Issue 236 of SOCIALIST REVIEW Published December 1999 Copyright © Socialist Review
One hundred years ago few could have predicted the extraordinary changes that would take place in the arts. Novels, poems, plays, sculpture and music still used traditional forms--even if the content was new and sometimes startling. Cinema had yet to be born--moving pictures were no more than a technological curiosity.
Yet within a dozen years a revolution was under way. Painters like Pablo Picasso brought hundreds of years of traditional ways of representing the human figure to an end. Cubism abolished the idea of perspective and fractured the human face into a set of dashing, distorted planes. Painting came to reflect more of an inner world of intense and turbulent emotion. Some of the avant garde--particularly in Russia--abandoned representation altogether, experimenting with pure abstraction.
Similar changes radicalised music. Advanced composers such as Schoenberg developed the luxuriant musical vocabulary of Richard Wagner's operas to the point at which music lost all sense of tonality. The extreme dissonance of their music reflected a new sense of anguish and inner tension. Other experimentalists in music were influenced by non-European forms of music. Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring, with its primitive, jagged dance rhythms, caused a riot at its Paris premiere in 1913. Poets such as the Italian Futurist Marinetti provoked fights by telling audiences that poetry should be nothing but 'violence, cruelty and injustice'.
Linking all these radical changes in the arts was a sense that no one could go on being an artist in the old sense. Machines, and the speed of the machine, were destroying old ideas about continuity in time and space. Violent juxtaposition of different experiences was now becoming the basis for new forms of art and writing. But the advent of new technologies is insufficient to explain the crisis in the arts. More crucially, the growing instability of bourgeois society which was to lead to imperialist war in 1914 began to make itself felt. The dominant ideology of liberalism was under pressure from both working class socialist internationalism and from more general questioning of the idea of progress, reason and morality. Sexuality and the dark side of the mind were explored by Freud. Not surprisingly, artists themselves questioned the role of art, its subjection to the market and its relationship to the audience.
How to make sense of the post-war Europe whose social order had tottered, or in some cases collapsed, was the problem many artists faced. Some, such as the American-born T S Eliot, saw the world as a waste land (the title he gave his most influential poem), full of fragments of an exhausted 'high' culture which, for a select few, could act as a bulwark against the slide into social chaos. The complexity and obscurity of his writing reinforced this sense of elitism which for many was also a reactionary position. Other writers responded more positively, even if the density of their language made their work relatively inaccessible. One such was the Irish writer James Joyce. His novel Ulysses is equally fragmentary in composition and uses myth to structure its apparent formlessness. But it ends on a note of celebration of ordinary life which is quite alien to Eliot.
In countries where social upheaval provided the vision of a brighter future, artists hoped that radically changed conditions would give birth to a radically changed art. Nowhere was this truer than in Russia, where artists hitched their revolt to the motor of working class revolution. They put themselves at the service of the revolution, seeking to break down the division between art and life. They produced exciting propaganda posters for mass consumption. They applied artistic standards to the production of everyday objects, such as clothes and china. Art itself would be stripped of its mystique, and the machine would be a source of creativity. Film, in the hands of Soviet artists of the 1920S, showed what that most mechanical of modern arts was capable of producing. The Odessa steps sequence of Eisenstein's film Battleship Potemkin (1925), where tsarist troops gun down supporters of the mutineering sailors, was radical in editing technique and its ability to convey political emotion. Its international impact was enormous.
The radicalisation of modern art was not confined to Russia. In Germany, Soviet-inspired architects and designers founded the Bauhaus, whose aim was a new style using modern materials (steel, concrete) and emphasising clean and uncluttered lines which would integrate every aspect of a building's function and design. In France, architects such as Le Corbusier talked of how construction projects, planning a total environment, could become 'machines for living'.
Germany in the 1920s also saw the rise of a new type of theatre. Bertolt Brecht, who became a Marxist under the impact of the world crisis, was determined to create drama which was radical in method, politically committed and open to its audience. His The Threepenny Opera of 1928, with its catchy, cabaret songs--most notably, 'Mack the Knife'-- cynically comparing criminals to big business, was a roaring success. During his Nazi-enforced exile plays such as Mother Courage (1938-39) captured the fate of 'little people' crushed by a war ravaged world they refuse to understand.
