The Turn to Modernism: Art and Architecture

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The Turn to Modernism: Art and Architecture

IN A DOLL’S HOUSE: IBSEN ON THE WOMAN’S PLIGHT

Cultural Fragmentation, Subjectivism, and Nonrepresentation. During the nineteenth century, the political map of Europe became increasingly defined by territorial, sovereign nation-states. The leaders and the people of these states, moreover, came to embrace nationalism, which often opposed the glories of one nation against the inferiority of others. By the last third of the century these European states had also entered into a global competition for colonies and trade, and they came to view warfare as a rational and logical way for states to settle their competitive differences. As a result, Europe became increasingly fragmented politically and culturally. The outbreak of World War I in 1914 was a thunderous result of political fragmentation, and the artistic style called Modernism was a consequence of growing cultural differences. Long gone from the artistic scene was the confidence in progress, improvement, and universalism that marked Classicism. The subjectivism of Romanticism remained, but Modernist artists and writers expressed it in moods of decadence, pessimism, and nostalgia. Cultural fragmentation in music resulted in discordance and dissonance, while in painting, fractured images led eventually to almost complete abstraction. Since the Renaissance, artists had assumed that art was fundamentally a representation of the real, visible world, but no such assumption guided the Modernists. Fragmentation and subjectivism had become the essence of the meaning of the term modern.

Impressionist Painting. Impressionism represents a fundamental transition in art, bringing to a close the era in which artists assumed that art was the study and representation of the external appearance of nature. This guiding idea had held sway since the Renaissance and the invention of three-point perspective, which creates the illusion of depth in a picture. Of course, movements such as Romanticism explicitly filtered representation through the imagination of the creative genius, but the images produced were still visibly identifiable as the world that humans directly perceive. Realism, as Gustave Courbet (1819–1877) stated, was the most extreme expression of objective representation. In one sense Impressionism was a reaction to and a rejection of such literalism, but as an imitation of natural objects (landscapes or people) it remained within the Renaissance objectivist tradition, as demonstrated by the paintings of the great Impressionists— Camille Pissarro (1830–1903), Edouard Manet (1832–1883), Edgar Degas (1834–1917), Claude Monet (1840–1926),

IN A DOLL’S HOUSE: IBSEN ON THE WOMAN’S PLIGHT

Paywright Henrik Ibsen sympathized with the individual’s struggle against predominant social values and mores. Although he was never a feminist, his portrayal of Nora in A Doll’s House was received with praise by feminists and with disdain by traditionalists. Set in the middle of a nineteenth-century Norwegian winter, the play shows the limitations married women faced with regard to control over property, children, and even their individualism. The following excerpt is from the last scene, where Nora decides to let her husband, Torvald Helmer, know what she has felt about the eight years of their marriage.

Nora. In all these eight years—longer than that—from the very beginning of our acquaintance, we have never exchanged a word on any serious subject.
Helmer. Was it likely that I would be continually and for ever telling you about worries that you could not help me to bear?
Nora. I am not speaking about business matters. I say that we have never sat down in earnest together to try and get at the bottom of anything.
Helmer. But, dearest Nora, would it have been any good to you?
Nora. That is just it; you have never understood me. I have been greatly wronged, Torvald, first by papa and then by you.
Helmer. What! By us two—by us two, who have loved you better than anyone else in the world?
Nora (shaking her head). You have never loved me. You have only thought it pleasant to be in love with me.
Helmer. Nora, what do I hear you saying?
Nora. It is perfectly true, Torvald. When I was at home with papa, he told me of his opinion about everything, and so I had the same opinions; and if I differed from him I concealed the fact, because he would not have liked it. He called me his doll-child, and he played with me just as I used to play with my dolls. And when I came to live with you....
Helmer. What sort of an expression is that to use about our marriage?
Nora (undisturbed). I mean that I was simply transferred from papa’s hands into yours. You arranged everything according to your own taste, and so I got the same tastes as you—or else I pretended to, I am really not quite sure which—I think sometimes the one and sometimes the other. When I look back on it, it seems to me as if I had been living here like a poor woman—just from hand to mouth. I have existed merely to perform tricks for you, Torvald. But you would have it so. You and papa have committed a great sin against me. It is your fault that I have made nothing of my life.
Helmer, How unreasonable and how ungrateful you are, Nora! Have you not been happy here?
Nora. No, I have never been happy. I thought I was, but it has never really been so.
Helmer. Not—not happy!
Nora. No, only merry. And you have always been so kind to me. But our home has been nothing but a playroom. I have been your doll-wife, just as at home I was papa’s dollchild; and here the children have been my dolls. I thought it great fun when you played with me, just as they thought it great fun when I played with them. That is what our marriage has been, Torvald.
Helmer. There is. some truth in what you say—exaggerated and strained as your view of it is. But for the future it shall be different. Playtime shall be over, and lesson-time shall begin.
Nora. Whose lessons? Mine, or the children’s?
Helmer. Both yours and the children’s, my darling Nora.
Nora. Alas, Torvald, you are not the man to educate me into being a proper wife for you.... Didn’t you say so yourself a little while ago—that you dare not trust me to bring them up?
Helmer. In a moment of anger! Why do you pay any heed to that?
Nora. Indeed, you were perfectly right. I am not fit for the task. There is another task I must undertake first. I must try and educate myself—you are not the man to help me in that. I must do that for myself. And that is why I am going to leave you now.
Helmer (springing up.) What do you say?
Nora. I must stand quite alone, if I am to understand myself and everything about me. It is for that reason that I cannot remain with you any longer.

