The revolution in physics and psychology was paralleled by a revolution in literature and the arts. Before 1914, writers and artists self-consciously rejected the traditional literary and artistic styles that had dominated European cultural life since the Renaissance. The changes that they produced have since been called Modernism.
NATURALISM Throughout much of the late nineteenth century, literature was dominated by Naturalism. Naturalists accepted the material world as real and felt that literature should be realistic. By addressing social problems, writers could contribute to an objective understanding of the world. Although Naturalism was a continuation of Realism, it lacked the underlying note of liberal optimism about people and society that had been prevalent in the 1850s. The Naturalists were pessimistic about Europe’s future and often portrayed characters caught in the grip of forces beyond their control.
The novels of the French writer Émile Zola (ay-MEEL ZOH-lah) (1840-1902) provide a good example of Naturalism. Against a backdrop of the urban slums and coalfields of northern France, Zola showed how alcoholism and different environments affected people’s lives. He had read Darwin’s Origin of Species and had been impressed by its emphasis on the struggle for survival and the importance of environment and heredity. These themes were central to his Rougon-Macquart, a twenty-volume series of novels on the “natural and social history of a family.” Zola maintained that the artist must analyze and dissect life as a biologist would a living organism. He said, “I have simply done on living bodies the work of analysis which surgeons perform on corpses.”
The second half of the nineteenth century was a golden age for Russian literature. The nineteenth-century realistic novel reached its high point in the works of Leo Tolstoy (TOHL-stoy) (1828-1910) and Fyodor Dostoevsky (FYUD-ur dos-tuh-YEF-skee) (1821-1881). Tolstoy’s greatest work was War and Peace, a lengthy novel played out against the historical background of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812. It is realistic in its vivid descriptions of military life and character portrayal. Each person is delineated clearly and analyzed psychologically. Upon a great landscape, Tolstoy imposed a fatalistic view of history that ultimately proved irrelevant in the face of life’s enduring values of human love and trust.
Dostoevsky combined narrative skill and acute psychological and moral observation with profound insights into human nature. He maintained that the major problem of his age was a loss of spiritual belief. Western people were attempting to gain salvation through the construction of a materialistic paradise built only by human reason and human will. Dostoevsky feared that the failure to incorporate spirit would result in total tyranny. His own life experiences led him to believe that only through suffering and faith could the human soul be purified, views that are evident in his best-known works, Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov.
SYMBOLISM At the turn of the century, a new group of writers, known as the Symbolists, reacted against Realism. Primarily interested in writing poetry, the Symbolists believed that an objective knowledge of the world was impossible. The external world was not real but only a collection of symbols that reflected the true reality of the individual human mind. Art, they believed, should function for its own sake instead of serving, criticizing, or seeking to understand society. In the works of such Symbolist poets asW. B. Yeats (YAYTS) and Rainer Maria Rilke (RY-nuh mah-REE-uh RILL-kuh), poetry ceased to be part of popular culture because only through a knowledge of the poet’s personal language could one hope to understand what the poem was saying (see the box on p. 730).
Since the Renaissance, artists had tried to represent reality as accurately as possible, carefully applying brushstrokes and employing perspective to produce realistic portrayals of their subjects. By the late nineteenth century, however, artists were seeking new forms of expression.
IMPRESSIONISM The preamble to modern painting can be found in Impressionism, a movement that originated in France in the 1870s when a group of artists rejected the studios and museums and went out into the countryside to paint nature directly. But the Impressionists did not just paint scenes from nature. Their subjects included streets and cabarets, rivers, and busy boulevards – wherever people congregated for work and leisure. In this sense, Impressionist subject matter reflected the pastimes of the new upper middle class. Instead of adhering to the conventional modes of painting and subject matter, the Impressionists sought originality and distinction from past artworks. Their paintings utilized bright colors, dynamic brushstrokes, and a smaller, more private scale than that of their predecessors. Camille Pissarro (kah-MEEL pee-SAH-roh) (1830-1903), one of Impressionism’s founders, expressed what they sought:
Precise drawing is dry and hampers the impression of the whole, it destroys all sensations. Do not define too closely the outlines of things; it is the brushstroke of the right value and color which should produce the drawing. Work at the same time upon sky, water, branches, ground, keeping everything going on an equal basis and unceasingly rework until you have got it. ... Don’t proceed according to rules and principles, but paint what you observe and feel. Paint generously and unhesitatingly, for it is best not to lose the first impression.
Impressionists like Pissarro sought to put into their paintings their impressions of the changing effects of light on objects in nature.
Pissarro’s ideas are visibly portrayed in the work of Claude Monet (CLOHD moh-NEH) (1840-1926). Monet was especially enchanted with water and painted many pictures in which he attempted to capture the interplay of light, water, and atmosphere, especially evident in Impression, Sunrise. It was Monet’s Impression, Sunrise that gave the Impressionists their name. Following their first exhibition in 1874, a satirical magazine referred to “Impressionism” in mocking the loose brushwork of Monet’s painting. By 1877, however, the artists had adopted the name for themselves.
The first Impressionist exhibition included paintings by three women, one of whom was Berthe Morisot (BAYRT mor-ee-ZOH) (1841-1895). Her work fetched the highest price at the first Impressionist auction. Morisot broke with the practice of women being only amateur artists and became a professional painter. Her dedication to the new style of painting won her the disfavor of the traditional French academic artists. Morisot believed that women had a special vision, which was, as she said, “more delicate than that of men.” Her special touch is evident in the lighter colors and flowing brushstrokes of Young Girl by the Window. Near the end of her life, Morisot lamented the refusal of men to take her work seriously: “I don’t think there has ever been a man who treated a woman as an equal, and that’s all I would have asked, for I know I’m worth as much as they.”
