Martel Gordon. A Companion to Europe 1900-1945
Подождите немного. Документ загружается.
148 gary p. steenson
20 Originally delivered as a paper at the American Historical Society annual meeting in
December 1985, then published in the American Historical Review in December 1986,
and finally appearing in a sterling collection, Joan Scott, ed., Gender and the Politics of
History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).
21 In
International Labor and Working Class History 31 (1987): 1–13, and in revised form
in Scott, Gender and the Politics, pp. 53–67.
22 Scott,
Gender and the Politics, p. 6.
23 See especially, Kathleen Canning, “Gender and the Politics of Class Formation: Rethinking
German Labor History,” in Society, Culture, and the State in Germany, 1870–1930, Geoff
Eley, ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), pp. 105–41.
24 See, for example, Mary Jo Maynes,
Taking the Hard Road: Life Course in French and
German Workers’ Autobiographies in the Era of Industrialization (Raleigh: University of
North Carolina Press, 1995).
25 Nicola Verdon,
Rural Women Workers in Nineteenth Century England: Gender, Work and
Wages (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2002).
26 J. Robert Wegs,
Growing Up Working Class: Continuity and Change Among Viennese
Youth, 1890–1938 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989).
27 For Germany, see Vernon Lidtke,
The Alternative Culture: Socialist Labor in Imperial
Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985); Richard Evans, ed., Proletarians and
Politics: Socialism, Protest and the Working Class in Germany Before the First World War
(London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990); and Stefan Berger, Social Democracy and the
Working Class in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Germany (London: Longman, 2000).
For France, see Robert C. Stuart, Marxism at Work: Ideology, Class and French Socialism,
1882–1905 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); and Christopher Ansell,
Schism and Solidarity in Social Movements: The Politics of Labor in the French Third
Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
28 Wilfred Spohn, “Religion and Working-Class Formation in Imperial Germany, 1871–
1914,” in Eley, Society, Culture, and the State in Germany, pp. 163–87 (originally
published in Politics and Society 119 (1991): 109–32.
29 Hobsbawm,
Age of Empire, p. 326.
30 Geoff Eley,
Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850–2000 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2002), p. xiv.
31 Ibid, p. 4.
32 Ibid, p. 5.
33 Ibid, p. 3.
GUIDE TO FURTHER READING
Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850–2000 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2002). Convincingly integrates pre- and post-1914 history with
regard to the working class.
Geoff Eley, ed., Society, Culture, and the State in Germany, 1870–1930 (Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 1996). Essays which look at worker consciousness from many angles.
E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1875–1914 (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press,
1987). Ably presents without exaggeration the influence of workers’ parties in pre-1914
Europe.
Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, 3 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1981). An exhaustive account of the origins and nature of Marx’s thought and of many
who were influenced by Marx.
social reform or social revolution? 149
George Lichtheim, Marxism: An Historical and Critical Study (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1982). Focuses on how Marxism changed as it moved eastward from Europe to
Russia.
Barrington Moore, Injustice: The Social Basis of Obedience and Revolt (White Plains NY: Sharpe,
1978). Insightful view of the relationship between workers and their organized
movements.
Ken Post, Revolution and the European Experience, 1800–1914 (London: Macmillan, 1999).
A Marxist’s effort to explain why the inevitable revolution never came.
Joan W. Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).
Fine collection of essays including several pertinent to worker consciousness.
Gary P. Steenson, After Marx, Before Lenin: Marxism and Socialist Working-Class Parties in
Europe, 1884–1914 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991). Discusses the rela-
tionship between Marx’s theory and workers’ parties before 1914.
Chapter Ten
Modernity: Approaching the
Twentieth Century
Angela K. Smith
. . . in or about December, 1910, human character changed.
I am not saying that one went out, as one might into a garden, and there saw that a
rose had flowered, or that a hen had laid an egg. The change was not sudden and definite
like that. But a change there was, nevertheless; and, since one must be arbitrary, let us
date it about the year 1910. (Virginia Woolf, “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown,” 1924)
1
The relationship between modernity and culture, explored in this chapter, is complex
and far-reaching. The beginning of the twentieth century, historically a site of so
much dramatic change, saw a blossoming of new ideas throughout the arts, reflecting
and cataloging the shifting world around them. Writers and artists built upon the
innovations of the last years of the nineteenth century as the pace of change acceler-
ated. A new awareness of the human psyche, ushered in by the growing body of work
by Sigmund Freud, began to change the perspectives through which the world, and
its occupants, could be viewed. When Virginia Woolf stated, “in or about December,
1910, human character changed,” she was well aware of the multiple factors that
brought about this notion of change.
