1 The Apache Dance
Hot off the Carey airport bus, looking for lofts
All the major modern movements except for de stijl, Dada, Constructivism, and Surrealism began before the First World War, and yet they all seem to come out of the 1920s. Why? Because it was in the 1920s that Modern Art achieved social chic in Paris, London, Berlin, and New York. Smart people talked about it, wrote about it, enthused over it, and borrowed from it. Borrowed from it, as I say; Modern Art achieved the ultimate social acceptance: interior decorators did knock-offs of it in Belgravia and the sixteenth arrondissement.
Things like knock-off specialists, money, publicity, the smart set, and Le Chic shouldn’t count in the history of art, as we all know—but, thanks to the artists themselves, they do. Art and fashion are a two-backed beast today; the artists can yell at fashion, but they can’t move out ahead. That has come about as follows:
By 1900 the artist’s arena—the place where he seeks honor, glory, ease, Success—had shifted twice. In seventeenth-century Europe the artist was literally, and also psychologically, the house guest of the nobility and the royal court (except in Holland); fine art and court art were one and the same. In the eighteenth century the scene shifted to the salons, in the homes of the wealthy bourgeoisie as well as those of aristocrats, where Culture-minded members of the upper classes held regular meetings with selected artists and writers. The artist was still the Gentleman, not yet the Genius. After the French Revolution, artists began to leave the salons and join cénacles, which were fraternities of like-minded souls huddled at some place like the Café Guerbois rather than a town house; around some romantic figure, an artist rather than a socialite, someone like Victor Hugo, Charles Nodier, Théophile Gautier, or, later, Edouard Manet. What held the cénacles together was that merry battle spirit we have all come to know and love: épatez la bourgeoisie, shock the middle class. With Gautier’s cénacle especially … with Gautier’s own red vests, black scarves, crazy hats, outrageous pronouncements, huge thirsts, and ravenous groin … the modern picture of The Artist began to form: the poor but free spirit, plebeian but aspiring only to be classless, to cut himself forever free from the bonds of the greedy and hypocritical bourgeoisie, to be whatever the fat burghers feared most, to cross the line wherever they drew it, to look at the world in a way they couldn’t see, to be high, live low, stay young forever—in short, to be the bohemian.
By 1900 and the era of Picasso, Braque & Co., the modern game of Success in Art was pretty well set. As a painter or sculptor the artist would do work that baffled or subverted the cozy bourgeois vision of reality. As an individual—well, that was a bit more complex. As a bohemian, the artist had now left the salons of the upper classes—but he had not left their world. For getting away from the bourgeoisie there’s nothing like packing up your paints and easel and heading for Tahiti, or even Brittany, which was Gauguin’s first stop. But who else even got as far as Brittany? Nobody. The rest got no farther than the heights of Montmartre and Montparnasse, which are what?—perhaps two miles from the Champs Elysées. Likewise in the United States: believe me, you can get all the tubes of Winsor & Newton paint you want in Cincinnati, but the artists keep migrating to New York all the same … You can see them six days a week … hot off the Carey airport bus, lined up in front of the real-estate office on Broome Street in their identical blue jeans, gum boots, and quilted Long March jackets … looking, of course, for the inevitable Loft…
No, somehow the artist wanted to remain within walking distance … He took up quarters just around the corner from … le monde, the social sphere described so well by Balzac, the milieu of those who find it important to be in fashion, the orbit of those aristocrats, wealthy bourgeois, publishers, writers, journalists, impresarios, performers, who wish to be “where things happen,” the glamorous but small world of that creation of the nineteenth-century metropolis, tout le monde, Everybody, as in “Everybody says” … the smart set, in a phrase … “smart,” with its overtones of cultivation as well as cynicism.
