Modernism

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Modernism

Modernism is a highly complex cultural phenomenon which has generated a variety of differing opinions and an immense critical literature. The notion of the "modern" has undergone various semantic shifts and definitions, mainly due to the sensibility of each age, yet the word has always retained a particular pertinence in characterizing a feeling of novelty, of change and historical evolution. For American expatriate writer Gertrude Stein Modernism was a sort of "inevitable art," the only "composition" appropriate to the new disposition of time and space in which people lived in the early part of the twentieth century. However it is defined, it is clear that Modernism was an extraordinary combination of often contradictory aspects: the futuristic and the nihilistic, the revolutionary and the conservative, the naturalistic and the symbolistic, the romantic and the classical. It was a celebration of a technological age, the so-called "Age of the Machine" and a condemnation of it, a faithful acceptance of any new, exciting cultural expression and the excuse for fearful and anxious reactions in face of it. The term has often included many artistic movements which originated mostly in Europe (Impressionism, Expressionism, Futurism, Cubism, Symbolism, Imagism etc.), but soon became truly international, often sharing a tendency towards abstraction and a refusal of realism. The Modernist tendency expressed itself as anti-representationalism in painting, free verse in poetry, stream-of-consciousness narrative in the novel, just to make a few examples. Most critics agree that the peak of the Modernist period was the first quarter of the twentieth century, but some place it as early as the 1890s, as did Frank Kermode in a famous study aptly entitled The Sense of an Ending.

One cannot date exactly the beginning of "modern" culture in America, but surely it was decried in quite exalted terms as early as 1871, in Walt Whitman's prophetic Democratic Vistas : "America demands a poetry that is bold, modern, and all-surrounding and kosmical, as she is herself. It must in no respect ignore science and the modern. It must bend its vision toward the future, more than the past." "Science and the modern" were firmly linked in Whitman's forward-looking vision in a union that expressed the post-Civil War optimism of American civilization. Surprisingly, Whitman's quest for an art that would favorably compare with science and the modern had virtually no followers until the first decades of the twentieth century, when a group of artists began to create a visual and literary culture that reflected and responded to the extraordinary transformations of American society under the impact of the machine. But this new art was to be rather different from what Whitman had optimistically envisioned. What Whitman had in mind was a larger aesthetic vision of democratic civilization which would have incorporated the world of science and technology. For the modernists, on the other hand, the new world of the machine was far more complex and their response was far more ambivalent.

Clearly, the changes that occurred during the years following Whitman's declaration of 1871 were extraordinary, even beyond any expectation: the material world was virtually rebuilt from scratch and the human subject came to be placed in an environment that was continuously changing. Candles and oil lamps had been replaced by lightbulbs powered by that invisible power, electricity; the wireless radio became ever more common in the dining-room. Specialized industrial processes had been in effect since the 1880s, but with electricity mechanization was much accelerated. In 1910, one in ten urban homes had electricity; by 1930 most did, and the consumer, especially the lady of the house, was surrounded with new machines: irons, sewing machines, vacuum cleaners, toasters, washing machines, refrigerators, in brief the household was transformed into a wholly new, exciting, mechanized environment.

Understandably, the impact of the modern times was most visible in the city. Cities like New York started growing upward, from their pre-elevator six stories to the thirty stories of the skyscraper by the end of the nineteenth century. Daniel Burnham's triangular Flatiron Building (1903), the tallest building of its time, became a symbol of such times. Photographers like Alfred Stieglitz, Alvin Langdon Coburn, and Edward Steichen started to immortalize these tall buildings as aesthetic objects. However, the skyscrapers would soon acquire a different role: they would perform an advertising function for the commercial interests that had built them in the first place; they would become icons of the modern age and, above all, of modern industrial civilization. In New York the very names of streets like Broadway, Wall Street, or Madison Avenue reflected those structures of mass communication and persuasion, finance, capitalism, and popular culture that were defining the new modern way of life. New York was to become the modern/ist metropolis par excellence, but it should be stressed that Modernism transformed and embraced not just one city, but many.

