Modernism
Modernism wanted to start again from scratch: an art without objects, an architecture without historical styles and a design for the machine age. Beauty was to be sought in form itself, in function and in material, not in ornament and representation. Yet in the very same decades others were questioning whether beauty was the heart of art at all.
Around 1900 the battles of the 19th century had left several threads that modernism took up and tied together in new ways. From the Aesthetes came the idea that form has a value of its own and that music is the model for all the arts. From Ruskin and Morris came the conviction that architecture and everyday objects matter as much as painting and sculpture, and that they should be honest to their materials and making. From Baudelaire came the demand for an art that belongs to its own time. What was new was that these threads were joined to a faith in industry, technology and progress that Ruskin and Morris had never shared. The modern artist and architect were not to flee the machine but to learn from it. The transition was not abrupt. Around 1900 Jugendstil, or Art Nouveau, sought a new style that borrowed nothing from history, with flowing lines taken from the plant world. Above the entrance to the Vienna Secession’s exhibition building of 1898 stood the words “To every age its art, to art its freedom”. But Jugendstil was still an art of ornament, and it was precisely ornament that the next generation rebelled against.
In architecture, ornament became the centre of the battle. This was not obvious at first. Louis Sullivan, who designed some of the first steel-framed high-rise buildings in Chicago, wrote in 1896 that form ever follows function. He meant that an office building should take its form from its task and its construction: a base with shops, a long series of identical office floors and a crowning top. Yet Sullivan was at the same time a master of ornament, and his buildings are covered in rich, plant-like decoration. For him function and ornament were not opposites but parts of the same organic whole, in which the building grows like a plant out of its task.
The Viennese architect Adolf Loos drew a harsher conclusion. In the lecture Ornament and Crime, which he gave in 1910 and which is often wrongly dated to 1908, he argued that ornament belonged to an earlier stage of culture and that in the modern world it was a waste of labour, material and capital. His own building on Michaelerplatz in Vienna (1909–1911), with a smooth, rendered façade above the marble of the ground floor, caused a great stir. Loos’s argument rested partly on the period’s notions of cultural evolution, which today appear prejudiced, but his thesis that the modern form is the smooth, plain and functional form became one of modernism’s articles of faith. It is a clear break with Ruskin, for whom ornament was the trace of the craftsman’s joy. Loos was also critical of those artists in Vienna who wanted to design everything, from the house to the spoon, according to a unified artistic will. A utilitarian object, he argued, should not be a work of art but should simply do its job well.
In painting the same movement led away from representation. Representation, mimesis, had been the self-evident foundation of art since the Greeks, but now it could be questioned. In Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911) Wassily Kandinsky wrote that colours and forms act directly on the soul, like notes in music, and that the artist should follow an inner necessity rather than external objects. His Composition VII of 1913 is one of the first major works without any recognisable subject. In the Netherlands Piet Mondrian and the De Stijl movement went further still, reducing painting to straight lines, white, black and the three primary colours in the search for a universal harmony. At roughly the same time the Swedish artist Hilma af Klint, independently of them, had been painting abstract pictures with spiritual themes since 1906, but her work became known much later. The way there had been opened by Cubism. Between 1907 and 1914 Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque broke up the single-point perspective that had governed painting since Alberti and showed objects from several sides at once, divided into planes and facets. The picture became a construction on the canvas rather than a window onto the world.
The theory that best explained the new art to the public came from the Bloomsbury Group in London. In 1910–1911 Roger Fry organised the exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists, where Londoners saw Cézanne, Gauguin and Van Gogh in quantity for the first time, and he coined the term Post-Impressionism. In 1914 his friend Clive Bell published the book Art, in which he argued that what all true works of art have in common is significant form, a certain relation of lines and colours that arouses a particular aesthetic emotion. What the picture represents is, according to Bell, irrelevant. This formalism made it possible to see a Byzantine mosaic, an African sculpture and a painting by Cézanne as related, but at the same time it said almost nothing about content, history and context.
