The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God (16 page)

Many painters would head to the South of France in search of colors and a landscape that would help them
intensify
their pictures. What all these artists had in common was a feeling that color was the sign of vitality, the emblem of well-being; it extended and sharpened the artist’s—and the viewer’s—sense of energy, their shared
joie de vivre
. Color was a gift of nature and the artist’s job was to
intensify
the experience of nature, enhancing life. The black habit and biretta of the priest have no place here. Matisse’s art never shouts, but it convinces. There is heroism in this.

THE MAGIC OF METAL, THE WORSHIP OF MACHINES

The sheer
joy
in color that united so many artists at the turn of the twentieth century radiated, as already noted, an optimism about the emergent new world, an optimism that was shared—trumpeted far and wide—by the Futurists, led by the Italian Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944),
almost a machine himself, tireless and repetitive. His influence spread far beyond his native country, as far afield as Russia, “where the Futurist worship of the machine and its Promethean sense of technology as the solvent of all social ills became a central issue for Constructivists after 1913.” He devised an approach in which every kind of human behavior could be seen as “art,” thus again intensifying life, and in this way spawned the rash of happenings, events and performance pieces later in the century.

Marinetti was convinced that the past—traditional religion as much as anything—was the enemy; that technology had created a new kind of individual—machine visionaries—redrawing the cultural map and creating hitherto undreamed-of experiences and liberties, transforming awareness. “Machinery was power; it was freedom from historical restraint.” In his
Futurist Manifesto
, published in 1909, he announced: “We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness. Courage, audacity and revolt will be the essential ingredients of our poetry. We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty; the beauty of speed. . . . We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot.”
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This message was rather suborned by the brute fact of the First World War, when the sheer speed of the machine gun (four hundred rounds a minute) was considerably more lethal than life-enhancing, and when artillery, tanks and U-boats could only underline that the Futurist obsession with the machine was at least somewhat misplaced. But Fernand Léger, who was not strictly speaking a Futurist in his worship of the machine and of metal, was not put off by war. The son of a Normandy farmer, he had fought in the trenches during the war, where he had experienced, he said, a great visual epiphany: “the breech of a 75-millimeter gun in the sunlight, the magic of light on white metal.”

He first applied this vision to the soldiers he knew in the trenches, painting repetitive rows of bodies and helmets and medals and insignia, all presented as tubes of metal. What interested Léger about metal was not its inhumanity but almost the reverse—its adaptability. In one of his grandest compositions,
Three Women
(1921), introduced earlier, all the bodies and furniture are geometrically simplified, formed as if of metal
tubes. “It is one of the supreme didactic paintings . . . embodying an idea of society-as-a-machine, bringing harmony and an end to loneliness”—in a word, secular redemption. “We are offered a metaphor of human relationships working smoothly as a clock,” everything in its place, the women (and the cat) comfortable with themselves; the scene is placid, even, and though metallic on the surface, far removed from the industrial nightmare often associated with steel and iron. Visually, it is nothing like one of Monet’s railroad stations, but the sentiment is not dissimilar. Again, this is a world that has left churches behind.

It was wartime, too, that witnessed the movement known as Dada, which built—or tried to build—on the
joy
that the painters in the South of France in the pre-war years had celebrated. One meaning of Dada is that it began with a “joyous Slavonic affirmation,” “Da da!”—“Yes! Yes!”—to life. The abstract artist Hans Arp, working in Zurich during the Great War alongside James Joyce and Lenin, said, “We searched for an elementary art that would, we thought, save mankind from the furious madness of those times . . . we wanted an anonymous and collective art,”
collective
being the crucial point.
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The core myth of the avant-garde was that by changing the language of art it could reform the order of experience, and so improve the conditions of social life. The Dadaists subscribed to this view as much as the Futurists did. The Dadaists focused on play as the highest human activity—the antithesis of war—and highlighted
chance
as a way to bring about what it wanted to happen.

Play has a long history in Western philosophy, going back at least to Schiller, who exalted play as the most disinterested—and therefore pure—activity man can aspire to. The new understanding of childhood, since Freud, as the primal battleground of the instincts, was also therefore a pure or original state, which, it was felt—if it could be achieved, or emulated—would release with clarity the simple building blocks of our psychological nature.

NO MEANING IN THE PAST

The aim of play and dance was
spontaneity
as a way of letting the unconscious “speak” in unadulterated form. Chance allowed this, at least in theory; and in the imitation of play, for instance, paper was torn into random shapes, and found objects were let fall where they would; poems were constructed from words randomly drawn out of a bag. “Every word that is spoken and sung here,” said Hugo Ball, “represents at least this one thing: that this humiliating age has not succeeded in winning our respect.”

The most lyrical of the Dadaists was Kurt Schwitters, who found beauty in—or at least produced artworks made out of—the detritus of the modern city: old newspapers, bits of wood, the lids of cardboard boxes, used toothpicks; for a world of abundance inevitably produces an abundance of waste. These emphasized, as the Impressionists had done, the fleeting but intense nature of life in the (still relatively new) urban sprawls that cities were becoming, where unrelated strangers were thrown together cheek by jowl in unanticipated, sometimes unwanted, juxtapositions. One of his best works,
The Cathedral of Erotic Misery
(1923), suggested agglomerations of memories, memories to be discarded along with the materials themselves. There was no meaning to be found in the past; and the new was too new.

•   •   •

So much for the optimists who, as we have seen, were predominantly French and therefore, nominally at least, Catholics, or brought up in that tradition. A far less optimistic reaction came from the Protestant nations: the Netherlands, Scandinavia, Germany.