The ambitious artist, the artist who wanted Success, now had to do a bit of psychological double-tracking. Consciously he had to dedicate himself to the antibourgeois values of the cénacles of whatever sort, to bohemia, to the Bloomsbury life, the Left Bank life, the Lower Broadway Loft life, to the sacred squalor of it all, to the grim silhouette of the black Reo rig Lower Manhattan truck-route internal-combustion granules that were already standing an eighth of an inch thick on the poisoned roach carcasses atop the electric hot-plate burner by the time you got up for breakfast… Not only that, he had to dedicate himself to the quirky god Avant-Garde. He had to keep one devout eye peeled for the new edge on the blade of the wedge of the head on the latest pick thrust of the newest exploratory probe of this fall’s avant-garde Breakthrough of the Century … all this in order to make it, to be noticed, to be counted, within the community of artists themselves. What is more, he had to be sincere about it. At the same time he had to keep his other eye cocked to see if anyone in le monde was watching. Have they noticed me yet? Have they even noticed the new style (that me and my friends are working in)? Don’t they even know about Tensionism (or Slice Art or Niho or Innerism or Dimensional Creamo or whatever)? (Hello, out there!) … because as every artist knew in his heart of hearts, no matter how many times he tried to close his eyes and pretend otherwise (History! History!—where is thy salve?), Success was real only when it was success within le monde.
Ronald Searle, La Vie de Bohème
He could close his eyes and try to believe that all that mattered was that he knew his work was great… and that other artists respected it… and that History would surely record his achievements … but deep down he knew he was lying to himself. I want to be a Name, goddamn it!—at least that, a name, a name on the lips of the museum curators, gallery owners, COLLECTORS, patrons, board members, committee members, Culture hostesses, and their attendant intellectuals and journalists and their Time and Newsweek—all right!—even that!—Time and Newsweek—Oh yes! (ask the shades of Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko!)—even the goddamned journalists!
* * *
During the 1960s this entire process by which le monde, the culturati, scout bohemia and tap the young artist for Success was acted out in the most graphic way. Early each spring, two emissaries from the Museum of Modern Art, Alfred Barr and Dorothy Miller, would head downtown from the Museum on West Fifty-third Street, down to Saint Marks Place, Little Italy, Broome Street and environs, and tour the loft studios of known artists and unknowns alike, looking at everything, talking to one and all, trying to get a line on what was new and significant in order to put together a show in the fall … and, well, I mean, my God—from the moment the two of them stepped out on Fifty-third Street to grab a cab, some sort of boho radar began to record their sortie … They’re coming! … And rolling across Lower Manhattan, like the Cosmic Pulse of the theosophists, would be a unitary heartbeat:
Pick me pick me pick me pick me pick me pick me pick me … O damnable Uptown!
By all means, deny it if asked!—what one knows, in one’s cheating heart, and what one says are two different things!
So it was that the art mating ritual developed early in the century—in Paris, in Rome, in London, Berlin, Munich, Vienna, and, not too long afterward, in New York. As we’ve just seen, the ritual has two phases:
(1) The Boho Dance, in which the artist shows his stuff within the circles, coteries, movements, isms, of the home neighborhood, bohemia itself, as if he doesn’t care about anything else; as if, in fact, he has a knife in his teeth against the fashionable world uptown.
Gustave Doré. The Boho Dance
(2) The Consummation, in which culturati from that very same world, le monde, scout the various new movements and new artists of bohemia, select those who seem the most exciting, original, important, by whatever standards—and shower them with all the rewards of celebrity.
By the First World War the process was already like what in the Paris clip joints of the day was known as an apache dance. The artist was like the female in the act, stamping her feet, yelling defiance one moment, feigning indifference the next, resisting the advances of her pursuer with absolute contempt … more thrashing about … more rake-a-cheek fury … more yelling and carrying on … until finally with one last mighty and marvelously ambiguous shriek—pain! ecstasy!—she submits … Paff paff paff paff paff … How you do it, my boy! … and the house lights rise and Everyone, tout le monde, applauds …
The artist’s payoff in this ritual is obvious enough. He stands to gain precisely what Freud says are the goals of the artist: fame, money, and beautiful lovers. But what about le monde, the culturati, the social members of the act? What’s in it for them? Part of their reward is the ancient and semi-sacred status of Benefactor of the Arts. The arts have always been a doorway into Society, and in the largest cities today the arts—the museum boards, arts councils, fund drives, openings, parties, committee meetings—have completely replaced the churches in this respect. But there is more!
