by similar changes in literature and the arts. Throughout
much of the late nineteenth century, literature was
dominated by Naturalism. Naturalists accepted the material
world as real and believed that literature should be
realistic. By addressing social problems, writers could
contribute to an objective understanding of the world.
But Naturalists lacked the underlying note of liberal
optimism about people and society that had still been
prevalent among their predecessors. The Naturalists were
pessimistic about Europe’s future. They doubted the existence
of free will and portrayed characters caught in the
grip of forces beyond their control.
The novels of the French writer Émile Zola (1840 –
1902) provide a good example of Naturalism. Against a
backdrop of the urban slums and coalfields of northern
France, Zola showed how alcoholism and different environments
affected people’s lives. The materialistic science
of his age had an important influence on Zola. He
had read Darwin’s Origin of Species and had been impressed
by its emphasis on the struggle for survival and
the importance of environment and heredity.
At the turn of the century, a new group of writers,
known as the Symbolists, reacted against Naturalism. Primarily
interested in writing poetry, the Symbolists believed
that an objective knowledge of the world was
impossible. The external world was not real but only a
collection of symbols that reflected the true reality of the
individual human mind. Art, they believed, should function
for its own sake instead of serving, criticizing, or
seeking to understand society. In the works of Symbolist
poets William Butler Yeats and Rainer Maria Rilke, poetry
ceased to be part of popular culture because only
through a knowledge of the poet’s personal language
could one hope to understand what the poet was saying.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, the belief
that the task of literature was to represent “reality” had
thus lost much of its meaning. By that time, the new psychology
and the new physics had made it evident that
many people were not sure what constituted reality anyway.
The same was true in the realm of art, where in the
late nineteenth century, painters were beginning to respond
to ongoing investigations into the nature of optics
and human perception by experimenting with radical
new techniques to represent the multiplicity of reality.
The changes that such cultural innovators produced have
since been called Modernism.
The first to embark on the challenge were the Impressionists.
Originating in France in the 1870s, they rejected
indoor painting and preferred to go out to the countryside
to paint nature directly. As Camille Pissarro (1830 –
1903), one of the movement’s founders, expressed it:
“Don’t proceed according to rules and principles, but
paint what you observe and feel. Paint generously and
unhesitatingly, for it is best not to lose the first impression.”
The most influential of the Impressionists was
Claude Monet (1840 –1926), who painted several series
of canvases on the same object—such as haystacks, the
Rouen Cathedral, and water lilies in the garden of his
house on the Seine River—in the hope of breaking down
the essential lines, planes, colors, and shadows of what
the eye observed. His paintings that deal with the interplay
of light and reflection on a water surface are regarded
among the wonders of modern painting.
The growth of photography gave artists another reason
to reject visual realism. Invented in the 1830s, photography
became popular and widespread after George Eastman
created the first Kodak camera for the mass market
in 1888. What was the point of an artist’s doing what the
camera did better? Unlike the camera, which could only
mirror reality, artists could create reality. As in literature,
so also in modern art, individual consciousness became
the source of meaning. Between the beginning of the new
century and the outbreak of World War I in 1914, this
search for individual expression produced a great variety
of painting schools—including Expressionism and Cubism—
that would have a significant impact on the world
of art for decades to come.
In Expressionism, the artist employed an exaggerated
use of colors and distorted shapes to achieve emotional
expression. Painters such as the Dutchman Vincent Van
Gogh (1853–1890) and the Norwegian Edvard Munch
(1863–1944) were interested not in capturing the optical
play of light on a landscape but in projecting their inner
selves onto the hostile universe around them. Who cannot
be affected by the intensity of Van Gogh’s dazzling
sunflowers or by the ominous swirling stars above a
church steeple in his Starry Night (1890)?
Another important artist obsessed with finding a new
way to portray reality was the French painter Paul
Cézanne (1839–1906). Scorning the photographic duplication
of a landscape, he sought to isolate the pulsating
structure beneath the surface. During the last years
of his life, he produced several paintings of Mont Saint
Victoire, located near Aix-en-Provence in the south of
France. Although each canvas differed in perspective,
composition, and color, they all reflect the same technique
of reducing the landscape to virtual geometric slabs
of color to represent the interconnection of trees, earth,
tiled roofs, mountain, and sky.
Following Cézanne was Pablo Picasso (1881–1973),
one of the giants of twentieth-century painting. Settling
in Paris in 1904, he and the French artist Georges Braque
(1882–1963) collaborated in founding Cubism, the first
truly radical approach in representing visual reality. To
the Cubist, any perception of an object was a composite
of simultaneous and different perspectives.
Modernism in the arts also revolutionized architecture
and architectural practices. A new principle known as
functionalism motivated this revolution by maintaining
that buildings, like the products of machines, should be
“functional” or useful, fulfilling the purpose for which
they were constructed. Art and engineering were to be
unified, and all unnecessary ornamentation was to be
stripped away.
The United States was a leader in these pioneering architectural
designs. Unprecedented urban growth and
the absence of restrictive architectural traditions allowed
for new building methods, especially in the relatively new
city of Chicago. The Chicago school of the 1890s, led by
Louis H. Sullivan (1856 –1924), used reinforced concrete,
steel frames, electric elevators, and sheet glass to
build skyscrapers virtually free of external ornamentation.
One of Sullivan’s most successful pupils was Frank
Lloyd Wright (1869–1959), who became known for innovative
designs in domestic architecture. Wright’s pri
private
houses, built chiefly for wealthy patrons, featured
geometric structures with long lines, overhanging roofs,
and severe planes of brick and stone. The interiors were
open spaces and included cathedral ceilings and built-in
furniture and lighting features. Wright pioneered the
modern American house.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, developments
in music paralleled those in painting. Expressionism
in music was a Russian creation, the product of composer
Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) and the Ballet Russe,
the dance company of Sergei Diaghilev (1872–1929).
Together they revolutionized the world of music with
Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring. When it was performed
in Paris in 1913, the savage and primitive sounds
and beats of the music and dance caused a near riot
among an audience outraged at its audacity.
By the end of the nineteenth century, then, traditional
forms of literary, artistic, and musical expression were in a
state of rapid retreat. Freed from conventional tastes and
responding to the intellectual and social revolution that
was getting under way throughout the Western world,
painters, writers, composers, and architects launched a
variety of radical new ideas that would revolutionize
Western culture in coming decades.
World History