For the world was changing in a range of new ways. Politically, the nineteenth
century saw a rise in the labor movement with the fight for manhood suffrage and
workers’ rights accelerating across Europe. Important new leaders such as Keir Hardie
emerged, driving socialism on as a political force inspired by the ideas of writers such
as Karl Marx. In Britain, the Education Acts of the 1870s ensured that the turn of
the century saw the first fully literate adult population, a population receptive to the
written word and all its implications. Simultaneously, the women’s movement, which
had been smoldering for fifty years, took on a new life with the formation of much
more militant organizations. In Britain, in 1903, Emmeline Pankhurst, together with
her daughters, founded the Women’s Social and Political Union, heralding the start
of a new phase in the struggle for women’s suffrage, that of militancy. Although
many established suffrage societies did not support the Pankhursts’ methods, they
did add another string to the suffrage bow and contributed to the general instability
faced by successive governments in the early years of the century. At the same time
the internationalism of the movement grew in strength, as women across Europe and
America worked together to achieve equality.
Change was also taking place on other fronts. Scientific and technological develop-
ments were rapidly altering the physical shape of the world. A shrinking globe was
created by inventions such as the telegraph and the telephone, which introduced an
immediacy to language and ideas that could never have been achieved through the
antiquated postal service. The typewriter transformed the life of the office; the world
of leisure was revolutionized by the gramophone and the moving picture. With so
much change, new means of expression had to be found to delineate experience in
a shifting, transient world.
The subject of the impact of modernity upon culture is a huge one, difficult to
do justice to in a small space and time. Inevitably, this chapter can only deal with a
sample survey of examples. But it presents an interesting challenge, as space and time
were such important concepts to the makers of modern art. The introduction of
Greenwich Mean Time in the late nineteenth century was intended to regulate and
control time, placing Britain at the center of a universal day. But the explosion of the
machine age had a profound effect on notions of space and time. Technological
innovation introduced new speeds with the steam train, the omnibus, the tram, and
the motorcar, enabling people to travel much more quickly, effectively appearing to
shrink space and time. At the same time, courtesy of Freud and other psychoanalytic
thinkers, there was a new emphasis on the exploration of inner space, the workings
of the mind, which had the effect of dismantling time completely. From within the
human mind it was possible to develop new subjective interpretations of time and
space and this too is reflected in the artistic production of the period.
Literature presented an ideal forum for such experimentation and it is useful to
take one archetypal “modernist” novel to illustrate the complexity of this change.
On the surface, Ford Madox Ford’s 1915 novel, The Good Soldier, deals with the
intricate relationships between two couples, the very British Ashburnhams and the
equally American Dowells, spanning the first decade and a half of the twentieth
century. The confused narrator, John Dowell, tells and retells the story, trying to
make sense of events that destroy the old world order and the lives of a number of
the central protagonists. He focuses on Edward Ashburnham, the eponymous good
soldier, whose clandestine taste for womanizing leads him into a spiral of destruction
that destroys hundreds of years of his heredity. Dowell’s adulterous wife, Florence,
a New Englander set on returning to old England, is a wayside casualty. Dowell
himself, the apparent onlooker, ends up owning the ancient Ashburnham estate, while
Edward’s Catholic wife, later widow, Leonora, reproduces gleefully with a forward-
thinking country squire, highlighting her late husband’s sterility. The novel engages
with a range of topical issues: class, nationality, religion, sex, sentiment, and psychol-
ogy. But it also does much more than this.
Ford’s narrative works on many levels. Dowell invites the reader to take on the
role of listener, psychologist, and perhaps psychoanalyst; we delve into his psyche,
exploring his unconscious as well as his conscious responses to his fellow characters
and thus can identify him as a major player in the drama after all. Time is confused,
as Dowell’s narrative jumps from one incident to another covering a period of years
or days. It is imprisoned within the internal space of his mind as he remembers and
modernity 151
152 angela k. smith
misremembers events. But the text also offers a metanarrative, with the unhappy
quartet symbolically representing a society and culture, doomed by modernity, des-
tined for extinction on the western front. All the significant events of the novel take
place on August 4, ensuring that the guns of World War I resonate throughout the
text. Edward Ashburnham, representative of the officer class, the upholder of empire,
cannot survive. John Dowell, herald of the new world superpower and later-day
imperialist, cannot do otherwise.