Today there is a peculiarly modern reward that the avantgarde artist can give his benefactor: namely, the feeling that he, like his mate the artist, is separate from and aloof from the bourgeoisie, the middle classes … the feeling that he may be from the middle class but he is no longer in it… the feeling that he is a fellow soldier, or at least an aide-de-camp or an honorary cong guerrilla in the vanguard march through the land of the philistines. This is a peculiarly modern need and a peculiarly modern kind of salvation (from the sin of Too Much Money) and something quite common among the well-to-do all over the West, in Rome and Milan as well as New York. That is why collecting contemporary art, the leading edge, the latest thing, warm and wet from the Loft, appeals specifically to those who feel most uneasy about their own commercial wealth … See? I’m not like them—those Jaycees, those United Fund chairmen, those Young Presidents, those mindless New York A.C. goyisheh hog-jowled stripe-tied goddamn-good-to-see-you-you-old-bastard-you oyster-bar trenchermen … Avant-garde art, more than any other, takes the Mammon and the Moloch out of money, puts Levi’s, turtlenecks, muttonchops, and other mantles and laurels of bohemian grace upon it.
That is why COLLECTORS today not only seek out the company of, but also want to hang out amidst, lollygag around with, and enter into the milieu of … the artists they patronize. They want to climb those vertiginous loft building stairs on Howard Street that go up five flights without a single turn or bend—straight up! like something out of a casebook dream—to wind up with their hearts ricocheting around in their rib cages with tachycardia from the exertion mainly but also from the anticipation that just beyond this door at the top … in this loft… lie the real goods … paintings, sculptures that are indisputably part of the new movement, the new école, the new wave … something unshrinkable, chipsy, pure cong, bourgeois-proof.
2 The Public Is Not Invited (And Never Has Been)
I’m still a virgin. (Where’s the champagne?)
Now we can begin to understand how it happened that the Modernists, Braque & Bros., completed almost all their stylistic innovations before the First World War, and yet Modern Art seems to belong to the postwar period. It is simply because the Boho Dance took place before the war and the Consummation took place afterward. This is not what is so often described as the lag between “the artist’s discoveries” and “public acceptance.” Public? The public plays no part in the process whatsoever. The public is not invited (it gets a printed announcement later).
Le monde, the culturati, are no more a part of “the public,” the mob, the middle classes, than the artists are. If it were possible to make one of those marvelous sociometric diagrams that sociologists tried to perfect in the 1950s, in which they tried to trace on a map the daily routes of key people in a community—a blue line for Community Leader A here and a red one for Leader B and a green one for Leader C and a broken sienna one for Bureaucrat Y, and so on—and the lines started moving around and intersecting here and there like a hallucinated Sony solid-state panel—if it were possible to make such a diagram of the art world, we would see that it is made up of (in addition to the artists) about 750 culturati in Rome, 500 in Milan, 1,750 in Paris, 1,250 in London, 2,000 in Berlin, Munich, and Düsseldorf, 3,000 in New York, and perhaps 1,000 scattered about the rest of the known world. That is the art world, approximately 10,000 souls—a mere hamlet!—restricted to les beaux mondes of eight cities.
The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in Modern Art, the notion that the public scorns, ignores, fails to comprehend, allows to wither, crushes the spirit of, or commits any other crime against Art or any individual artist is merely a romantic fiction, a bittersweet Trilby sentiment. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened. The public that buys books in hardcover and paperback by the millions, the public that buys records by the billions and fills stadiums for concerts, the public that spends $100 million on a single movie—this public affects taste, theory, and artistic outlook in literature, music, and drama, even though courtly elites hang on somewhat desperately in each field. The same has never been true in art. The public whose glorious numbers are recorded in the annual reports of the museums, all those students and bus tours and moms and dads and random intellectuals … are merely tourists, autograph seekers, gawkers, parade watchers, so far as the game of Success in Art is concerned. The public is presented with a fait accompli and the aforementioned printed announcement, usually in the form of a story or a spread of color pictures in the back pages of Time. An announcement, as I say. Not even the most powerful organs of the press, including Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times, can discover a new artist or certify his worth and make it stick. They can only bring you the news, tell you which artists the beau hamlet, Cultureburg, has discovered and certified. They can only bring you the scores.
We can now also begin to see that Modern Art enjoyed all the glories of the Consummation stage after the First World War not because it was “finally understood” or “finally appreciated” but rather because a few fashionable people discovered their own uses for it. It was after the First World War that modern and modernistic came into the language as exciting adjectives (somewhat like now, as in the Now Generation, during the 1960s). By 1920, in le monde, to be fashionable was to be modern, and Modern Art and the new spirit of the avant-garde were perfectly suited for that vogue.
