Modernism: The Lure of Heresy

by Peter Gay

In his most ambitious endeavour since Freud, acclaimed cultural historian Peter Gay traces and explores the rise of artistic Modernism, the cultural movement that heralded and shaped the modern world, dominating western high culture for over a century. He traces the revolutionary path of modernism from its Parisian origins to its emergence as the dominant cultural movement in world capitals such as Berlin and New York, resulting in a work unique in its breadth and brilliance.

Lavishly illustrated, Modernism is a superb achievement by one of our greatest historians.

Genres: History, Art, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Literature, Literary Criticism, Art History

610 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

Peter Joachim Gay was a German-American historian, educator, and author. He was a Sterling Professor of History at Yale University and former director of the New York Public Library's Center for Scholars and Writers (1997–2003). He received the American Historical Association's (AHA) Award for Scholarly Distinction in 2004. He authored over 25 books, including The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, a two-volume award winner; Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (1968); and the widely translated Freud: A Life for Our Time (1988).
Gay was born in Berlin in 1923, left Germany in 1939 and emigrated, via Cuba, to the United States in 1941. From 1948 to 1955 he was a political science professor at Columbia University, and then a history professor from 1955 to 1969. He left Columbia in 1969 to join Yale University's History Department as Professor of Comparative and Intellectual European History and was named Sterling Professor of History in 1984.
Gay was the interim editor of The American Scholar after the death of Hiram Haydn in 1973 and served on that magazine's editorial board for many years. Sander L. Gilman, a literary historian at Emory University, called Gay "one of the major American historians of European thought, period".

Reviews

[Paul Bryant · Rating 2 out of 5]

What was it the artist still known as Prince nearly said? There's joy in definitions. They prevent us from having to be party to any more inane conversations e.g.

- Hey, what's Tracy Emin's latest stuff like?

- Well, it is what it is.

- Yeah.

- She's still keeping it real.

- For sure.

So, let's define 120 years of art, starting with bad boy Baudelaire. Les Fleurs du Mal, 1857

– "the strictest rule-bound sonnets and the grossest subject matter".

Sounds like Lou Reed.

PG says that the essential elements of modernism are the lure of heresy and the cultivation of subjectivity... a commitment to a principled self-scrutiny…

And these modernists were

aesthetic radicals rebelling against the beloved and oppressive past

Yeah right. Blah blah. Did modernism add up to anything more than a parade of lionised tortured white male artist ritually offending their tribal elders with their rulebreaking tuneless howls of pain about the meaninglessness and futility of boohoo human life?

Art serves no one but itself – not mammon, not God, not country, not bourgeois self-gratification, certainly not moral progress.

Nothing is truly beautiful but what can never be of use to anything. Everything that is useful is ugly, for it is the expression of some need, and human needs are ignoble and disgusting. The most useful place in a home is the latrine.

– Theophile Gautier, a foppish French writer.

Really.

What a load of pompous shit – is a musical instrument ugly? Well, of course, tubas are fairly unlovely, I grant you, but all the rest of them are very beautiful to look at, and they are useful too because they produce music. Human beings appear to need music so that's one need which isn't ignoble. Gautier room, Gautier! And stay there!

Walter Pater : All art constantly aspires to the condition of music.

This is more like it – music can be abstract and very beautiful at the same time. What am I saying - music IS abstract. So in other words it doesn't represent anything, it just is. Oh, excellent, now I sound like a Van Morrison lyric. (Music can also be very useful, like jolly military bands firing up young men with the desire to slaughter other young men they haven't met yet, or like say disco music which inspires persons of all sexes to camp it up and become better acquainted. )

All these aphorisms have more holes in them than a Walmart that only sells colanders.



PAINTING

It's clear what modernist painting is. Impressionism, cubism, you know the whole grinning growling gurning besplotched ploopy carousel. Poor Vincent! Starry night, ah! No 1 in the charts and you never knew. Tragic.

