Modernism: The Lure of Heresy Book

Finally finished the book, after maxing out renewals and having a fine placed on my library account. I won't lie to you; reading Peter Gay's Modernism is no light undertaking. There are, after all, more than 500 pages of text.

As voluminous as the volume is, though, it may still not be enough for Gay's ambitious undertaking. He seeks to define Modernism and discuss its exemplars. Although he does exactly that, there is still a sense of something missing, as if there is a slight blip in the book's coherence. The definition of Modernism given and applied over and over is a little simplistic, comprising two parts. The first part is given in the title: "the lure of heresy." The second part is subjectivity. These are the main two criteria Gay applies to modernist works.

He begins with Baudelaire's exhortation to "Make it new!", contending that adhering to this imperative is what marks the beginnings of Modernist art. Well, okay. But this is what pioneer artists have been doing all along, else art would never advance or change. Is it simply that artists adopted this exhortation and began consciously attempting to do things that have never been done before that makes it Modern? We need another ingredient to Modernism. At least one. Gay turns to subjectivity as the second ingredient. That is, exploration of the self and the inner realms through art. However, he concentrates much less on this than on the "lure of heresy" and thus runs into some difficulties when discussing art in the Soviet Union, and overall differentiating the modernists from the non-modernists. He attempts to delineate between them, but I did not find that particular portion of his study illuminating.

As a survey of late-19th to early-20th century art, the book is decent if far from exhaustive. Gay is at his best when discussing history, art history, and architecture. He is on much shakier ground with music and literature. His literary analysis leaves much to be desired, as he has a tendency to assert a claim, provide some supposedly illustrative quotations, and leave it as if it is self-explanatory. In his section on music, Schoenberg's twelve-tone composition method is prominent, but he leaves any explanation of what the twelve-tone system is until nearly the end of it.

Overall, it seems that in this book, Gay has decided on a definition of Modernism and marshalled an array of work from artists working in various art forms (painting, sculpture, fiction, poetry, music, dance, drama, film, and architecture) to apply his definition to. Challenges to his schema are not handled very sure-handedly, as we can see in his discussion of Soviet art and artists. Most of the Soviet artists he discusses at any lengths are generally emigrants who continued their work outside of the U.S.S.R. In his section on the threats to Modernism, in dealing with art in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and Fascist Italy, he baldly states that Modernist art was impossible in Nazi Germany because of political constraints. He doesn't go so far as to say the same thing for the Soviet Union, but certainly gives short shrift to artists who chose to remain there.

One of the figures Gay declines to discuss at any length is the composer Shostakovich. Yes, I do have a soft spot for Shostakovich, and so of course I'd like to see more about him. I recognize that in a book of this kind of scope that there is no room to dwell too long on any particular thing, but I certainly thing that Gay could have said much more on Shostakovich, as he poses quite a challenge to Gay's narrative structure. Gay does mention the composer's censure by Soviet authorities and discusses what the charge of "formalism" meant for him and other Soviet artists. But he doesn't push this very far, and there's certainly more to be said there. Gay does not write off all Soviet art as non-modernist, as he does about Nazi Germany, but he is also unwilling to explore to what extent modernist art was possible under the Soviet regime. I suppose he can be forgiven for this, as it is a difficult question, but I would have liked to have seen some acknowledgment that it was a difficult balance for Soviet artists to strike, and Shostakovich would have been a good example through which to begin to explore that.