Contrasting Views: Debating the Revolt in Art, Ideas, and Lifestyles

At the turn of the century and up until the outbreak of war, heated feelings about changes in ideas, the arts, and everyday life erupted. Music and the visual arts fueled debates over modernity versus traditional values. The break with tradition in everyday life, especially the appearance of the modern woman who worked and did not marry, aroused comment. As the press carried the opinions of heads of state and ordinary critics, the atmosphere around what was called “modernity” was sometimes explosive.

1. House of the Vienna Secession, Motto, 1898

The Vienna Secession was a group of modern artists who broke with traditional ways of painting and design. This motto was inscribed on the wall of its headquarters.

To the age its art, to art its freedom.

2. William II, “True Art,” 1901

As emperor of Germany, William II’s opinions received widespread publicity. This is a pronouncement he made on the modern art springing up in this time.

Sculpture has, as yet, remained largely free of so-called modern directions and influences. It still stands tall and sublime. See to it that it remains so. . . .

So often, under the much abused name and flag of “freedom,” one descends into excess, licentiousness, and presumption. . . .

But there is more: Art should assist in educating the public. By way of its ideals, it should also offer [the members of] the lower classes the opportunity – after a day of strenuous work and effort – to refresh and strengthen themselves. . . . And these ideals demand that we give [the members of] the working, toiling classes the chance to edify themselves through beauty and thereby elevate themselves above everyday concerns.

If art, now, does no more than portray misery – as it happens so often today – in an even more dreadful light than that in which it is already cast, then it sins against the German people. . . . If culture is to fully fulfill its duty, it must penetrate the lowest levels of society. Art can only do this [however] when it offers its hand, when it elevates, when it does not lower itself into the gutter instead.

Source: Wilhelm II, “Die wahre Kunst” [“True Art”] (December 18, 1901), in Ernst Johann, Reden des Kaisers: Ansprachen, Predigten und Trinksprüche Wilhelms II [The Kaiser’s Speeches: Addresses, Preachings, and Toasts by Wilhelm II] (Munich, 1996), 99–103. German Historical Institute, http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/docpage.cfm?docpage_id=1185, trans. Angela A. Kurtz. Accessed October 19, 2014.

3. Claude Debussy, “Taste,” 190?

Claude Debussy was a celebrated composer of the turn of the century. His music broke with the Western tradition of melodic, hummable music because he incorporated non-Western patterns so fully into his music that it sounded strange to listeners used to the music of Mozart, for example. His modifications, breaking with rule-bound formulas, shaped classical music from that time forward. Here is his analysis of the Indonesian music on which his modern compositions were based.

If one listens to [Javanese music] without being prejudiced by one’s European ears, one will find in it a percussive charm that forces one to admit that our own music is not much more than a barbarous kind of noise fit for a traveling circus. . . . All that is needed is an instinctive desire for the artistic, a desire that is satisfied in the most ingenious ways and without the slightest hints of “bad taste.”

Source: Claude Debussy, “Taste,” in Claude Debussy on Music, ed. and trans. Richard Langham Smith (New York: Knopf, 1977) 278-9.

4. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, “Futurist Manifesto,” 1909

Marinetti had studied to become a lawyer before turning to poetry and journalism. After creating an uproar in Italian theaters and issuing pronouncements in newspapers against traditional artistic and political values, he published the “Futurist Manifesto,” excerpted below.

  1. We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness.
  2. The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity and revolt.
  3. Literature has up to now magnified pensive immobility, ecstasy and slumber. We want to exalt movements of aggression, feverish sleeplessness, the double march, the perilous leap, the slap and the blow with the fist.
  4. We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath . . . a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.

What can you find in an old picture except the painful contortions of the artist trying to break uncrossable barriers which obstruct the full expression of his dream?

To admire an old picture is to pour our sensibility into a funeral urn instead of casting it forward with violent spurts of creation and action. Do you want to waste the best part of your strength in a useless admiration of the past, from which you will emerge exhausted, diminished, trampled on?

For the dying, for invalids and for prisoners it may be all right. It is, perhaps, some sort of balm for their wounds, the admirable past, at a moment when the future is denied them. But we will have none of it, we, the young, strong and living Futurists!

5. Clifton A. Wheeler, response to the Armory show, 1913

Clifton A. Wheeler, an artist in Indiana who had trained in New York, wrote to the organizer of a 1913 New York Armory show, a major exhibition of new artistic works, that shocked many U.S. viewers because of the modern art it contained. His opinions, expressed in a letter of December 22, 1913, also reflect his views of a similar exhibit he had just seen in Chicago.

I must confess that the exhibition in Chicago (The International) did not strike me with overwhelming force but I have enough respect for the opinions of Mr. Davies and yourself to admit that the fault may have been my own.

The principal effect the exhibition has had upon me has been to give me a more complete indifference to the facile nothings that most of the artists are painting now and a greater love for Massacio and Giorgione and the engravings of Durer.*

Source: Smithsonian Institution, Armory Show, http://armoryshow.si.edu/. Accessed October 19, 2014.

6. Aleksandra Kollontai, Autobiography, 1926

Kollontai was a Russian activist allied with socialism and would become prominent in the Bolshevik government during World War I. This is her recollection of her feelings as a young woman in the late nineteenth century.

I am far from being one of those “new women” who take their experiences as females with relative lightness (one might even say superficiality), and whose feelings and mental energies are directed at all other things in life but sentimental emotions of love. After all, I still belong to that generation of women who grew up at a turning point in history. Love, with its many disappointments, with its tragedies and eternal demands for happiness, still played a very important part in my life.

Source: Alexandra Kollontai, Autobiography of a Sexually Emancipated Communist Woman, trans. Akvatir Attanasio, ed. Iring Fetscher (New York: Herder and Herder, 1971), 7.

Questions to Consider

  1. What are the major issues in the debate over modern life?
  2. Some historians find the clash over culture and social life to be as important an ingredient in the buildup to war as clashes because of nationalism and disputes over territory. What do you think?
  3. Describe and analyze the different opinions over modern life and culture that appear in the documents.