Philosophically, formalism had a counterpart in Benedetto Croce’s Aesthetic (1902). For Croce art was intuition and expression, an inner image that the artist gives form to in his mind, and the physical work was merely an aid for preserving and communicating it. Where Bell looked at form outside us, Croce looked at expression within us. Both gave art an autonomy, a sphere of its own separate from morality, utility and knowledge, which goes back to Kant’s disinterested contemplation and to the l’art pour l’art of the 19th century.
Architecture took the abstract forms and turned them into space. Gerrit Rietveld’s Red and Blue Chair, the first version of which was made around 1917–1918, looks like a Mondrian painting in three dimensions. In Weimar in 1919 Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus, a school intended to unite art, craft and industry, where Kandinsky taught from 1922. In Towards a New Architecture (Vers une architecture, 1923) Le Corbusier argued that the engineer’s cars, aeroplanes and ships showed the way to a new beauty. In the same book he compared the Parthenon with a sports car: both were the result of a standard refined until it reached perfection. The classical idea of harmonious proportion, from Pythagoras and Vitruvius, thus lived on, but in a new form. In 1925 the Bauhaus moved to Dessau, where Gropius designed a new school building with glass façades and asymmetrically placed wings, and the school’s slogan from 1923 was “art and technology – a new unity”. There lamps, tubular steel chairs and textiles were designed with industrial manufacture in mind. When the Museum of Modern Art in New York staged its exhibition on the International Style in 1932, smooth, white, asymmetrical architecture was established as a formal language in its own right.
In Sweden modernism took on a distinctly social character. Gregor Paulsson’s More Beautiful Everyday Things (Vackrare vardagsvara, 1919) took up Ellen Key’s idea of beauty for all and combined it with the German Werkbund’s idea of collaboration between artists and industry. The aim was for good, beautiful objects to be manufactured industrially and become cheap enough for ordinary people. The Stockholm Exhibition of 1930, which Paulsson led together with the architect Gunnar Asplund, and the manifesto acceptera (1931) marked the breakthrough of functionalism in Sweden. Here functionalism was associated with housing policy, hygiene and the folkhem, the ‘people’s home’, not merely with a style.
At the same time the whole idea that art is about beauty and form was being challenged. Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, a urinal that he submitted to an exhibition in New York in 1917, was an object chosen, not created, and it made no claim to be beautiful. The readymade shifted the question from how a work looks to what makes an object art, a question that post-war philosophers would take up in earnest. As early as their manifesto of 1909 the Futurists had proclaimed that a roaring motor car was more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace, and during the First World War the Dadaists turned against the whole idea of bourgeois art.
During the 1930s the questions changed under the pressure of crisis, dictatorship and war. In Art as Experience (1934) John Dewey tried to bring art back to ordinary experience instead of shutting it away in museums. In lectures in 1935–1936 Martin Heidegger argued that the work of art opens up a world and lets a truth appear, with a Greek temple as one of his examples. In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936) Walter Benjamin described how photography and film dissolve the work of art’s aura, its unique presence, and turn art into a political instrument. It was a warning written at a time when the Nazis closed the Bauhaus in 1933 and in 1937 displayed modern art as “entartete Kunst”, degenerate art, in a mocking exhibition in Munich. The three texts differ greatly, but they have in common that they leave behind formalism’s question of how a work looks. Dewey asks what art does in people’s lives, Heidegger what it allows to appear, and Benjamin how it is changed by technology and used in politics. Many modernists emigrated to the United States at the same time, and Gropius and Mies van der Rohe carried the ideas of the Bauhaus on to Harvard and Chicago.
When the Second World War ended in 1945, modernism had triumphed in architecture and become a canon in art, but it had also lost much of its innocence. The belief that pure form and rational planning would create better people had begun to crack. The post-war period would inherit both modernism’s formalism, in Clement Greenberg’s criticism, and its dissenting voices: Duchamp’s question of what art is, Benjamin’s critique of the aura and Dewey’s idea of experience.