Culture in Interwar Europe

Can we define a typology of modernism in Interwar Europe?

I think it's possible to define a typology of modernism in Interwar Europe that permeates the visual arts, music, and literature. Part of understanding the term "modernism" is seeing it as something other than a merely date-specific categorization. Rather, it's informative to situate culture within the larger historical context and to compare cultural output to that during the preceding period to identify the distinctive aspects of the typology of modernism.

For instance, in the area of music, the debut of Igor Stravinsky's Sacre du Printemps is instructive. For Modris Eksteins, the key aspect here is Freud's ability to shock fin-de-siècle Europe's sensibilities: "For modern art as for modern science shock and surprise had become by the early years of the twentieth century an integral part of the cultural landscape."[1] In this regard, Stravinsky's work did not disappoint, with audience members rioting at its premiere. More broadly, Stravinsky's music and even the more "radical" atonal work of Arnold Schoenberg were marked by the influence of neoclassicism, which could be seen as a reaction to the romanticism of the previous century.

In the visual arts, Eksteins notes the influence of new thinking about science and morality on cubism: "the geometric shapes that formed the basis of cubist composition-its critics derided it as decomposition - hinted at a fourth dimension beyond time, space, and matter related to the new ability to escape existing laws, be they gravitational, moral, or artistic."[2] Here, there is also again a reaction to the previous prevailing form, i.e., impressionism, with its realistic, if softly focused, emphasis on the subject matter. In this arena, Picasso is possibly the most famous artist and his Les Demoiselles d'Avignon embodying both a break with previous form and content -- the subject being prostitutes.

Finally, in literature, the subgenre of High Modernism was ascendant. With High Modernism, another sort of neoclassicism, which combined a return to mythic archetypes with radically new styles, was an important factor. A rallying cry was issued by the American expatriate (and future fascist) Ezra Pound, who exhorted his proteges to "make it new."[3] The literary figures thus influenced certainly include James Joyce, whose Ulysses retold Homer's Odyssey as a single day in 1901 Dublin, or the Anglo-American T.S. Eliot, whose poem "The Waste Land" juxtaposed passages wholly parachuted from ancient and medieval literature with lines such as "These fragments I have shored against my ruins,"[4] a direct reference to the fragmentation of High Modernist poetry (and prose).

In conclusion, the arts offered a typology of modernism in interwar Europe characterized by a radical break with past forms influenced in part by the rapidly evolving intellectual environment and by a desire to react directly against the previous mode. Although it does not make a particular point in this regard, I thought I'd end this post with this quotation from Paul Johnson's Modern Times, if only because it so nicely mashes together a bunch of figures from the arts into a single sentence: "They [Marcel Proust and James Joyce] in Paris on 18 May 1922 , after the first night of Stravinsky's Renard, at a party for Diaghilev and the cast, attended by the composer and his designer, Pablo Picasso. Proust, who had already insulted Stravinsky, unwisely gave Joyce a lift home in his taxi."[5]

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[1] Modris Ecksteins, "Culture," in Europe, 1900-1945, ed. Julian Jackson (New York: Oxford UP, 2002), 178.
[2] Ibid, 175.
[3] Michael North, "The Making of 'Make It New,'" Guernica (August 15, 2013), https://www.guernicamag.com/the-making-of-making-it-new/
[4] T.S. Eliot, "The Waste Land," https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47311/the-waste-land
[5] Paul Johnson, Modern Times: From the Twenties to the Nineties (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 9-10.