The Depth and Breadth of Modernism

While the period of Modernism is not known for its overall cohesion as a movement, one can group together modernist works in many ways to demonstrate the experiments and trends that became influential. In Putting Modernism Together: Literature, Music, and Painting, 1872-1927, Daniel Albright presents Modernism as characterized by artists who were interested in challenging traditional values and finding value in what he calls “counterintuitive” subjects. The “transvalues” resulting from this experimentation are attended by a difficulty in judging the artworks themselves, as former standards of taste are no longer sustainable.

To demonstrate his view of transvaluation as a defining feature of Modernism, Albright establishes two texts as seminal precursors to the type of artworks being produced during the period: Baudelaire’s The Painter of Modern Life (1864) and Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (1872). Each, in its own way, provides part of the thrust behind modernism’s eagerness to expose and rethink traditions of value. It is beyond dispute that Baudelaire’s work is formative for the Symbolist movement. Albright, however, reads Baudelaire’s symbolism as an elevation of the ordinary as he finds value concealed in the drabness of everyday life. The artist, for Baudelaire, is able to locate the hidden transcendental value by discarding the accidents of physicality to distill the essential meaning of an object. Nietzsche’s emphasis on the Dionysian and the Apollonian—but especially the Dionysian—mounts a similar assault on conventional modes of understanding, and “transvaluation” is a Nietzschean term. Nietzsche concludes “mankind is dissonance” and so, Albright suggests, accepting the contradictions that inhere in that dissonance, is what it means to be human. But more to the point for Albright, and for Nietzsche too, thus situated as discordance itself, the “notion of a solid undergirding to the universe” falls away. What is supported, though, is the momentum of modernism’s appetite for uncovering value in multiple and unconventional ways.

Though Albright devotes the remainder of the book to investigating the abundant “-isms” of Modernism—from Impressionism to Futurism to Aestheticism, to name a few—his discussion tackles what are often thought of (and taught as) discrete “-isms” by accentuating points of intersectionality, where he focuses on similar motivations behind dissimilar techniques, or shows one “-ism” to be a response to another. As his title intimates, Albright conceives of each component of the Modernist period as open to participation from various art forms. The text is loaded with images of artworks (more than forty-five). However, one wishes they were in color to better illustrate the details of his argument. Albright offers refreshingly close readings, not only of texts and paintings, but of music as well. For, “if mankind is dissonance, there must be ethical as well as musical ramifications,” and to investigate Modernism as strictly a literary movement, is to miss the cross-pollination among genres.

And so, rather than structuring the book around fields of work, Albright isolates the new value(s) that each of his “-isms” strives to represent. This is an exceptionally useful strategy as it enables readers to understand—and perhaps to judge— creative works from the vantage point of the artist’s own program as well as from its historical context within the transvaluative process of the period.

Two of the first sub-movements of Modernism that Albright addresses are Impressionism and Expressionism. The Impressionism chapter begins with Gerard Manley Hopkins’s sonnet “Pied Beauty” (1877) and Renoir’s painting La Moulin de la Galette (1876), as an entry point to what Albright calls the “dapple” effect, which revels in “the precious unlikenesses of individual objects.” Impressionism as a movement attempts to tell the truth about the physical world, which could mean eschewing even the simple habit of outlining a figure, so as not to imply that the world might be captured or experienced as discrete objects. Probably less well-known, or certainly less discussed, is the new discovery in the field of physics that...