Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century

by Peter Watson

  Towards the end of the war, Hugo Ball left Zurich for the Ticino, the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland, and the centre of gravity of Dada shifted to Germany. Hans Arp and Max Ernst, another collagist, went to Cologne, and Schwitters was in Hanover. But it was in Berlin that Dada changed, becoming far more political. Berlin, amid defeat, was a brutal place, ravaged by shortages, despoiled by misery everywhere, with politics bitterly divided, and with revolution in the wake of Russian events a very real possibility. In November 1918 there was a general socialist uprising, which failed, its leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg murdered. The uprising was a defining moment for, among others, Adolf Hitler, but also for the Dadaists.104

  It was Richard Hülsenbeck who transported ‘the Dada virus’ to Berlin.105 He published his Dada manifesto in April 1918, and a Dada club was established. Early members included Raoul Hausmann, George Grosz, John Heartfield, and Hannah Hoch, who replaced collage with photomontage to attack the Prussian society that they all loathed. Dadaists were still being controversial and causing scandals: Johannes Baader invaded the Weimar Assembly, where he bombarded the delegates with leaflets and declared himself president of the state.106 Dada was more collectivist in Berlin than in Zurich, and a more long-term campaign was that waged by the Dadaists against the German expressionists, such as Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Emil Nolde, who, they claimed, were no more than bourgeois German romantics.107 George Grosz and Otto Dix were the fiercest critics among the painters, their most striking image being the wretched half-human forms of the war cripple. These deformed, grotesque individuals were painful reminders for those at home of the brutal madness of the war. Grosz, Dix, Hoch and Heartfield were no less brutal in their depiction of figures with prostheses, who looked half-human and half-machine. These mutilated figures were gross metaphors for what would become the Weimar culture: corrupt, disfigured, with an element of the puppet, the old order still in command behind the scenes – but above all, a casualty of war.

  No one excoriated this society more than Grosz in his masterpiece Republican Automatons (1920), where the landscape is forbidding, with skyscrapers that are bleak in a way that Giorgio de Chirico, before long, would make menacing. In the foreground the deformed figures, propped up by prostheses of absurd complexity and yet at the same time atavistically dressed in traditional bowler hat, stiff high collar, boiled shirt, and sporting their war medals, wave the German flag. It is, like all Grosz’s pictures, a mordant image of virulent loathing, not just of the Prussians but also of the bourgeoisie for accepting an odious situation so glibly.108 For Grosz, the evil had not ended with the war; indeed the fact that so little had changed, despite the horror and the mutilation, was what he railed against. ‘In Grosz’s Germany, everything and everybody is for sale [prostitutes were a favourite subject]…. The world is owned by four breeds of pig: the capitalist, the officer, the priest and the hooker, whose other form is the socialite wife. It was no use objecting … that there were some decent officers, or cultivated bankers. The rage and pain of Grosz’s images simply swept such qualifications aside.’109

  Tristan Tzara took the idea of Dada to Paris in 1920. André Breton, Louis Aragon, and Philippe Soupault, who together edited the modernist review Littérature, were sympathetic, being already influenced by Alfred Jarry’s brand of symbolism and its love of absurdity.110 They also enjoyed a tendency to shock. But unlike in Berlin, Dada in Paris took a particularly literary form, and by the end of 1920 there were at least six Dada magazines in existence and as many books, including Francis Picabia’s Pensées sans langage (Thoughts without Language) and Paul Eluard’s Les Nécessités de la vie et les conséquences des rêves (The Necessities of Life and the Consequences of Dreams). The magazines and books were reinforced by salons and soirées in which the main aim was to promise the public something scandalous and then disappoint them, forcing the bourgeoisie to confront its own futility, ‘to look over into an abyss of nothing.’111 It was this assault on the public, this fascination with risk, this ‘surefootedness on the brink of chaos,’ that linked Paris, Berlin, and Zurich Dada.112

  Unique to Paris Dada was automatic writing, a psychoanalytic technique where the writer allowed himself to become ‘a recording machine,’ listening for the ‘unconscious murmur.’ André Breton thought that a deeper level of reality could be realised through automatic writing, ‘that analogical sequences of thought’ were released in this way, and he published a short essay in 1924 about the deeper meaning of our conscious thoughts.113 Called Manifeste du Surréalisme, it had an enormous influence on artistic/cultural life in the 1920s and 1930s. Even though surrealism did not flower until the mid-1920s, Breton maintained that it was ‘a function of war.’114

  Across from the Austrian front line, where Wittgenstein was writing and rewriting the Tractatus, on the Russian side several artists were recording hostilities. Marc Chagall drew wounded soldiers. Natalya Goncharova published a series of lithographs, Mystical Images of War, in which ancient Russian icons appeared under attack from enemy aircraft. Kasimir Malevich produced a series of propaganda posters ridiculing German forces. But the immediate and crude intellectual consequence of the war for Russia was that it cut off the Russian art community from Paris.

