dustbin.
The example they set was followed avidly by all their successors – with no exception. Alban Berg and Anton Webern, disciples of Schönberg, studiously advanced the atonality of their mentor; Berg, by mixing it in with a late Romantic grandiloquence in his Opera Wozzeck (1925); Webern, by stripping it down to its bare bones in pointillist works like his Symphony (1926).
In a parallel musical narrative, a thirty-one year-old Igor Stravinsky premièred, in 1913, his fiercely assymetrical ballet Rite of Spring, doing for rhythm what Schönberg had done for tonality five years earlier. Georges Braque – who, alongside Picasso, is credited with having co-founded Cubism – completed, in an astonishing six-year burst of creativity, such notable works as Maisons à l’Éstaque (1908), Violon et palette (1909), Portrait of a Woman (1910), Nature morte (1913) and Man with a Guitar (1914) – all of which rival, if not surpass the work of his more famous colleague for their uncompromising radicalism.
Literary modernism was a little slower to get going, but once it did, there was no stopping it. In 1913, the year of Stravinsky’s Rite, Marcel Proust found a publisher for the first of the seven volumes of his colossus, À la recherche du temps perdu. Nine years later, James Joyce published the first instalment of his own answer to the Recherche: the sprawling, vexing Ulysses.
The two works present unmissable parallels. Both are of formidable length (at 1.3 million words, Proust’s Recherche is generally agreed to be the longest novel ever written). Both see the world through the eyes of highly sensitive, neurotic types who are on the hunt for meaning in a world reluctant to provide it. And most importantly, both paint a vivid picture of a decadent, nihilistic culture, deploying to this end aesthetic tools every bit as earth-changing as those of Picasso, Stravinsky and Schönberg.
Proust filled the Recherche to bursting point with sentences so serpentine, that one has to reread the longest of them several times in order to properly register their meaning. In Ulysses, Joyce systematically dismantled language, twisting the meaning of words, subverting traditional syntax and constantly coining neologisms – the effect of which is a wilful bamboozlement of the reader. In both, a linear plotline takes back seat to less conventional structuring principles. Flow is attributable less to story arch and character development than to an ongoing commentary on the nature of language, and to a reflection on interconnected ideas, big and small.
Just as Picasso and Schönberg had done away with realism and diatonicism respectively, Proust and Joyce had now done away with traditional narrative. The literary man-god, like his counterparts in music and painting, was here wilfully undoing history, destroying the old and rebuilding Art from its very foundations.
The experimentalism that had seen its first tentative stirrings in Romanticism had now become Art’s unquestionable governing force. For the modernist, no idea or value was sacred, not even those that had remained unchallenged for centuries. Originality was now seen as the supreme intellectual and aesthetic virtue, and its exponents pursued it with the fervour of martyrs.
Modernism had become a sort of religious creed. It is telling, in this sense, that for the first time in history, Art saw a flourishing of so-called manifestos – Filippo Marinetti’s 1909 Manifesto del futurismo being the first in a series that also included those by the Dadaists (1916), the Bauhaus architects (1919), and the Surrealists (1924). These were not unlike sets of holy commandments; prescriptive codes that regulated, in the strictest terms, the set of aesthetic practices and outcomes considered acceptable for the subscribers to a given style or school.
Manifestos were made necessary because the ‘rules’ they prescribed were not intuitable. They had been more or less artificially devised and, therefore, had to be inculcated by moderately coercive means. Modernism was distinguishable from preceding movements also for this reason: it was overtly dogmatic. In previous eras, aesthetic dogmas were, not absent, but functionally organic and therefore, for the most part, only ‘softly’ enforced. They evolved by a process analogous to common law judicial precedents. When an influential artist made an advancement that was perceived to be likely to contribute something legitimately good and beautiful, it was taken up by other artists and, slowly, it diffused itself as common practice.
But in an era of violent and sudden rupture with the past, this approach would no longer suffice. An acceptable agenda for the future could not be left to nature to ‘sort out’; it had to be expressly deliberated and catalogued, much as it would be in a civil law code.