Expressionism was the art form of those who, unlike the Impressionists and Fauvists,
were
bewildered and bothered by the changes taking place, including the death of God. Unlike
Gravelines
,
Grande Jatte
or
The Red Studio
, Expressionism is the art of
struggle
, the art of anxiety, the art of what it means to be alive in an indifferent (rather than a beneficently abundant) universe. What you feel with the Expressionists—and this was an idea that ran through the century and crossed the Atlantic later on—was that the
encounter
with paint, the struggle to make the artwork work, to make it mean what the artist wanted it to mean, is there for all to see. In Expressionist art, above all other forms, what we are told, what we
see
,
is that after the death of God all that is left is the self. In some ways the Expressionist artist is
overwhelmed
by life, it rushes in on him, floods his mind to the point where it is all he can do to prevent images running away with him and descending into chaos. The Expressionist artist feels the responsibility of being an artist, of being human, of showing to the rest of the world the struggle that it is just to live from day to day.

This is shown vividly and foremost in the paintings of the Dutchman Vincent van Gogh, whose whorls and swirls of heavy impasto—his starry night skies, his writhing mountains, his florid cypresses—almost burst off the canvas with the energy they seek to encapsulate. Van Gogh was less impressed by the colors of the South of France than by the sheer energy that he felt crackling in the atmosphere, the rocks, the vegetation. As if in response to Federico García Lorca’s line “Who will speak the truths of wheat?” in
The Sower
(1888), Van Gogh does just that. The truth of wheat is that its sowing, growing and reaping are an
encounter
between man and nature, with man as
part
of nature, and without God our encounter with nature is revised: the sun beats mercilessly down, everything in the picture is laid on thick, showing—highlighting—an assertion of man’s
will
. A Van Gogh image imposes itself, on the canvas, on the viewer. Here I am, the paintings say, my colors may not be your colors or my shapes your shapes but the composition shows their
force
, in an explosion of ecstasy. The paintings take a vision and push it to the limit. Come with me, says Van Gogh, and I will show you ecstasy in this world, whether it be by sunlight or starlight.

This is not color as meaning but light and energy as meaning, intensity as meaning, an ecstasy that is available but can be achieved only by effort, physical struggle, the same effort as the sower expends. We must be alive to the energy in the world and use it for our own purposes. And we must
manage
our own energy if we are to live well, to know ecstasy.
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But intensity carries risks as well as offering fulfillment. As the world knows, Van Gogh spent just over a year in an asylum in the South of France in 1889–90. He was not the only one to battle with instability. Edvard Munch wrote in a letter to a friend, “Disease and insanity were the black angels on guard at my cradle.”
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Though neither Van Gogh nor Munch, probably, had read the latest physics of the day (energy as a con
cept dated from the 1850s), energy in nature, its effect on the
perception
of nature, the potentially explosive, destabilizing effects of that energy, are rendered visible in paintings, which invite us to understand nature in a new way, suggesting that we must redefine our relationship with nature after the death of God.

Munch’s was a much darker vision than Van Gogh’s. In
Death in the Sickroom
(1895), Munch painted his family in the room where his sister died. Their grief is intense, so palpable in the painting that we are invited to ask whether, religious or not, they are totally convinced that there is an afterlife. In
Puberty
(1894–95), a young woman contemplates her own naked body and her budding sexuality—adult life, the future—with a mixture of horror and bewilderment. Horror and bewilderment run through several of Munch’s other works, such as
The Voice
(1893), in which a woman dressed in pure white, but with her brown hair arranged around her head like a dead halo, is trapped in a lakeside (or fjordside) forest, where all the trees and even the reflection of the sun on water are represented as virile, implacable, imprisoning vertical bars. This is the modern condition—we are both estranged from, and yet trapped in, nature; alone. The other people in the painting, aboard a canoe on the water, are likewise locked into a different cell, wedged tightly between two trees, two more confining bars, not allowing them to move.

And then there is
The Scream
(also of 1893), the main image of which has been much commented upon. Less remarked on is the fact that the two figures farther along the bridge over the fjord or chasm
do not appear to hear
the scream. They are ciphers for a world that doesn’t care. They are far away and indistinct, but given that one is dressed in a long dark cloak or coat, they could be clerics.

Munch in many ways defined Expressionism: insecurity and unease become so strong that the artist has no choice but to recoil upon himself, treating that Self as the one secure point in an otherwise indifferent universe. Munch thought that “Salvation shall come from Symbolism,” by which he meant that mood and thought were placed above everything else, becoming the grounds of reality.
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If we examine the works of the other leading Expressionist painters—the spiky, jerky figures of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, the emaciated, flagrantly
naked victims of Erich Heckel, the stiff elongations and violent awkwardnesses of Max Beckmann, the bloody, fleshy impasto of Chaim Soutine—we see, as one critic put it, “the sluices of the self” opened in the process that would become known as “expressive individualism.” In other words, the artist’s struggle to realize himself is defined in part as
difference from others
, and is achieved only with great difficulty by exploring distortion, violence, sickness, a sort of
via negativa
that cannot help but fasten together individuality and apartness, with the inevitable disappointment of which Valéry spoke (see chapter 6). In Expressionism, the Freudian visceral depths have replaced the soul as the ultimate reality in which we find meaning. Essentially we struggle to civilize our instincts, which, as Nietzsche foresaw, can be as destructive as creative. As a result, it is a reality we are apt to beware of as much as embrace. Intensity cuts both ways.

THE FOUR TRAITS OF THE “NEW SPIRIT” IN ART

Roger Shattuck, who, so far as I know, is the popularizer of the useful phrase “the avant-guerre” in English, distinguished “a new spirit,” in France especially, between 1885 and 1918. These were the “Banquet Years,” which, he said, carried the arts wholesale, not just the visual arts, into the “ultimate modern heresy: the belief that God no longer exists.” He went on: