The Total Work of Art in European Modernism (review)

2013 will mark the bicentenary of the birth of Richard Wagner, and for the last several years, publishers have been in high gear issuing new titles to mark the occasion. David Roberts’s The Total Work of Art in European Modernism ranks among the most ambitious, comprehensive, and intellectually satisfying of these recent studies. To link it too closely to other products of the Wagner industry, however, is to do it injustice, for while the notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or “total work of art” will forever be linked to the Master of Bayreuth, Roberts’s study covers considerably wider ground. Indeed, only about ten of its nearly 300 pages are devoted to an explication of Wagnerian aesthetics, and in many ways the person who stands at the intellectual heart of this new book is not Wagner but Wassily Kandinsky, whose 1920 “Program for the Institute of Artistic Culture” provides Roberts with a condensed version of his own argument.

This argument proceeds from the premise that the total work of art poses a number of questions that “run counter to key assumptions of aesthetic modernism, such as the separation and autonomy of the arts” (1). “Separation” and “autonomy” are, of course, terms that we most readily associate with the theorists of the Frankfurt School, and indeed the present work, though an entirely independent study, was conceived as the final part of a trilogy on aesthetic philosophy, the two previous parts being Art and Enlightenment: Aesthetic Theory after Adorno (1992) and Dialectic of Romanticism: A Critique of Modernism (2004, with Peter Murphy). In other words, at least parts of this work have been twenty years in the making, and the resulting book is very much shaped by this fact. To see the benefits of Roberts’s long involvement with his subject, one only has to turn to the bibliography, which is impressively omnivorous and covers hundreds upon hundreds of sources in German, English, French, and Italian. Certain disadvantages are also apparent, however, for the study of European modernism has changed considerably over the past two decades, and Roberts does little to engage with recent trends. Few scholars now working in the field would still associate their work with the twin terms of “separation” and “autonomy,” and modernist studies have been infinitely enriched by forays into popular culture, publishing and advertising history, minor-language literatures, and a host of other fields, all of which strongly contest the notion that modern art was ever as separate from the social world as some of its practitioners and early theorists loved to proclaim.

In truth, however, such objections have little traction in Roberts’s work, which ultimately aims to expand our aesthetic horizons rather than merely revise existing accounts. Roberts argues, in short, that the quest for aesthetic totalization represents an underexamined facet of modernist ideology, one that did continuous battle with more analytical and particularizing strains of modern art during the first third of the twentieth century. On this model, the total work of art is something much more vital than merely a neo-Romantic concept that resurfaced sporadically in aesthetic movements influenced more or less directly by Wagnerism, such as French symbolism, German expressionism, or the Bauhaus. It represents, rather, a constant pole within modern art, whose presence can be detected even within works and schools that on the surface seem little amenable to it, such as Russian futurism or epic theater. Nor is Roberts content to let the term Gesamtkunstwerk stand simply for the fusion of a variety of forms or media into a more comprehensive whole, whether it be through the “expressive-mimetic parallelism of the arts” (184) in Wagnerian music-drama; through synesthesia, as in the works of Alexander Scriabin; or even through antirepresentational ritual, as in Antonin Artaud’s theater of cruelty. He describes instead how the ultimate aim of aesthetic totalization is always to undo the social rifts that were opened up in the body politic by the advent...