Classicism of the Twenties: Art, Music, and Literature

Classicism of the Twenties

Classicism of the Twenties

Art, Music, and Literature

THEODORE ZIOLKOWSKI

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

THEODORE ZIOLKOWSKI is professor emeritus of German and comparative literature at Princeton University.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2015 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2015.

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-18398-5 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-18403-6 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226184036.001.0001

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014029537

♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Ilhi Synn

President, Keimyung University,

a student who became a friend,

in admiration of his achievements

in support of the arts and humanities

in South Korea and globally

Contents

List of Figures

Preface

PART 1 THE THEORY

1 Prewar Classicism

Classicism as Term

Classicism as Reaction

Prewar Classicism

An Ironic Retrospective

2 Classicism of the Twenties

Wartime Transitions

The Turning Point

The Dissemination

The Turn to Antiquity

PART 2 THE PRACTICE

3 Three Exemplary Figures

The Composer: Igor Stravinsky

The Artist: Pablo Picasso

The Writer: T. S. Eliot

Summary

PART 3 TEST CASES

4 The Writers

James Joyce

Jean Cocteau

Hans Henny Jahnn

Paul Valéry

5 The Artists

Giorgio de Chirico

Gino Severini, Fernand Léger, and Others

Francis Picabia

6 The Composers

Paul Hindemith

Alfredo Casella

PART 4 CONCLUSIONS

7 Classicism of the Twenties?

Notes

Index

Figures

FIGURE 1 Giorgio de Chirico, Song of Love (1914)

FIGURE 2 Pablo Picasso, Studies (1920)

FIGURE 3 Pablo Picasso, Bacchanal with Minotaur (1933/34)

FIGURE 4 Pablo Picasso, Two Women Running on the Beach (1922)

FIGURE 5 Pablo Picasso, Three Women at the Spring (1921)

FIGURE 6 Pablo Picasso, Woman in White (1923)

FIGURE 7 Giorgio de Chirico, The Joys and Enigmas of a Strange Hour (1941)

FIGURE 8 Giorgio de Chirico, Roman Villa (1922)

FIGURE 9 Giorgio de Chirico, Departure of the Argonauts (1921)

FIGURE 10 Fernand Léger, Three Women by a Garden (1922)

Preface

I undertook this study initially in order to provide myself with a scholarly excuse for indulging several personal predilections: for the music of Stravinsky, the paintings of Picasso, and the poetry of T. S. Eliot—works that fall outside the normal scope of my research as a scholar of comparative literature but all of which I have treated, at least in passing, in earlier books. I began to wonder if there might be some common denominators linking the works of these three masters, who are routinely labeled (neo)classicists at one stage in their careers and who were bound to one another in various relationships of friendship and respect. It was my hope to detect a common set of values—the theory—underlying the works of the trio and their fellow (neo)classicists of the twenties and then to determine whether there were common means—the practice—through which they achieved the realization of those values in music, art, and literature.

Interdisciplinarity is currently a fashionable endeavor, as evidenced by the articles and reviews in such journals as Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature, SUNY–Albany Press’s Literature and Medicine, and Oxford University Press’s Literature and Theology. But the study of literature and the other arts is honored more frequently in theory than in practice. The Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity (2010) devotes fewer than fifteen of its almost six hundred pages to music and art, and few studies deal in a common vocabulary with the interdisciplinary relationships among the arts. Indeed, some influential theorists such as René Wellek—in his chapter Literature and the Other Arts in René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (1948)—have even expressed skepticism concerning the possibility of determining any common and comparable elements among the arts.

