Tuesday Lectures
FROM MONET TO BRECHT
This course is concerned with the birth of the modern in the arts. Although it ends with the Second World War, the extraordinary period between the last decades of the nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth laid the foundations for all that was to follow - and which still challenges us. The course studies the major names and movements of the period, not just in painting but in sculpture, architecture, poetry, music and theatre. Perhaps more than in any other period it is impossible to really understand any of the arts in isolation, so that the interconnections in this course are especially important.
To try to understand one’s own period is the most exciting challenge to any art lover. This is not a new enterprise: every age has had to do it, but our task is more complex and more problematic. Why? There are four reasons, each of which forms a thread running through the lecture series.
The first is what Nietzsche called “the death of God”, the dominance of industry and science and the loss of faith in any single set of cultural ideas. More than ever before it seemed that man was the maker of his own destiny. With so many forces and imperatives vying with one another, the world and any world-view, fragmented, and this leaves us with the task not only of making sense of the new but also trying to hold contradictory fragments together.
The second is our concern with consciousness itself. After Freud we are more than ever aware of the conflict between individual psychology and objective reality. As we struggle with Cézanne, Stravinsky, Brecht or James Joyce we are struggling not only with art but with our own perceptions of the world, what it is and how it can be understood.
Third, we live in a world of increasing speed - of travel, change and communication. Never before have new ideas risen - and fallen - so quickly, leaving us to sift through a mass of poetry, painting, drama and more, trying to make sense of what remains and still keep up with what is being made.
Finally, there is the paradox of growing globalization that has introduced so many new cultural threads, opening art up to a far wider range of influences than ever before. Although we shall be restricting ourselves largely to the western European and American traditions, the impact of so-called primitive cultures is impossible to ignore as they were used by radical artists such as Gaugin and Picasso, Debussy and Bartok to create the new languages that enabled our own modernism.
Complex, problematic, challenging and exciting The Explosion of the Modern will take us through some of the major strands and moments of this unfinished adventure.
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