Modernism: the Lure of Heresy. From Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond

An overview of the century-and-a-half-long evolution of the movement that has radically transformed art and culture across the world.

Acclaimed American art historian Peter Gay traces the history of modernism in painting, architecture, sculpture, literature, music, and cinema from the 1840s—the time of Flaubert and Baudelaire—to the post-war "Warhol era." Published in 2007, Modernismis one of his last works, and in it Gay revisits his earlier writings on the Enlightenment and Freud. For example, offering an analysis of modernism based on Freud’s theories of opposite drives and contradictory desires that shape our lives, Gay points out the crucial role that the struggle between modernists and the cultural establishment has played in the movement’s history.

Although modernist artists consciously challenged tradition (hence Ezra Pound’s injunction to "make it new!"), choosing to be heretics, they also, Gay argues, shared a common interest in self-reflection and an ambition to express their subjectivities through art. Choosing these two criteria to define modernism, he proceeds to analyse the complex relationship between modernism and post-war movements such as pop art and conceptualism—and discusses the possibility of a new turn towards modernism in the early twenty-first century.