The Purple Decades

by Tom Wolfe

  All the major Modern movements except for De Stijl, Dada, Constructivism, and Surrealism began before the First World War, and yet they all seem to come out of the 1920s. Why? Because it was in the 1920s that Modern Art achieved social chic in Paris, London, Berlin, and New York. Smart people talked about it, wrote about it, enthused over it, and borrowed from it, as I say; Modern Art achieved the ultimate social acceptance: interior decorators did knock-offs of it in Belgravia and the sixteenth arrondissement.

  Things like knock-off specialists, money, publicity, the smart set, and Le Chic shouldn’t count in the history of art, as we all know—but, thanks to the artists themselves, they do. Art and fashion are a two-backed beast today; the artists can yell at fashion, but they can’t move out ahead. That has come about as follows:

  By 1900 the artist’s arena—the place where he seeks honor, glory, ease, Success—had shifted twice. In seventeenth-century Europe the artist was literally, and also psychologically, the house guest of the nobility and the royal court (except in Holland); fine art and court art were one and the same. In the eighteenth century the scene shifted to the salons, in the homes of the wealthy bourgeoisie as well as those of aristocrats, where Culture-minded members of the upper classes held regular meetings with selected artists and writers. The artist was still the Gentleman, not yet the Genius. After the French Revolution, artists began to leave the salons and join cénacles, which were fraternities of like-minded souls huddled at some place like the Café Guerbois rather than a town house; around some romantic figure, an artist rather than a socialite, someone like Victor Hugo, Charles Nodier, Théophile Gautier, or, later, Edouard Manet. What held the cénacles together was that merry battle spirit we have all come to know and love: épatez la bourgeoisie, shock the middle class. With Gautier’s cénacle especially … with Gautier’s own red vests, black scarves, crazy hats, outrageous pronouncements, huge thirsts, and ravenous groin … the modern picture of The Artist began to form: the poor but free spirit, plebeian but aspiring only to be classless, to cut himself forever free from the bonds of the greedy and hypocritical bourgeoisie, to be whatever the fat burghers feared most, to cross the line wherever they drew it, to look at the world in a way they couldn’t see, to be high, live low, stay young forever—in short, to be the bohemian.

  By 1900 and the era of Picasso, Braque & Co., the modern game of Success in Art was pretty well set. As a painter or sculptor the artist would do work that baffled or subverted the cozy bourgeois vision of reality. As an individual—well, that was a bit more complex. As a bohemian, the artist had now left the salons of the upper classes—but he had not left their world. For getting away from the bourgeoisie there’s nothing like packing up your paints and easel and heading for Tahiti, or even Brittany, which was Gauguin’s first stop. But who else even got as far as Brittany? Nobody. The rest got no farther than the heights of Montmartre and Montparnasse, which are what?—perhaps two miles from the Champs Elysées. Likewise in the United States: believe me, you can get all the tubes of Winsor & Newton paint you want in Cincinnati, but the artists keep migrating to New York all the same … You can see them six days a week … hot off the Carey airport bus, lined up in front of the real-estate office on Broome Street in their identical blue jeans, gum boots, and quilted Long March jackets … looking, of course, for the inevitable Loft …

  No, somehow the artist wanted to remain within walking distance … He took up quarters just around the corner from … le monde, the social sphere described so well by Balzac, the milieu of those who find it important to be in fashion, the orbit of those aristocrats, wealthy bourgeois, publishers, writers, journalists, impresarios, performers, who wish to be “where things happen,” the glamorous but small world of that creation of the nineteenth-century metropolis, tout le monde, Everybody, as in “Everybody says” … the smart set, in a phrase … “smart,” with its overtones of cultivation as well as cynicism.