The Good Soldier is an almost perfect example of the modernist novel. It rejects
the chronological structures of the nineteenth century, draws heavily on the artistic
school of impressionism within which Ford grew up (his grandfather was the impres-
sionist painter Ford Madox Brown), and it draws upon contemporary ideas and
innovations such as Freudian psychoanalysis, that were changing man’s understanding
of himself. It explores the condition of late nineteenth-century society and finds it
terminally flawed, and it anticipates the cataclysmic event that will transform it.
Culturally, The Good Soldier illustrates the processes of modernity at play in the first
years of the twentieth century, processes located not just in literature, but also in the
visual arts, in performance, and in the world of ideas.
Literature
Ideas about the form, structure, and purpose of literature have always been fluid. By
the end of the nineteenth century the novel had become established as a major liter-
ary force. Writers such as Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Leo Tolstoy, and Gustave
Flaubert had given it authority and dignity as well as transforming it into an important
political weapon. Culturally, it still ranked below poetry, the highest literary form,
but that too was changing. The short story, emerging from the magazines and peri-
odicals of the nineteenth century, was becoming important as an alternative literary
form. The writers of the fin de siècle were once again searching for difference, for
ways of adapting their craft to reflect a changing world.
Within literature, this change took a number of forms, many of which can be
linked with shifting ideas about the use of language; whether or not language
reflected the world and the ways in which it might be used more effectively to repre-
sent the world. A number of writers used these changing ideas about the status of
language to explore and develop the genre of the novel. Henry James had already
led the way in the late nineteenth century, criticizing the objective prose that had
come, for him, to epitomize the Victorian novel. These older books were often “triple
deckers”; that is, in three distinguishable parts, extremely long, with a moral or social
message to guide the reader’s thinking. James argued that the novel should be
regarded as an art form, just like any other, and strove in his writing to use language
aesthetically as a painter might use paint, to convey the subject rather than the object,
to develop the interior life of his characters. A similar effect can be seen in the undu-
lating prose of Thomas Hardy, the tightly constructed words of Joseph Conrad, or
the naturalism of Emile Zola. James was also the first writer to identify and construct
the notion of a theoretical framework for the novel, analyzing linguistic and structural
processes, criticizing it as any work of art may be criticized. He set a trend which
was followed in the first decades of the twentieth century by a number of important
and influential writers, among them Virginia Woolf , D. H. Lawrence, and Wyndham
modernity 153
Lewis. This exploration of the relationship between reality and art through literature
is perhaps most fully realized in Marcel Proust’s great work, A la Recherche du temps
perdu, a series of volumes that search for artistic ways to recapture a lost past.
In the early twentieth century, fiction, on the whole, got shorter.
2
The writing of
the “modernists”, as they would later be termed, was self-aware, often politically so,
and often built around a number of shared characteristics: disruptions to narrative
form, concern with issues of temporality, aesthetic self-consciousness, fragmentation
and montage, paradox, ambiguity, uncertainty, and juxtaposition. For many, there
was a shift in focus from external, objective reality to the internal working of the
human mind. Ford Madox Ford’s novel The Good Soldier embodies many of these
characteristics. John Dowell is an unreliable narrator. His narrative moves backwards
and forwards in time denying temporal cohesion and thus disrupting the expected
narrative form. It is fragmented: pieces of information about the various characters
are pieced together almost randomly. Everything is ambiguous, nothing is certain,
we have only one person’s point of view; all the others are trapped within his. And
it is political: when read as allegory, it comments on the state and condition of the
world in 1914; the state and condition of modernity.
In 1915, the same year as he published The Good Soldier, Ford also published a
critical study, Henry James. Clearly influenced by James, Ford had spent years con-
sidering “how words should be handled and novels constructed.”
3
He was also
influenced by Joseph Conrad’s efforts to develop new literary techniques. Moving
on from the experiments of James and Conrad, Ford developed his own brand of
“literary Impressionism,” a technique that foregrounded language as an artistic tool
to create an effective representation of life. It concentrated on the representation of
the transitory mental impressions of an observer, in this case John Dowell, rather
than giving more conventional descriptions of events. It places an emphasis on
interior space, on the complex workings of the mind, indicating the growing impor-
tance of Freud’s ideas of psychoanalysis in the early years of the century.