Source: Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House (New York: Washington Square Press, 1968), pp. 108-111.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919), and Mary Cassatt (1844–1926). Lane near a Small Town, painted by Alfred Sisley (1839–1899) in 1864-1865, is a typical example of how Impressionists rejected literal realism without foregoing objective representation.

Toward Modernism. Impressionism, however, was a leap toward Modernism. Like Romantic painters, Impressionists recognized the subjectivity of the act of representation, but many of them carried this awareness to a new level by asserting that painting was consciously about the act of representation more than the subject matter of the painting. They recognized that painting was more a record of the artist’s experience than an account of perceived natural objects. Impressionists did not totally invent the images they represented in paint, but they often reduced the significance of the subject to complete banality or even utter meaninglessness and therefore directed the viewer’s attention to how the artist represented the world rather than what he represented. Renoir forcefully drove this point home in The Luncheon of the Boating Party (1881). Although individuals are clearly depicted, the overwhelming impression upon the viewer is the play of light and the effect of texture one gets from the artist’s application of paint to canvas. Not all Impressionist painters stripped their pictures of meaning, however. Manet or Degas, for example, used their subject matter to comment on the social fragmentation that was emerging in modern life. According to some social critics, industrialism had led to a class society and driven a wedge between social groups while creating a sense of isolation and anomie among individuals. Manet captured this disconnectedness between people in The Bar of the Folies Bergere (1881–1882), in which a dispirited and disinterested barmaid gazes blankly toward the viewer. On closer inspection, the viewer observes in a mirror behind her a bourgeois man (who is from a different social class than the barmaid) intently returning her gaze. The viewer is initially struck by the disjuncture between the seeming isolation of the woman and the physical proximity of the man. Moreover, the mirrored reflection does not faithfully represent reality. The man in the mirror is impossibly close, and the woman’s back is reflected at an angle that logically suggests it cannot belong to the woman facing the viewer. Degas also sometimes commented on the isolation of modern life. In L’Absinthe (1876) he portrays a modern, working-class couple who attempt to obliterate their meaningless existence by drinking an addictive and sense-deadening alcoholic beverage.

Symbolism and Expressionism. More than their Impressionist precursor, Symbolist and Expressionist painting were a conscious reaction against Realism. Where an empiricist scientism had come to guide Realism, Symbolists and Expressionists returned to the Romantic notion that a higher spiritual existence was attainable not through rationalism but rather through feeling. Like Romantics, Symbolists and Expressionists sometimes sought to explore the psyche and investigate the meaning of identity. In their explorations of the imagination, however, they continued the Impressionist departure from faithfully representing visual reality. Symbolism, as the name suggests, conveys meaning through the use of representational images, while Expressionism seeks an unmediated “expression” of the artist’s inner, and individualistic, vision. Paul Gauguin (1848–1903), Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890), the Norwegian Edvard Munch (1863–1944), and Paul Cezanne (1839–1906) are among the best-known painters working in these styles.

Gauguin. Disgusted by the bourgeois culture of his homeland, Gauguin emigrated in 1891 from his native France to the French colony of Tahiti, where he painted a series of works that illustrate a blending of cultures in an age of imperialism and colonialism. His paintings also raise the related question about the formation and meaning of an individual’s identity. While many of his Tahiti paintings depict nearly nude natives, Ancestors ofTehamana (1893), a portrait of his Polynesian wife, shows a native woman wearing European dress and adopting a traditional European pose. Contrasted to this Western representation, however, is a background that displays Polynesian linguistic and religious ancestral images. Gauguin therefore suggests that identity is a malleable construct, the product of blended cultures. Making the same statement about the cultural construction of identity and more clearly Symbolist in style is Gauguin’s painting Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897), which again combines European and non-Western motifs. On the one hand, it is a symbolic representation of the Christian story of the fall of man and a lost paradise. On the other hand, it embraces non-Western images of nearly nude women representing the life cycle from birth to death, and Polynesian icons (such as the fruit picker) preside over this paradise.

Van Gogh. Van Gogh’s paintings also probed the psyche and were all the more poignant than Gauguin’s in that they often powerfully expressed van Gogh’s own mental state. In paintings such as The Church at Auvers (1890) van Gogh visually warped reality, forcing the viewer to see the world from his own tormented perspective and so pressing further the subjectivist trajectory of much of nineteenth-century art.

Munch. An equally disturbing Expressionist painting is Edvard Munch’s The Scream (1893). Often interpreted as a desperate and frantic cry from the archetypal isolated individual in modern society, this painting also represents a culture that—through fragmentation and disorientation— has lost its bearings and its moorings and is careening catastrophically into a frightening future.