  The ambitious artist, the artist who wanted Success, now had to do a bit of psychological double-tracking. Consciously he had to dedicate himself to the anti-bourgeois values of the cénacles of whatever sort, to bohemia, to the Bloomsbury life, the Left Bank life, the Lower Broadway Loft life, to the sacred squalor of it all, to the grim silhouette of the black Reo rig Lower Manhattan truck-route internal-combustion granules that were already standing an eighth of an inch thick on the poisoned roach carcasses atop the electric hot-plate burner by the time you got up for breakfast … Not only that, he had to dedicate himself to the quirky god Avant-Garde. He had to keep one devout eye peeled for the new edge on the blade of the wedge of the head on the latest pick thrust of the newest exploratory probe of this fall’s avant-garde Breakthrough of the Century … all this in order to make it, to be noticed, to be counted, within the community of artists themselves. What is more, he had to be sincere about it. At the same time he had to keep his other eye cocked to see if anyone in le monde was watching. Have they noticed me yet? Have they even noticed the new style (that me and my friends are working in)? Don’t they even know about Tensionism (or Slice Art or Niho or Innerism or Dimensional Creamo or whatever)? (Hello, out there!) … because as every artist knew in his heart of hearts, no matter how many times he tried to close his eyes and pretend otherwise (History! History!—where is thy salve!) Success was real only when it was success within le monde.

  He could close his eyes and try to believe that all that mattered was that he knew his work was great … and that other artists respected it … and that History would surely record his achievements … but deep down he knew he was lying to himself. I want to be a Name, goddamn it!—at least that, a name, a name on the lips of the museum curators, gallery owners, collectors, patrons, board members, committee members, Culture hostesses, and their attendant intellectuals and journalists and their Time and Newsweek—all right!—even that!—Time and Newsweek—Oh yes! (ask the shades of Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko!)—even the goddamned journalists!

  During the 1960s this entire process by which le monde, the culturati, scout bohemia and tap the young artist for Success was acted out in the most graphic way. Early each spring, two emissaries from the Museum of Modern Art, Alfred Barr and Dorothy Miller, would head downtown from the Museum on West Fifty-third Street, down to Saint Marks Place, Little Italy, Broome Street and environs, and tour the loft studios of known artists and unknowns alike, looking at everything, talking to one and all, trying to get a line on what was new and significant in order to put together a show in the fall … and, well, I mean, my God—from the moment the two of them stepped out on Fifty-third Street to grab a cab, some sort of boho radar began to record their sortie … They’re coming! … And rolling across Lower Manhattan, like the Cosmic Pulse of the theosophists, would be a unitary heartbeat:

  Pick me pick me pick me pick me pick me pick me pick me … O damnable Uptown!

  By all means, deny it if asked!—what one knows, in one’s cheating heart, and what one says are two different things!

  So it was that the art mating ritual developed early in the century—in Paris, in Rome, in London, Berlin, Munich, Vienna, and, not too long afterward, in New York. As we’ve just seen, the ritual has two phases:

  (1) The Boho Dance, in which the artist shows his stuff within the circles, coteries, movements, isms, of the home neighborhood, bohemia itself, as if he doesn’t care about anything else; as if, in fact, he has a knife in his teeth against the fashionable world uptown.

  (2) The Consummation, in which culturati from that very same world, le monde, scout the various new movements and new artists of bohemia, select those who seem the most exciting, original, important, by whatever standards—and shower them with all the rewards of celebrity.

  By the First World War the process was already like what in the Paris clip joints of the day was known as an apache dance. The artist was like the female in the act, stamping her feet, yelling defiance one moment, feigning indifference the next, resisting the advances of her pursuer with absolute contempt
… more thrashing about … more rake-a-cheek fury … more yelling and carrying on … until finally with one last mighty and marvelous ambiguous shriek—pain! ecstasy! —she submits … Paff paff paff paff paff … How you do it, my boy! … and the house lights rise and Everyone, tout le monde, applauds …

  The artist’s payoff in this ritual is obvious enough. He stands to gain precisely what Freud says are the goals of the artist: fame, money, and beautiful lovers. But what about le monde, the culturati, the social members of the act? What’s in it for them? Part of their reward is the ancient and semi-sacred status of Benefactor of the Arts. The arts have always been a doorway into Society, and in the largest cities today the arts—the museum boards, arts councils, fund drives, openings, parties, committee meetings—have completely replaced the churches in this respect. But there is more!

