Modernism:
The Lure of Heresy
By Peter Gay
W. W. Norton, $35

Wassily Kandinsky discovered the future of painting in a corner of his studio late one afternoon around 1909. "I saw an indescribably beautiful canvas soaked in an inner glow," he later wrote. He didn’t notice at first that the painting was his own, for the stretcher was propped on its side, rendering his picture unrecognizable. His befuddlement lasted only a moment, though, before he compensated for the accident by utterly reorienting his way of thinking, disavowing millennia of artistic depiction in favor of pure abstraction. "[T]he aims (and thus the means) of nature and art are essentially, organically, and by universal law different from each other," he concluded, never again admitting the outside world into his paintings.

One of the greatest modernists, Kandinsky was also one of the most characteristic, an iconoclastic visionary on a personal quest for the absolute. This distinction earns him a major role in Modernism, cultural historian Peter Gay’s earnest attempt to trace the movement, across all the arts, in terms of "its rise, triumphs, and decline."

That Kandinsky’s accomplishments are condensed to a mere six pages of text suggests both the immensity of Gay’s subject and the challenge of capturing its essence in one book. Modernism is necessarily perfunctory, superficial in its treatment of specifics, yet engrossingly expansive as a work of historical synthesis.

Gay begins his study with a compelling premise. "For all their palpable differences, modernists of all stripes shared two defining attributes," he writes, "first, the lure of heresy that impelled their actions as they confronted conventional sensibilities; and, second, a commitment to a principled self-scrutiny."

Clearly applicable to Kandinsky, these criteria are no less effective when applied to Paul Cézanne or Jackson Pollock, and operate across genres as well as eras, encompassing T. S. Eliot, Frank Lloyd Wright and Igor Stravinsky. Many exemplars would have shunned each other—for instance, Wright was notoriously antagonistic toward modern art—yet from the broader vantage of history, they each played a vital role in a crucial cultural resistance.

What were they resisting, and why was it so crucial? "[M]odernism amounted to a double psychological liberation, for consumers of high culture as much as for its producers," writes Gay. "It provided artists with a license to take their insubordinate fantasies seriously, to look unblinkingly at the canons that had for so many centuries dictated their subject matter and their techniques, to decide whether a modification—or, more radically, an overthrow—of reigning standards was called for."

The Impressionists are an obvious example of this radicalism, as even a cursory glance at their initial critical reception in the 1870s will attest. Traditionalists found them technically inept or visually crippled. More telling, as Gay points out, the Impressionists were alternately called Intransigents and defamed accordingly: "The Intransigents in art are holding hands with the Intransigents in politics," claimed a conservative journalist in Le Moniteur Universal in 1876.