Cézanne. Like van Gogh and Gauguin, the French painter Paul Cezanne also abandoned Impressionism to accomplish something less limited. He shared the Impressionists’ proclivity to avoid representational meaning in his paintings, but through short, almost blunt brush strokes (stabs of color, at times in shapes of rough rectangles and squares) he pushed painting to near abstraction. By breaking down an object into what would seem on close inspection to be disconnected shapes, Cézanne profoundly influenced the young artists (some of whom became Cubists) who flocked to view a retrospective and posthumous exhibition of his works in 1907.

Cubism. In 1909 in Paris, Georges Braque (1882–1963) and Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) exhibited paintings that signaled to the public a decisive break with representation. Often heralded as nonobjective representations (that is, works of art that do not appear visually as the objects for which they stand), Braque’s and Picasso’s “Cubist” paintings are often considered the first abstract works of the twentieth century. Viewers must certainly have thought so. Although the paintings were still recognizably pictures of things or persons, such as Picasso’s Portrait ofAmbroise Vollard (1910), they appeared decidedly unreal. By constructing their works with scores of short brush strokes and breaking up or breaking down the objects they depicted, Braque and Picasso reached yet another stage in the march of subjectivism and Modernism. Like so much art at the turn of

VAN GOGH’S TORMENT: A LETTER TO HIS BROTHER

In his 17 January 1889 letter to his brother Theo, an art dealer on whom he was financially dependent, Vincent van Gogh wrote of his poverty and his estrangement from Paul Gauguin, who for a time in 1888 had painted with van Gogh in the south of France. (Though van Gogh’s paintings are now valued at millions of dollars, during his lifetime they earned him little.) As this letter reveals, van Gogh could not clearly understand why Gauguin had ended their friendship and returned to the north. Written just after van Gogh had returned to Aries from being hospitalized for psychological disorders and less than a year before his death by suicide, this letter is filled with evidence of the painter’s emotional instability.

...It is unfortunately complicated in various ways, my pictures are valueless, it is true they cost me an extraordinary amount, perhaps even in blood and brains at times. I won’t harp on it, and what am I to say about it?
…
… I have started work again, and I already have three finished studies in the studio, besides the portrait of Dr. Rey, which I gave him as a keepsake. So there is no worse harm done this time than a little more suffering and its attendant wretchedness. And I keep on hoping. But I feel weak and rather uneasy and frightened. That will pass, I hope, as I get back my strength.
Rey told me that being very impressionable was enough to account for the attack that I had.... I took the liberty of [asking] M. Rey... whether he had seen many madmen in similar circumstances fairly quiet and able to work; if not, would he then be good enough to remember occasionally that for the moment I am not yet mad.
…
If Gauguin stayed in Paris for a while to examine himself thoroughly, or have himself examined by a specialist, I don’t honestly know what the result might be.
On various occasions I have seen him do things which you and I would not let ourselves to, because we have consciences that feel differently about things. I have heard one or two things said of him, but having seen him at very, very close quarters, I think that he is carried away by his imagination, perhaps by pride, but... practically irresponsible.
…
… Lord, let him do anything he wants, let him have his independence?? (whatever he means by that) and his opinions, and let him go his own way as soon as he thinks he knows it better than we do.
…
Whatever happens, I shall see my strength come back little by little if I can stick it out here. I do so dread a change or move just because of the fresh expense. I have been unable to get a breathing spell for a long time now. I am not giving up work, because there are moments when it is really getting on, and I believe that with patience the goal will at last be reached, that the pictures will pay back the money invested in making them.
…
Although this letter is already very long, since I have tried to analyze the month’s expenses and complained a bit of the queer phenomenon of Gauguin’s behavior in choosing not to speak to me again and clearing out, there are still some things that I must add in praise of him.
One good quality he has is the marvelous way he can apportion expenses from day to day.
While I am often absent-minded, preoccupied with aiming at the goal, he has far more money sense for each separate day than I have. But his weakness is that by a sudden freak or animal impulse he upsets everything he has arranged.
…
As for me, I have ceased to be able to follow his actions, and I give it up in silence, but with a questioning note all the same.
From time to time he and I have exchanged ideas about French art, and impressionism....
It seems to me impossible, or at least pretty improbable, that impressionism will organize and steady itself now.
…
… Gauguin has a fine, free and absolutely complete imaginary conception of the South, and with that imagination he is going to work in the North! My word, we may see some queer results yet.
And now, dissecting the situation in all boldness, there is nothing to prevent our seeing him as the little Bonaparte tiger of impressionism as far as... I don’t quite know how to say it, his vanishing, say, from Aries would be comparable or analogous to the return from Egypt of the aforesaid Little Corporal, who also presented himself in Paris afterward and who always left the armies in the lurch. Fortunately Gauguin and I and other painters are not yet armed with machine guns and other very destructive implements of war. I for one am quite decided to go on being armed with nothing but my brush and my pen.