  Before World War I the Russian artistic presence in Paris was extensive. Futurism, begun by the Italian poet Filippo Marinetti, in 1909, had been taken up by Mikhail Larionov and Natalya Goncharova in 1914. Its two central ideas were first, that machinery had created a new kind of humanity, in so doing offering freedom from historical constraints; and second, that operating by confrontation was the only way to shake people out of their bourgeois complacencies. Although it didn’t last long, the confrontational side of futurism was the precursor to that aspect of Dada, surrealism, and the ‘happenings’ of the 1960s. In Paris, Goncharova designed Le Coq d’or for Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and Alexandre Benois worked for Serge Diaghdev’s Ballets Russes. Guillaume Apollinaire reviewed the exhibition of paintings by Larionov and Goncharova at the Galérie Paul Guillaume in Les Soirées de Paris, concluding that ‘a universal art is being created, an art in which painting, sculpture, poetry, music and even science in all its manifold aspects will be combined.’ In the same year, 1914, there was an exhibition of Chagall in Paris, and several paintings by Malevich were on show at the Salon des Indépendants. Other Russian artists in Paris before the war included Vladimir Tatlin, Lydia Popova, Eliezer Lissitzky, Naum Gabo, and Anton Pevsner. Wealthy Russian bourgeois collectors like Sergey Shchukin and Ivan Morozov collected some of the best modern pictures the French school had to offer, making friends with Picasso, Braque, Matisse, and Gertrude and Leo Stein.115 By the outbreak of war, Shchukin had collected 54 Picassos, 37 Matisses, 29 Gauguins, 26 Cézannes, and 19 Monets.116

  For Russians, the ease of travel before 1914 meant that their art was both open to international modernistic influences and yet distinctively Russian. The works of Goncharova, Malevich, and Chagall combined recognisable themes from the Russian ‘East’ but also images from the modern ‘West’: Orthodox icons and frozen Siberian landscapes but also iron girders, machines, airplanes, the whole scientific palette. Russian art was not backward before the revolution. In fact, ‘suprematism,’ a form of geometrical abstraction born of Malevich’s obsession with mathematics, appeared between the outbreak of war and revolution – yet another ‘ism’ to add to the profusion in Europe. But the explosion of revolution, coming in the middle of war, in October 1917, transformed painting and the other visual arts. Three artists and one commissar typified the revolution in Russian art: Malevich, Vladimir Tatlin, Alexandr Rodchenko, and Anatoli Lunacharsky.

  Lunacharsky was a sensitive and idealistic writer of no fewer than thirty six books who was convinced that art was central to the revolution and the regeneration of Russian life and he had firm ideas about its role.117 Now that the state was the only patron of art (the Shchukin collection was nationalised on 5 November 1918), Lunacharsky conceived the notion of a new f
orm of art, agitprop, combining agitation and propaganda. For him art was a significant medium of change.118 As commissar for education, an authority on music and theatre, Lunacharsky had Lenin’s ear, and for a time several grandiose plans were considered – for example, a proposal to erect at well-known landmarks in Moscow a series of statues, monuments of great international revolutionaries of the past. Loosely interpreted, many of the ‘revolutionaries’ were French: Georges-Jacques Danton, Jean-Paul Marat, Voltaire, Zola, Cézanne.119 The scheme, like so many others, failed simply for lack of resources: there was no shortage of artists in Russia, but there was of bronze.120 Other agitprop schemes were realised, at least for a while. There were agitprop posters and street floats, agitprop trains, and agitprop boats on the Volga.121 Lunacharsky also shook up the art schools, including the two most prestigious institutions, in Vitebsk, northwest of Smolensk, and Moscow. In 1918 the former was headed by Chagall, and Malevich and Lissitzky were members of its faculty; the latter, the Higher State Art Training School, or Vkhutemas School, in Moscow, was a sort of Bauhaus of Russia, ‘the most advanced art college in the world, and the ideological centre of Russian Constructivism.’122