Monet's prices rose spectacularly, year after year. In 1879 he was earning the same as a top lawyer. By the early 1880s he tripled that. In 1995 he was the Bill Gates of blurry painting. Blurry blurry waterlilies! Oh Claude!

The painters rejected convention, conformity, the academy, they wanted to be proud and alone and unique, so they instantly banded together and called themselves Fauves or Cubists or Neo-plasiticists or The Shangri-Las or whatnot. They were a whole bunch of loners, loning together.

Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian – the three imaginary boys.

Paintings of white squares and then black squares by 1913! Now that's progress.

What they did share was a powerful sense of opposition to the world as it was, and a hunger for spirituality – PG

Yeah well, Mr Gay, that's not so special. I too have a powerful sense of opposition to the world as it is, don't you? Doesn't everybody?

Art historians who in recent years have announced the death of art usually give Duchamp the credit or blame for killing it – PG

You got to love Marcel, the only French artist to inspire a doowop group to name themselves in his honour.



Readymades - Bicycle Wheel, 1913 – art by fiat – I am the artist and if I say this thing is art it is and I'll bite you if you say any different so yah. Yeah? Yeah? Bicycle wheel! Urinal! Suck it up, creeps!

LITERATURE

It's also clear what modernist literature is.

James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust were in a noisy pub one evening.

'Will you lend me £10?' shouted Joyce.

'You'll have to speak up a bit,' said Virginia, 'I can't hear a word you're saying with all the noise in here.'

'Will you lend me £10?' screamed Joyce at the top of his voice.

'It's no use,' said Virginia, 'I still cannot hear a word you're saying.'

'Now now, Virginia,' said Marcel Proust, 'I can hear him quite clearly.'

'In that case,' said Virginia, "you lend him the £10.'

What's more extreme than Finnegans Wake? No book is.

Samuel Beckett : Pinter said about him : The farther he goes the more good it does me. I don't want philosophies, tracts, dogmas, way outs, truths, answers, nothing from the bargain basement. The more he grinds my nose in the shit the more I am grateful to him.

They gave Beckett the Nobel Prize, that's how avant his garde was.

MUSIC

Among all the domains of modernism, music was the most esoteric. Unlike avant-garde painting, or the novel, or architecture, which all entered the mainstream of taste after a time of trials, much avant-garde music is still avant-garde music. PG

Well, when Mr Gay says music what he is referring to is that strange thing called "modern classical music" or "atonal bollocks".

Composers resigned themselves to their fate as emotionally available only to a narrow elite.

- poorly attended concerts before an audience consisting in the main of fellow professionals – pg

Ha ha, serves em right. Take it, take another little piece of my art, baby.

Okay, I get this. Modernism introduced the concept of ugliness as not only acceptable but as something to earnestly strive for. So in music, atonality; in painting, horrible hideousness like Les Demoiselles d'Avignon; in architecture, all that nasty steel & glass; in novels, abandonment of plots i.e. no fun

(Note : modernism is the same as the avant-garde as far as Peter Gay is concerned. Same thing.)

Anyway, jazz does not merit a mention here. But that was modernist pop music.

PG loses me when he describes what a modernist composer like Debussy was trying to do – using such phrases as "such descents into the self" and "the inner life and its felicitous portrayal" – I quite see that that is what Debussy was trying to achieve (and did) but can't see why the same vague phrases couldn't be applied to pre-modernists like Beethoven.

Grand poetasting goulash like :

Mahler was principally concerned to establish the sovereignty of the sounds he invented and constructed, to let them blossom in his own and his listeners' minds (p243) – pg

Why can't this be said about any composer? Or then again – why spin this fatuous twaddle anyway? Why not do something useful instead?

Hold the front page. It says here that Modernists could be and often were right wing, racist and misogynist.
No…

TS Eliot, Charles Ives, Strindberg, Hamsun.

The Wrap Up, at Long last

So according to PG Modernism began in the mid 1850s, got up to high speed in 1890 to 1920 and then crashed into a big fat thing called Pop Art in 1960 and died. Don't go breaking my art!!

