Table Of Content1
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.
Copyright © 1980, 1991 by Robert Hughes
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint from previously published
material:
Faber and Faber Ltd.: Excerpt from “MCMXIV” by Philip Larkin. Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber
Ltd. from The Whitsun Weddings by Philip Larkin.
Editions Gallimard: Excerpts from Oeuvres de Gérard de Nerval de la Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, © Editions
Gallimard 1952 and 1956. Excerpts from Oeuvres poétiques de Guillaume Apollinaire de la Bibliothèque de la Pléiade,
© Editions Gallimard 1957.
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., and Faber and Faber Ltd.: Excerpt from “East Coker” by T. S. Eliot is reprinted
from Four Quartets by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., and Faber and Faber Ltd.; copyright 1943 by T.
S. Eliot; copyright renewed 1971 by Esme Valerie Eliot.
John Murray (Publishers) Ltd. and Houghton Mi���in Company: Excerpt from “Planters Vision” by John
Betjeman, from Collected Poems by John Betjeman. Reprinted by permission of John Murray (Publishers) Ltd., and
Houghton Mi���in Company.
Punch and Rothco Cartoons, Inc.: Six lines of poetry from an issue of Punch published in the 1930s. Copyright
Punch.
Random House LLC, and Faber and Faber Ltd.: Excerpt from “Epitaph on a Tyrant” by W. H. Auden. Copyright
1940 by W. H. Auden. Copyright renewed 1968 by W. H. Auden. From W. H. Auden: Collected Poems, edited by
Edward Mendelson. Reprinted by permission of Random House LLC, and Faber and Faber Ltd.
Peter Newbolt: Excerpt from “Vital Lampada” by Sir Henry Newbolt. Reprinted by permission.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States
by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York. Distributed by Random House LLC, New York. Originally published in Great
Britain by BBC Publications.
A Penguin Random House Company
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hughes, Robert, [date]
The shock of the new / by Robert Hughes. – Rev. ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
eBook ISBN: 978-0-307-81555-2
Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-0-679-72876-4
1. Art, Modern – 19th century. 2. Art, Modern – 20th century.
I. Title.
N6447.H83 1991
709′.04 – dc20 89-43355 CIP
v3.1
2
TO VICTORIA, WITH LOVE
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CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction
One
THE MECHANICAL PARADISE
Two
THE FACES OF POWER
Three
THE LANDSCAPE OF PLEASURE
Four
TROUBLE IN UTOPIA
Five
THE THRESHOLD OF LIBERTY
Six
THE VIEW FROM THE EDGE
Seven
CULTURE AS NATURE
Eight
THE FUTURE THAT WAS
Bibliography
Index
Illustration Credits
A Note About the Television Series
A Note About the Author
Other Books by This Author
4
INTRODUCTION
This book grew out of a television series I wrote and narrated for the BBC. From the ��rst
take to the last, The Shock of the New ate up three years of research, writing, and ��lming; and
having addressed the camera from places as remote from one another, geographically and
spiritually, as the Japanese bridge of Monet’s lily-pond in Giverny, the crematorium at Dachau, a
roof in Brasília, the edge of the Grand Canyon, and the ruins of the Marquis de Sade’s château, I
��nd – adding up the air tickets – that I covered more than a quarter of a million miles doing it.
The soul, some Arabs believe, can only travel at the pace of a trotting camel. They are right.
From the start, the producers, directors, and I agreed that The Shock of the New should be, as
Kenneth Clark put it more than ten years ago in his subtitle to Civilisation, “a personal view” of
the art of our century. Eight hours sounds like a lot of air time, and it is; but it is totally
inadequate to the task of doing a formal history of modern art on television, with every artist
who did anything signi��cant given his or her just place and explication. There are no footnotes
on the Box. Instead, we decided to do eight essays about eight separate subjects that seemed
important to an understanding of modernism. We would start with a programme about the
blossoming of a sense of modernity in European culture – roughly from 1880 to 1914 – in which
the myth of the Future was born in the atmosphere of millenarian optimism that surrounded
the high machine age, as the nineteenth century clicked over into the twentieth century. We
would ��nish with a ��lm that tried to describe how art gradually lost that sense of newness and
possibility, as the idea of the avant-garde petered out in the institutionalized culture of late
modernism. In between, we would have six programmes dealing with six subjects – visual
essays on the relationship of painting, and to a lesser degree sculpture and architecture, to some
of the great cultural issues of the last hundred years. How has art created images of dissent,
propaganda, and political coercion? How has it de��ned the world of pleasure, of sensuous
communion with worldly delights? How has it tried to bring about Utopia? What has been its
relation to the irrational and the unconscious? How has it dealt with the great inherited themes
of Romanticism, the sense of the world as a theatre of despair or religious exaltation? And what
changes were forced on art by the example and pressure of mass media, which displaced
painting and sculpture from their old centrality as public speech? Obviously, these are only
some of the themes of modern art. Equally obviously, neither eight chapters nor eight
programmes can cover them fully. But to tackle themes rather than a formal, sequential history
seemed the best way to present at least some of this vast subject in so limited a frame, and to
give a fairly wide panorama of the relations of art to ideas and to life in the modernist century.
So I did not try to get everyone in, and there is a long roster of artists whose work is not
discussed (and often not even mentioned) in The Shock of the New. Little attention has been
paid to sculpture, beyond the work of Brancusi, Picasso, and some of the Constructivists: no
Rodin, Rosso, or Moore, no Gonzales, Calder, Anthony Caro, Louise Nevelson, or David Smith. In
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painting, artists as diverse and important as Vuillard, Hans Hofmann, and Balthus are left out. I
can only plead, in modest self-defence, that their omission was not the result of ignorance but
of the insuperable di���culty of ��tting them into the narrative frame. In any case, it seemed
better to look at a few artists quite closely than to try for a generalized and speckly tour
d’horizon; and if that is advisable with the written word, it is an iron law of television.
The eight chapters of this book follow the eight programmes of the series quite closely in
theme and general structure, and though they are much longer than the scripts – about ��ve
times as long – all the same I decided to use the extra space to ��esh out the discussion rather
than to introduce more characters. Television does not lend itself to abstract argument or
lengthy categorization. If the making of the series had one repeated phrase that still echoes in
my head, it was not heard on the soundtrack; the inexorable voice of Lorna Pegram, the
producer, muttering: “It’s a clever argument, Bob dear, but what are we supposed to be looking
at?”
What the Box can do is show things, and tell. The inaccurate image on the screen is not the
real painting, and does not substitute for the real experience of art – any more than a
reproduction on the printed page, an image inaccurately reassembled in terms of printer’s dots
rather than electronic lines, can do so. No matter; we are used to the conventions of print
reproduction of works of art, and the same will happen with television as more arts
programming is done. Besides, the great virtue of TV is its power to communicate enthusiasm,
and that is why I like it. I am not a philosopher, but a journalist who has had the good luck never
to be bored by his subject. “Je resous de m’informer du pourquoi,” Baudelaire wrote after seeing
Tannhäuser in 1860, “et de transformer ma volupté en connaissance”: “I set out to discover the
why of it, and to transform my pleasure into knowledge.” Pleasure is the root of all critical
appreciation of art, and there is nothing like a long, steady project to make one discover (and
with luck, convey) what it was in the siren voices of our century that caught me as a boy – when
I ��rst read Roger Shattuck’s translations of Apollinaire, hidden from the Jesuits in the wrapper
of a Latin grammar – and has never let me go.
NOTE TO 1991 EDITION
Books have their fate, and this one has been lucky enough to last more than ten years –
certainly a good deal longer than the television series on which it was based. In the meantime, I
have to confess, the enthusiasm for TV as a means of conveying information and opinion about
the visual arts that I felt while making the original series of The Shock of the New has waned.
Without accepting the extreme view of neo-conservative American critics like Hilton Kramer –
that everything that can be shown or said about art on TV is a pernicious lie – I now realise that
the optimistic hope I set forth above, that in some way the distortions of the artwork inherent in
TV reproduction would cease to matter, as they largely have in print reproduction, has turned
out to be wrong. The wish was father to the thought. By stressing the iconic content of art, by
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forcing images meant to be slowly contemplated into merely narrative frames, and thus
imposing the fast time of TV on the slow time of painting and sculpture; by eliminating surface,
texture, detail, and authentic colour, by working against the resistant physical presence and
scale of the work of art, and above all by the brief attention-span it encourages, TV – even in the
hands of the most sympathetic director – cannot construct a satisfactory parallel to the
experience of the static artwork. This would not matter in a culture that did not confuse TV
with reality. Unfortunately, America does. But the fuller truth about art is in museums, studios,
galleries, and books, and cannot be ��tted on the screen.
Nevertheless, my original gratitude to those with whom I worked on the original production
of The Shock of the New remains unchanged: to Lorna Pegram, who produced the series and
directed three of its eight programmes as well; to its other three directors, David Cheshire,
Robin Lough, and David Richardson; and to Robert McNab, who did the picture and ��lm
research. The BBC insisted on The Shock of the New as the series title, and I remain grateful to
my friend Ian Dunlop, whose excellent study of seven historic modernist exhibitions was
published under that title in 1972, for letting us use it. Henry Grunwald and Ray Cave, successive
managing editors at Time, were more than generous in putting up with my frequent, prolonged
absences from the magazine when on location. And without Victoria Whistler, now Victoria
Hughes, who sustained me through the ��nal two years of production, neither series nor book
would probably have been done at all.