As with Stalin in Russia, the triumph of Hitler put an end to radical experimentation in the arts. The best of modernism migrated to the US after the Second World War and created startling skyscrapers in cities like Chicago--but mostly as a monument to corporate power. Elsewhere, it degenerated into monotonous, soulless tower blocks. This caricature became the excuse for a motley crew of opponents, from Prince Charles to the postmodernists, to dismiss what had been truly exciting and radical about modern art and architecture.
Movements such as Surrealism attempted to carry through the revolution in different ways. The Surrealists, who included both writers and painters, wanted a revolution of the imagination, as part of the revolt against society. The question of political commitment produced a crisis. Some, such as the Spanish painter Salvador Dali, finished up supporting Franco. His distinctive style became lucrative rather than subversive. In comparison, the poet and dramatist Frederico Garcia Lorca, though not a Surrealist, paid heavily for his commitment to an art whose intensity acted as an appeal for liberation from repression. He was murdered by nationalists early on in the Spanish Civil War. Other Surrealists took political commitment to mean adherence to the Stalinised Communist Party. Only André Breton turned to the beleaguered revolutionary tradition represented by Trotsky. Together with him and the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, they published a manifesto calling for a free art--a necessarily revolutionary art which would be neither subordinate to Stalinist bureaucratic command nor prostituted by the 'free market'.
Radicalism could also be found amongst the many writers reworked traditional forms in ways that gave radical insights into the world. Some novelists felt a documentary--like responsibility to report realistically on the world. Christopher Isherwood's Berlin novels capture something of the political and sexual turmoil of life at the end of the Weimar republic. And Graham Greene's long novelistic career from the 1930s to the 1980s celebrated the sinner rather than the saint, the outcast rather than the insider, the anti-imperialist struggle rather than the status quo.
The realist tradition produced some of its finest work in the cinema. The sense that film should he true to the lives of ordinary people and their hopes and fears informed the work of film makers like Jean Renoir in the Popular Front France of the 1930s, the neo-realists of postwar Italy, the French New Wave of the 1960s and the Indian film maker Satyajit Ray. All these achievements were in response to new patterns of social discontent.
The pressure to make sense of a world gone mad even made its way into the commercial world of Hollywood. One dramatic instance is the films of Charlie Chaplin. Originally a music hall artist who became phenomenally successful (and rich) in the expanding Hollywood industry after the First World War, Chaplin quickly came to use his comic gifts to satirise 'modern times' the title he gave his 1936 film attacking the alienation of the 'little man' at the mercy of the industrial machine. He, like many others, eventually fell foul of McCarthyism. Other cinematic talent to be strangled by the system included Orson Welles. The pervasive, if muted, influence of left wing politics shaped the 1941 film that made his name, Citizen Kane. But his later, and in many ways more interesting and ambitious work, such as Touch of Evil (1957), which explored racist tensions on the American-Mexican border, was savaged by the Hollywood studios, determined to tame Welles to manageable box office proportions.
Even in the world of the long postwar boom where it seemed, in the words of Jimmy Porter, the angry young man of John Osborne's play Look Back in Anger (1956), that 'there are no good causes left any more', new forms of culture could be the source of radical art. Television seemed to many in the 1960s little more than a means to indoctrinate the masses. Yet writers like Dennis Potter were able to write popular yet artistically and politically challenging plays.
The postwar boom also prepared the way for an extraordinary mixing of different cultures on a global scale. Marx's prediction in The Communist Manifesto, that a world literature would arise as the intellectual creations of individual nations become common property and national exclusiveness breaks down, was becoming true, particularly as far as the novel was concerned. One example of this can be found in 'magic realism', most strongly identified with the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) by the Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Like Surrealism, magic realism mixed the fantastic and the natural without distinguishing between them. One Hundred Years of Solitude explored the combined and uneven development of his country's history, becalmed in its Spanish colonial past but simultaneously thrown open to the impact of modern US imperialism. Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1981) did for India what Garcia Marquez had done for Latin America. The life story of a single individual, born at the exact moment of India's independence, re-enacts the fantasy of Indian unity, born out of antagonistic bits of British, Hindu and Muslim culture, and its subsequent disintegration.
Postmodernism has tried to claim such developments for itself, along with developments in architecture. But having written off the transformation of reality itself, it has also written off any genuinely radical forward looking art as well. The last 100 years have shown that art has only realised its liberatory potential in so far as it has responded, however indirectly, to the working class, anti-fascist and anti-imperialist struggles that have marked our epoch. As a crisis-prone capitalism staggers out of our century, fresh struggles will transform the arts in the century to come.