I was cruisin' in my Stingray late one night
When Andy Warhol pulled up on the right
He rolled down the window of his shiny new Jag
And challenged me then and there to a drag
I said, "you're on, buddy, my mill's runnin' fine
Let's come off the line, now, at Sunset and Vine
But I'll go you one better if you've got the nerve
Let's race all the way
To Pop Art Curve
Pop Art Curve
Pop Art Curve

(Abstract Expressionists :
You won't come back from Pop Art Curve)


I don't get it. Peter Gay appears to despair at Pop Art and consider it a bad thing because – this is just a guess – although the artists were still white males, they weren't anguished, and they loved low culture (and spent their time eagerly ripping it off). They possessed "hardworking cheerfulness". Maybe that's what was wrong with them. They loved selling out! They wanted to be rich. (As rich as Monet!) After traversing so much interesting material PG suddenly seems to give up. He spends a few pages hunting high and low for signs of Modernism after Pop Art. In Literature he gives a crazy number of pages to Gabriel Garcia Marquez who he appears to think is the very model of a modern major Modernist. He laments the absence of any other great-but-difficult cutting edge authors. He appears not to have noticed Williams Gass and Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, John Barth, Marguerite Young or Alexander Theroux. Throughout the book Modernism is identified with the avant garde – well, last time I looked, we still have one of those. We have Carl Andre's minimal bricks, Andres Serrano's Piss Christ, Tracy Emin's bed, Damien Hirst's sharks – we have regular outbursts of outrage from the bourgeoisie! What's not to love? Maybe he thinks of all this stuff as "post-modern" and in some way therefore not modernist. But we wouldn't know, because he never discusses post-modernism. Huh.

I was going to grudgingly give this book 3 stars but you know what? it's just a bit crap really. Two stars, and sue me.

[Dawn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Finally finished the book, after maxing out renewals and having a fine placed on my library account. I won't lie to you; reading Peter Gay's Modernism is no light undertaking. There are, after all, more than 500 pages of text.

As voluminous as the volume is, though, it may still not be enough for Gay's ambitious undertaking. He seeks to define Modernism and discuss its exemplars. Although he does exactly that, there is still a sense of something missing, as if there is a slight blip in the book's coherence. The definition of Modernism given and applied over and over is a little simplistic, comprising two parts. The first part is given in the title: "the lure of heresy." The second part is subjectivity. These are the main two criteria Gay applies to modernist works.

He begins with Baudelaire's exhortation to "Make it new!", contending that adhering to this imperative is what marks the beginnings of Modernist art. Well, okay. But this is what pioneer artists have been doing all along, else art would never advance or change. Is it simply that artists adopted this exhortation and began consciously attempting to do things that have never been done before that makes it Modern? We need another ingredient to Modernism. At least one. Gay turns to subjectivity as the second ingredient. That is, exploration of the self and the inner realms through art. However, he concentrates much less on this than on the "lure of heresy" and thus runs into some difficulties when discussing art in the Soviet Union, and overall differentiating the modernists from the non-modernists. He attempts to delineate between them, but I did not find that particular portion of his study illuminating.

As a survey of late-19th to early-20th century art, the book is decent if far from exhaustive. Gay is at his best when discussing history, art history, and architecture. He is on much shakier ground with music and literature. His literary analysis leaves much to be desired, as he has a tendency to assert a claim, provide some supposedly illustrative quotations, and leave it as if it is self-explanatory. In his section on music, Schoenberg's twelve-tone composition method is prominent, but he leaves any explanation of what the twelve-tone system is until nearly the end of it.

Overall, it seems that in this book, Gay has decided on a definition of Modernism and marshalled an array of work from artists working in various art forms (painting, sculpture, fiction, poetry, music, dance, drama, film, and architecture) to apply his definition to. Challenges to his schema are not handled very sure-handedly, as we can see in his discussion of Soviet art and artists. Most of the Soviet artists he discusses at any lengths are generally emigrants who continued their work outside of the U.S.S.R. In his section on the threats to Modernism, in dealing with art in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and Fascist Italy, he baldly states that Modernist art was impossible in Nazi Germany because of political constraints. He doesn't go so far as to say the same thing for the Soviet Union, but certainly gives short shrift to artists who chose to remain there.