7
ONE
THE MECHANICAL PARADISE
In 1913, the French writer Charles Péguy remarked that “the world has changed less since the
time of Jesus Christ than it has in the last thirty years.” He was speaking of all the conditions of
Western capitalist society: its idea of itself, its sense of history, its beliefs, pieties, and modes of
production – and its art. In Péguy’s time, the time of our grandfathers and great-grandfathers,
the visual arts had a kind of social importance they can no longer claim today, and they seemed
to be in a state of utter convulsion. Did cultural turmoil predict social tumult? Many people
thought so then; today we are not so sure, but that is because we live at the end of modernism,
whereas they were alive at its beginning. Between 1880 and 1930, one of the supreme cultural
experiments in the history of the world was enacted in Europe and America. After 1940 it was
re��ned upon, developed here and exploited there, and ��nally turned into a kind of entropic,
institutionalized parody of its old self. Many people think the modernist laboratory is now
vacant. It has become less an arena for signi��cant experiment and more like a period room in a
museum, a historical space that we can enter, look at, but no longer be part of. In art, we are at
the end of the modernist era, but this is not – as some critics apparently think – a matter for
self-congratulation. What has our culture lost in 1980 that the avant-garde had in 1890?
Ebullience, idealism, con��dence, the belief that there was plenty of territory to explore, and
above all the sense that art, in the most disinterested and noble way, could ��nd the necessary
metaphors by which a radically changing culture could be explained to its inhabitants.
For the French, and for Europeans in general, the great metaphor of this sense of change –
its master-image, the one structure that seemed to gather all the meanings of modernity
together – was the Ei�fel Tower. The Tower was ��nished in 1889, as the focal point of the Paris
World’s Fair. The date of the Fair was symbolic. It was the centenary of the French Revolution.
The holding of World’s Fairs, those festivals of high machine-age capitalism in which nation
after nation showed o�f its industrial strength and the breadth of its colonial resources, was not,
of course, new. The fashion had been set by Victoria’s Prince Albert, in the Great Exhibition of
1851. There, the greatest marvel on view had not been the Birmingham stoves, the reciprocating
engines, the looms, the silverware, or even the Chinese exotica; it had been their showplace
itself, the Crystal Palace, with its vaults of glittering glass and nearly invisible iron tracery. One
may perhaps mock the prose in which some of the Victorians recorded their wonder at this
cathedral of the machine age, but their emotion was real.
The planners of the Paris World’s Fair wanted something even more spectacular than the
Crystal Palace. But Paxton’s triumph could not be capped by another horizontal building, so
they decided to go up: to build a tower that would be the tallest manmade object on earth,
8
topping out – before the installation of its present-day radio and TV masts – at 1056 feet. No
doubt a biblical suggestion was at work, consciously or not. Since the Fair would embrace all
nations, its central metaphor should be the Tower of Babel. But the Tower embodied other and
socially deeper metaphors. The theme of the Fair was manufacture and transformation, the
dynamics of capital rather than simple ownership. It was meant to illustrate the triumph of the
present over the past, the victory of industrial over landed wealth that represented the essential
economic di�ference between the Third Republic and the Ancien Régime. What more brilliant
centrepiece for it than a structure that turned its back on the ownership of land – that occupied
unowned and previously useless space, the sky itself? In becoming a huge vertical extrusion of a
tiny patch of the earth’s surface, it would demonstrate the power of process. Anyone could buy
land, but only la France moderne could undertake the conquest of the air.
The Fair’s commissioners turned to an engineer, not an architect, to design the Tower. This
decision was in itself symbolic, and it went against the prestige of Beaux-Arts architects as the
o���cial voice of the State; but Gustave Ei�fel, who was ��fty-seven and at the peak of his career
when he took the job, managed to infuse his structure with what now seems to be a singular
richness of meaning. Its remote inspiration was the human ��gure – the Tower imagined as a
benevolent colossus, planted with spread legs in the middle of Paris. It also referred to the
greatest permanent festive structure of the seventeenth century, Bernini’s Fountain of the Four
Rivers in the Piazza Navona in Rome, which (like the Tower) was a spike balanced over a void
de��ned by four arches and (like the Fair itself) was an image of ecumenical domination of the
four quarters of the world.
You could not escape the Tower. It was and is the one structure that can be seen from every
point in the city. No metropolis in Europe had ever been so visually dominated by a single
structure, except Rome by St. Peter’s; and even today, Ei�fel’s spike is more generally visible in its
own city than Michelangelo’s dome. The Tower became the symbol of Paris overnight, and in
doing so, it proclaimed la ville lumière to be the modernist capital – quite independently of
anything else that might be written, composed, produced, or painted there. As such, it was
praised by Guillaume Apollinaire, the cosmopolitan poet who had once been a Catholic and
imagined, in a tone of mingled irony and delight, the Second Coming of Christ enacted in a new
Paris whose centre was the Tower, at the edge of the coming millennium, the twentieth century:
At last you are tired of this old world.
O shepherd Ei�fel Tower, the ��ock of bridges bleats this morning
You are through with living in Greek and Roman antiquity
Here, even the automobiles seem to be ancient
Only religion has remained brand new, religion
Has remained simple as simple as the aerodrome hangars
It’s God who dies Friday and rises again on Sunday
It’s Christ who climbs in the sky better than any aviator
He holds the world’s altitude record
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