Page 5 - summer 22

MODERN PARADISE

Part One: Culture
• Modernism and the shock of the new
Picasso, Kandisky, Schoenberg, Joyce, Eliot, Le Corbusier, Eisenstein

Bonfire
In our recent sessions, we have been looking at how people in the last three
centuries thought and felt about the fact they were “making the modern world”. By

1900 it was becoming clear that the new urban world of industry and technology
with its burgeoning machines and startling cityscapes was different to any previous
age; and the difference was speed. This began with the Industrial Revolution, which
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increased the speed of production. Then 19 century railways and steamships
revolutionised travel and transport, while the telegraph revolutionised the speed of
information. By 1900. Cityscapes like London and Paris presented a dazzling,

fragmented kaleidoscope of simultaneous images and sense impressions;
pedestrians, crowds, traffic, advertisements. The speed of urban living was dizzying
and accelerating; electricity arrived, then telephones, cars, aeroplanes, films and
radios.

To understand what people made of the new century, we must first turn to the
artists. How would they react to all this innovation and speed? When the industrial
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revolution first began, the initial response of artists was negative: the 19 century
Romantics sought escape into a medieval fantasy world of emotion and imagination.
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Then, by contrast, the later 19 century Realists sought to represent the new
industrial civilisation as accurately as possible; thus, in War and Peace Tolstoy
portrayed battle in all its horrors, while Gustav Courbet, as Cathy Knight showed us
last year, painted street workmen and a carriage trapped in snow. But artists and
writers of the new generation of 1900 - Picasso, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Schoenberg -
wanted neither to escape from this new world, nor to simply represent it accurately,

but to capture and render its inner essence. To do this, they had to abandon the old
artistic conventions and to turn instead to the innovation of the avant-garde.

The artistic revolution of Modernism was not planned, nor did it follow any
philosopher or critic - it just so happened that in a dozen or so years, in one art form
after another - first painting, then poetry, music, novels and finally architecture - the
centuries-old conventions were consigned to the bonfire, in a series of works that
became the foundational classics of the Modernist movement.