The crisis of modernity 1. Dissatisfaction with reason Reason: instrument of freedom → instrument of oppression, policing, terror Inhumanity of science and technology (Frankenstein, mad scientist, factory as dystopia, production line, machine, WW1) Inhumanity of rational bureaucracy: man as victim of reason (Dickens, Kafka) Social engineering: Utopian social and political experiments (Fascism, communism) – experience of modern history

Auschwitz, Hiroshima and the Gulag: not aberrations Henri Lefebvre: “And human reason appears only as some terrifying, distant, dehumanized reason: scientific barbarity. … the concentration camp is the most extreme form of a modern housing estate, or of an industrial town” (The Critique of Everyday Life)

The crisis of modernity 2: Modernity as disorder Modern: cult of the new; idea of progress ; Sheer pace of life Capitalist economy: constant change and growth Permanent revolution of technology: production, transport, communication) Phineas Fogg (Jules Verne: Around the World in 80 Days)

crisis Karl Marx: “Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social relations, everlasting uncertainty and agitation, distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier times. All fixed, fast- frozen relationships, with their … venerable ideas and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become obsolete before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into the air” (Communist Manifesto, 1848)

crisis W.B. Yeats: “Things fall apart, the center does not hold” Ady Endre: “minden egész eltörött” (‘everything that used to be whole is broken’) The chaos of the modern city (Georg Grosz: Funeral)

crisis Permanent revolution, fast change - reproduction of the same Logic of consumer society

The crisis of modernity 3: loss of ideals The citoyen → petty bourgeois The shopkeeper caring for his profit and comfort boredom, pettiness, Philistinism Julien Sorel: victim of an unheroic age Soames Forsyte in Galsworth’s The Forsyte Saga

Walter Sickert: Ennui

Edgar Degas: Absinthe

Edouard Manet: La Folie Bergere

Crisis of modernity 4: alienation Søren Kierkegaard: existentialist philosophy Karl Marx: specialization in factories atrophy of the human being chinovnik; Bartleby the Scrivener

MODERNISM The symptom of of modernity; its high culture, opposition Three attitudes of modernist art to the modern world: 1. affirming the modern world 2.revolt against the modern world 3.withdrawal from the modern world

1.Affirming modernity Italian futurism, pop art Modernist architecture Fortunato Depero: Skyscrapers and Tunnels (1930)

Mies van der Rohe: Farnsworth House

Walter Gropius: Bauhaus Building in Dessau,

Le Corbusier: Villa Savoie

Berthold Lubetkin: London Zoo, Penguin Pool

Lawn Road Flats (or Isokon Building, , Wells Coates)

Lawn Road Flats

Lawn Road flat interior: FUNCTIONALISM

Isokon inhabitants Marcel Breuer (Breuer Lajos Marcell,Pécs) Model B32 chair (1925) Walter Gropius Moholy-Nagy László Agatha Christie

Victorian interior

Goldfinger Ernő: Trellick Tower

Goldfinger: Willow Road, Hampstead

2.Revolting against the modern world a, returning to non-rational ways of thinking (occult,mysticism, religion) eg Oscar Wilde, Arthur Conan Doyle, W. B. Yeats, Aldous Huxley b, myth (Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Yeats, John Cowper Powys, Mary Butts) J.G.Fraser (Scottish anthropologist): The Golden Bough c, primitivism

Pablo Picasso: Mask - Demoiselles

Henry Moore: Reclining Figure 1929

Revolt d, cult of sexuality, desire, the unconscious, the body (Surrealism)

D. H. Lawrence Sons and Lovers (1913) Paul Morel, Miriam, Clara The Rainbow (1915) Women in Love ( ) Novellas: The Fox, The Virgin and the Gipsy Etruscans, Mexico: Quetzalcoatl The Plumed Serpent (1925) Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928)

D. H. Lawrence “My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true” (letter)

D. H. Lawrence “What is it but the worst and last form of intellectualism, this love of yours for passion and the animal instincts? Passion and instincts  you want them hard enough, but through your head, in your consciousness. It’s all that Lady of Shalott business. You’ve got that mirror, your own fixed will, your immortal understanding, your own tight conscious world, and there is nothing beyond it.” (Rupert Birkin in Women in Love)