One of the figures Gay declines to discuss at any length is the composer Shostakovich. Yes, I do have a soft spot for Shostakovich, and so of course I'd like to see more about him. I recognize that in a book of this kind of scope that there is no room to dwell too long on any particular thing, but I certainly thing that Gay could have said much more on Shostakovich, as he poses quite a challenge to Gay's narrative structure. Gay does mention the composer's censure by Soviet authorities and discusses what the charge of "formalism" meant for him and other Soviet artists. But he doesn't push this very far, and there's certainly more to be said there. Gay does not write off all Soviet art as non-modernist, as he does about Nazi Germany, but he is also unwilling to explore to what extent modernist art was possible under the Soviet regime. I suppose he can be forgiven for this, as it is a difficult question, but I would have liked to have seen some acknowledgment that it was a difficult balance for Soviet artists to strike, and Shostakovich would have been a good example through which to begin to explore that.

[AC · Rating 2 out of 5]

Verbose -- more adjectives than analysis - superficial and general - a mediocre book. The bibliographical essay at the back is the most (only real) valuable portion of this volume.

[Merve · Rating 4 out of 5]

İngilizcemi oturtmak için çevirerek okuduğum enfes kitaplardan biriydi. Gerçi okuma keyfi bir yerde anlamak adına çalışma sorumluluğuna dönüştüğü için zorlanmış olsam da, modernize dair akıcı bir anlatı diline sahip ve alternatif bir bakışaçısına sahip kitap benim çok ilgimi cekti. Özellikle kültürel ve sanatsal alandaki modernizmin oluşum süreci, şairler ve ressamlarla ilgili bölümlerden ayrıca keyif aldım (sürekli sözlüğe bakmak durumunda kalmanın yarattığı bunalmayla beraber). İngilizcesi turkcesinden (baskısı olmadığı için sahaf sitelerinde türkçesi 750 tl'den başlıyor.) daha uygundu İngilizcesini aldım. Çok hacimli ve puntosu küçük olduğu için uzun süre okumak için meraktan cildirsam da beklettim. En sonunda bir yerden başlamak gerek dedim. Okuduğum için pişman değilim ama çok yavaş bir okuma süreci yaşadığım için ne kadar iyi sindirebildim bilemiyorum. Yine de etkili ve önemli bir kitap. Umarım türkçesi yeniden basılır ve anadilimde daha akıcı bir şekilde tekrar okuyabilirim.

[Daniel Mueller · Rating 5 out of 5]

The thesis isn't profound, that all of the arts underwent a radical change from objective to subjective representation between the mid-1800s and now, but what I love about this history is how incisively the author treats all the artforms--literature, dance, music, painting, sculpture, architecture, and film--and shows how diverse artists, architects, composers, and writers responded to powerful cultural and historical forces with a similar premise but with markedly different results. The book, extremely erudite, is packed with anecdotes that give the reader insight into the personal lives of a great many modernist luminaries. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was impressed by the flowing, lucid prose, as well as by the vast scope of this book. In a mere 610 pages (including the index and a bibliographic essay), Peter Gay provides a warm, sympathetic overview of a century's worth of artistic expression in multiple disciplines—painting, music, architecture, literature, dance and motion pictures.

This approach necessarily leads to some skimming of creators and works. The book has so many hooks, in fact—jumping-off points for further research—that I'd recommend reading it alongside an encyclopedia, or a computer with Internet access, so you can look up more about items referred to only in passing. I also wanted more illustrations, and more in color, but I liked the ones that were chosen.

But Gay really does hit pretty much all of the names you'd expect and then some, and goes into detail on many. The sections on Baudelaire, Picasso, Andy Warhol, Frank Lloyd Wright and the "coda" about Frank Gehry were especially memorable.

