Book review
The Shock of the New: Art & The Century of
Change by Robert Hughes
Published by the British Broadcasting Corporation
Reviewed by ROSS FRASER
The Shock of the New is a book that began as a brilliantly entertaining series of television programmes, produced for the B.B.C. and shown recently over one of the New Zealand channels.
Sadly, this 'spin-off' book (despite the inflation of his original script, so Hughes tells us, to five times the number of words) may go to prove that the sort of journalism that does quite well on the Box, while we are being dazzled by images created by the great image-makers of our times, may look thin and naked in the sobriety of the printed page.
Hughes is the enfant terrible of modern art commentators; and in The Shock of the New this brilliant columnist (one of the most brightly spluttering stars in the firmament of Time magazine) takes a little over four hundred pages to patronise just about every genius (and some of the lesser talents) in the whole history of the modern movement.
 |
LYONEL FEINENGER Cathedral,
Frontispiece from the first Bauhaus
Manifesto 1919 Woodcut |
If we are to take seriously Hughes's claims to be covering the territory we can look at his evaluation of important movements and artists of the twentieth century. He is inclined to be dense about some figures now generally regarded as the fons et origo of modernism. (He shows a seemingly constitutional lack of sympathy with Expressionism and all its associates, for instance.)
Hughes on Kandinsky:
'The meanings with which Kandinsky hoped to
imbue his later geometrical abstracts in the twenties and thirties - fine as
pattern though they are - now seem esoteric and somewhat naive, but this is
largely because the Expressionist context from which they emerged (not to
mention the woolly pieties of Theosophy) is so long gone. Yet they were a coda
to a lengthy tradition of German transcendentalism, and in that they were not
alone.'
Hughes on Klee:
'His work ferreted around in innumerable crannies of
culture, bringing back small trophies and emblems from botany, astronomy,
physics, and psychology ... He was the compleat Romantic, hearing the Weitgeist
in every puff of wind, reverent before nature but careful to stylize it. Klee's
assumptions were unabashedly transcendentalist. "Formerly we used to
represent things visible on earth," he wrote in 1920, "things we
either liked to look at or would have liked to see. Today we reveal the reality
that is behind visible things, thus expressing the belief that the visible
world is merely an isolated case in relation to the universe and that there are
many other, latent realities. . ."'
Hughes on Mondrian:
'... Mondrian
seems to have been utterly convinced by the Theosophical belief that matter was
the enemy of spiritual enlightenment, and that all forms of material appearance
in history were about to be swept away by a new age whose prophets were Annie
Besant and Madame Blavatsky. Nothing but abstraction could do justice to the
imminent dawn of the spirit. There was a direct link between Mondrian's
religious belief, his personal asceticism, and the development of his art. The
difference between him and other harmless religious cranks, however, was that
Mondrian also happened to be an artist of genius and great moral tenacity.'
On Brancusi:
'Brancusi was a Theosophist, like Kandinsky and Mondrian-and it may
say something about the state of religion in the twentieth century that no less
than three of its greatest artists should have adhered to this sect, while not
one appears to have been a practising Catholic. His utterances on sculpture
centred on the familiar division of essence versus attributes: "What is
real is not the external form, but the essence of things ... it is impossible
for anyone to express anything essentially real by imitating its exterior
surface."'
'.. . Expressionism was, so to speak, a fossil of the ancient Judaeo-Christian
belief in a moral conflict between the world and the
spirit. To rise above the material world, to subdue it by using its contents as
emblems or abstractions, was to chalk up a victory for the spirit even when the
worship of God, the original stake in the battle, had been replaced as in
Expressionism by the cult of the imperious Ego.'
Here, one feels, Hughes's prejudices reveal themselves. The studied philistinism of his approach is evident in a failure to take seriously the philosophy of men who were thinkers as well as artists, and their confounding with such figures as H. P. Blavatsky and Annie Besant. (Hughes might, with more justice, have mentioned the names of Hegel, of Goethe, of Alfred North Whitehead, of Rudolf Steiner. Much more accurate information on the ideas that shaped the work of these artists has been published in Sixten Ringborn's The Sounding Cosmos; a Study in the Spiritualism of Kandinsky and the Genesis of Abstract Painting, Abo, 1970; and Robert Welsh's introduction to the catalogue, Piet Mondrian, 1872-1944, Centennial Exhibition, New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheirn Museum, 1971.)
Hughes gives not more than
two or three pages to the Bauhaus: even though he admits that there has been 'no
experiment in learning comparable to the Bauhaus. . .'
'Whom did ... [Gropius]
hire as his first head teacher? None but Johannes Itten, a faddist who would
have been quite at home on the coast of California in the seventies, who held
purification rituals with his students, called his classroom the "Templars'
Hall", insisted on a vegetarian kitchen in the canteen, and announced that
hair was a sign of sin. In its Weimar years, the Bauhaus was host to every
sort of romantic nitwit, Tolstoyan Wandervogel, and fringe prophet-the
'Inflation Saints", as they were called, preaching their transcendental
gospels and holding marathon readings of the Epic of Gilgamesh by candlelight.'
This is rather cheap writing, and there is no hint of Itten's important pedagogical contributions, and his classic study, The Art of Colour.
On the subject of Cézanne, Hughes expends no more than a couple of
pages (this in spite of the fact that he describes Cézanne, en passant, as the
most influential painter of the first quarter of the twentieth century).
'With
Cézanne... "This is what I see", becomes replaced by a question:
"is this what I see?" You share his hesitations about the position of
a tree or a branch; or the final shape of Mont Ste Victoire, and the trees in
front of it. Relativity is all. Doubt becomes part of the painting's subject.
Indeed the idea that doubt can be heroic, if it is locked into structure as
grand as that of the paintings of Cézanne's old age, is one of the keys to our
century, a touchstone of modernity itself. Cubism would take it to an extreme.'
And this is all! - really all of any substance! - that Hughes has to say about the artist whom Picasso called 'the father of us all'.
All the above disappointments aside, Hughes's book remains an enormously lively text that one really has to read. He is breezily informative in areas often sparely covered (particularly those relating to architecture and technology); and it is quite a feat to have made a palatably popular essay out of a most intellectually complex epoch of human endeavour. I suppose only the naive could take seriously any implied suggestion that he has 'explained' all, exploded all myths, dispelled all mysteries, reduced all things in art and nature to everyday simplicity!
It may be the supreme danger of tellie-punditry that it leaves some viewers with the feeling ('seeing is believing' after all) that their education is complete. In this instance how many will need to be reminded that, for more serious and truthful elucidation of the work of our modern heroes of cilure, they will need to turn to other, perhaps less entertaining, but ultimately more sustaining, writers?