Revolt e, social-political revolt (Expressionism, Surrealism) Film: Fritz Lang: Metropolis; Chaplin: City Lights and Modern Times

3.Withdrawal from the modern world Émile Zola: “We are sick, no doubt, made sick by progress” Gérard de Nerval: “The only refuge left to us was the poet’s ivory tower, which we climbed, ever higher, to isolate ourselves from the mob.” Modernism defines itself in opposition to popular/mass culture ad middlebrow culture (kitsch)

Withdrawal from the world art, writing as hard work; asceticism; difficulty, obscurity of art (intended for the elect few) Bildungsroman replaced by Künstlerroman (integration into society - exodus from the world)

Withdrawal from the world art vs. life Renunciation of life/love; artist vs. bourgeois Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray: “I wish I could love” Joseph Conrad: “Solitude subdues me; it absorbs me. I don’t see anything... It is like a kind of tomb, which will be at the same time a hell, where one has to write, to write, to write.” Split: Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus (Adrian Leverkühn’s pact with the devil)

Withdrawal from the world Figure of the artist: outsider, deviant (criminality, disease, difference; “Tonio Kröger”) Modern artist: both central and marginal doubleness; contempt and desire for the abandoned ordinary world; artists: split figures Baudelaire: flâneur: stroller, city walker Self-imposed exile: Faust, high priest and clown (Kafka: “The Hunger Artist”) Adorno: “Estrangement from the world is a moment of art”

Features of modernist art and lit: 1. non-realist, non-mimetic l’art pour l’art (art for art’s sake) Oscar Wilde: “Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside, of herself. She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance. She is a veil, rather than a mirror.” art nouveau (Jugendstil, ‘szecesszió’) Maurice Denis; Aubrey Beardsley; Rennie Mackintosh (Glasgow); Gustav Klimt; Antoni Gaudi (Casa Milá, Barcelona)

ART NOUVEAU (Maurice Denis: Tuileries) No depth, no plasticity Line vs colour Decorativity vs representation

ART NOUVEAU Aubrey Beardsley

Ch. Rennie Mckintosh: wall plaque

Charles Rennie Mackintosh: chairs

Ingram Street Tea Rooms, Glasgow

Gaudí: Casa Milá (Barcelona)

ART NOUVEAU (Paris Metro - Horta House, Brussels)

Features of modernist art and literature 2. purity poetry: made of words and nothing else Mallarmé: poésie pure Flaubert: “What I would like to write is a book about nothing”; cult of MUSIC as pure art Painting: made of colours and lines. representation vs. composition Maurice Denis: “a picture – before being a war horse, a nude woman, or an anecdote – is essentially a flat surface covered with colours and assembled in a certain order.”

POST-IMPRESSIONISM ‘On or about December 1910 human character changed’ (Virginia Woolf) Vincent Van Gogh Paul Gaugain Paul Cézanne

Vincent Van Gogh: Room in Arles

Van Gogh: Starry Sky

Gaugain: Tahiti women

Gauguin Mahana no Atua (Day of God)

Paul Cézanne: Mt. St. Victoire

Paul Cézanne ( ) ‘The world must be seen objectively’ No plasticity, no light/shade effects Search for the object’s internal structure Geometrical method (‘Nature must be shaped out of cylindrical, spherical, conical shapes’) Chromatic scale of colours Music as the ideal

Cézanne: River Bank

Cézanne: Woman with a Coffee Pot

Features of modernist art and literature 3. self- reflexivity art about itself (Max Ernst: Surrealism and painting)

Features of modernist art and literature 4. elimination of individuality (part of the idea of “purity”) Rilke: Cézanne painted not “I love this” but “here it is” Fiction: objectivity (Flaubert’s “impassibilité”) ‘The artist cannot appear inj his work more often than God in his creation’ poetry: impersonal poetry (Eliot), Imagism (Pound)

Features of modernist art and literature 5. difficulty, obscurity 6. novelty → avantgarde