In all I'd say this work is a great success.

Oh, and A Note on the Type: There isn't one, which is a shame, because the typeface used for chapter and section headings, and other such elements within the book, is distinctive and unfamiliar to me. I would have liked to know what it's called.

[Yu · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked it, a book for very detailed and personalized general information on modernism. Most of the figures in the stream of history are mentioned by the author. However, names like Susan Sontag during the important 1960s was not appeared in the text at all. She might be just a surfer, a rider on the wave, or perhaps, her value is far more underestimated by the contemporary literary world. But anyway, this book brings back many memories and knowledges on "Foreign literature".

[James Murphy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Peter Gay writes that the 2 major attributes of modernism are the desire to confront conventional sensibilities and a focus on self-scrutiny or the deep scrutiny of subject. That emphasis on investigation and understanding of people and ideas, Gay makes clear, means that psychology in art of all kinds drove what we call the modernist movement. Freud overlooks all of it, even though the full thrust of his ideas on art and culture haven't been fully digested.

As the title states, the book concerns itself with those writers, artists, architects, and musicians who produced work with those ideas in mind and who we consider modernist, from Baudelaire to Beckett. And beyond: he spends a lot of time at the end discussing Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Frank Gehry. Most of the iconic works we associate with modernism are discussed, along with those who gave them to us. I thought the discussions of the writers--the artists I'm most familiar with--were insightful and thought-provoking. I was inspired in some cases to read again or discover for the first time. His treatment of Proust was the most interesting in the book.

However, Gay is a historian rather than a critic, and I wondered if this was the reason for the largest drawback I saw with the book, that it's essentially a survey of the modernist movement and reads a little like those dreary history and literature texts we used to pour over in school. The need to try to catalog everything results in a blandness. In order to comprehensively comment on such a large cultural event he necessarily has to hurry at times, meaning his discussion is too often only cursory. A study of the artists and works driving one of the most interesting aesthetic trends of our time should be more engaging.

[Sanjay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not a book to read for bold new assessments or provocative theses, but to gain a broad overview of the Modern movement which, according to Gay, starts with Baudelaire and ends with Warhol. Lucidly written -- but could have done with more illustrations -- and engaging throughout. Gay covers the gamut: from prose, poetry and drama to art to architecture to music (but leaves out photography). Makes you realise once again that though there may be very many good works of art nowadays, there aren't any great ones.

[Kirti Upreti · Rating 5 out of 5]

One man's lunacy is another man's genius. As the avant garde artist Vincent Van Gogh famously remarked, "Normality is a paved road; it's comfortable to walk but no flowers grow on it."

The book transports you to that very era where some people were taking the courage to challenge conformity; especially when it was a real risk. They suffered under the indifference and ridicule of society but it didn't deter them from becoming the transforming force that the world needed and deserved. To delve into the minds of those crazy brilliant artists is not only an exciting but a mind expanding journey.

[Lauren Albert · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good review of the rise and development of modernism. Don't expect anything new but it's good coverage for a beginner. Gay makes a point of showing that there were modernists covering the full political spectrum--modernism does not align with a particular politics. The end was weaker as he did the (seemingly inevitable) "art is not what it used to be" thing. You'd think this would be done with some irony considering the history he just covered.

[Juneko Robinson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Thus far, I'm lukewarm: I like it, but I'm not loving it. Usually I love these kinds of ambitious cultural histories, but I'm just not feeling it. I think I'm just not in the mood to read this right now, so I'm going to stop my reading at page 57. I'll pick it up again when I'm in the mood for it.

[Cypress Butane · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good overview, with good critical sense, only complaint is it's not long enough, not in depth enough. I wanted more detail and more minor characters. I guess I will have to read his biography of Freud that I am sure will have plenty to offer.