A notable exception was Leonard B. Meyer’s Music, the Arts, and Ideas: Patterns and Predictions in Twentieth-Century Culture (1967). In his brilliant synthesis, Meyer makes the case for an aesthetics of stability in the twentieth century, in which various styles coexist and past styles are productively recovered by various techniques for use in contemporary art forms. I found Meyer’s work encouraging because it demonstrates the possibility of determining a common vocabulary with which comparisons may be drawn across the arts. But because he was concerned with twentieth-century culture generally and not with what I call the classicism of the twenties, his book did not address the specific questions that intrigued me. As Meyer correctly emphasizes, the different concurrent styles of modernism are governed by utterly different criteria. More recently, Christopher Butler, undertaking a similar, albeit temporally more limited, challenge in his Early Modernism: Art, Music, and Painting in Europe, 1900–1916 (1994), approached the subject thematically rather than through the analysis of specific works and mentioned (neo)classicism only briefly in connection with vorticism.

Surprisingly, despite the vast secondary literature overwhelming the oeuvre of the three modern masters in their various fields, few studies venture beyond their areas of specialization in musicology, art history, and literary criticism. Many of the studies aspiring to comparison deal with such specifically delimited topics as ekphrasis: the representation of the visual arts in literature, as in W. H. Auden’s depiction of a Bruegel painting in his Musée des Beaux Arts or Rainer Maria Rilke’s portrayal of preclassical sculptures in his Früher Apollo and Archaïscher Torso Apollos. Other such specific topics concern the influence of a painting on a poem (e.g., Picasso’s Les saltimbanques in the fifth of Rilke’s Duino Elegies); the musicalization of a literary work (e.g., Rilke’s Das Marienleben in Paul Hindemith’s setting); the representation of paintings in music (e.g., Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition); musical motifs in art (e.g., the violins and guitars in paintings by Picasso and Georges Braque); and so forth.

But we rarely encounter attempts to demonstrate general analogies and stylistic similarities among the paired or tripled examples or to posit similar criteria for their disparate arts. The occasional exhibitions of classical art of the twentieth century, which have a great deal to teach us about the paintings and sculptures on display, rarely look across to music and literature of the same period. Among these, the one that I found most helpful was Canto d’Amore: Classicism in Modern Art and Music, 1914–1935, the catalog accompanying the exhibition of that title at the Basel Kunstmuseum in 1996. The volume, beautifully edited and in part written by Gottfried Boehm, Ulrich Mosch, and Katharina Schmidt, contains five substantial introductory essays plus some sixty briefer commentaries on specific works of music and art. Despite the generally high quality of the contributions, however, few of the authors look beyond the boundaries of their own disciplines to note similarities among the compositions and artworks presented there. More recently, New York’s Guggenheim Museum mounted a splendid exhibition entitled Chaos and Classicism: Art in France, Italy, and Germany, 1918–1936, but the essays in the informative catalog edited by Kenneth E. Silver (2010) restrict themselves wholly to the visual arts of that period.

When I say classicism of the twenties, I wish no one to infer that it was the only or even the predominant aesthetic style of that decade. Many movements were competing for attention under the common label of modernism—expressionism, surrealism, New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit), and various Marxist tendencies (socialist realism, Brecht’s epic theater), among others—and the criteria of the one do not apply to the others. Hence the appropriate plural form in the title of the recent Oxford Handbook of Modernisms (2010). It is not my ambition here to discuss the currently fashionable but still loose concept of modernism or what in German is somewhat confusingly called klassische Moderne but, rather, to identify certain criteria that characterize the (neo)classical movement of that period, to understand to what extent those criteria are shared by the music, art, and literature of the period, and to ascertain the motives underlying the movement. This book should not be confused, in other words, with works from the increasingly popular field of modernism studies.

It is my goal to inquire to what extent the stylistic characteristics—the practice—are directly related to the theory of classicism that emerged independently and simultaneously in various European cultures. I am aware that there is considerable disagreement on the extent to which the arts and their embracing cultures are mutually interdependent. (The conflicting views have been summarized by Leonard B. Meyer in his chapter Varieties of Style Change.) Many scholars do not believe that external forces, such as war, directly cause style change. Yet even if the Viennese classical music of Mozart and Beethoven was not directly influenced by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, I believe it can be demonstrated that World War I provided the direct instigation for the resurgence of classicism—first in theory and then in practice—during the twenties.

In an effort to find common terms applicable to all the arts and to make the following chapters accessible to readers who are not specialists in all the fields, I have avoided, whenever possible, the sometimes abstruse technical and theoretical terminology of art history, literary criticism, and musicology. If specialists note any loss of precision, I hope that they will find a corresponding gain in lucidity and general accessibility.

I want to express my gratitude to Alan Thomas, who took an early interest in my project and guided it through the editorial process. I benefited from the suggestions in three incisive readers’ reports, which helped me to sharpen my argument. Randy Petilos responded to my frequent technical queries with admirable patience and skill. I am grateful to India Cooper for the meticulous and sensitive care with which she copyedited my manuscript. For their assistance in obtaining copies of the artworks for this volume, and the authorization to use them, I would also like to thank Kay Menick of Art Resource and J’Aimee Cronin of Artists Rights Society.

As so often before, I am indebted to my wife, Yetta—not only for her constant encouragement but especially for her extensive knowledge of art and art history. She has been my constantly stimulating muse during our visits to the splendid collections featuring Picasso at the Musée Picasso in Paris, the Sammlung Berggruen in Berlin, and the 2013 exhibition of Picasso’s prints at Berlin’s Kulturforum, as well as other museums featuring art of the twentieth century.

Theodore Ziolkowski

Princeton, New Jersey

December 2013

Part 1

The Theory

1

Prewar Classicism

Classicism, a term originating in the early nineteenth century, is probably one of the last words that spring to mind when we think of the twenties, whether Roaring or Golden, that followed the destruction and deprivations of the Great War in Europe. Some may recall the visual and verbal clichés that fill Woody Allen’s comedy Midnight in Paris (2011) as the Lost Generation of American writers gathered in Gertrude Stein’s Paris salon. Others may visualize the expressionistic horrors of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari or the Weimar Germany of The Blue Angel. The Jazz Age with its marathon dances, its flappers, and its Charleston also brought to Europe a surge of fascination with African art and the Harlem Renaissance as represented by Josephine Baker and other African American stars. When one emerged from the salons, dance halls, nightclubs, and thriving new movie theaters featuring the comic antics of Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp or the sublime propaganda of Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin and tore one’s eyes away from the omnipresent art déco, the scene seemed to be dominated by the twelve-tone compositions of the Second Viennese School, by the fantasies of surrealism, by the inanities of dada, by late or so-called synthetic cubism. Meanwhile, in the background the political arena was dominated by the fierce and often brutal struggle between adversaries from Left and Right. Where, amidst this cultural turmoil, was there room for anything as sedate and conservative as classicism? Yet when we remind ourselves that the chief representatives of that movement in the twenties were none other than Igor Stravinsky, Pablo Picasso, and T. S. Eliot, surely we must pause to give it due consideration.

Classicism as Term

Classicism remains one of the more slippery terms of cultural criticism. Stemming from the Latin word classis, which basically means simply a grouping—divisions of the army, for instance, or fleets of the navy—it was appropriated in the sixth century BCE to designate the five classes into which Roman society, not least for purposes of taxation, was divided by Servius Tullius. By the second century CE, as we know from the encyclopedic Noctes Atticae of Aulus Gellius, the adjectival form classicus was restricted to designate citizens of the top economic class: classici dicebantur non omnes, qui in quinque classibus erant, sed primae tantum classis homines (6.13.1; not all who were in the five classes were called ‘classici’ but only men of the first class)—those worth at least 125,000 Roman asses (a vaguely defined but considerable fortune) and distinguished by the taste and elegance associated with their wealth. (The four lower classes were regarded as infra classem.) Consistent with this meaning, the adjective was expanded to designate writers appropriate to that estate—classicus assiduusque aliquis scriptor, non proletarius (some classic and prosperous writer, not a proletarian one; Noctes Atticae, 19.8.15)—in contrast to the merely popular ones whose appeal was more to the lower classes and tastes.