  Today there is a peculiarly modern reward that the avant-garde artist can give his benefactor: namely, the feeling that he, like his mate the artist, is separate from and aloof from the bourgeoisie, the middle classes … the feeling that he may be from the middle class but he is no longer in it … the feeling that he is a fellow soldier, or at least an aide-de-camp or an honorary cong guerrilla in the vanguard march through the land of the philistines. This is a peculiarly modern need and a peculiarly modern kind of salvation (from the sin of Too Much Money) and something quite common among the well-to-do all over the West, in Rome and Milan as well as New York. That is why collecting contemporary art, the leading edge, the latest thing, warm and wet from the Loft, appeals specifically to those who feel most uneasy about their own commercial wealth … See? I’m not like them—those Jaycees, those United Fund chairmen, those Young Presidents, those mindless New York A.C. goyisheh hog-jowled stripe-tied goddamn-good-to-see-you-you-old-bastard-you oyster-bar trenchermen … Avant-garde art, more than any other, takes the Mammon and the Moloch out of money, puts Levi’s, turtlenecks, muttonchops, and other mantles and laurels of bohemian grace upon it.

  That is why collectors today not only seek out the company of, but also want to hang out amidst, lollygag around with, and enter into the milieu of … the artists they patronize. They want to climb those vertiginous loft building stairs on Howard Street that go up five flights without a single turn or bend—straight up! like something out of a casebook dream—to wind up with their hearts ricocheting around in their rib cages with tachycardia from the exertion mainly but also from the anticipation that just beyond this door at the top … in this loft … lie the real goods … paintings, sculptures that are indisputably part of the new movement, the new école, the new wave … something unshrinkable, chipsy, pure cong, bourgeois-proof.

  Great Moments in Contemporary Architecture

  The Clients’ First Night in the House

  “Well, maybe we’ll make Architectural Digest anyway.”

  “We damn well better.”

  THE WHITE GODS

  *

  All at once, in 1937, the Silver Prince himself was here, in America. Walter Gropius; in person; in the flesh; and here to stay. In the wake of the Nazis’ rise to power, Gropius had fled Germany, going first to England and coming now to the United States. Other stars of the fabled Bauhaus arrived at about the same time: Breuer, Albers, Moholy-Nagy, Bayer, and Mies van der Rohe, who had become head of the Bauhaus in 1930, two years after Gropius, already under pressure because of the left-wing aura of the compound, had resigned. Here they came, uprooted, exhausted, penniless, men without a country, battered by fate.

  Gropius had the healthy self-esteem of any ambitious man, but he was a gentleman above all else, a gentleman of the old school, a man who was always concerned about a sense of proportion, in life as well as in design. As a refugee from a blighted land, he would have been content with a friendly welcome, a place to lay his head, two or three meals a day until he could get on his own feet, a smile every once in a while, and a chance to work, if anybody needed him. And instead—

  The reception of Gropius and his confreres was like a certain stock scene from the jungle movies of that period. Bruce Cabot and Myrna Loy make a crash landing in the jungle and crawl out of the wreckage in their Abercrombie & Fitch white safari blouses and tan gabardine jodhpurs and stagger into a clearing. They are surrounded by savages with bones through their noses—who immediately bow down and prostrate themselves and commence a strange moaning chant.

  The White Gods!

  Come from the skies at last!

  From From Bauhaus to Our House, chapter 3 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981). First published in Harper’s, June 1981.

  Gropius was made head of the school of architecture at Harvard, and Breuer joined him there. Moholy-Nagy opened the New Bauhaus, which evolved into the Chicago Institute of Design. Albers opened a rural Bauhaus in the hills of North Carolina, at Black Mountain College. Mies was installed as dean of architecture at the Armour Institute in Chicago. And not just dean; master builder also. He was given a campus to create, twenty-one buildings in all, as the Armour Institute merged with the Lewis Institute to form the Illinois Institute of Technology. Twenty-one large buildings, in the middle of the Depression, at a time when building had come almost to a halt in the United States —for an architect who had completed only seventeen buildings in his career—

  O white gods.

  Such prostrations! Such acts of homage! The Museum of Modern Art honored Gropius with a show called “Bauhaus: 1919–1928’” those being the years when Gropius headed it. Philip Johnson, now thirty-four years old, could resist the physical presence of the gods no longer. He decamped to Harvard to study to become an architect at Gropius’ feet. Starting from zero! (If the truth be known, he would have preferred to be at Mies’ feet, but to a supremely urbane young man like Johnson, we may be sure, the thought of moving to Chicago, Illinois, for three years was a bit more zero than he had in mind.)