[Jason Friedlander · Rating 4 out of 5]

This overview primarily covers the “modernist” developments over the 120 year period from the 1840s to the 1960s in the fine arts, architecture, literature, music, film, and more. Given the dearth of books covering a similar scope, I have to recommend this as a decent primer to modernism across the arts. Expect for the book to be focused exclusively on how it was expressed in the U.S. and Europe, however. It’s still quite varied and extensive, though it can read more like a series of monographs than a unified whole. I guess that’s as best as you can expect for someone attempting to present and tie together such disparate artistic movements. The presumption of placing them all under the same label is that they all shared common philosophical and psychological impulses, implicitly bound by their historical moments— the rapid rise of capitalism, psychoanalysis, and its apotheosis in global war. In particular, as this book’s title suggests, Gay greatly defines the modernist impulse as an act of heresy, of resisting the forces that drive us more and more into stagnation and homogeneity. It’s a book about artistic outlaws.

For me I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing for an author to artificially group together different artists in order to illustrate a broader point. It’s less interesting to me how they all fit into the “modernist” label and more interesting to learn who they were and what they strove to achieve with their art. Taken as a series of biographies of exemplary creatives over the last 150 years, I think this book is a very worthy read. It can feel at times a bit overly opinionated and not as “objective” as one would think an overview should be, but his passionate points of view make the text much livelier than it would have been otherwise. I wouldn’t say this is the be-all-end-all of books about modernism, but it’s still quite insightful. I learned a lot about different artists that I’ve since decided to dig further into, and that exposure is priceless.

Of all the things here I found most interesting, my favorite was learning about how artists across different fields dealt with and reacted to war, in particular, WWI. It seemed like a generation of artists were so deeply affected by such widespread depravity that they felt compelled to protest it through new uses of aesthetics. And it’s interesting just how little of their intentions survived the test of time, as many without knowledge of their movements merely see today their art as “abstract” or “modern” or “minimal” without really understanding in what ways they were being highly political. What some even intentionally created to be anti-beautiful, to frankly be ugly, to be against understanding and rationality, have over time been assimilated by a kind of middle-brow relativist philosophy of everything being an “acquired taste”.

It’s by no means a perfect book, and I found that the last 50 or so pages, as it moves into pop art and into the “end of modernism,” to be of lesser quality than the preceding chapters, but his concerns about the death of these types of artistic impulses is something I feel instinctively to be true, though I wish he spent less time focusing on himself as an observer. It just feels like a limp end to an otherwise fascinating book. I also found including his personal politics a bit unnecessary. Still, I’d recommend this book for those looking for “heretic” artistic inspiration.

[James Moran · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really good . A nice strong thesis so u don't forget that it's just one perspective

[Jared Colley · Rating 3 out of 5]

What's up people; I'm back. Been on book review sabbatical, but here I am. I'm going to keep this one short.

Peter Gay is one of my favorite historians of modern-to-late-modern Europe. His work on the Enlightenment, the rise of the middle class, weimar culture, etc. is all excellent - especially his Enlightenment books (1st volume won the National Book Award...). His latest study is on 'Modernism' (with a capital 'M'); it covers literature, architecture, the visual arts, etc., but there is one omission (as pointed out by my good friend, Roberto). There is no investigation of the great Gertrude Stein!!!!

My 3 star rating is misleading; the book is lovely and informative. I learned much about architecture and sculpture specifically. However, any book that claims to be an account of Modernism as a cultural phenomenon should engage the eccentric work of Gertrude Stein.

Note: For a good account (but less "exhaustive") of Postmodernism, read David Harvey's 'The Condition of Postmodernity'.......

[James Henderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is both a history and a compendium of ideas about the arts and how they have changed. In it he discusses writers, including 'the Fascist Knut Hamsun, the bigot High Anglican TS Eliot and the hysterical anti-feminist August Strindberg'. As a child of Weimar, he admits with that 'Modernism was not a democracy'. The artists examined here are haughty autocrats such as Picasso or Diaghilev, or self-deifying prophets such as the painters Kandinsky and Ensor. His insights are suggestive and often scintillating and his style makes this enjoyable to read. Near the end of the book, As with most of Gay's non-biographical works this book provides an impetus for further reading and enriches the reading I have already done.

