Alongside these revolutionary changes, enacted primarily in Europe and America in the half-century between 1880 and 1930, took place one of the supreme cultural experiments in history. And if we accept that art then had a social importance it can no longer claim today, we should not be surprised to find that it had quite a bit to say about how to live—how to live amid the new technology and the new world it was making, how to live in a world without God. A lot of it was implied in the paintings and sculpture of the time, but it was there, and there in abundance.
At the most basic level, with very few exceptions (Chagall, Rouault), the art of modernism was a secular art—religious themes are notable by their absence. In Robert Hughes’s seminal book The Shock of the New, for example, covering the period 1874–1991, of 268 illustrations, only nine could be considered religious (Munch’s Madonna, Gaudí’s cathedral in Barcelona, Rothko’s chapel on the grounds of the Menil Collection in Houston). Modern art is a celebration of the secular.
Though important, crucial even, this was not totally new. There had been no shortage of secular painting in the eighteenth or the nineteenth centuries. But what was new, what was a major break, occurred in painting with the innovations of Impressionism, the patchwork compositions of Cézanne, the Pointillism of Seurat and the Cubist works of Braque and Picasso. Here the very foundations of reality—of seeing, of understanding seeing—were being experimented with, just as the experiments in physics taking place at much the same time were yielding—in the X-ray, radio waves and the electron, for instance—new building blocks of nature. Painting was overwhelmed by these innovations: they changed the very idea of art and how we are to understand ourselves.
The church—God—had no part in this new self-understanding, which, taking a leaf out of the new sciences, was experimental in approach. Instead, the paintings of this half-century explored the constituent elements of visual experience—color, light, form—building innovation upon innovation in what was essentially an optimistic adulation of the new world coming into being at that time. Not everyone was equally optimistic, and some not at all, but on balance turn-of-the-century artists were exuberant about their new freedoms and luxuriated in the comforts newly available.
This is easy to overlook. The Impressionists and those who came immediately after them seemed entirely untroubled by the death of God. This life, in all its novelty (an inadequate word, trivializing what were transformative innovations), was more than sufficient. For them, as their paintings show, the conditions of the new life were bountiful, and for many that was enough.
AN UNTROUBLED SENSE OF WHOLENESS
Claude Monet was the most explicit. In 1892, the year Ellis Island became a reception center for immigrants to the United States and Tchaikovsky premiered his Nutcracker ballet, Monet rented a room opposite the west front of Rouen Cathedral. Over the following weeks he made around twenty paintings of the same façade under different conditions of light. “Certainly, he had no religious motive in painting the building. Monet was not a pious Frenchman. Never had so famous a religious object been treated in so secular a way.” Here was a Gothic cathedral, with all the lugubrious associations that went with the Middle Ages. But Monet’s brilliantly simple vision and his limpid technique implied that consciousness was more important than religion; his subject was not a view but the act of seeing that view, “a process of mind, unfolding subjectively, never fixed, always becoming.” The fixed certainties of religion, its fixed beauties, were—by this act—dispelled. Consciousness and the will were what counted. Religion, religious beauty, are a function of the human mind.2
Monet’s treatment of the great Parisian railroad stations was not dissimilar. His stations were not the ugly, dirty behemoths of an industrial world, but the locus of the dramas of departure and arrival. Here the excited worship of the locomotive and of the power and beauty of steam, out of which the paintings seem to be constructed, the new experience of travel that railways make possible, confirm the terminus as the new focus of cities, a position that cathedrals once occupied and around which life coalesces.
Later, after Monet moved into his property at Giverny and began to paint what he owned, he concentrated—as the world knows—on water lilies and his pond. The pond, as one critic saw, was a “slice of infinity.” “To seize the infinite; to fix what is unstable; to give form and location to sights so evanescent and complex that they could hardly be named—these were the basic ambitions of modernism, and they went against the smug view of determined reality that materialism and positivism give us.”3 Monet saw what Wallace Stevens was to put into words: that infinity is itself a poetic idea.
The secular world of pleasure—middle-class pleasure, not aristocratic—was nowhere better caught than by the Impressionists, whose first show, in 1874, preceded Nietzsche’s pronouncements by nearly a decade, though the ascendency of the secular world could already be seen everywhere. Alfred Sisley and Gustave Caillebotte, Degas, Pissarro and Renoir were each very different in artistic style, but they did have something in common. “It was a feeling that the life of the city and the village, the cafés and the bois, the salons and the bedrooms, the boulevards, the seaside and the banks of the Seine, could become a vision of Eden—a world of ripeness and bloom, projecting an untroubled sense of wholeness.” Yes, wholeness. In the Impressionist world God was not missed. More than that, the Impressionists showed us that pleasures, truths, are fugitive, evanescent, may not outlast the moment. In Impressionism there is no difference between the moment and eternity.
