| During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
people moved toward a modern consciousness. Their changing worldview was
expressed in innovative art movements. Developments in the sciences also
changed how people saw themselves and their world. Some people took nationalism
to the extreme. They advocated Social Darwinism to justify the dominance
of Western nations.
The Culture of Modernity
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Dramatic innovation occurred in literature, the visual arts,
and music in the late 1800s.
Between 1870 and 1914, many writers and artists rebelled
against the traditional literary and artistic styles that had dominated
European cultural life since the Renaissance. The changes they produced
have since been called modernism.
Literature
Western novelists and poets who followed the naturalist
style felt that literature should be realistic and address social problems.
Henrik Ibsen and Émile Zola, for example, explored the role of women
in society, alcoholism, and the problems of urban slums in their work.
The symbolist writers had a different idea about what
was real. Inspired by Sigmund Freud, they believed the external world,
including art, was only a collection of symbols reflecting the true reality—the
human mind. Art, the symbolists believed, should function
for its own sake, not criticize or seek to understand
society.
Painting
Since the Renaissance, Western artists had tried to represent
reality as accurately as possible. By the late 1800s, artists were seeking
new forms of expression to reflect their changing worldviews.
Impressionism was a movement that began in France in the
1870s, when a group of artists rejected traditional indoor studios and
went to the countryside to paint nature directly. One important impressionist
is Claude Monet (moh•NAY), who painted pictures that captured the interplay
of light, water, and sky. Other impressionist painters include Pierre-Auguste
Renoir (REHN•wahr) and Berthe Morisot.
In the 1880s, a new movement, known as postimpressionism,
arose in France and soon spread. Painters Paul Cezanne and Vincent van
Gogh used color and structure to express a mood. For van Gogh, art was
a spiritual experience. He was especially interested in color and believed
that it could act as its own form of language. Van Gogh maintained that
artists should paint what they feel.
By the early 1900s, artists were no longer convinced that
their main goal was to represent reality. This was especially true in the
visual arts. One reason for the decline of realism in painting was photography.
Invented in the 1830s, photography gained wide popularity
after George Eastman created the first Kodak camera in 1888.
Artists tended to focus less on mirroring reality, which
the camera could do, and more on creating reality. Painters and sculptors,
like the symbolist writers of the time, looked for meaning in individual
consciousness. Between 1905 and 1914, this search for individual expression
created modern art. One of the most outstanding features of modern art
is the attempt of the artist to avoid “visual reality.”
By 1905, Pablo Picasso, an important figure in modern
art was beginning his career. Picasso was a Spaniard who settled in Paris.
He painted in a remarkable variety of styles and even created a new style—cubism.
Cubism used geometric designs to re-create reality in the viewer’s mind.
In his paintings, Picasso attempted to view human form from many sides.
In this aspect, he seems to have been influenced by Albert Einstein’s increasingly
popular theory of relativity.
Abstract painting emerged around 1910. Wassily Kandinsky,
a Russian who worked in Germany, was one of the first to use an abstract
style. Kandinsky sought to avoid visual reality altogether. He believed
that art should speak directly to the soul. To do so, it must use only
line and color.
Architecture
Modernism in the arts revolutionized architecture and
gave rise to a new principle known as functionalism. Functionalism was
the idea that buildings, like the products of machines, should be functional,
or useful. Buildings should fulfill the purposes for which they were built.
All unnecessary ornamentation should be stripped away.
The United States was a leader in the new architecture.
The country’s rapid urban growth and lack of any architectural tradition
allowed for new building methods. Architects, led by Louis H. Sullivan,
used reinforced concrete, steel frames, and electric elevators to build
skyscrapers virtually free of ornamentation. One of Sullivan’s pupils was
Frank Lloyd Wright, who pioneered the building of American homes with long
geometric lines and overhanging roofs.
Music
At the beginning of the twentieth century, developments
in music paralleled those in painting. The music of the Russian composer
Igor Stravinsky exploited expressive sounds and bold rhythms.
Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring revolutionized
music. When it was performed in Paris in 1913, the sounds and rhythms of
the music and dance caused a near riot by an outraged audience.
How did the impressionists radically change the art of
painting in the 1870s?
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Uncertainty Grows
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Scientific discoveries in this period had a profound impact
on how people saw themselves and their world.
Science was one of the chief pillars supporting the optimistic
worldview that many Westerners shared in the 1800s. Science, supposedly
based on hard facts and cold reason, offered a certainty of belief in nature’s
orderliness. Many believed that by applying already known scientific laws,
humans could completely understand the physical world and reality.
Curie and the Atom
Throughout much of the 1800s, Westerners believed in
a mechanical conception of the universe that was based on the ideas of
Isaac Newton. In this perspective, the universe
was viewed as a giant machine. Time, space, and matter
were objective realities existing independently of those observing them.
Matter was thought to be made of solid material bodies called atoms.
These views were seriously questioned at the end of the
nineteenth century. The French scientist Marie Curie discovered that an
element called radium gave off energy, or radiation, that apparently came
from within the atom itself. Atoms were not simply hard material bodies
but small, active worlds.