[Brittany · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have not quite finished this book, but I just want to respond to some book reviews that I have read on this book in New York times and some other publications. While the academic world may criticize this book for lack of novel ideas and perspectives on the modern movement, I think that sometimes we need good books that a normal person can pick up and enjoy an overview of a movement that otherwise they might never have been aware of. This book does that, it draws connections to things in a clear way that even one not well versed in modernism might understand . True it says nothing that hasn't already been said many times, but it is well written and easy to understand which many academic writings seems to lack.

[Gary Norris]

so, I checked this out at a bookstore recently and was shocked to see Gay attempts to offer a synthesis (a singularity, if you will,) to the history of Modernism.

This cannot work. Modernism is not to be traced linearly.

However, after listening to the NYTimes Book Review podcast, I am intrigued enough once again to read the book. The NYTimes critics are such bourgeois assholes. I'll read it and like it to spite them.

I've always wanted to read Gay's history on Weimar culture. So, more Gay Reading. Great. heh. Oh sheesh. I better pick up his essays on Freud.

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've only really just started it but am totally engrossed. Peter Gay is trying to cover what makes the modernism movement "modernism" and the key people in this movement (across architecture, music, literature, painting, etc).

I already have some modernist names i'll be looking into. Just fantastic

I picked this up at Reading book store in Lygon St Carlton (Melbourne) on the bargain table... I love that bookstore.

[Jonathan Frederick Walz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Just ok. While there are two or three interesting insights—and I'm always interested in hearing how someone frames this story or how they theorize it—there is too much fluff to make this useful. Too many eccentric notes and sidebars that don't really add anything. Not surprisingly white and masculinist but really? I'll keep it as a reference but Norman Cantor and Joseph Singal are still my go-to's.

[Geo Vittoratos · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am much more a fan of postmodern art and philosophy but I figured I should get to know the predecessor of the "movement." As comprehensive as this book is, it barely even scratched the surface but it was more than enough to build up a nice hefty modernist reading list for me. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who is a lover of modern literature or art.

[김 관홍 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Eurocentric. Solid prose style. Not too accessible. Sometimes it meanders. Thematically, the ideas are kind of basic. It is, however, a decent introduction to what is taught as "influential" in mainstream arenas of the arts and letters.

[Tanina Cadwell · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's unashamedly academic with more than a hundred pages of index, bibliographic notes and sources. Stylistically, Peter Gay sits somewhere between Simon Schama and the drier Peter Ackroyd and is eminently readable and interesting.

[Jonathan · Rating 2 out of 5]

The only good thing about this book is its survey of a broad range of artists in different disciplines considered 'modernists'. But mostly it reads as a rather uncritical summery of the authors favourite artists and his admiration for modernism as such.

[Jason · Rating 5 out of 5]

my mum got me this for father's day...looking forward to it...billy raves about it...
i'm hoping it'll be useful to the thesis...

[Maximilian Gerboc · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent overview of modernism among various artistic platforms. Can be a little repetitive, but I guess that's true of most writers trying to reinforce a thesis.

[J. · Rating 3 out of 5]

A lot of meat, but also a lot of fat. Read Weimar Culture by Gay some years back and it was much more tightly written and better for it. Still, a lot of ground covered with a vast subject.

[John Ferngrove · Rating 3 out of 5]

As I seem to be saying more and more these days, this book would suit a much younger reader. I was very impressed with Gay's biography of Freud in both its rigour and depth but his history, if history is quite what it is, of Modernism in the arts of the Western world has proved a little disappointing to me personally. If I had found this in my late 20s or early 30s I would have lapped it up and it it would have set the course of my artistic explorations for a decade or so to come. But after a life of immersion in the arts and particularly modernist arts; painting, literature, poetry, music - above all music; even at 600+ pages this is little more than a concatenation of thumb-nail sketch biographies and key works that might form the basis of a 4-part BBC4 documentary series. For those who have got anywhere close to any of these arts in their appreciation, they will find little that is new or startling in this book. I guess the lesson for me is that anything purporting to be single book on the whole of Modernism is going to seem superficial. When I think of painting for instance this book doesn't come anywhere close to the acuity and subtlety of insight of Robert Hughes' Shock of the New. Likewise, in relation to poetry, Gay's treatment has none of the critical depth or analytic rigour of The Cambridge Introduction to Modernist Poetry, that I am also currently reading.

