NONFICTION
Most histories of modernism trace its development through one art form.
The beauty of %26quot;Modernism: The Lure of Heresy%26quot; lies in Peter Gay’s detailing, in his first 100 pages, of the ways in which the tidal wave of artistic freedom and change surging through the past century swept all the arts before it.
Gay roots this new spirit in what he calls %26quot;the lure of heresy%26quot; paired with %26quot;a commitment to a principled self-scrutiny.%26quot; %26quot;The one thing that all modernists had indisputably in common was the conviction that the untried was markedly superior to the familiar, the rare to the ordinary, the experimental to the routine,%26quot; he explains.
Gay doesn’t slight the modernist milestones in the decades bookending the turn of the 20th century — he calls those years %26quot;pivotal%26quot; — but he looks all the way back to 1848 to find the movement’s genesis.
Modernism’s %26quot;first hero,%26quot; in Gay’s view, was French poet Charles Baudelaire, who, in 1848, was acquitted of blasphemy but convicted and fined for obscenity in six poems in %26quot;Les Fleur du Mal.%26quot;
Baudelaire’s trial was an ultimate victory.
He %26quot;was speaking for a still small but growing minority of artists who were turning their backs on the classical and Christian past,%26quot; Gay writes.
Novelist Gustave Flaubert, painter Edouard Manet and poet-playwright Oscar Wilde would soon take up Baudelaire’s banner.
Later, with French Impressionism, which Gay correctly calls %26quot;more than a style . . . a new way of seeing,%26quot; the many %26quot;isms%26quot; that propelled modernism through the 20th century began their seemingly unending parade.
The bulk of %26quot;Modernism%26quot; details the progress of modernism in each of the arts, with chapters devoted to literature, visual art, music, dance, architecture and design and theater and cinema. For most of the distance, Gay makes a reliable and engaging guide as he charts the careers and assesses the achievements of titans ranging from James Joyce to Arnold Schoenberg, Jackson Pollock and D.W. Griffith in anecdote-peppered prose that is both readable and erudite.
Only when Gay turns to what he considers the probable demise of modernism beginning in the 1960s does he find himself in quicksand.
The villain: Would you believe Pop Art?
%26quot;Pop Art was subverting the modernist ideal by reconciling the irreconcilable, assimilating two essentially distinct areas of art, high art and low, which modernists had thought it crucial to keep apart,%26quot; he writes.
Gay fails to see that, far from subverting modernism, Pop artists were just as revolutionary as anything that had gone before them.
Nonetheless, Gay reclaims solid ground in his last paragraph. %26quot;At the very least,%26quot; he writes, %26quot;we can say that modernism has had a hundred and twenty years to throw its products — often exquisite and always new — onto the cultural market, providing confusion, astonishment and delight. It has had a good long run.%26quot;
Indeed it has.
Roy Proctor, a retired Times-Dispatch arts writer, is now a freelance writer and theater director.
artistic freedom,Novel,prose
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