The crisis of modernitygap between the modern world and the

world of art (high culture)

the world is increasingly less like a home

crisis – the root of modern art

Reason 1 reason: instrument of freedom → instrument of

oppression, policing, terror

inhumanity of science and technology

image of the machine

factory as dystopia, the production line

mad scientist

World War One: industrialised war

reason (science) breeding monsters (Frankenstein, nuclear energy, cloning)

Reason 2 inhumanity of rational bureaucracy: man as the

victim of reason (Dickens, Kafka)

social engineering: utopian social and political experiments (fascism,

communism) experience of modern history: trauma (man as

the victim of history)

the camp (segregation, surveillance, dehumanisation)

Reason 3 Auschwitz, Hiroshima and the Gulag: not

aberrations

(colonization)

Henri Lefebvre: “And human reason appears only as some terrifying, distant, dehumanized reason: scientific barbarity. … the concentration camp is the most extreme form of a modern housing estate, or of an industrial town” (The Critique of Everyday Life)

The crisis of modernity 2: Modernity –experience of disorder

the modern: cult of the new; idea of progress

sheer pace of life; speed; cult of the new

capitalist economy: constant change and growth

permanent revolution of technology (production, transport, communication)

Phineas Fogg in Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days

crisis confusion, chaos

Karl Marx: “Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social relations, everlasting uncertainty and agitation, distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier times. All fixed, fast-frozen relationships, with their … venerable ideas and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become obsolete before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into the air” (Communist Manifesto, 1848)

crisis W.B. Yeats: “Things fall

apart, the center does not hold”

Ady Endre: “minden egészeltörött” (‘everything that used to be whole is broken’)

The chaos of the modern city

Georg Grosz: Funeral

crisis

Paradox of modernity: permanentrevolution, fast change - reproduction of the same

logic of consumer society

The crisis of modernity 3:loss of ideals

the citoyen → the petty bourgeois

the shopkeeper caring for his profit and comfort

boredom, pettiness, Philistinism

Julien Sorel: victim of an unheroic age

Soames Forsyte in Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga: paintings as investment

Walter

Sickert:

Ennui

Edgar Degas:

Absinthe

Edouard Manet: La Folie Bergère

Crisis of modernity 4:alienation

Søren Kierkegaard: existentialist philosophy

Karl Marx: specialization in factories

atrophy of the human being

The factory and the office: dystopian places

chinovnik; Bartleby the Scrivener

MODERNISM the art of late 19th and early 20th century

present in all the arts

the symptom of of modernity; its high culture, internal opposition

Now: Modernisms (eg. Modernist crimefiction)

MODERNISM

three attitudes of modernist art to the modern world:

1. affirming the modern world

2.revolt against the modern world

3.withdrawal from the modern world

1.Affirming modernity Italian futurism, pop art

Fortunato Depero: Skyscrapers and Tunnels (1930)

Modernist architecture Mies van der Rohe: Farnsworth House

Walter Gropius: Bauhaus Building in Dessau, 1925-6

Le Corbusier: Villa Savoie

Berthold Lubetkin: London Zoo, Penguin Pool

Lawn Road Flats (or Isokon Building, 1933-4, Wells Coates)

Lawn Road Flats

Lawn Road flat interior: FUNCTIONALISM

Victorian interior

Isokon inhabitants Marcel Breuer (Breuer

Lajos Marcell, Pécs)

Model B32 chair (1925)

Walter Gropius

Moholy-Nagy László

Agatha Christie

Goldfinger Ernő:

Trellick Tower

Goldfinger: Willow Road, Hampstead

2.Revolting against the modern world a, return to non-rational ways of thinking

(occult,mysticism, religion) eg. Oscar Wilde, Arthur Conan Doyle, W. B. Yeats, Aldous Huxley

b, myth (Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Yeats, Faulkner, John Cowper Powys)

James G.Fraser (Scottish anthropologist): The Golden Bough – a 24-volume encyclopaedia of all mythologies

c, primitivism

Pablo Picasso: Mask - Demoiselles

Henry Moore: Reclining Figure (1929)

Revolt

d, cult of sexuality, desire, the unconscious, the body (Surrealism)

D. H. Lawrence Sons and Lovers (1913)

The Rainbow (1915)

