The Stuff Modernism Overthrew

By ROBERT HUGHES

The sprawling show that opened this month at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, "1900: Art at the Crossroads," is sure to be a hit with the public. It was a smash in London. Organized by art historian Robert Rosenblum and consisting of 240 paintings and sculptures, it takes an ecumenical and almost judgment-free view of its task, which is to show what kinds of art were being made at the last turn of the century, when the idea of modernism in culture was just forming, and when some of the most admired artists bore names you'd hardly recognize today--not Cezanne, Mondrian, Picasso, but Boldini, Carolus-Duran, Zorn, Sorolla, Vrubel, Toorop and Pellizza da Volpedo.

It is an unsettling show for those of programmatic mind, just because it is so inclusive. It shows us the stuff that modernism overthrew, along with plenty of samples of modernism itself. It is, for this reason, fascinating. It is also unmethodical, a show with no ideology of taste. It will therefore be hated by all those who believe in the founding mission of the Guggenheim: to establish modernism, and in particular abstract art, as the ultimate and spiritually obligatory art of the 20th century, to render monumental the gap between past and present.

In the year 1900, the apparent history of art did not have the profile it possesses today. Different artists were considered important; different painters and sculptors exerted an influence on what was then the present. In some respects the art world was more tolerant, because the notion of an avant-garde was not yet all-encompassing. The ideal of high craft, of sheer manifest skill as a criterion of aesthetic success, had not yet been consigned to the trash can, and artists placed a value on drawing--however mistakenly they might sometimes have interpreted it--that was still very much alive.

The education of an artist was entirely different from what it is today. Indeed, it is unlikely that the students and teachers of 1900 would have recognized the woozy therapeutics and the rhetoric of personal expression that prevail in most art schools 100 years later (especially in America) as being education at all. Most of the art schools of a century ago produced bad art, but it was of a different kind from our bad art, with different expectations.

For these and other reasons, the Guggenheim show entails dramatic reversals of fortune. Certain artists had to be included for what they did long after 1900--not for what they were at the time. Picasso, for instance: Would he be remembered if he'd died at age 19, known only for his moderately promising pastiches of older artists? Unlikely. But the idea of Picasso's being unknown or not much good seems such a contradiction in terms that we have real difficulty imagining it.

On the other hand, consider an older Spaniard like Ignacio Zuloaga, long regarded as the discreditable essence of flashy, virtuoso academism. The picture he has in the show--a portrait of a sulky-looking, middle-aged dwarf holding a mirrored sphere the size of a soccer ball, in homage to that god of all Spanish realists, Velazquez--is a masterpiece of unsparing scrutiny and direct painting, and it brings you up with a jerk.

It's not surprising, 1900 being 1900, to see everywhere the imprint of the decorative style we call Art Nouveau, co-existing with the stern realism of Madrid, Munich and Thomas Eakins' Philadelphia. Its sources in great figures like Gauguin are not skimped; it's there in Edvard Munch, Gustav Klimt and in a host of lesser figures across the world, including Australia--Sydney Long's Pan, 1898, with its fauns and sweetly sexless hippies cavorting discreetly by the evening billabong, takes great formal advantage of the serpentine shapes of native gum trees.

Was the division between retrograde, despised "academism" and noble, inventive "modernism" always as sharp as has been said? Were the black hats so black, and the white ones so white? Of course not. In fact there are moments when you can hardly tell them apart. A case in point is Optician, 1902. It's a shop sign stuffed with puns: a monocled terrier, with a pair of pince-nez above him and, below, the French word opticien, broken up to read O PTI CIEN--which, read aloud, translates as either "o little dog" or "at the sign of the little dog." This is exactly the sort of feeble punning that Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia went in for--a staple of Dada and Surrealism. But its author was the antimodernist par excellence Jean-Leon Gerome, sworn enemy of Manet, Monet and everyone since. Which perhaps only shows that academics can be just as funny as Dadaists.

Some paintings in the show are unutterable camp, but that was what the upper-middle classes liked in the Belle Epoque, and artists saw no reason to deprive them of it. Particularly strong was the appetite for historical works in which stern Antiquity framed the goddess Pornography. By far the hottest example of the genre here is a fabulous piece of kitsch by Paul Jamin, Brennus and his Loot, 1893, showing a barbarian Gallic chieftain gloating over his spoils from the sack of Rome. They include five naked, rosy-nippled girls, writhing on the floor in postures of submission and despair; all-conquering Brennus surveys them with the Bertie Wooster grin of a boulevardier entering a whorehouse. This is archaeology with zip.

The fin de siecle was also a great time for painters whose displaced religious yearnings and hunger for allegory induced them to do mock altarpieces, usually triptychs, whose format signaled the presence of a Big Statement. The most ludicrous of these is by the Belgian artist Leon Frederic, whom the spirit moved to paint, in the 1890s, an enormous three-parter called The Stream, an allegory of the Life-Force (Henri Bergson was a hot philosopher circa 1900) in the form of thousands, thousands, of pink, roly-poly babies cascading down Alpine waterfalls and through a forest glade. This condommaker's nightmare took 10 years to paint (no wonder, with all that dimpled piglet flesh) and was regarded not only as Frederic's masterpiece but also as an utterance of deep, deep depth.

The further lesson of this show is a fairly depressing one--or could be if you cling to a reflexive belief in the Latest Thing, abetted by the shaky fantasy that there's such a thing as progress in art. Looking back on 1900 from the year 2000, we see a lot of images and objects whose authors were long ago banished from right-thinking, modernist art history--corpses strewn behind the merciless juggernaut of avant-garde "progress." Some of these are stirring, and quite a few are weirdly interesting. Many can be experienced only as camp, raised by the artists' obsessions to a level of superheated conviction. But many more are just God-awful, period. They are turkeys, duds, complete stiffs.

Yet critics (not necessarily venal ones, either) and patrons (no more stupid than the ones we have today) lined up, jostling to kiss the artists' nether parts. The artists were laden with gold medals, garlands and titles of honor. They were seen as tradition incarnate, worthy successors to Rubens, Donatello and Titian. Powerful systems of taste enforcement--ministries of fine arts, academies, salons--underwrote the promise of their immortality.

And then, within a few short decades, these titans proved wholly ephemeral. Their achievement was wiped out by a couple of dozen scrags with names like Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso, Malevich, Beckmann, Rauschenberg, mouthing their bizarre and (at first) peculiar and unpopular visual dialects. Over their bones rose a new edifice of taste enforcement, even more coercive than the old--the transnational bureaucracy of late modernism, staffed by as pompous a set of dullards as ever infested the shorter corridors of cultural power in 1900, all bombing on about their radical credentials. "The accursed power based on privilege," as Hilaire Belloc wrote:

Which goes with women, and champagne, and bridge, Broke!--and Democracy resumed her reign, Which goes with bridge, and women, and champagne.

It's not as though Miro or Matisse is about to vanish into the oubliette--that isn't in the cards. The 20th century has seen great artists whose work and names, as the eulogists say, will live forever. But the Guggenheim's show makes you think of the impending fate of our present. It is a lead-pipe cinch that the year 2100 will see the absurdities of our taste, both private and official, and wonder how we could have been so comically wrong about such self-evident crap. A few score years from now, will Jeff Koons' porcelain confections be on view in the world's museums, or will they have become like garden gnomes, sociological testimony to the degenerate taste of collectors in the late 20th century? