Clement Greenberg

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Clement Greenberg

Beginnings of Modernism

The term " Modernism" points to a historical fact, an episode, in Western culture, just as classicism and romanticism do. But there are extra-historical ways of applying the adjectives " classical" and " romantic"; they can be used to characterize phenomena of any time or place. " Modernist" cannot be used with the same freedom; it remains time-bound, more historically specific.

But for all its historical specificity, it is not easy to say when Modernism actually began. It used to be viewed as a prolongation of romanticism, of its temper and mood if not of the romantic period as such. This may be partly true, though not true enough to be useful. But I do not propose to try here to extricate the beginnings of Modernism from the after-life of romanticism. That cannot be done any more conclusively than extricating the beginnings of romanticism itself from eighteenth-century classicism, let alone neoclassicism (where it is more a matter of differentiation than of extrication).

My subject gets me into a question of classification, which makes me uncomfortable. But how am I to talk about beginnings without distinguishing between what was there in the first place and what came after, and how am I to do this without classification? And then, how is classification possible without definition? Yet the last thing I want to do is attempt a definition of Modernism. I must proceed with " Modernism" as I would proceed with " art. " Art has not been and probably never will be defined acceptably, yet that does not prevent us from telling the difference by and large between art and everything else. We do that by intuition, and I would say that the same must be true, or at least for the time being, with Modernism. We identify Modernism too without help of a definition, by intuition. How else settle an argument about whether or not Puvis de Chavannes, say, or Thomas Hardy was a Modernist?

Like romanticism, like almost any other broad cultural tendency. Modernism emerged at different times in the different arts—but not for the most part in different places. Except for architecture and dance, where Modernism came latest, it appeared first in France, and from there its creative impulse was exported to other countries. In this Modernism is like Gothic architecture and the roman courtois and much else. Even in the case of music, where Modernism came relatively late, it still originated with a Frenchman, Debussy. ¹ It came even later— curiously enough—in sculpture: if not with Rodin or even Degas, then with Maillol and Despiau; if not quite with them, then most definitely with Brancusi and Picasso, who, though foreigners, could not have done what they did when they did without having lived in Paris.

The notion of Modernism comes up first in French literature, " historically" if not conclusively. Gustave Lanson, in his monumental and wonderful history of French literature, writes that " it is on Gautier somehow that our literature pivots in order to turn from Romanticism towards Naturalism. " In his equally absorbing history of French literature after 1789, Albert Thibaudet writes that " the term Modernism [modernisme] [was] introduced by the Goncourts to give expression to a form of literary art. " At first glance I do not see Gautier as tending toward naturalism any more than I see the Goncourts as tending toward what I would recognize as Modernism. But then I realize that my focus is too narrow. Widening it, I see that naturalism, a more detached, more impassive realism, did lie somehow at the origins of Modernism in French fiction. Flaubert is there to tell me that: the first Modernist in whatever art or medium, Flaubert is the key, as much the first " art-for-art's-sake" -ist as Gautier, and far more the first naturalist, Lanson's pivot or hinge.

A contradiction seems to be under way here, but it is resolved even before its start. Art for art's sake and naturalism do not have to be in opposition, and as it turns out were not. This is most readily apparent in painting. (Henry Zirner and Charles Rosen, in the New York Review of Books, 4 March 1982, are enlightening here, up to a point. ) If any poet, moreover, was a naturalist it was Baudelaire, who was at the same time an " art-for-art's-sake" -ist before he was anything else, along with Flaubert. But I must not be unjust to Gautier: both Flaubert and Baudelaire felt that he was their source as well as their early support (which returns us to Lanson's idea, if not quite in the way he meant).

Flaubert, Baudelaire, maybe Gautier, maybe other French writers show early signs of Modernist activity. But as an unmistakable, full-fledged fact, as a phenomenon that declared itself to be radically new, Modernism arrived only in Manet's paintings of the early 1860s. Nowhere before did it announce itself so definitely as in Manet's sheer handling of his medium- The change appeared without proclamation, without program (but then Modernism never knew a program, not when it was the real thing; all it knew was an ideal: " pure" art, illusory in itself, but immensely useful, as it proved). So Modernism showed itself most clearly at first in terms of technique, technique in the most immediate, concrete sense. That is how Manet broke with the recent past more momentously than did any contemporary in his or any other of the arts. Not that he broke with all tradition. Harking back to a more distant past in Spanish painting, he found himself inspired to leap into the future. Some such reaching back in order to initiate new departures has happened in every important phase of Modernist art since—and, as Berenson has pointed out, it had happened often enough before; it is not peculiar to Modernist art.

To be sure, Baudelaire and Flaubert were also responsible for technical innovations, but nothing as radical or momentous as those of Manet. If innovation is measured by shock, it was their explicitness about sex that alone created shock. They were not hard to read, whereas Manet was, for a time, hard to see. It is true that his innovativeness was not confined to technique alone, and that he, too, provoked scandal by the " indecency" with which he treated his subjects (through only in two paintings). But the lasting shock had to do with his handling of the medium, and that alone (and this was what Fromentin complained about in the 1870s). Similarly, the impressionists, coming in Manet's wake, caused shock or scandal by nothing other than the way they used paint.

It is what happened to the medium, in every art, that I consider most decisive in fixing the beginnings of Modernism. The renovation of the medium has brought about a revaluation of aesthetic quality. Away from such renovation Modernism evaporates; what happens becomes something else—not necessarily something less, by any means, but still no longer or not yet Modernism.

Since the mid-nineteenth century some arts have pressed for the radical renovation of their media more than others. Notice how comparatively little the medium of prose fiction has needed innovation-cum-renovation in order to maintain quality. Despite Joyce, there is D. H. Lawrence, there is Thomas Mann, there is, finally, Proust. But here the distinction between what belongs to the medium as such and what does not is too fine, and maybe any notion of the medium as such is too narrow. Whether the same distinction can be made out to be greater or lesser when it comes to poetry would ask far too much space to be discussed here. It is also possible that the distinction between what is medium and what is not in literature is too scholastic, too Alexandrian, too far away from the actual experience of literature, to take trouble over. In literature " content" and " form, " technique, or medium swallow one another more immediately than in any other art—though they do the same ultimately in all the other arts, too.

It remains, nonetheless, the case that in music and in visual art the medium declares itself as medium conspicuously enough. On the surface music is all medium, all form, all technique, but by the same token all content too. This could not be said so immediately of painting or sculpture as long as they remained figurative, representational; nor can it be said of architecture that serves a function. The relative ease—even if it ultimately proves to be factitious under scrutiny—with which the medium in painting could be isolated seems to me a major reason that painting was the first to dive deep into its medium in all its concreteness, in order to become the first unmistakably Modernist art, and to remain the exemplary one. (See how the painter supplanted the poet as typical bohemian figure as the nineteenth century came to a close. )

That sculpture, by contrast, was slow to enter Modernism, slower maybe than music, was due above all to its being the least vital of the high arts in the nineteenth century—and in the eighteenth century as well. I find the explanation as simple as that. The opposite is true with music, however, which entered Modernism so late because it was, with painting and prose fiction, the liveliest of the high arts in the nineteenth century and precisely for that reason, like prose fiction but unlike painting, needed re-invigoration least. Why painting " needed" reviving is a question all by itself. My own speculative answer is that painting's great future as " photographic" or literal realism was blighted by photography itself. Evidence for that future was to be found everywhere in painting, even in Delacroix, all through the middle of the nineteenth century—in Germany, in Italy, in the Lowlands, in Russia, in America, and in still other places. Currently, sculpture has caught up with painting as an advanced form of Modernist art: it now occupies with painting the zone where some of the crucial issues of Modernism are being decided. Music, also, occupies that sphere, and I suspect that today's music, looked back on in future years, will be seen to be the art form in which those issues will have been most clearly revealed, if not decided. (Modernist music's very lack of a sufficient public seems to me to make its case exemplary and most significant. )

After this brief digressive tour of the arts, I repeat that Manet's compulsion to innovate, like Flaubert's and Baudelaire's, had behind it the same (if more urgent) need to be " modern. " And art for art's sake was a natural product of modernity's heightened, rationalizing awareness of the relation between means and ends: as with well-being, happiness, the soul's salvation, art finally became recognized as an end in itself. Modern-ness meant at bottom this impulse to establish the means for better art. And better art—not life for the sake of art—is all that art for art's sake meant to begin with. (Flaubert to Baudelaire in 1857: " What I like most of all about your book is that art comes first. " )

The question remains why Modernism, together with its art-for-art's-sake doctrine, should have compelled innovation in a way that it had never, apparently, been compelled before: disturbingly, shockingly, provocatively. There had always been innovation in the arts. But before Modernism innovation had never been so startling (not only in Western but in any other tradition). Originality had always been essential to the vitality of art, to its, quality and effectiveness, but only with Modernism did artistic innovation begin to be so disruptive to taste, so shocking, and so disorienting. Why? The case has been with us for a hundred-odd years, but still hardly any real attention has been paid to the questions it raises.

Every successive move of Modernism proved shocking at first to cultivated, " elite" taste, not only to that of philistines. True, after a generation or so what was new and shocking became assimilated, accepted; ironically, Modernist art, after its initial shock, in almost every medium came to be regarded as art had been regarded before. Despite all talk about " breaks, " revolutions, and so on, continuity persisted. And, yes, innovation in the arts had been resisted before Modernism; still, neither the shock nor the outcry was the same. What was most surprising, more of an indication that something new was being done, was the depth of the reactions to Modernism's innovations. Never before, as far as we can tell, had there been such a blocking off of aesthetic reaction, such an initial blindness, deafness, or incomprehension.

The urgency of Modernist innovation and the resistance to it are basic questions that involve one another, as do their answers. Modernism has meant, among other things, the devolution of a tradition. The continued production of superior aesthetic value after the mid-nineteenth century began, turn by turn in most of the arts, to require the devolution, the gradual unravelling—not so much the dismantling—of the Renaissance tradition of common-sense rationality, conformity to ostensible Nature (from which even tonality in music was held to be derived), and conformity, too, to the way things in general seemed to happen. Modernist architecture, which began late, may be an exception: it turned against the Renaissance and historicist revivals precisely because of their " irrationality. " And Modernist architecture did not so much devolve a tradition as start, suddenly, a new one. The same might be said about Modernist dance. But these exceptions do not make it any the less true that devolution is the general rule in Modernism, not revolution.

The very fact of devolution might seem to account for the resistance to Modernist innovation. Taste and habits had been disoriented, just as disturbingly as if there had been revolution instead of devolution. Maybe devolution can be more disturbing and disorienting than outright revolution, and maybe devolution can also generate a greater momentum of innovation, a greater urgency. I find it easy to envisage that.

But accounting for the resistance to Modernist innovation by the fact of devolution alone does not answer the question adequately, if only because the past offers one very clear precedent for creative devolution, at least in the visual arts, that did not meet resistance. Between the fourth and sixth centuries of our era Greco-Roman pictorial art underwent a creative devolution that turned it into Byzantine art. Then, too, painting flattened itself out as under Modernism, after having been the first and only pictorial art before the Western European to create sculptural, three-dimensional illusion by means of shading-modelling. Then, too, what had been the subordinately decorative infiltrated and finally identified itself with the autonomously pictorial. Sculpture in the round declined and finally disappeared (being prohibited anyway by the Eastern church because it was reminiscent of pagan idols). But sculpture did persist as bas-relief, usually small in scale and shallow-cut, and it did so under the guidance of the pictorial—just as Western sculpture got its new lease on life in the twentieth century from the bas-relief constructions that emerged from cubist painting at the hands of Picasso. But the parallels between the two creative devolutions stop with their respective receptions.

The late Greco-Roman and then Byzantine devolution was accepted from the first, its products installed straightway in church, palace, and other official places. With architecture, which likewise underwent a creative devolution, the situation was the same. I would like to think that this acceptance came about because the devolution was so gradual, and because it so soon became an evolution, one of a largely new tradition of visual art and architecture. In contrast, the Modernist devolution constantly accelerated; instead of two or three centuries or more, it took place, in effect, within a matter of fifty years, between the 1850s and the 1910s (though it is not finished yet). Never had innovation in the arts proceeded nearly so fast. This speed explains in part the resistance to Modernism—but only in part.

The Byzantine devolution-evolution expressed a general, radical change in sensibility, and not only among the upper classes. Has Modernism expressed a similar change in the West? Yes and no. The change may not have been so widespread in its effects, and maybe it still is not. Obviously, we are too close to it in time to be able to tell. Whether the Modernist devolution means the start of the evolution of a new tradition, as did the Byzantine devolution, at least in visual art, remains debatable (despite Modernist architecture and maybe dance).

Another sharp difference between the two devolutions is that Byzantine art had no competitor or alternative. The production and practice of anything that looked like classical Hellenic or Greco-Roman art had fallen off and finally become extinct. Renaissance-adherent art, on the other hand, continued and still continues in the presence of Modernism. I mean " faithfully" representational art, which still produces work of at least minor significance. There is an analogous situation in literature and in music, too. This coexistence of Renaissance-adherent art as a living, productive, even creative alternative has had much to do with the resistance to Modernism.

The question stays open. Such attempts to answer it as I have made do not satisfy even me. The case is too historically unusual. There has been creative devolution in all the arts under Modernism, as there was not in Byzantium, where, for instance, Hellenic literary tradition did not only devolve, it declined and failed for the most part. The parallels with Western Modernism are valid in visual art and architecture alone. A fully adequate explanation of the resistance to Modernism, as well as of the urgency and dynamism of Modernist innovation, has still to be sought.

That over the last two decades the art-interested public, along with officialdom, has turned around and now embraces the idea of Modernist innovation—but without being aware of its point, the maintaining of aesthetic value—hardly affects the matter. This turnaround, mass co-optation, is a problem all by itself, but only within the larger one with which I have been wrestling.

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