Women in Love (1916-1920)

The Plumed Serpent (1925)

Lady Chatterley’s Lover(1928)

D. H. Lawrence: Sons and Lovers

Paul Morel and his parents

Miriam Leivers (farmer’s daughter; spiritual)

Clara Dawes (divorced factory girl; sexual)

sexuality split in two (affection and physical sex)

father: miner

Hades and Persephone

D. H. Lawrence

modern man: split between mind and body

“My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true” (letter)

D. H. Lawrence’s modernism1. critique of modernity

2. mythological, cosmic awareness

3. rethinking the family (influence of Freud)

Revolt against modernity

e, social-political revolt

Expressionism, Surrealism

Modernist film: Fritz Lang: Metropolis; Chaplin: City Lights and Modern Times

3.Withdrawal from the modern world Émile Zola: “We are sick, no doubt, made sick by

progress”

Gérard de Nerval: “The only refuge left to us was the poet’s ivory tower, which we climbed, ever higher, to isolate ourselves from the mob.”

Lady of Shalott image

Bildungsroman replaced by Künstlerroman (Marcel Proust)

integration into society→ exodus, exile from theworld

Withdrawal from the world artist vs. bourgeois art vs. life

renunciation of life/love;

Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray: “I wish I could love”

Joseph Conrad: “Solitude subdues me; it absorbs me. I don’t see anything ... It is like a kind of tomb, which will be at the same time a hell, where one has to write, to write, to write.”

split: Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus (Adrian Leverkühn’s pact with the devil)

Withdrawal from the world Figure of the artist: outsider, outcast, deviant

(criminality - “Tonio Kröger”)

Self-imposed exile: Joyce: Potrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Stephen Dedalus)

Adorno: “Estrangement from the world is a moment of art”

Artist: high priest and clown (Kafka: “The Hunger Artist”)

Withdrawal from the world

Modernism: defines itself in opposition to popular/mass culture and middlebrow culture(commercialism and kitsch)

success = artistic failure

The difficulty, obscurity of modernism

elitism or respect for the reader

Features of modernist art and lit:

1. non-realist, non-mimetic l’art pour l’art (art for art’s sake)

Oscar Wilde: “Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside, of herself. She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance. She is a veil, rather than a mirror.”

art nouveau

(‘szecesszió’, Jugendstil)

Maurice Denis; Aubrey Beardsley; Rennie Mackintosh (Glasgow); Gustav Klimt; Antoni Gaudi

ART NOUVEAU

(Maurice Denis: Tuileries)

No depth, no plasticity

Line vs colour

(graphic art; Oriental effects)

Decorativity vs representation

ART NOUVEAU

Aubrey Beardsley

Ch. Rennie Mckintosh: wall plaque

Charles Rennie Mackintosh: chairs

Ingram Street Tea Rooms, Glasgow

Gaudí: Casa Milá (Barcelona)

ART NOUVEAU (Paris Metro - Horta House, Brussels)

Features of modernist art and

literature 2. purity poetry: made of words and nothing else

Mallarmé: poésie pure

Flaubert: “What I would like to write is a book about nothing”;

cult of MUSIC as pure art

painting: made of colours and lines.

representation vs. composition

Maurice Denis: “a picture – before being a war horse, a nude woman, or an anecdote – is essentially a flat surface covered with colours and assembled in a certain order.”

Features of modernist art and literature

3. self-reflexivity

art about itself

(Max Ernst: Surrealism and painting)

Features of modernist art and literature4. elimination of individuality (part of the ideal of “purity”)

Rilke: Cézanne painted not “I love this” but “here it is”

fiction: objectivity (Flaubert’s impassibilité)

‘The artist cannot appear in his work more often than God in his creation’

poetry: impersonal poetry (Eliot), Imagism (Pound)

The avant-garde Militant novelty

Breaking with the past

manifestos

Épater le bourgeois

Often aligned with political radicalism

Cubism - Georges Braque: Harbour in Normandy

Richard

Nevinson:

Arrival (1913)

Futurism – Nevinson: Returning to the Trenches (1917)

Expressionism

Edvard Munch:

The Scream

(1893)

Surrealism

Edith

Rimmington:

The

Oneiroscopist

Leonora Carrington:

Darvault (ca. 1950)