A powerful introduction to modernism and the creative arts it
inspired.
How do you rationally connect the diverse literature, music, and
painting of an age? Throughout the modernist era--which began roughly in
1872 with the Franco-Prussian War, climaxed with the Great War, and
ended with a third catastrophe, the Great Depression--there was a
special belligerence to this question. It was a cultural period that
envisioned many different models of itself: to the Cubists, it looked
like a vast jigsaw puzzle; to the Expressionists, it resembled a
convulsive body; to the Dadaists, it brought to mind a heap of junk
following an explosion. In Putting Modernism Together, Daniel Albright
searches for the center of the modernist movement by assessing these
various artistic models, exploring how they generated a stunning range
of creative work that was nonetheless wound together aesthetically, and
sorting out the cultural assumptions that made each philosophical system
attractive.
Emerging from Albright's lectures for a popular Harvard University
course of the same name, the book investigates different methodologies
for comparing the evolution and congruence of artistic movements by
studying simultaneous developments that occurred during particularly key
modernist years. What does it mean, Albright asks, that Joseph Conrad's
Heart of Darkness, published in 1899, appeared at the same time as
Claude Debussy's Nocturnes--beyond the fact that the word
"Impressionist" has been used to describe each work? Why, in 1912, did
the composer Arnold Schoenberg and the painter Vassily Kandinsky feel
such striking artistic kinship? And how can we make sense of a movement,
fragmented by isms, that looked for value in all sorts of under- or
ill-valued places, including evil (Baudelaire), dung heaps (Chekhov),
noise (Russolo), obscenity (Lawrence), and triviality (Satie)?
Throughout Putting Modernism Together, Albright argues that human
culture can best be understood as a growth-pattern or ramifying of
artistic, intellectual, and political action. Going beyond merely
explaining how the artists in these genres achieved their peculiar
effects, he presents challenging new analyses of telling craft details
which help students and scholars come to know more fully this bold age
of aesthetic extremism.
