The Arts: 100 Years Of Attitude

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It all happened so fast. One minute Madama Butterfly was on the Gramophone, Harold Bell Wright's The Shepherd of the Hills was on the reading table, the pretty Gibson Girl you had seen in a magazine was on your mind. You wondered if you wanted to see Maude Adams in her return engagement as Peter Pan. Or perhaps brave the odors and chatter of the nickelodeon to catch that spunky new girl--her name, unpublicized at the time, was Mary Pickford--people were talking about in Ramona.

How sweet it was--the genteel culture of this century's first decade. There were noises off, of course: the clatter of Ashcans in New York City's ateliers, for example. But--saints be praised!--New York's police commissioner had closed Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession after one performance because it was "revolting, indecent and nauseating when it was not boring." As late as 1912, a magazine editor (quoted in Ann Douglas' Terrible Honesty) could write that "no-one paints life as it is--thank Heaven--for we could not bear it," and receive few arguments from his readers. It was an era in which the word irony described a passing attitude, not a cultural imperative, and celebrity was something pleasant that happened to deserving strivers, not the glue that held everything together, everyone in its thrall.

Yet to borrow a famous phrase from Karl Marx, "All that is solid melts into air"--was melting already, as of 1911, and forming large and inconvenient puddles on the floor, quite insusceptible to the morally muscular moppings of outraged critics. Here one directs the reader to the foldout chart elsewhere in these pages. Prepared with much disputatious--not to say rebellious--muttering by this magazine's critics, it lists the century's "best" work in every facet of the arts. Its most interesting aspect is the intensely clustered dates of the works representing the major expressive forms.

A period of just 11 years--1911 to 1922--contains the greatest painting, play, novel and poem of this century and encompasses as well major annunciatory works by the authors of what we deem our greatest musical composition and sculpture, and not a few runners-up in several categories. To put it simply: there was in these few years an outburst of creative (and subversive) daring that may well be unsurpassed in human history.

1911. Matisse paints The Red Studio, "discarding perspective, abolishing shadows, repudiating the academic distinction between line and color," as his biographer Hilary Spurling puts it. Already burdened by the Fauve ("wild beast") misnomer, his public saw his work as a threat "to undermine civilization as they knew it." At virtually the same moment, his great rival Picasso creates his equally masterly Cubist collage Still-Life with Chair Caning and Guitar, which reverses the centuries-old traditions of sculpture, focusing the spectator's eye not on the final effect but on the process and materials by which it is obtained.

1913. Stravinsky premieres his ballet The Rite of Spring in Paris, setting the audience into a riotous frenzy with his rhythms--violent syncopation, sudden changes of meter, "barbaric" repetitions--subverting everyone's expectations for a predictable and reassuring beat. We are but a moment from Wozzeck (1925) and on the way to banishing tonality itself from opera.