In fact if we're going to get really critical here I would say that this is a book to introduce newcomers to a broad range of artistic experiences, but that they should take the analysis, which is really just received academic opinion, even to the point of the book's title, with a pinch of salt. As someone who doesn't believe in postmodernism except as an obfuscating academic fiction, the notion that Modernism fizzled out somewhere between the end of WWII and the sixties has always seemed implausible. The fact that there is no real agreement on when the modern/postmodern transition occurred I take in itself to be telling. It seems entirely clear to me that we still live in an aesthetic condition of evolving modernism, and will continue to do so for as long as science and technological innovation continue. While the phenomenon of late capitalism as identified by Jameson as derived from Marx, seems to me like a real thing or at least something that it is useful to treat as such, I do not see how this sets an aesthetic agenda that is definitive or pervasive enough to change all the arts, both production and reception, into something different from the arts as practiced in an earlier era. Modernism I take to be a real phenomenon or at least a tangibly useful category with a beginning that can point to Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal as an early exemplar. Modernism can be seen as the form that all the arts gradually took on when science and technology facilitated a transition to industrial society that in turn set in motion movements towards increased urbanism, democratisation and a progressive removal from nature and religion, for both good and ill. What academics treat as postmodernism across the arts in general I see as just the stories of the evolution of the economic conditions of production for each individual art and its evolving relation to their respective baselines in popular culture.

So, as I see it, while the academic myth of postmodernism persists, young people wishing to engage with the more deeply personally transformative layers of culture, i.e., the arts, as they have evolved since the emergence of industrial society, then they will be obliged to do so through books with titles like Modernism.

As for Gay's sub-title, The Lure of Heresy, that too I feel to be a bit redundant. There have been artists who wish to achieve their impact through shock and controversy in all times. And they have always worked against a backdrop of artistic creation that simply hopes that its audience will see the value of its creation as self evident, whether as beautiful, ennobling, uplifting, etc. Not all modernist artists have created all their works with a desire to shock, perhaps even offend. While much of modern art, particularly the most historically notorious of it, has been created with the intent, or at least the result of courting controversy, the vast majority of it has been offered with the sincere desire to find a receptive and understanding audience.

My conclusion then is that for someone seeking an introduction, to certain notorious artists and their works, this is as good an introduction as might be found. But in the context of fundamentally misleading academic and historical categorisation the critical analysis, such as there is, should be approached with critical scepticism.

[Qian Xie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is an ambitious and engaging panoramic introduction to modernism in the arts. Written by a distinguished cultural historian rather than a literary critic, the book offers readers a sweeping historical narrative that situates modernist creativity within its broader social, political, and intellectual contexts. For anyone seeking a comprehensive, historically grounded overview of modernism, Gay’s work is an excellent point of entry. Although specialists in literary studies may find the book less theoretically probing or critically interventionist than the field’s major scholarly contributions, its accessibility and historiographical breadth make it an invaluable resource for general readers.

Gay’s central argument is that modernism is best understood as an “atmosphere of heresy”—a pervasive cultural disposition defined by rebellion against established norms, conventions, and authorities. Drawing on and extending insights from thinkers such as Matei Călinescu, Gay identifies two essential traits shared across modernist movements. The first is the “lure of heresy” itself: the modernist impulse to overturn inherited traditions, defy academic orthodoxies, and pursue forms of expression capable of shattering complacency. The second is a commitment to principled self-scrutiny—a restless drive toward experimentation, introspection, and self-renewal. For Gay, modernism thrives at the intersection of these two forces: a desire to break free from the past and a compulsion to reinvent the self.