From that general implication came the vernacular meaning of classic, which today is used broadly and loosely both as an adjective and a noun to designate items regarded as the representative best of their category, often with the implication that their heyday is past. As the German composer Wolfgang Rihm rather drastically put it, "something of the present can never be classic. Classicism always is when it has been. . . . Classicism becomes."¹ The Classic Car Club of America defines classic cars as those built between 1925 and 1948—expensive cars suitable for the uppermost socioeconomic class embracing what the Romans called classici. Jazz classics are commonly associated with musicians already deceased (Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, and Miles Davis, among others). In this sense the term classic has been expanded to encompass works in fields ranging from physics, children’s literature, crime fiction, and film to protest poetry, rock music, rap, or hip-hop. As a critical term the word has become virtually meaningless—or, at least, valueless.

A later and secondary derivation of the word since late antiquity, notably in the Romance languages, connected classicus with students who attend school classes—an association that was broadened to include the authoritative texts that the students studied as models of excellence, both stylistically and contextually. Hence classic was applied to the finest works of Greek and Roman antiquity. In universities today the Departments of Classics teach the architecture, art, history, and literature of ancient Greece and Rome, and classicist designates the students and professors who specialize in those fields. In an even more specific sense the term is often narrowed down to refer to what is regarded as the high point of classical antiquity: the culture of Periclean Athens. In this restricted sense, suggests one critic, Aeschylus would be regarded as archaic and not yet classic and Euripides as postclassic and Baroque.²

The noun classicism, a fairly recent coinage in most modern languages,³ refers to the principles underlying the works of classical antiquity, such as proportion and moderation. In this sense classicism has been appropriated by scholars to designate periods within various modern literatures and the visual arts that have sought to emulate the arts of antiquity and their principles and are held to represent high points of their respective cultures.⁴ These principles, as enunciated in particular by Aristotle and Horace, were differently evaluated. In Italy, classicism refers to various periods in the history of Italian literature, from the classicism of the ninth-century Carolingian revival and twelfth-century scholasticism by way of humanism and the Renaissance down to the early eighteenth-century Arcadia era.⁵ Their tradition of Latinity led French classicists of the later seventeenth century (Boileau, Corneille, Racine, and Molière, among others) to look mainly to ancient Rome for their models, while borrowing from Aristotle the formal criteria—notably the three unities of time, place, and action—suggested in his Poetics.⁶

In Germany, although as late as 1730 Johann Christoph Gottsched still prefaced his Versuch einer critischen Dichtkunst (Essay toward a critical art of poetry) with a translation of Horace’s poetics, the principal writers regarded today as classical—Goethe, Schiller, Wieland, and Herder—turned to ancient Greece, rather than Rome, for their models.⁷ In his early and influential essay Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst (1755; Thoughts on the imitation of Greek works in painting and sculpture), Johann Joachim Winckelmann coined the phrase that caught the imagination of his generation as characterizing the works of Greek antiquity: edle Einfalt und stille Größe (noble simplicity and quiet grandeur). With his chapters on dramatic art (Hamburgische Dramaturgie, 1767/68), Gotthold Ephraim Lessing rejected the French-classicist formal reading of Aristotle’s Poetics and emphasized instead his conception of catharsis as a vehicle for emotional purification. In England the popularity of Greek architecture produced a wave of neoclassical buildings in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.⁸ Indeed, as Salvatore Settis points out in his stimulating essay on the classical, Western civilization, in contrast to other great but culturally static civilizations (Chinese, Indian, and others), is unique in its notion of the cyclical return of classical periods.⁹

In yet another variant, historians of music, which has few ancient models to imitate, have appropriated the term classical to designate works of music that, in contrast to contemporary popular musical forms, are considered to be analogous in their excellence to the works of fifth-century Athens. As a German musicologist puts it:

