Messianic Pains. The Apocalyptic Temporality in Avant-Garde Art, Politics, and War

Once one has acquired the right ear and eye, one becomes restless, Franz Marc (1914)

Experienced by many artists as the era of private passions, devoid as such of the collective experiences necessary to the creation of "Great Art," modernity found more than once in war and revolution the propitious conditions for a salutary rupture. The majority of artists of the European avant-garde thus succumbed to the euphoria following the declaration of the First World War in 1914, in the hopes of living the powerful common experiences that the gloomy accumulation of days during peace time had seemed to deny them. Although they had previously defended their autonomy, transgressing without respite the limits defined by "tradition" and "common sense," those artists were now ready to recognize in war the "feast" of socialization, advocated once by Hegel as the necessary means for the taming of modern individualism.¹ In other words, the war offered to the artist the opportunity to protect his self against its own excesses. Expecting to finish with the aporias inherent in the "autonomy of art," he desired to merge in the anonymity of the people.

It is widely acknowledged today that if the Great War accomplished this anonymity, it was in a radically different way than the one hoped for by artists: not simply interdependent, factories and armies became almost interchangeable in their means of production and in their ways of using workers and soldiers' labour power. Just as it was impossible for a worker to have a total vision of the industrial productive process, for individuals participating in battles it had become impossible to perceive the army's plan. The first deception that the war provoked in Max Beckmann was therefore the oppression of his individuality, which he had until then considered to be his most precious capital as an artist.² In a manner similar to George Grosz, Ludwig Meidner, and Ludwig Kirchner, Beckmann would thereafter reject the industrial war for its capacity to multiply horror.³

Nevertheless, other artists' reactions to the war do not fall under the purview of such a disillusioned humanism. They were interested in the spirit or method of war rather than in its immediate effects. Despite their crucial differences, the Cubist Fernand Léger, the Expressionist Franz Marc, and the Italian Futurists belong to this general framework. No trace of the horror of war can be detected in their texts or war sketches: instead of focusing on the "inhuman" effects of the war, these artists paid attention to its capacity to abstract the human. Even though all of them recognized in the war's "methodological" abstraction the confirmation and objectification of their previous aesthetic battles, a clear distinction can be made between those who, like Léger, speculated about the war in a rationalist way, analyzing its principles and drawing appropriate conclusions for the future of their art, and those who, like Marc and the Futurists, lived the abstraction of the war in total empathy.⁴ This empathy, defined here as the subject's identification with the virtual object of its representation, produced ultimately the transfiguration and, even, sacralization of the war. The war was sometimes sacralized in itself, as the climax of a transcendental experience, and sometimes as the means to accelerate the manifestation of the sacred.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Romantic painter Philipp Otto Runge conceived his landscape painting (Landschafterey) as the anticipation of a new religion, purer and more abstract than Protestantism, which was itself already purer and more abstract than Catholicism; he momentarily imagined a war able to accelerate, by its purifying effects, the irruption of this new religion. Nonetheless, he soon confronted the tenacious inadequacy dividing modern forms of war and religion. In a letter to his brother Daniel written in 1802, the painter explains: "I once imagined a war able to turn the whole world upside down and the way that such a war could come, but since war was becoming a science everywhere in the world and no war was fair any more, I did not see any other...