Seurat, however, wasn’t satisfied with the inherently fugitive nature of Impressionism. He wanted something more stable, even more monumental; and as a child of the nineteenth century, and in particular of the scientific-positivist nineteenth century, he wanted to bring science—or elements of science—into his art. Particle physics hadn’t yet emerged, but the periodic table had been established by the Russian Dmitri Mendeleev (in 1869), and the elements were regarded as the constituent units of reality—the building blocks of nature. Seurat attempted something parallel in his theory of Pointillism, based on published theories of color perception and organized around small dots of pure color that the eye converted into an image. The stipples were so small—little cells of color—that all manner of variations could be incorporated; Pointillism lent itself to calm, hieratic, luminous subjects rather than dramatic or violent ones.4
Robert Hughes describes Seurat’s Port of Gravelines Channel (1890) as a “landscape of thought.” This landscape is notable for its complete lack of incident; its subject is light, the hazy luminosity of the north coast of France. A third of the picture is of the sky, the heavens, but for Seurat heaven is Gravelines itself on an afternoon such as this, when nothing moves because everything is in its rightful place. Slow down, Seurat is saying to the spectator, slow down and stop, stop and look. Don’t let heaven pass you by.
This attitude is developed further in what is arguably his greatest work, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884–86). It is afternoon again, a Sunday afternoon. People are not at church, not worshipping. They are picnicking, promenading, sailing, playing, walking the dog, enjoying themselves and the weather—what the city and nature have to offer. To the right, near the foreground, stand a very fashionable couple, dressed in gray and black. Have they just been to church? They survey the scene from the (moral?) high ground, taking in the countless people enjoying themselves in very secular ways, most with their backs turned. But there is more context to this picture than in the view of Gravelines. This is a large painting, the size of history paintings in the French tradition, designed essentially for public contemplation. The painting is, if anything, overpopulated, but that serves only to emphasize that all the figures—the dandy with his cane, the girl skipping, the people lounging on the grass—are treated with a monumentality, a nobility and grace that were once reserved for gods and kings. This was an early sighting of what was to be a major theme in twentieth-ce
ntury art, in writing as much as in painting—namely, the heroism of everyday life, particularly life in the city with all its tensions, antagonisms, brutalities and dirt. In Sunday Afternoon there is no tension, no dirt, no brutality.
But this vision of pleasure has a seriousness about it. “Seurat had grasped that there is something atomized, divided, and analytical about modernist awareness. . . . To build a unified meaning, in this state of extreme self-consciousness, meant that the subject had to be broken down into molecules and then re-assembled under the eye of formal order. Reality became permanent when it was displayed as a web of tiny, distinct stillnesses.”5 This prefigures T. S. Eliot’s admonition in “Ash Wednesday” (1930): “Teach us to sit still.”
COLOR AS MEANING
Matisse’s aims coincided with Monet’s and Seurat’s, and built on them. Born in 1869, the year the Cutty Sark was launched, he died in 1954, the year the first hydrogen bomb exploded at Bikini Atoll. He lived through some of the worst political traumas, but you would never know it from his art. Nowhere in Matisse does one feel the alienation or conflict that the modern world seems to have stimulated in so many. His studio was a “place of equilibrium” that for more than fifty years produced a world within a world, “images of comfort, refuge, and balanced satisfaction.” Much impressed by Manet and Cézanne (he bought one of the latter’s works very early on), he was also influenced by Seurat, becoming friends with Seurat’s closest follower, Paul Signac. Signac did several paintings of St. Tropez that were instrumental in attracting Matisse to the South of France—and the Mediterranean.
In particular he was very taken with one of Signac’s large works, In the Time of Harmony, which shows an Arcadia, a scene of “relaxation and farming by the sea,” a visualization of Signac’s anarchist beliefs. This seems to have been one of the inspirations for Matisse’s own Luxe, Calme et Volupté (1904–5), nudists picnicking by the sea near St. Tropez. It was, as Hughes has it, Matisse’s first attempt to depict the Mediterranean “as a state of mind.” Not long after, he produced the first of what would become a familiar motif—the sea, the Mediterranean, seen through a window. The bright, discordant—even garish—colors shocked many people to begin with, as did Matisse’s depiction of individuals in a pre-civilized world, Eden before the Fall, showing figures in their original state, languid as plants or unbridled as animals in the wild. In the two notable works he did for the Russian collector Sergey Shchukin, The Dance and Music, Matisse takes us back into deep antiquity, before even the red-figure vases of ancient Greece, all the way back to the caves. In the former painting he is showing us the ecstasy the ancients obtained from acts of primitive worship, and in the latter, a group of hunter-gatherers engaging in music and song, one of the basic pleasures of life that may have been born with religion. Here there is an overlap, knowing or not, with Laban.
