Some Key Ideas

• Late 19th century developments towards the idea that art depicts or creates sensations – for many
artists, the stronger the better.
• Fauvism
• Gaugin and van Gough
• Primitivism
• Decadence and Experimentation (we talked about this last time)
• The mood of the fin de siècle
• Art Nouveau
• Comte de Lautremont, Les Chants de Maldoror (1869)
• Charles-Marie-Georges Huysmans, A Rebors (1884)
• Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself” (1892): https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45477/song-of-myself-1892-version
• Alfred Jarry, Ubu Roi (1896)
• A sense of traditional resources being pushed to their limits.
• Expressionism: an early form of modernism
• Not to be confused with “abstract expressionism”, which we’ll come back to!
• We will use the term to indicate a continuation of the pessimism of fin de siècle decadence, including its
renewal in the face of the First World War.
• We will not include more optimistic figures like Kandinsky or Klee; we’ll discuss them in a separate session.
 By “Fauvism” I mean painting that emphasises very
intense, non-naturalistic and often contrasting
colours. These are usually painted in flat fields like
the colours of a commercial poster. Figurative
elements might be painted with varying degrees of
detail, often with exaggerated curves.

This is a sort of “mannerism of expressionism” –

expressionism taken to extremes beyond what is
optically believable.

Fauvism The artists who called themselves Fauves (“wild

beasts”) were active in the very early years of the
20th century, although many had long careers on
either side of that. They knew very well that their
work would be provocative.
Paul Gaugin, Arearea, 1892
Albert Marquet, Posters at Trouville, 1906
Andre Derain, Charing Cross Bridge, 1906
Max Pechstein, Under the Trees, 1911
Henri Matisse, Le Bonheur de Vivre, 1906
 By “Primitivism” I mean visual art that borrows from
non-Western cultures that were perceived at the
time to be more “primitive” or “backward” than the
West.

Those of a Romantic inclination saw in them a

childlike innocence. Some saw these borrowings as a
way to inject a kind of raw, vigorous, physical
honesty into their work.

Many saw the primitive not as a throwback but as

Primitivism something futuristic – a clue from outside Western

culture about how it could be advanced.
Henri Rousseau, The Repast of the Lion, 1907
Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselle d’Avignon, 1907
 By “Expressionism” I mean painting that aims to
express inner psychological turmoil or trauma.

It often used contorted or grotesque figures but

explicitly morbid subject-matter is not typical; the
subject is “deeper” than that.

The technique may involve wild-looking, quasi-

abstract brushstrokes perhaps aiming to depict
energy or stress, or to suggest that the painting was
made in a frenzy. Muted grey colours and overall

Expressonism
darkness are common.

Around this time people are wondering why art

can’t be beautiful any more. An Expressionist might
say: Because the world is beautiful, so representing
it as such is a lie. You have to face its ugliness to get
anywhere.

And pretty soon World War I would come along and

seemingly prove them right.
Egon Schiele, I shall Endure for Art and for the Happiness of my Lover, 1912
August Strindberg, The Town, 1903
Oskar Kokoschka, The Bride of the Wind, 1914
Frederik Varley, German Prisoners, c1919
 Some Notes on Neitzsche
• Before art, humans are already primal “artists” in two spheres: dreaming and intoxication.
• When an artist makes something beautiful, they are not copying a physical thing but rather a “dream”.
• For the Greeks, this was “the sphere of beauty in which they see their mirror-images, the Olympians” (p.126)
• Epic poetry, statues, temple architecture
• Similarly, Dionysian art comes from “intoxication”.
• Here “Man is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art” (p.121)
• Not just a frenzy but also conscious, maybe hyper-conscious.
• There is a tendency away from individuation, towards an undifferentiated “state of nature”. There is something universal, instantaneous and transformative about it.
• Music and lyric poetry “never has the formation of images as its goal” (p.127)
• Other things to consider:
• “A religion of life, not one of duty or asceticism or spirtuality” (p.124)
• “Will” comes from Schopenhauer; we can read it as something like “life-force”, but in the sense of “the will to live as fully as possible”. It is “a single
entity” (p.129) – this certainly has sinister overtones.
• Music appears to be Apollonian, since it’s highly ordered, but Dionysos speaks “with terrifying clarity, in musical sound, in the face of which seductive
semblance lost most of its power” (126-7)
• “Know thyself” – the Apollonian desire to discover and establish limits (p.128)
• The emergence of tragedy as a kind of “middle ground” that yields “the sublime” and “the comical”(p.130)
• Aeschylus finds the sublime in the perfection of divine justice, which comes from Gods that are like more-perfect people; Sophocles in its seeming arbitrariness, coming as
it does from a wildly alien source.
• The problem in Sophocles, though, is not that the gods are unlike us but that we do not understand ourselves enough to understand their justice.
• Representation (p.134-5) in the arts is problematic; instrumental music is non-representational, like physical sensations (p.136).
• But music has a logical form (harmony) that allows it to be “a symbol, not just of feeling but of the world” (p.136).
• This signification of the universal is music’s (perhaps irreducible) Dionysian element.
• Music and gesture are the (Dionysian) roots of language
• “The Sprechgesang is, as it were, a return to nature; the symbol which gets blunted in use regains its original strength once more” (p.137)
• Apollonian and Dionysian tendencies in the different arts (p.139) – also here a reiteration of the ecstatic and physical/natural aspect of the Dionysian.
Some Notes on Bergson
• Bergson’s project is to understand experience.
• In this passage – the opening of his first book – he is concerned with the relative intensities of sensations.
• These might be physical, like the straining of a muscle or the prick of a pin, or emotional – or indeed artistic.
• A key phrase is on p.11: “this progressive stepping in of new elements, which can be detected in the
fundamental emotion and which seem to increase its magnitude, although in reality they do nothing more
than alter its nature”
• Bergson claims that changes in these “inner experiences” are qualitative, not quantitative, despite the language we
use to describe them.
• He locates the experience of “grace” as follows: “the perception of ease in motion passes over into the
pleasure of mastering the flow of time and of holding the future in the present” (p.12)
• This is an early example of a general trend in 20th century philosophy: the temporal turn.
• It is quite the opposite of Nietzche’s Dionysian aesthetics: it’s about control, not abandon.
• But in “beautiful” art there is also a kind of intoxication: art is “a refined and in some way spiritualized
version of the processes commonly used to induce the state of hypnosis” (p.14). It succeeds by suspending
the feeling of time passing.
• Aesthetic feelings are “suggested but not caused” (p.17). Art (good art) does not make us directly experience a
sensation.
• I think the word “suggest” here is to be taken in the sense of “hypnotic suggestion”.
• It is a bit unclear what Bergson means by “the free play of sympathy” (p.16) that this hypnosis makes possible, but
perhaps it isn’t so far as it seems from the Dionysian unity with nature and the universe…
 Some Notes on Pound
• Pound’s use of language is derived from the Symbolists’: he writes in a
very compressed, fragmentary way.
• He doesn’t seem to mind if you don’t “get it”.
• He creates visual or sensual images very quickly, with few words.
• His references to ancient cultures are wide-ranging and erudite but also
fragmentary.
• In what sense is he identifying a “tradition” here?
• Can anyone understand this poem without footnotes except its author?
• What is the point of these references?
• His poem undergoes a transformation like the ship that Dionysius has
boarded; the form to an extent enacts the content.
• To what extent is this comparable to Monet painting “what it’s like to see things”
rather than “what things look like”?