Movements of Modernity

The Case of Glasgow and Art Nouveau

William Eadie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000436518
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Historia del arte moderno

Originally published in 1990, acknowledges the social as well as the artistic significance of the Glasgow Art Nouveau movement by examining the history of it from its inception through to its demise. By considering the contributions of social theorists like Peter Bürger, Theodor Adorno, and Walter Benjamin, the author illustrates how Art nouveau can be located within an avant-garde. The book also reveals to what extent the contract which the Glasgow group had with the Secessionists in Vienna was significant for the development of their work.

Chapter one
The dialectics of modernity and modernism

‘Modernism’ is usually understood as a distinctive mentality and range of activities fundamentally preoccupied with the disruptive renewal of perception in a society which engenders routinized experience. The term ‘modernity’, historically, carries with it proliferating meanings which none the less centre around the theme of ‘the deformations of a one-sidedly rationalized everyday praxis’ evoking ‘the need for something equivalent to the unifying power of religion’.¹ Max Weber argued that the internal relationship which subsisted between the modes of rationality peculiar to the West, and modernity - understood as the rationalization of everyday existence and the corresponding dissolution of traditional life patterns - was a necessary one. The disintegration of religious world views which portrayed a ‘meaningful cosmos’ had resulted from the emergence of new cultural spheres around empirical science, autonomous art critical of ancient classical artistic models, and secular legal and moral conceptions grounded in rationalist principles. Georg Simmel described how economic and political forces encouraged, with economic growth, technical development and a ‘practical materialism’ commensurate with industrialism. These, in turn, had brought about ‘the increased externalization of life’.² With everything subordinated to material interests, the technical side of life came to dominate the inner, subjective dimension of personal values. The intense desire to escape from the constant unrest, fragmentariness, and complexity of modern life lay at the heart of the modernist experience, and for many this escape assumed an aesthetic character as they sought release in ‘the artistic conception of things’.³ Simmel gave concrete historical and psychological content to the concept of modernity by illustrating how specific socio-cultural trends are connected with the inner needs and responses of individuals. The essence of modernity, he claimed, is psychologism, ‘the experiencing [das Erleben] and interpretation of the world in terms of the reactions of our inner life and indeed as an inner world’.⁴ Simmel viewed modern art as having the potential for both the embodiment of modernity and the resolution of its contradictions. This is because modern art, unlike naturalism, overtly stylizes real life by capturing ‘the impression of the supra-temporal, the timeless impression’.⁴ A significant example given by Simmel of this reaction against naturalism in art is the ‘Scottish School’ of painters (the ‘Glasgow Boys’).⁵

Among recent theorists of modernity, Marshall Berman dates the beginnings of a modern sensibility from the sixteenth century and the advent of a world market. Berman detects three historical phases of such a sensibility: firstly, up to around 1790; secondly, throughout the nineteenth century, and thirdly, in the twentieth century with the expansion of modernization. In the second of these phases the actual experience and language of modernity gave rise to classical visions of modernism which both celebrate and denounce the unprecedented objective social transformations facilitated by the advent of the capitalist world market. Modernity, Berman informs us, is the experience undergone within the modernization process which, in turn, engenders modernism. As experience within the dynamism of capitalism - with its oscillations of construction and destruction - it is experience of an essentially contradictory nature, at once of both exhilaration and fear, elation and despair, emancipation and ordeal. The nineteenth-century public, claims Berman, ‘can remember what it is like to live, materially and spiritually, in worlds that are not modern at all. From this inner dichotomy, this sense of living in two worlds simultaneously, the ideas of modernization and modernism emerge and unfold.’⁶ Economic ‘development’ has operated to transform the subjective life of individuals. As well as providing the means towards the emancipation of the individual self from the rigidities of fixed social status, narrow morality, and restricted imaginative range, economic development also engendered, at one and the same time, insecurity, disorientation, frustration and despair. For Berman, modernisms are characterized by their ability to appropriate the ambiguities and contradictions of modern life as fostered by capitalist ‘development’, and give expression to the dramatic tensions which such processes create within individuals. The classic examples of such modernisms are to be found with thinkers such as Marx and Nietzsche in the nineteenth century, whose ‘self-ironies and inner tensions were a primary source of their creative power’.⁷ The dialectical nature of the experience of modernity has, with their twentieth-century successors, increasingly given way to a shrinking of imaginative range with ‘rigid polarities and flat totalizations’.⁸ Modernist art, despite its manifesting brilliant creativity, no longer connects with any common life, since it is not capable of being adequately incorporated via thought. However, it is possible, Berman believes, that ‘going back can be a way to go forward: that remembering the modernisms of the nineteenth century can provide the vision and courage to create the modernisms of the twenty-first’.⁹

When claiming that Berman’s book had reopened the contemporary debate on modernity, Perry Anderson outlined a number of difficulties with Berman’s position. Fundamentally, Anderson considers modernism as a notion to be ‘the emptiest of all cultural categories’¹⁰ designating no describable object in its own right at all and completely lacking in positive content. Modernism, says Anderson, as a specific set of aesthetic forms,

is generally dated precisely from the 20th. century, is indeed typically construed by way of contrast with realist and other classical forms of the 19th, 18th or earlier centuries … modernism too needs to be framed within some more differential conception of historical time.¹¹

If modernism is treated in this way, that is, periodized within the history of capitalism, it becomes strikingly apparent that its geographical and spatial distribution is uneven, with major areas of the world having failed to generate any significant modernist momentum. Berman’s reading of modernism as a whole, according to Anderson, ‘establishes no distinctions either between very contrasted aesthetic tendencies, or within the range of aesthetic practices that comprise the arts themselves’.¹² Because the ‘decisive’ currents of modernism in the first decades of the twentieth century - symbolism, expressionism, cubism, futurism or constructivism, surrealism - engendered doctrines and practices peculiar to themselves, but which were antithetical to each other, the possibility of defining the classical modernist bearing towards modernity in terms of one characteristic disposition or sensibility is precluded. ‘Much of the art produced from within this range of positions already contained the makings of those very polarities decried by Berman in contemporary or subsequent theorizations of modern culture as a whole.’¹³ This range of incompatible aesthetic practices from the beginning of the twentieth century was unified post hoc into ‘a portmanteau concept whose only referent is the blank passage of time itself.¹⁴

Such criticisms do not, however, lead Anderson to reject the possibility of establishing a meaningful category for the analysis of modernism as an historical phenomenon. He concedes that European modernism in the early twentieth century manifests certain unifying characteristics. A common adversary for modernist movements was found in the official academicism which reflected the persistence of the anciens régimes. This gave unity to a wide span of new aesthetic practices: insurgent art forms could measure themselves against the cultural values represented by academicism, but they were at the same time able to articulate themselves in terms of the latter:

The classical stocks of high culture still preserved - even if deformed and deadened - in late 19th-century academicism, could be redeemed and released against it, as also against the commercial spirit of the age as many of these movements saw it.¹⁵

The latter points to a further unifying dimension, namely, the uniform detestation of the capitalist market as an organizing socio-cultural principle by ‘every species of modernism’. It was ‘in the space between a still usable classical past, a still indeterminate technical present, and a still unpredictable political future’ that European modernism flowered at the beginning of the twentieth century. Cubism, futurism, constructivism were to derive a powerful imaginative stimulus from ‘the energies and attractions of a new machine age’, but the interest here reflected a conception which was conditioned by ‘the abstraction of techniques and artefacts from the social relations of production that were generating them’.¹⁶

Anderson argues that ‘a conjunctural explanation of the set of aesthetic practices and doctrines subsequently grouped together as “modernist”’ should be attempted, which ‘would involve the intersection of different historical temporalities, to compose a typically overdetermined configuration’. ‘Modernism’ is thus to be understood as ‘a cultural field of force triangulated by three decisive coordinates’: the codification of a highly formalized academicism in the (visual and other) arts leading to the emergence of oppositional cultural forms; the still incipient emergence within official regimes of state and society of the key technologies or inventions of the second industrial revolution and the lack of mass consumption industries founded on these; and thirdly the imaginative proximity of social revolution and utopian cultural radicalism.