In music history, unlike the history of art and architecture, the term usually applies either to a nineteenth-century recourse to genres from the late seventeenth or eighteenth century such as the suite, courtly dances such as the gavotte, technical models such as the motet style, or to a general quality of formal clarity and sublimity that characterizes the great masterworks of this period.¹⁰

Accordingly, on classical radio stations one hears a great deal of Bach along with Gregorian chants, Renaissance gavottes, symphonies from Beethoven to Mahler, and opera from Monteverdi to Stravinsky. In fact, Aaron Copland, who was in Paris at the time, has pointed out that before the terms classicism or neoclassicism became common in the later 1920s to designate a movement in contemporary music, the phrase back-to-Bach was commonly used.¹¹ More narrowly, the term is often restricted to apply to the late compositions of Haydn and Mozart (often in contrast to the more romantic Beethoven), who were roughly contemporaneous with Weimar Classicism in literature.

Classicism is sometimes used to designate two separate aesthetic phenomena of the early twentieth century. First, its writers and artists often took themes from Greek and Roman history and mythology as their subjects, as did Joyce when he borrowed the tale of Odysseus as the prefigurative pattern for his Ulysses (1922). Second, writers, artists, and musicians sought to achieve in their own works the form and the values of simplicity and order that epitomized ancient classicism, as when the purity of line evident in the works of Picasso’s so-called classical period in the 1920s is said to correspond to the elegant forms of Greek sculpture.

In the chapters that follow we shall have occasion to examine the specific manifestations of this thematic and formal emulation of the past in various works by modern writers, artists, and musicians. This classicism of the early twentieth century has been labeled in various ways and with various restrictions. One designation used frequently is neoclassicism, a term that, according both to the Oxford English Dictionary and to the Random House Dictionary, is quite recent in origin, occurring first as an adjective (neoclassic) between 1875 and 1880 and as a noun around 1890¹² and often bearing negative associations. This was noted by T. S. Eliot, who argued that all ‘neos’ indicate some fad or fashion of the moment, and it is not our concern to be fashionable.¹³ In reaction against the pejorative taint associated with neoclassicism it has been called, notably with regard to music, modernist classicism,¹⁴ a formulation suggesting that all classicism of the period is modernist, while alternative modernism—a term proposed by the editors of the same volume in order to avoid the belief that classicism is hostile to modernism¹⁵—implies that it is simply another form of modernism. Classicisme méditerranéen is geographically restricted to France and Italy,¹⁶ while klassische Moderne as understood by the contributors to the volume of that title defines loosely a paradigm for the period from 1880 to 1930 in German literature.¹⁷ Similarly restrictive is the term socialist classicism, which Abram Tertz (Andrei Sinyavsky) proposed to replace socialist realism because, he argued, the latter starts from an ideal image to which it adapts the living reality.¹⁸ Modern classicism, in turn, has been largely preempted by architecture, as any glance at Google will confirm,¹⁹ and in many cases it implies nothing but ornamental quotations taken out of context.²⁰ Such terms as restorative modernism²¹ drift, in my opinion, too far away from the subject. And pseudo-classicism, as used cynically by Yves Bonnefoy and based on a selective group of minor French painters, ignores the positive achievements of the movement.²²

In my opinion it is better to avoid the label modernist or modernism altogether in connection with classicism because modernism is such a loose and in many senses misleading term that embraces, according to one scholar of the movement, a variety of aesthetic practices²³ ranging, according to another, from expressionism, dadaism, and cubism to imagism, futurism, and vorticism.²⁴ Classicism is of course often included among the movements designated as modernism, but it differs quite radically, as we shall see, from most of the other contemporary modernist movements. Indeed, it is sometimes set explicitly in opposition to modernism, as by that notorious enemy of neoclassicism, Theodor W. Adorno, who called it, among other things, a catastrophe and a deformation that leads aesthetically to hell.²⁵

It should be stressed at the outset that every classicism takes on characteristics of