POST-IMPRESSIONISM By the 1880s, a new movement known as Post-Impressionism had emerged in France and soon spread to other European countries. Post-Impressionism retained the Impressionist emphasis on light and color but revolutionized it even further by paying more attention to structure and form. Post-Impressionists sought to use both color and line to express inner feelings and produce a personal statement of reality rather than an imitation of objects. Impressionist paintings had retained a sense of realism, but the Post-Impressionists shifted from objective reality to subjective reality and in so doing began to withdraw from the artist’s traditional task of depicting the external world. Post-Impressionism was the real beginning of modern art.
Paul Cézanne (say-ZAHN) (1839-1906) was one of the most important Post-Impressionists. Initially, he was influenced by the Impressionists but soon rejected their work. In paintings, such as Mont Sainte-Victoire, Cezanne sought to express visually the underlying geometric structure and form of everything he painted. He accomplished this by pressing his wet brush directly onto the canvas, forming cubes of color on which he built the form of the mountain. His technique enabled him to break down forms to their basic components. As Cezanne explained to one young painter: “You must see in nature the cylinder, the sphere, and the cone.”
Another famous Post-Impressionist was a tortured and tragic figure, Vincent van Gogh (van GOH or vahn GOK) (1853-1890). For van Gogh, art was a spiritual experience. He was especially interested in color and believed that it could act as its own form of language. Van Gogh maintained that artists should paint what they feel, which is evident in his Starry Night.
THE SEARCH FOR INDIVIDUAL EXPRESSION By the beginning of the twentieth century, the belief that the task of art was to represent “reality” had lost much of its meaning. By that time, psychology and the new physics had made it evident that many people were not sure what constituted reality anyway. Then, too, the development of photography gave artists another reason to reject visual realism. Invented in the 1830s, photography became popular and widespread after George Eastman produced the first Kodak camera for the mass market in 1888. What was the point of an artist doing what the camera did better? Unlike the camera, which could only mirror reality, artists could create reality. Individual consciousness became the source of meaning. Between 1905 and 1914, this search for individual expression produced a wide variety of schools of painting, all of which had their greatest impact after World War 1.
In 1905, one of the most important figures in modern art was just beginning his career. Pablo Picasso (PAHB-loh pi-KAH-soh) (1881-1973) was from Spain but settled in Paris in 1904. Picasso was extremely flexible and painted in a remarkable variety of styles. He was instrumental in the development of a new style called Cubism that used geometric designs as visual stimuli to re-create reality in the viewer’s mind. Picasso’s 1907 work Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (lay dem-wah-ZEL dah-vee-NYONH) has been called the first Cubist painting.
The modern artist’s flight from “visual reality” reached a high point in 1910 with the beginning of abstract painting. Wassily Kandinsky (vus-YEEL-yee kan-DIN-skee) (18661944), a Russian who worked in Germany, was one of the founders of abstract painting. As is evident in his Square with White Border, Kandinsky sought to avoid representation altogether. He believed that art should speak directly to the soul. To do so, it must avoid any reference to visual reality and concentrate on color.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, the Romantics’ attraction to exotic and primitive cultures had sparked a fascination with folk music, which became increasingly important as musicians began to look for ways to express their national identities. In the second half of the century, new flames of nationalistic spirit were fanned in both literary and musical circles.
GRlEG One example of this new nationalistic spirit may be found in the Scandinavian composer Edvard Grieg (ED-vart GREEG) (1843-1907), who remained a dedicated supporter of Norwegian nationalism throughout his life. Grieg’s nationalism expressed itself in the lyric melodies found in the folk music of his homeland. Among his best-known works is the Peer Gynt Suite (1876), incidental music to a play by Henrik Ibsen. Grieg’s music paved the way for the creation of a national music style in Norway.
DEBUSSY The Impressionist movement in music followed its artistic counterpart by some thirty years. Impressionist music stressed elusive moods and haunting sensations and is distinctive in its delicate beauty and elegance of sound. The composer most tangibly linked to the Impressionist movement was Claude Debussy (CLOHD duh-bus-SEE) (1862-1918), whose musical compositions were often inspired by the visual arts. One of Debussy’s most famous works, Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun (1894), was actually inspired by a poem, “Afternoon of a Faun,” written by his friend, the Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé (stay-FAHN mah-lahr-MAY) (1842-1898). But Debussy did not tell a story in music; rather, Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun re-created in sound the overall feeling of the poem. Said Mallarme upon hearing Debussy’s piece, “I was not expecting anything like this. This music prolongs the emotion of my poem, and evokes the scene more vividly than color.”
Other composers adopted stylistic idioms that imitated presumably primitive forms in an attempt to express less refined and therefore more genuine feelings. A chief exponent of musical primitivism was Igor Stravinsky (EE-gor struh-VIN-skee) (1882-1971), one of the twentieth century’s most important composers, both for his compositions and for his impact on other composers. He gained international fame as a ballet composer and together with the Ballet Russe, under the direction of Sergei Diaghilev (syir-GYAY DYAHG-yuh-lif) (1872-1929), revolutionized the world of music with a series of ballets. The three most significant ballets Stravinsky composed for Diaghilev’s company were The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911), and The Rite of Spring (1913). All three were based on Russian folk tales. The Rite of Spring proved to be a revolutionary piece in the development of music. At its premiere on May 29, 1913, the pulsating rhythms, sharp dissonances, and unusual dancing overwhelmed the Paris audience and caused a riot at the theater. Like the intellectuals of his time, Stravinsky sought a new understanding of irrational forces in his music, which became an important force in inaugurating a modern musical movement.