John Dowell’s narrative explores these ideas. It is almost as though the reader
is being asked to psychoanalyze him. He inhabits an internal world that we have
to decipher, within which the external world, the events of the novel, are contained
or imprisoned. He tells us, “the whole world for me is like spots of color in an
immense canvas,”
4
and indeed it is so. The spots of color are provided by Edward
Ashburnham, by Leonora, by Florence, by Nancy, flitting in and out according to
the light against the background of Dowell’s gray uncertainty. Trapped as they are
within his gaze, the reader can never be sure of them; we are left instead with an
impression that enables us to construct our own narrative upon Dowell’s canvas.
Nothing in the text is explicit. Each word is carefully chosen and suggestive, leaving
it open to the interpretation of the reader: “And then I had my first taste of
English life. It was amazing. It was overwhelming. I never shall forget the polished
cob that Edward, beside me, drove; the animal’s action, its high-stepping, its skin
that was like satin. And the peace! And the red cheeks! And the beautiful, beautiful
old house.”
5
This is an interesting passage in a number of ways. In terms of its construction,
Ford uses short clipped sentences and distinct images to present Dowell’s first impres-
sion of England: the movement of the horse, the satin skin, the red cheeks. But at
the same time, for all its precision, it tells the reader almost nothing. There is nothing
154 angela k. smith
about the horse to suggest either Englishness or to appear overwhelming. It is unclear
whose cheeks are red; Edward’s? the horse’s? Dowell’s? The impression of the
“beautiful, beautiful house” is vague and unhelpful. Dowell’s response is almost
childlike. There is little in these first impressions to remind the reader that Dowell
has been recently widowed, or to warn the reader that he has been called to a house-
hold in dire emotional trouble despite the fact the Dowell himself is well aware of
this. We are given the spots of color. It is up to us to arrange them and create our
own impression without much help from the guide, just as one might be expected
to do in life. Dowell’s telling and retelling of the Ashburnham story builds up the
layers on the canvas, allowing for multiple readings to be made. For example,
Dowell’s late wife, Florence Hurlbird, is “poor Florence,” she is an angel, she is
beautiful, later she is a whore, and finally a victim. Most significantly, the reader is
left in no doubt from the outset that she is dead and unable to speak for herself. We
are reliant on Dowell’s changing impressions of her, and all the other characters, and
he is the ultimate modernist: an unreliable narrator, confused and yet manipulative
in his confusion.
Such narrative and linguistic exploration was not confined to the English language.
Across Europe writers were developing new writing techniques to convey their
alternate changing worlds. The Viennese doctor, Arthur Schnitzler, experimented
with the German language, writing about the middle and upper classes surrounding
him, actively portraying Freud’s Vienna. Perhaps his most important work, Leutnant
Gustl, published in 1901, was constructed around an interior monologue that was
unique in German literature of the period. A complex tale that was both social criti-
cism and psychoanalytic exploration, it was a precursor to many later European
modernist works. Another German writer, Franz Kafka, may perhaps be considered
as Schnitzler’s heir. Although all of Kafka’s work was published posthumously, much
of it was written in the period before 1914. Kafka had an innate distrust of established
institutions, including that of literary tradition, leading him to search for new ways
of literary representation. He analyzes language, seeing it as a source of purity, focus-
ing on the plight of the individual in a world of growing confusion. This is perhaps
exemplified in his novel The Trial, written in 1914 and published in 1925, with its
pessimistic representation of the oppression of bureaucracy. Kafka’s work blends
comedy, irony, and tragedy, identifying the troubled modern psyche of the world
around him.
But similar experiments were taking place in other genres with equally dramatic
results. In poetic circles there was a movement away from the wordiness of the
Victorians with a focus on the intricacies of language, ideas not dissimilar to those
in the arena of prose writing. These notions reached their pinnacle in imagism.
Imagism was the brainchild of Ezra Pound and F. S. Flint and was the practice of
paring poetry back to present an idea through an image. Also involved in the devel-
opment of the movement were poets T. E. Hulme, Richard Aldington, and H. D.
(Hilda Doolittle). They worked according to a small set of rules:
• Direct treatment of the “thing” whether subjective or objective.