Picasso is a case in point. Picasso did not begin to become Picasso, in the art world or in the press, until he was pushing forty and painted the scenery for Diaghilev’s Russian ballet in London in 1918. Diaghilev & Co. were a tremendous succès de scandale in fashionable London. The wild dervishing of Nijinsky, the lurid costumes—it was all too deliciously modern for words. The Modernistic settings by Picasso, André Derain, and (later on) Matisse, were all part of the excitement, and le monde loved it. “Art,” in Osbert Lancaster’s phrase, “came once more to roost among the duchesses.”
Picasso, who had once lived in the legendary unlit attic and painted at night with a brush in one hand and a candlestick in the other—Picasso now stayed at the Savoy, had lots of clothes made on Bond Street and nearby, including a set of tails, went to all the best parties (and parties were never better), was set up with highly publicized shows of his paintings, and became a social lion—which he remained, Tales of the Aging Recluse notwithstanding, until he was in his seventies.
Pablo Picasso.
Back in Paris, the new Picasso turned up at the theater with his kid gloves, canes, tall hats, capes, and dinner clothes, and the linings gave you a little silk flash every time he wheeled about in the lobby to chat with one of his hellish new friends … Our old pal Braque shook his head sadly … At least Derain had had the decency to confine himself to a blue serge suit when he was being lionized in London, and he had stuck to the company of local bohos in his off hours … But Picasso—Braque was like that incorruptible member of the Cénacle of the rue des Quatre Vents, Daniel D’Arthez, watching the decay of Lucien Chardon in Balzac’s Lost Illusions. With a sigh Braque waited for his old comrade Pablo’s imminent collapse as a painter and a human being … But the damnedest thing happened instead! Picasso just kept ascending, to El Dorado, to tremendous wealth but to much more than that, to the sainted status of Picasso, to the point where by 1950 he was known at every level of opinion, from Art News to the Daily News, as the painter of the twentieth century. As for Derain and his blue serge suit and Braque and his scruples—the two old boys, both very nearly the same age as Picasso, i.e., about seventy, were remembered in 1950 chiefly as part of the pit crew during Picasso’s monumental victory.1
Not to beg the question of differences in talent—but here we have the classic demonstration of the artist who knows how to double-track his way from the Boho Dance to the Consummation as opposed to the artist who gets stuck forever in the Boho Dance. This is an ever-present hazard of the art mating ritual. Truly successful double-tracking requires the artist to be a sincere and committed performer in both roles. Many artists become so dedicated to bohemian values, internalize their antibourgeois feelings so profoundly, that they are unable to cut loose, let go, with that cathartic shriek—pain! ecstasy! paff paff paff paff paff paff—and submit gracefully to good fortune; the sort of artist, and his name is Legion, who always comes to the black-tie openings at the Museum of Modern Art wearing a dinner jacket and paint-spattered Levi’s … I’m still a virgin! (Where’s the champagne?)
3 Le Tout New York on a Cubist Horse
“Hitch your wagon to a star.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson
So modern art enjoyed a tremendous social boom in Europe in the 1920s. And what about the United States? A painter, Marsden Hartley, wrote in 1921 that “art in America is like a patent medicine or a vacuum cleaner. It can hope for no success until ninety million people know what it is.” Bitter stuff! In fact, however, he couldn’t have gotten it more precisely wrong. Modern Art was a success in the United States in no time—as soon as a very few people knew what it was, the 400, as it were, as opposed to the 90 million.
These were New Yorkers of wealth and fashion, such as the Rockefellers and Goodyears, who saw their counterparts in London enjoying the chic and excitement of Picasso, Derain, Matisse, and the rest of Le Moderne and who wanted to import it for themselves. This they did. Modern Art arrived in the United States in the 1920s not like a rebel commando force but like Standard Oil. By 1929 it had been established, institutionalized, in the most overwhelming way: in the form of the Museum of Modern Art. This cathedral of Culture was not exactly the brain child of visionary bohemians. It was founded in John D. Rockefeller, Jr.’s living room, to be exact, with Goodyears, Blisses, and Crowninshields in attendance.
