8 - Modern Times

Summary

In the years preceding World War I, roughly between 1906 and 1914, important changes began to penetrate the European cultural landscape, forming the basis of what is now called modernism. A wealth of new ideas— experimentalism, objectivism, classicism (new in that it was a reaction to romanticism), as well as influences as diverse as primitivism, exoticism, and folk and ancient cultures—began to permeate all the art forms. Artists from all over the world, seeking to question and reinvent their creative forms, converged in Paris, London, Vienna, and other great European capitals to join in the ferment of new ideas and movements. In the plastic arts, Fauvism replaced post-impressionism as the predominant style, only to be replaced by the cubism of Picasso and Braque a few years later. In 1907 Henri Bergson espoused a confident, optimistic philosophy of “Creative Evolution,” defining the mind as pure energy, governed by a vital force. A new literary magazine, La Nouvelle Revue française, edited by André Gide, featured the work of a young group of writers and poets, including Paul Valéry, Marcel Proust, and Guillaume Apollinaire. These confident new voices toppled the rules of writing by infusing irony, burlesque, and unconventional syntax into their works. Maurice Ravel, the composer-provocateur, embraced these new stylistic trends in his 1906 settings of Jules Renard's Histoires naturelles, matching his musical declamation to the sounds and inflections of spoken French. The rebelliousness of Erik Satie's music lay in its tongue-in-cheek simplicity. The young, multi-talented gadfly Jean Cocteau had just arrived in Paris; his enormous output—poetry, scenarios, novels, and, later, films—would cement his reputation as the clarion voice of the avant-garde. And the century's newest medium, the motion picture, became more widely disseminated in 1907, as the Pathé brothers and industrialist Léon Gaumont built cinema theaters throughout Paris.

Le Figaro acknowledged the profound sense of change in the air when it published, on 20 February 1909, “The Futurist Manifesto,” in which Filippo Marinetti declared that “We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness. The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, daring, and revolt.