• To use absolutely no word that did not contribute to presentation.
• As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in
sequence of a metronome.
6
modernity 155
Pound argued that “An ‘image’ is that which presents an intellectual and emotional
complex in an instant of time.”
7
The image at the heart of each poem contained its
essence. The image explored the subject of the poem with the painter’s eye, bringing
out the aesthetics within. The imagists published four anthologies of poetry in
the years 1914–17. Pound himself felt that H. D.’s poetry provided the most
perfect examples of the working of imagism. The following example illustrates the
paradoxical simplicity and complexity of the movement, as well as the brevity of much
of the work:
Whirl up, sea –
Whirl your pointed pines,
Splash your great pines
On our rocks,
Hurl your green over us,
Cover us with your pools of fir.
8
This poem, taken from the 1915 collection Some Imagist Poets 1915, was sighted
by Pound in his definition of vorticism as the most perfect imagist poem. It appears
to reject the existing conventions of poetry, built around a paradoxically abstract,
yet crystal-clear image. The image is everything. There is no subject. There are none
of the expected structures of poetry, there is no meter or rhyme, only what
Peter Jones terms “a rhythm organic to the image itself.”
9
Yet it provokes an
emotional response from the reader through the sensory and sensual nature of
the image itself.
Imagism was one of many cultural and artistic movements of the early twentieth
century, the “isms” which have subsequently found space beneath the umbrella term
of modernism. They include futurism, cubism, and later surrealism, to name but a
few. Vorticism, the manifesto for which was printed in the short-lived publication
Blast, argued for an attack on old values and an assertion of new ones. In many ways
it embodies the nature of these rebellious groups. The ideas of these various “isms,”
imagism included, were promoted in a range of “Little Magazines” that articulated
the voice of new cultures to an unsuspecting population. Publications such as Poetry
Review, The Egoist, and the Little Review became mouthpieces for the radical arts
and philosophical debates of the time. Such magazines had existed for years, but the
nature of their development in the first decades of the century gives an indication of
the way in which changing cultural ideas were being disseminated.
The Egoist provides a good example of this development. It began life in 1911 as
The Freewomen, a radical feminist publication set up by a disillusioned suffragette,
Dora Marsden, and her friend and colleague, Mary Gawthorpe. Perceived primarily
as a suffrage magazine, The Freewomen highlighted the poor conditions of many
women, but equally attacked militant suffrage organizations, especially that of the
Pankhursts, as misguided in their interpretation of the fight. The paper became more
and more anarchic in its subject matter, leading to the withdrawal of its distributor
in 1912 – after which it quickly folded. When it reappeared as The New Freewoman
it had Harriet Shaw Weaver sharing the editorial work with Marsden and the input
and support of a number of significant literary women – Rebecca West, May Sinclair,
and H. D. among them. Through West, Ezra Pound became involved with the
156 angela k. smith
publication and it began to publish experimental literature in addition to the focus
on feminist and political issues. In December 1913 the name of the paper was
changed again, to The Egoist, indicating a new ideology – egoism – that could incor-
porate artistic and literary experimentation as well as revolutionary politics and philo-
sophical exploration. Although multi-dimensional, The Egoist is best remembered for
its advance publication of some of the most exciting works of modernism, including
James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Wyndham Lewis’s Tarr, and
a wide selection of imagist poetry. Indeed, the edition of May 1915 was entirely
dedicated to the work and ideas of the imagists. However, it never lost the connec-
tion with philosophy and to some degree politics, enabling it to reflect many aspects
of cultural modernity.
The Visual Arts
In the visual arts, too, the changes of the early twentieth century manifested them-
selves through experiments with spatial concepts, both internal and external.
Developing schools across Europe found new and alternative ways of representing
the world, sharing many of the influences of contemporary writers. When Virginia
Woolf made her famous statement, quoted above, that “in or about December, 1910,
human character changed,” she had in mind the first of two exhibitions of
“Post-Impressionism” organized by her friend Roger Fry at the Grafton Galleries,
definitively linking literature and the visual arts. The show was seen as shocking by
the general public and press alike, and contained works by established artists such as
Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Cezanne. Surprisingly, considering the public response,
it did not contain examples of any of the more radical experimentation in the arts,
most especially cubism, which had been developing in the previous years.
Fry’s Post-Impressionism explored aesthetic ideas of pure form, prioritizing the
formal characteristics of a work over and above its subject. It is easy to connect these
theoretical ideas with the development of modern literature, particularly through the
writing of, for example, Virginia Woolf. Woolf examined the formal characteristics of
writing in theoretical essays such as “Modern Fiction” (1919) and “Mr Bennett and
Mrs Brown” (1924), exploring ways in which writing could develop aesthetically.
These ideas are played out in her fiction of the 1920s. Her modernist novels – for
example, Jacob’s Room (1922), Mrs Dalloway (1925), and To the Lighthouse (1927)
– use language in innovative ways to create an aesthetic whole.
In Europe things had developed rather differently. The Post-Impressionism of
Fry’s exhibition provided the building bricks for artists such as Picasso, Matisse, and
Braque to develop alternative routes into abstract art. Matisse elected the route of
color, experimenting further along the lines first explored by Cezanne. Indeed, it was
Cezanne who inspired the term “cubism” for the art of his contemporaries, describ-
ing their developing work as “little cubes.”
10
The group of painters involved in the
movement regularly met together with writers and critics to develop ideas that related
cubism to other areas of the arts. They accepted the term “CUBIST” as a collective
description when it was first used in print in 1911 by the poet Guillaume Apollinaire,
a supporter of and commentator on the group.
The bridge between the impressionists and the cubists was also Cezanne. Glen
Macleod suggests that through broken brushstrokes and the use of pure color,
modernity 157
Cezanne added weight and volume by emphasizing the underlying geometric
structure of objects.”
11
It was this emphasis on these geometric shapes that would
become the trademark of cubism.
Cubism, which developed between 1907 and 1914 in three stages, is perhaps the
most influential development in the visual arts of the twentieth century. The two
artists generally credited with its development are Picasso and Braque, but a much
larger group would meet in Picasso’s studio, the Bateau Lavoir, in Montmartre from
about 1905 onwards. The first stage, still clearly influenced by Cezanne, begins with
Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907). It breaks down the subject into geometri-
cal shapes, and while it remains recognizable, it is distorted, breaking with conven-
tion. After about 1910, Picasso and Braque moved cubism on to its second stage,
which has become known as analytical cubism. In this period, the artists further
fragmented and distorted their subjects, removing all color, thus analyzing the form.
After 1912 the artists began to move away from the monochrome nature of this
second stage, evolving synthetic cubism, which involved the reintroduction of color,
along with dialogue and texture. Even physical objects were sometimes incorporated
into the works. Macleod states: “This technique, known as collage, is a revolutionary
invention because it breaks down the boundaries between art and life, causing the
viewer to ponder various kinds and degrees of artifice.”
12
This phase of cubism
explored the three dimensional nature of art and representation which would prove
very influential in the years that followed.
The influence of this movement resonates throughout the twentieth century.
Picasso in particular was a prolific artist and his works can be viewed in many
European cities. An early example of this influence can be found in vorticism, a
movement set up by a range of artists including Wyndham Lewis, Henri Gaudier-
Brzeska, and the poet Ezra Pound. This, like the Italian-based movement, futurism,
claimed to incorporate literature and music as well as art, but was cut short by the
outbreak of World War I. It is interesting to further note the impact of cubism on
some of the most significant artists of the war, Wyndham Lewis among them, who
used modern experimental techniques to represent the unthinkable experience of the
battlefield in an authentic way. Just as modernist writers used their new techniques
to convey the unspeakable, so artists found alternative ways of illustrating a different
and profoundly tragic development in warfare.
In literature, too, the impact of cubism was felt. A number of writers were directly
involved with the group of artists, among them Apollinaire, André Salmon and,
perhaps most interestingly, the American writer, Gertrude Stein. Apollinaire and
Salmon wrote commentaries of the development and processes of cubism, such as
Salmon’s “Anecdotal History of Cubism” (1912) and Apollinaire’s “The Beginnings
of Cubism” (1912).
13
For example:
There lived in Montmartre an adolescent with restless eyes and a face that was reminis-
cent of those of both Raphael and Forain. Pablo Picasso . . . had abruptly rejected his
former style and devoted himself to creating mysterious paintings dominated by a deep
blue . . . He dressed in the blue smock worn by electricians; his words were often very
bitter . . . His studio, crowded with canvases representing mystical harlequins and with
drawings over which we walked and which anyone could carry off, was the meeting
place of all the young artists and all the young poets.
14