Against such a vogue in le monde, conservative critics in New York were helpless. Their very base no longer existed. The doyen of the breed, Royal Cortissoz, made a mighty effort, however. Writing in 1923, at the time of a national debate over immigration (which led to the Immigration Act of 1924), he compared the alien invasion of European modernism to the subversive alien hordes coming in by boat. “Ellis Island art,” he called it, no doubt figuring he had come up with a devastating label. Well!—as one can imagine!—how everybody sniggered at poor Mr. Cortissoz over that!
By the mid-1930s, Modern Art was already so chic that corporations held it aloft like a flag to show that they were both up-to-date and enlightened, a force in Culture as well as commerce. The Dole Pineapple Company sent Georgia O’Keeffe and Isamu Noguchi to Hawaii to record their impressions, and the Container Corporation of America was commissioning abstract work by Fernand Léger, Henry Moore, and others. This led to the Container Corporation’s long-running advertising campaign, the Great Ideas of Western Man series, in which it would run a Great Idea by a noted savant at the top of the page, one of them being “‘Hitch your wagon to a star’—Ralph Waldo Emerson.” Underneath would be a picture of a Cubist horse strangling on a banana.
Naturally the chic of Le Moderne put a heavy burden on theory. Each new movement, each new ism in Modern Art was a declaration by the artists that they had a new way of seeing which the rest of the world (read: the bourgeoisie) couldn’t comprehend. “We understand!” said the culturati, thereby separating themselves also from the herd. But what inna namea Christ were the artists seeing? This was where theory came in. A hundred years before, Art Theory had merely been something that enriched one’s conversation in matters of Culture. Now it was an absolute necessity. It was no longer background music. It was an essential hormone in the mating ritual. All we ask for is a few lines of explanation! You say Meret Oppenheim’s Fur-Covered Cup, Saucer and Spoon (the pièce de résistance of the Museum of Modern Art’s Surrealism show in December 1936) is an example of the Surrealist principle of displacement? You say the texture of one material—fur—has been imposed upon the forms of others—china and tableware—in order to split the oral, the tactile, and the visual into three critically injured but for the first time fiercely independent parties in the subconscious? Fine. To get the word was to understand. The Dadaists professed to be furious over this obscene embrace by the very people they had been attacking. “Any work of art that can be understood is the product of a journalist,” said Tristan Tzara’s Dada manifesto. “So what?” came the reply. (“You dismal little Rumanian.”) Even an explanation of why one couldn’t accept something, including Dada, was explanation enough to accept it.
Yet Theory did not come fully into its own, triumphant, transcendent, more important than painting and sculpture themselves, until after the Second World War. Theory, this first-class coach on the Freight Train of History (to use a phrase from the period), was held back by a little matter that seldom finds its way into the art histories today, as if what the Freudians call “the amnesia of childhood” were at work. For more than ten years, from about 1930 to 1941, the artists themselves, in Europe and America, suspended the Modern movement… for the duration, as it were … They called it off! They suddenly returned to “literary” realism of the most obvious sort, a genre known as Social Realism.
Left politics did that for them. Left politicians said, in effect: You artists claim to be dedicated to an antibourgeois life. Well, the hour has now come to stop merely posing and to take action, to turn your art into a weapon. Translation: propaganda paintings. The influence of Left politics was so strong within the art world during the 1930s that Social Realism became not a style of the period but the style of the period. Even the most dedicated Modernists were intimidated. Years later Barnett Newman wrote that the “shouting dogmatists, Marxist, Leninist, Stalinist, and Trotskyite” created “an intellectual prison that locked one in tight.” I detect considerable amnesia today on that point. All best forgotten! Artists whose names exist as little more than footnotes today—William Gropper, Ben Shahn, Jack Levine—were giants as long as the martial music of the mimeograph machines rolled on in a thousand Protest Committee rooms. For any prominent critic of the time to have written off Ben Shahn as a commercial illustrator, as Barbara Rose did recently, would have touched off a brawl. Today no one cares, for Social Realism evaporated with the political atmosphere that generated it. By 1946 the scene had cleared for the art of our day—an art more truly Literary than anything ever roared against in the wildest angers of the Fauvists and Cubists.
Copyright © 1975 by Tom Wolfe