As well as Berman and Anderson, a significant contribution to the recent debate on modernity has been made by Habermas. The context for Habermas’s analysis of Nietzsche’s articulation of aesthetic modernity lies with his acknowledgement of ‘the autonomous art that emerged in modern Europe (together with art criticism institutionalized since the eighteenth century) as the product of a [cultural] disintegration and the result of a process of rationalization’.¹⁷ Eighteenth-century Kantian idealist aesthetics, in separating aesthetic pleasure (founded on perception of the beautiful and the sublime) from other ‘empirical’ forms of satisfaction involving the useful and the desirable, allows art to emerge ‘with its own proper claim, along with science and technology, law and morality’. The result is an institutional differentiation of art within ‘three cultural value spheres, which are also separated from each other institutionally in the form of functionally specified systems of action’.¹⁸ Forms of argumentation have developed with Western art criticism which ‘specifically differentiate it from the forms of theoretical and moral-practical discourse’. However, Habermas stresses, the ‘locus of directed and cumulative transformations’ is not to be found with the discourses about works of art, but rather with the works of art themselves which, through their inner logical differentiation of specifically aesthetic content, radically uncouple the potential for non-routinized, unconventional modes of experience which can elicit the decentring and unbounding of subjectivity and transform relations between self and world:

The ever more radical uncoupling of this potential for experience, the purification of the aesthetic from admixtures of the cognitive, the useful, and the moral is mirrored in the reflections of the early Romantic period (especially in Friedrich Schlegel), in the aestheticism of Baudelaire and the symbolists, in the programme of I’art pour I’art, in the surrealistic celebration of illumination through shock effects…¹⁹

With the decentring of subjectivity comes a heightened sensitivity towards

what remains unassimilated in the interpretive achievements of pragmatic, epistemic, and moral mastery of the demands and challenges of everyday situations; it effects an openness to the expurgated elements of the unconscious, the fantastic, and the mad, the material and the bodily – thus to everything in our speechless contact with reality which is so fleeting, so contingent, so immediate, so individualized, simultaneously so far and so near that it escapes our normal categorical grasp.²⁰

Two relevant questions to raise at this stage would be (1) to what extent does the decentring of subjectivity, as facilitated by the experiences made possible with such movements as symbolism and aestheticism, lead to evidence of the heightened sensitivity which Habermas describes, manifesting itself with Art Nouveau? And (2) what might an empirical study of Art Nouveau reveal about the attempt actively to apply such a heightened sensitivity to the integration of the artistic with the cognitive, the useful, and the ethical? German Jugendstil certainly reflected the need for a surrender to unconscious powers; late Art Nouveau, with its form-language of geometric abstraction, appeared against a background of innovative theorizing about psychology and aesthetics. In opposing eclectic-historicism and the demarcations separating the various styles, and in seeking out the ‘motives’ behind architectural appearances, Art Nouveau elicited reflection upon the fundamental conditions of architecture and its relationships with the political, social, and ethical infrastructures.

In his critique of Habermas’s position, Peter Burger²¹ argues that the increasing differentiation of the separate cultural spheres - science, morality, art - and the contrary drive for the reintegration of these spheres with the ‘life-world’, is more contradictory than Habermas’s theory of modernism concedes. In Burger’s view, Habermas, in claiming parallel developments towards autonomy and specialization by the three spheres, misconstrues their relative structural and social differences. Cognitive-instrumental rationalization has a primary position in the modernization process. Autonomous art carries with it the idea of its self-transcendence, writes Burger, but this is not true of science in the same way because science betrays no impulse for its reintegration with everyday life. Again, an empirically grounded examination of Art Nouveau - as an artistic movement which attempted to confront the separated spheres of art and rationality with a view to achieving their integration on the level of the practical - can surely prove its value for the illumination of the kind of issues covered by these debates. In setting the scene for such an analysis, let us begin by examining Nietzsche in connection with Habermas’s critique: the latter has the virtue of elucidating what Nietzsche himself owed to rationality. Importantly, we find in Nietzsc...