  The early works of Kasimir Malevich (1878–1935) owe much to impressionism, but there are also strong echoes of Cézanne and Gauguin – bold, flat colour – and the Fauves, especially Matisse. Around 1912 Malevich’s images began to break up into a form of cubism. But the peasants in the fields that dominate this period of his work are clearly Russian. From 1912 on Malevich’s work changed again, growing simpler. He was always close to Velimir Khlebnikov, a poet and a mathematician, and Malevich’s paintings have been described as analogues to poetry, exploiting abstract, three-dimensional forms – triangles, circles, rectangles, with little colour variation.123 His shapes are less solid than those of Braque or Picasso. Finally, Malevich changed again, to his celebrated paintings of a black square on a white background and, in 1918, a white square on a white background. As revolution was opening up elsewhere, Malevich’s work represented one kind of closure in painting, about as far as it could be from representation. (A theoretician of art as well as a painter, he entitled one essay ‘The Objectless World.’)124 Malevich aimed to represent the simplicity, clarity, and cleanliness that he felt was a characteristic of mathematics, the beautiful simplicity of form, the essential shapes of nature, the abstract reality that lay beneath even cubism. Malevich revolutionised painting in Russia, pushing it to the limits of form, stripping it down to simple elements the way physicists were stripping matter.

  Malevich may have revolutionised painting, but constructivism was itself part of the revolution, closest to it in image and aim. Lunacharsky was intent on creating a people’s art, ‘an art of five kopeks,’ as he put it, cheap and available to everyone. Constructivism responded to the commissar’s demands with images that looked forward, that suggested endless movement and sought to blur the boundaries between artist and artisan, engineer or architect. Airplane wings, rivets, metal plates, set squares, these were the staple images of constructivism.125 Vladimir Tatlin (1885–1953), the main force in constructivism, was a sailor and a marine carpenter, but he was also an icon painter. Like Kandinsky and Malevich, he wanted to create new forms, logical forms.126 Like Lunacharsky he wanted to create a proletarian art, a socialist art. He started to use iron and glass, ‘socialist materials’ that everyone knew and was familiar with, materials that were ‘not proud.’127 Tatlin’s theories came together in 1919, two years after the revolution, when he was asked to design a monument to mark the Third Communist International, the association of revolutionary Marxist parties of the world. The design he came up with – unveiled at the Eighth Congress of the Soviets in Moscow in 1920 – was a slanting tower, 1,300 feet high, dwarfing even the Eiffel Tower, which was ‘only’ 1,000 feet. The slanting tower was a piece of propaganda for the state and for Tatlin’s conception of the place of engineering in art (he was a very jealous man, keenly competitive with Malevich).128 Designed in three sections, each of which rotated at a different speed, and built of glass and steel, Tatlin’s tower was regarded as the defining monument of constructivism, an endlessly dynamic useful object, loaded with heavy symbolism. The banner that hung above the model when it was unveiled read ‘Engineers create new forms.’ But of course, a society that had no bronze for statues of Voltaire and Danton had no steel or glass for Tatlin’s tower either, and it never went beyond the model stage: ‘It remains the most influential non-existent object of the twentieth-century, and one of the most paradoxical – an unworkable, probably unbuildable metaphor of practicality.’129 It was the perfect epitome of Malevich’s objectless world.

  The third of revolutionary Russia’s artistic trinity was the painter Alexander Rodchenko (1891–1956). Fired by the spirit of the revolution, he created his own brand of futurism and agitprop. Beginning with a variety of constructions, part architectural models, part sculpture, he turned to the stark realism of photography and the immediate impact of the poster.130 He sought an art form that was, in the words of Robert Hughes, as ‘arresting as a shout in the street’:131 ‘The art of the future will not be the cosy decoration of family homes. It will be just as indispensable as 48-storey skyscrapers, mighty bridges, wireless [radio], aeronautics and submarines, which will be transformed into art.’ With one of Russia’s great modernist poets, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Rodchenko formed a partnership whose common workshop stamp read, ‘Advertisement Constructors, Mayakovsky-Rodchenko.’132 Their posters were advertisements for the new state. For Rodchenko, propaganda became great art.133

  Rodchenko and Mayakovsky shared Tatlin’s and Lunacharsky’s ideas about proletarian art and about the reach of art. As true believers in the revolution, they thought that art should belong to everyone and even shared the commissar’s view that the whole country, or at least the state, should be regarded as a work of art.134 This may seem grandiose to the point of absurdity now; it was deadly serious then. For Rodchenko, photography was the most proletarian art: even more than typography or textile design (other interests of his), it was cheap, and could be repeated as often as the situation demanded. Here are some typical Rodchenko arguments:

  Down with ART as bright PATCHES

  on the undistinguished life of the

  man of property.