To go back to Whitman again, one could wonder why, in a time of such revolutionary changes, his aspiration was not answered earlier by the world of art and culture. The reason might be that all the major transformations Whitman and the American people in general were witnessing (the tall buildings, the manufacturing products, etc.) were not regarded as pertaining to the world of art, at least the capital "A" Art of high culture, as defined by the academy and by its well established aesthetic criteria. In a way, Art was perceived as a defence against the ever-changing world of bridges, skyscrapers, steam engines, and railroads. Even when the machine was artistically represented, its mere functionalism had to be hidden behind some classical decorative embellishment. It was only gradually, in the machinery and architectural forms of the industrial landscape, that the new modernist vocabulary found its inspiration, and as a result science and the modern began to find their way into the culture at large.

The vocabulary of "the modern" was one of mechanical forms and elaborate mechanisms viewed under a metaphorical light. Such a vocabulary was embraced in the visual arts by European expatriates like Picabia and Duchamp and by American artists as well; not surprisingly the city and the machine became the subject matter of modernist art. The American response was characterized by the attempt to connect the new age of the machine with a native cultural tradition; it was as if in order to look at the future one had first to look backwards, especially at the century that had just come to a close. This is perhaps one of the most interesting paradoxes of modernity: that the projection into the future and the emergence of a popular modernism also coincided with a deepening traditionalism. This tendency is detectable in literature and in the visual arts as well, in artists as diverse as William Faulkner, William Carlos Williams, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, or in the adherents to the Precisionist movement, a handful of young painters and photographers that would represent one of the most interesting American contributions to international modernism.

Compared to the European, the American artists were more critical and, in many respects, more worried about the consequences of mechanical civilization: the dangers of robotization deriving from matching the man to the machine and the machine to the man found perhaps their best expression in Chaplin's Modern Times (1936). However, already in his 1919 book Our America, Waldo Frank had voiced the concern of many Americans who feared that the dehumanizing forces of technology would lead to psychic fragmentation and spiritual deprivation. Such opinions dominated literary magazines like The Seven Arts, Secession, and Broom, to name just a few. However, American artists were also engaged in building native forms of cultural expression that could not disregard the contemporary reality of machine technology. For many Walt Whitman provided a singular model for the celebration of indigenous culture, in particular the metaphysical analogy that he drew between mechanical energy and divine spirit. William Carlos Williams echoed portions of the poet's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" in his own exhortations to American artists to develop indigenous subjects and forms of expression. These new forms should be based on Whitman's glorification of the dynamism, vitality, and energy of the native environment and his celebration of the machine as an American cultural symbol.

Not surprisingly, it was another poet, Hart Crane, who derived an affirmative mythology from the realities of the technological world. Crane wanted to resuscitate contemporary, but decayed, culture by aligning it with the great mythologies of the past. He considered the entrenchment of machinery in contemporary life as a challenging responsibility for the poet. The machine could not be ignored but must be absorbed into poetry, where its destructive forces would be countered through the creation of an alternative myth. Guided by an evangelical temperament Crane infused technological culture with transcendent ecstasy. By fusing popular legends about American history—Columbus, Pocahontas, Rip Van Winkle—with contemporary reality—railroads, subways, office buildings—he aimed to construct "a mystical synthesis of 'America"' that would achieve "a mythic transfiguration of current values." For Crane, the bridge, especially Brooklyn Bridge, was an emblem of unification, a passage between the ideal and the transitory sensations of history.

One could well agree with Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane when they argue that for many writers the city became the very "analogue of form," not only that Modernism was a particularly urban art but also that the artist was "caught up in the spirit of the modern city, which is itself the spirit of a modern technological society…. The city has become culture." In New York the experimental spirit was particularly evident in Greenwich Village and was often conflated with a sense of liberation in morals. Henry James described the Village of those years in Washington Square (1881). Soon radicalism characterized not only arts and morals, but also politics, especially in the period 1910-1917, after the appearance of magazines like the Masses, the Freeman, The Nation, and The New Republic, to name a few. Radical politics was debated in the salon of Mabel Dodge by people like John Reed and Bill Haywood. From an artistic perspective the salon of Alfred Stieglitz is certainly worth mentioning. The Berlin-educated Stieglitz staged the first American exhibition of Matisse, Toulouse Lautrec, Picasso, and Picabia, among others. He organized the famous Armory Show of 1913, the exhibition that would mark a turning point in the world of art, not to mention the role that Stieglitz played in the history of photography.

