Page 22 - summer 22

and marginalised culturally by Hollywood (a theme we’ll pursue in a later session

when we look at popular culture). Eisenstein remains a hero to film theorists.

How did Modernism develop?
“Make it difficult” applied to all Modernist art. By taking away narrators, plots, poetic
forms, subjects for paintings, tonality in music and decoration on buildings; readers,
viewers and listeners had do more of the work. One writer, Peter Carey*, half-
seriously suggests this was a deliberate move on the part of the Modernists to
bamboozle the public and exclude the masses from art or “high culture”; the whole

thing was just an elitist plot. One flaw with this neat and provocative theory is that
many of the bourgeoisie often felt equally bamboozled, yet they were the market on
whom the Modernists depended.

The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Intellectual Intelligentsia (1992).
We will return to this idea of cultural elitism when we look at popular culture.

Some Modernists, such as Duchamp and Dali, clearly did enjoy shocking people. Ezra
Pound wanted his poems to…

Greet the grave and the stodgy,
Salute them with your thumbs at your noses.
Ruffle the skirts of prudes
speak of their knees and ankles.
But above all, go to practical people –
go! jangle their doorbells!

Say that you do no work
and that you will live forever!

What is more difficult to explain is the way in which Modernism spread so rapidly
th
across all the arts and established itself as the major cultural movement of the 20
century. It is true that by 1900 both Romanticism and Realism were played out;
clearly the time was ripe for change. But Modernism had no obvious philosophy,
though Bergson’s ideas, contrasting the subjective perception of time with clock

time, were an influence. The First World War helped. Before 1914, a sense of the
fragmentation and dislocation of life was essentially an avant-garde preoccupation;
after the experience of the trenches, it entered the cultural mainstream. But all the
core people had at least started to find their Modernist voice before 1914; Picasso,
Schoenberg and Kandinsky were further on than that.

Modernism was spread by personal contact; these artists knew each other. When
Kandinsky went to a concert of Schoenberg’s atonal music, he immediately saw how