The sensuality of such works is present in The Red Studio of 1911, a closed space in which the “windows” are provided by Matisse’s own paintings dotted about the walls. All have red in them so that, with the flat red of the studio walls which encompasses everything, this is red beyond ordinary experience. The loveliness of the whole is part of the point; this is a self-contained work, celebrating the self-contained world that art can offer, a “republic of pleasure, a parenthesis within the real world—a paradise.”6
During the war years Matisse moved to the South of France—the Mediterranean—and found a large studio in Nice from where he continued to produce paintings in which the common theme was “the act of contemplating a benevolent world from a position of utter security.”7 In a painting like Porte-Fenêtre à Collioure (1914), ambitiously near-abstract, he was, he admitted, painting his emotions. The purples and blacks and grays, however, are not—as might be conventionally imagined—depressive in their effect. On the contrary, this daring composition—looking forward to Rothko decades later—has a self-confidence about it; it is a perfect example of Matisse’s aim, to combine the familiar and the new, to show that the new world of the twentieth century, its innovations, ideas and discoveries, did not have to be worrying and dislocating, that in fact dislocation could be managed, even beautiful.
Many painters would head to the South of France in search of colors and a landscape that would help them intensify their pictures. What all these artists had in common was a feeling that color was the sign of vitality, the emblem of well-being; it extended and sharpened the artist’s—and the viewer’s—sense of energy, their shared joie de vivre. Color was a gift of nature and the artist’s job was to intensify the experience of nature, enhancing life. The black habit and biretta of the priest have no place here. Matisse’s art never shouts, but it convinces. There is heroism in this.
THE MAGIC OF METAL, THE WORSHIP OF MACHINES
The sheer joy in color that united so many artists at the turn of the twentieth century radiated, as already noted, an optimism about the emergent new world, an optimism that was shared—trumpeted far and wide—by the Futurists, led by the Italian Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944), almost a machine himself, tireless and repetitive. His influence spread far beyond his native country, as far afield as Russia, “where the Futurist worship of the machine and its Promethean sense of technology as the solvent of all social ills became a central issue for Constructivists after 1913.” He devised an approach in which every kind of human behavior could be seen as “art,” thus again intensifying life, and in this way spawned the rash of happenings, events and performance pieces later in the century.
Marinetti was convinced that the past—traditional religion as much as anything—was the enemy; that technology had created a new kind of individual—machine visionaries—redrawing the cultural map and creating hitherto undreamed-of experiences and liberties, transforming awareness. “Machinery was power; it was freedom from historical restraint.” In his Futurist Manifesto, published in 1909, he announced: “We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness. Courage, audacity and revolt will be the essential ingredients of our poetry. We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty; the beauty of speed. . . . We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot.”8
This message was rather suborned by the brute fact of the First World War, when the sheer speed of the machine gun (four hundred rounds a minute) was considerably more lethal than life-enhancing, and when artillery, tanks and U-boats could only underline that the Futurist obsession with the machine was at least somewhat misplaced. But Fernand Léger, who was not strictly speaking a Futurist in his worship of the machine and of metal, was not put off by war. The son of a Normandy farmer, he had fought in the trenches during the war, where he had experienced, he said, a great visual epiphany: “the breech of a 75-millimeter gun in the sunlight, the magic of light on white metal.”
He first applied this vision to the soldiers he knew in the trenches, painting repetitive rows of bodies and helmets and medals and insignia, all presented as tubes of metal. What interested Léger about metal was not its inhumanity but almost the reverse—its adaptability. In one of his grandest compositions, Three Women (1921), introduced earlier, all the bodies and furniture are geometrically simplified, formed as if of metal tubes. “It is one of the supreme didactic paintings . . . embodying an idea of society-as-a-machine, bringing harmony and an end to loneliness”—in a word, secular redemption. “We are offered a metaphor of human relationships working smoothly as a clock,” everything in its place, the women (and the cat) comfortable with themselves; the scene is placid, even, and though metallic on the surface, far removed from the industrial nightmare often associated with steel and iron. Visually, it is nothing like one of Monet’s railroad stations, but the sentiment is not dissimilar. Again, this is a world that has left churches behind.
It was wartime, too, that witnessed the movement known as Dada, which built—or tried to build—on the joy that the painters in the South of France in the pre-war years had ce
lebrated. One meaning of Dada is that it began with a “joyous Slavonic affirmation,” “Da da!”—“Yes! Yes!”—to life. The abstract artist Hans Arp, working in Zurich during the Great War alongside James Joyce and Lenin, said, “We searched for an elementary art that would, we thought, save mankind from the furious madness of those times . . . we wanted an anonymous and collective art,” collective being the crucial point.9 The core myth of the avant-garde was that by changing the language of art it could reform the order of experience, and so improve the conditions of social life. The Dadaists subscribed to this view as much as the Futurists did. The Dadaists focused on play as the highest human activity—the antithesis of war—and highlighted chance as a way to bring about what it wanted to happen.
Play has a long history in Western philosophy, going back at least to Schiller, who exalted play as the most disinterested—and therefore pure—activity man can aspire to. The new understanding of childhood, since Freud, as the primal battleground of the instincts, was also therefore a pure or original state, which, it was felt—if it could be achieved, or emulated—would release with clarity the simple building blocks of our psychological nature.
The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God Page 14