To dispel any doubt about the conceptual link between "modernism" and "modernization," it should be stressed that even in the era of high aesthetic modernism (roughly 1890 to 1930), the impact of the machine was reflected also in a whole range of cultural productions that appealed to a large number of people. As Douglas Tallack has rightly pointed out: "material changes were no mere backdrop to artistic experimentation. They produced a mass culture based on the market, the phenomenon with which all twentieth-century writers and artists had to contend." Far from being just a "lure" for a mass audience that mindlessly consumed every product it was offered, popular culture texts of the time should be viewed for their often contradictory meanings and uses and for the social and cultural dynamics they reflected. Saloons, parks, dance halls, music, and celebrations are examples of new forms of leisure that became commodified during this period. Though a detailed analysis of such phenomena is beyond the scope of this essay, it is worth mentioning impact of the communications revolution on the creation of an ever-growing market for news and entertainment.

The fact that the communications revolution had an effect on the production as well as on the distribution and reception of culture was already evident in the late nineteenth century when American fiction, like the domestic household, made contact with the new mass-produced brand-named merchandise. As advertisements became touch-stones of modernity and its fragmentations, fiction and advertising acted on one another in complex and unexpected ways. Frank Munsey, editor and publisher of one of the first new magazines oriented to the middle class in the 1890s, argued that: "fiction … is responsible for enormous circulations, and without fiction the general advertiser would find the magazine proposition … decidedly uninteresting from a business standpoint." The big change in magazine economics usually dates back to 1893, the year that three monthlies, Munsey's, McClure's, and Cosmopolitan dropped their prices to ten cents, shifted their enterprise from sales to advertising, and increased their circulation to hundreds of thousands. These magazines were different from the old elite magazines such as Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly, and The Century (which cost thirty-five cents a copy/four dollars a year) in that they achieved a large circulation, thus reaching readers who had never subscribed to magazines. Munsey's, the first of the middle-class magazines to drop its price to a dime, is exemplary in its mission of bringing fiction and ad writing ever closer, so readers would learn to appreciate the directness and succinctness of advertising writing. Again, to quote Frank Munsey's words: "The modern advertisement is a thing of art, a poem, a sledge hammer, an argument—a whole volume compressed into a sentence. Some of the cleverest writing … can be found in the advertising pages of a first rate magazine."

Munsey's published mainly general fiction, articles, and comments specifically directed to a middle class reading public largely, but not exclusively, formed by women. Others would soon follow Munsey's example. The Saturday Evening Post, which began publishing in its modern form in 1897, offered a contrast between conventional moral values and modern publishing conventions. De Witt Wallace's Reader's Digest, founded in 1922, aimed to emulate Henry Ford by applying mass production techniques to the world of print. The "tabloid" made its first appearance in 1919 in the form of the New York Illustrated Daily News. In the 1930s, Henry Luce became the first media tycoon thanks to the massive circulation of his magazine Life, which made an extensive use of the camera.

Much of the recent interest in modernism has had less directly to do with high literary manifestations, and more with the lived forms of popular culture: cinema, radio, fashion, mass advertising, automobiles, daily papers, and detective and science fiction. These forms came to symbolize not just Manhattan or Chicago, but city life in general. As Raymond Williams puts it, "out of an experience of the cities came an experience of the future." Besides, there is the question of whether modernism has actually ended, whether there is a case for a sort of aesthetic continuity from the abundance of versions of modernism to the equal abundance of versions of postmodernism. What is certain is that although modernism was not to everybody's taste, it was the movement which best described and shaped our modern consciousness.

—Anna Notaro