  Down with ART as a precious STONE

  midst the dark and filthy life of the pauper.

  Down with art as a means of

  ESCAPING from LIFE which is

  not worth living.135

  and:

  Tell me, frankly, what ought to remain of Lenin:

  an art bronze,

  oil portraits,

  etchings,

  watercolours,

  his secretary’s diary, his friends’ memoirs –

  or a file of photographs taken of him at work and at rest, archives of his books, writing pads, notebooks, shorthand reports, films, phonograph records? I don’t think there’s any choice.

  Art has no place in modern life…. Every modern cultured man must wage war against art, as against opium.

  Don’t he.

  Take photo after photo!136

  Taking this perfect constructivist material – modern, humble, real, influenced by his friend, the Russian film director Dziga Vertov – Rodchenko began a series of photomontages that used repetition, distortion, magnification and other techniques to interpret and reinterpret the revolution to the masses. For Rodchenko, even beer, a proletarian drink, could be revolutionary, an explosive force.

  Even though they were created as art forms for the masses, suprematism and constructivism are now considered ‘high art.’ Their intended influence on the proletariat was ephemeral. With the grandiose schemes failing for lack of funds, it was difficult for the state to continue arguing that it was a work of art. In the ‘new’ modern Russia, art lost the argument that it was the most important aspect of life. The proletariat was more interested in food, jobs, housing, and beer.

  It does not
diminish the horror of World War I, or reduce our debt to those who gave their lives, to say that most of the responses considered here were positive. There seems to be something in human nature such that, even when it makes an art form, or a philosophy, out of pessimism, as Dada did, it is the art form or the philosophy that lasts, not the pessimism. Few would wish to argue which was the worst period of darkness in the twentieth century, the western front in 1914–18, Stalin’s Russia, or Hitler’s Reich, but something can be salvaged from ‘the Great War’.

  * The hostilities also hastened man’s understanding of flight, and introduced the tank. But the principles of the former were already understood, and the latter, though undeniably important, had little impact outside military affairs.

  PART TWO

  SPENGLER TO ANIMAL FARM

  Civilisations and Their Discontents

  10

  ECLIPSE

  One of the most influential postwar ideas in Europe was published in April 1918, in the middle of the Ludendorff offensive – what turned out to be the decisive event of the war in the West, when General Erich Ludendorff, Germany’s supreme commander in Flanders, failed to pin the British against the north coast of France and Belgium and separate them from other forces, weakening himself in the process. Oswald Spengler, a schoolmaster living in Munich, wrote Der Untergang des Abendlandes (literally, The Sinking of the Evening Lands, translated into English as The Decline of the West) in 1914, using a title he had come up with in 1912. Despite all that had happened, he had changed hardly a word of his book, which he was to describe modestly ten years later as ‘the philosophy of our time.1

  Spengler was born in 1880 in Blankenburg, a hundred miles southwest of Berlin, the son of emotionally undemonstrative parents whose reserve forced on their son an isolation that seems to have been crucial to his formative years. This solitary individual grew up with a family of very Germanic giants: Richard Wagner, Ernst Haeckel, Henrik Ibsen, and Friedrich Nietzsche. It was Nietzsche’s distinction between Kultur and Zivilisation that particularly impressed the teenage Spengler. In this context, Kultur may be said to be represented by Zarathustra, the solitary seer creating his own order out of the wilderness. Zivilisation, on the other hand, is represented, say, by the Venice of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, glittering and sophisticated but degenerate, decaying, corrupt.2 Another influence was the economist and sociologist Werner Sombart, who in 1911 had published an essay entitled ‘Technology and Culture,’ where he argued that the human dimension of life was irreconcilable with the mechanical, the exact reverse of the Futurist view. There was a link, Sombart said, between economic and political liberalism and the ‘oozing flood of commercialism’ that was beginning to drag down the Western world. Sombart went further and declared that there were two types in history, Heroes and Traders. These two types were typified at their extremes by, respectively, Germany – heroes – and the traders of Britain.