Einstein and Relativity
In the early twentieth century, Albert Einstein, a German-born
scientist, provided a new view of the universe. In 1905 Einstein published
his special theory of relativity, which stated that space and time are
not absolute but are relative to the observer.
According to this theory, neither space nor time has an
existence independent of human experience. As Einstein later explained
to a journalist, “It was formerly believed that if all material things
disappeared out of the universe, time and space would be left.
According to the relativity theory, however, time and
space disappear together with the things.” Moreover, matter and energy
reflect the relativity of time and space. Einstein concluded that matter
is just another form of energy. The vast energies contained within the
atom were explained, and the Atomic Age began. To some, however, a relative
universe—unlike Newton’s universe—was one without certainty.
Freud and Psychoanalysis
Sigmund Freud (FROYD), a doctor from Vienna, proposed
theories regarding the nature of the human mind. Freud’s ideas, like the
new physics, added to the uncertainties of the age. His major theories
were published in 1900 in The Interpretation of Dreams.
According to Freud, human behavior was strongly determined
by past experiences and internal forces of which people were largely unaware.
Repression of such experiences began in childhood, so he devised a method—known
as psychoanalysis—by which a therapist and patient could probe deeply into
the patient’s memory. In this way, they could retrace the chain of repressed
thoughts all the way back to their childhood origins. If the patient’s
conscious mind could be made aware of the unconscious and its repressed
contents, the patient could be healed.
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Extreme Nationalism
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In the late 1800s, extreme nationalism was reflected in the
movements of Social Darwinism and anti-Semitism.
Nationalism became more intense in many countries in the
late 1800s. For some Europeans, loyalty to their nation became an anchor,
almost a religious faith. Preserving
their nation’s status and their national traditions counted
above everything else.
Social Darwinism and Racism
Social Darwinism was a theory used to justify the dominance
of Western nations in the late nineteenth century. Certain thinkers claimed
that it was valid science to apply Darwin’s theory of natural selection
to modern human societies. In fact, this was not good science, but what
today might be called “junk science,” or faulty science.
A British philosopher, Herbert Spencer, argued that social
progress came from “the survival of the fittest”—that is, the strong advanced
while the weak declined. This kind of thinking allowed some people to reject
the idea that they should take care of the less fortunate.
Extreme nationalists also used Social Darwinism. They
said that nations, too, were engaged in a “struggle for existence” in which
only the fittest nations would survive. The German general Friedrich von
Bernhardi argued in 1907: “War is a biological necessity of the first importance,
. . . since without it an unhealthy development will follow, which excludes
every advancement of the race, and therefore all real civilization. War
is the father of all things.”
Perhaps nowhere was the combination of extreme nationalism
and racism more evident than in Germany. One of the chief exponents of
German racism was Houston Stewart Chamberlain, a Briton who became a German
citizen and an extreme nationalist.
Chamberlain believed that the ancestors of modern-day
Germanic peoples were the Aryans, a tribal people from Central Asia who
were thought to have migrated to northern India, Iran, and parts of Europe
around 2000 BCE. Chamberlain thought the Aryans were the original creators
of Western culture. He further believed that Jews were the enemy out to
destroy the “superior” Aryans.
Anti-Semitism and Zionism
Anti-Semitism, or hostility toward and discrimination
against Jews, was not new to Europe. Since the Middle Ages, the Jews had
been falsely portrayed by Christians as the murderers of Jesus Christ and
subjected to mob violence. Their rights had been restricted. They had been
physically separated from Christians by being required to live in areas
of cities known as ghettos.
By the 1830s, the lives of many Jews had improved. They
had legal equality in many European countries. They became bankers, lawyers,
scientists, and scholars and were absorbed into the national culture. Old
prejudices were still very much alive, though, and anti-Semitism grew stronger
in the late 1800s.
The intensity of anti-Semitism was evident from the Dreyfus
affair in France. In 1894, a military court found Dreyfus, a captain in
the French general staff, guilty of selling army secrets. During the trial,
angry right-wing mobs yelled anti-Semitic sayings such as “Death to the
Jews.” After the trial, evidence emerged that proved Dreyfus innocent.
A wave of public outcry finally forced the government to pardon Dreyfus
in 1899.
In Germany and Austria-Hungary during the 1880s and 1890s,
new parties arose that used anti-Semitism to win the votes of people affected
by economic problems and blamed those problems on Jews. However, the worst
treatment of Jews at the turn of the century occurred in Russia. Persecutions
and pogroms, or organized massacres, were widespread.
Hundreds of thousands of Jews decided to emigrate to escape
the persecution. Many went to the United States. Some Jews, probably about
25,000, immigrated to Palestine, which became home for a Jewish nationalist
movement called Zionism.
For many Jews, Palestine, the land of ancient Israel,
had long been the land of their dreams. A key figure in the growth of political
Zionism was Theodor Herzl, who stated in his book The Jewish State (1896),
“The Jews who wish it will have their state.”
Settlement in Palestine was difficult, however, because
it was then part of the Ottoman Empire, which was opposed to Jewish immigration.
Although 3,000 Jews went annually to Palestine between 1904 and 1914, the
Zionist desire for a homeland in Palestine remained only a dream on the
eve of World War I.
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