  It was embarrassing, perhaps … but it was the kind of thing one could learn to live with … . Within three years the course of American architecture had changed, utterly. It was not so much the buildings the Germans designed in the United States, although Mies’ were to become highly influential a decade later. It was more the system of instruction they introduced. Still more, it was their very presence. The most fabled creatures in all the mythology of twentieth-century American art—namely, those dazzling European artists poised so exquisitely against the rubble—they were … here! … now! … in the land of the colonial complex … to govern, in person, their big little Nigeria of the Arts.

  This curious phase of late colonial history was by no means confined to architecture, for the colonial complex was all-pervasive. Stars of the two great rival movements of European painting, the Cubists and Surrealists, began arriving as refugees in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Léger, Mondrian, Modigliani, Chagall, Max Ernst, André Breton, Yves Tanguy—O white gods! The American Scene and Social Realist painting of the 1930s vanished, never to reappear. From the Europeans, artists in New York learned how to create their own clerisy. The first American art compound, the so-called New York School of abstract expressionists, was formed in the 1940s, with regular meetings, manifestos, new theories, new visual codes, the lot. Arnold Schoenberg, the white god of all the white gods in European music, arrived as a refugee in 1936. For the next forty years, serious music in America became a footnote to Schoenberg’s theory of serial composition. There was considerable irony here. Many European composers looked to American jazz and to American composers such as George Gershwin, Aaron Copland, and Ferde Grofé as liberating forces, a way out of the hyperrationalization of European avant-garde music as typified by Schoenberg. But serious American composers, by and large, were having none of that. They acted like Saudis being told their tents were marvelous because they were so natural and indigenous and earthy. They wanted the real thing—the European thing—and they fastened onto it with a vengeance. Thereafter, Gershwin, Copland, and Grofé were spoken of with condescension or else plain derision.v

  In a
rchitecture, naturally, the Silver Prince became the chief executive, the governor of the colony, as it were. The teaching of architecture at Harvard was transformed overnight. Everyone started from zero. Everyone was now taught in the fundamentals of the International—which is to say, the compound—Style. All architecture became nonbourgeois architecture, although the concept itself was left discreetly unexpressed, as it were. The old Beaux-Arts traditions became heresy, and so did the legacy of Frank Lloyd Wright, which had only barely made its way into the architecture schools in the first place. Within three years, every so-called major American contribution to contemporary architecture—whether by Wright, H. H. Richardson, creator of the heavily rusticated American Romanesque, or Louis Sullivan, leader of the “Chicago School” of skyscraper architects—had dropped down into the footnotes, into the ibid. thickets.

  Wright himself was furious and, for one of the few times in his life, bewildered. It was hard to say what got under his skin more: the fact that his work had been upstaged by the Europeans or the fact that he was now treated as a species of walking dead man. He was not deprived of honor and respect, but when he got it, it often sounded like a memorial service. For example, the Museum of Modern Art put on an exhibition of Wright’s work in 1940—but it was in tandem with a show of the work of the movie director D. W. Griffith, who had retired in 1931. Mies made a very gracious statement about what a genius Wright was and how he had opened up the eyes of European architects … back before the First World War … As to just what debt he might have felt to the eighty-odd buildings Wright had designed since then, he didn’t say.

  The late 1920s and early 1930s had been disastrous for Wright. He was already fifty-eight when a fire destroyed his studio at Taliesin, Wisconsin, in 1925. Troubles with his mistress, Miriam Noel, seemed to paralyze his practice. His business had fallen off badly even before the Depression. Wright had finally holed up, like a White Russian on his uppers, in his rebuilt redoubt at Taliesin, with a dozen or so apprentices, known as the Taliesin Fellows, his porkpie hats, berets, high collars and flowing neckties, and his capes from Stevenson, the Chicago tailor. Wright himself had been an apprentice of Louis Sullivan and had broken with or been fired by him—each had his own version—but Wright had taken with him Sullivan’s vision of a totally new and totally American architecture, arising from the American terrain and the spirit of the Middle West. Well, now, finally, in the late 1930s, there was a totally new architecture in America, and it had come straight from Germany, Holland, and France, the French component being Le Corbusier.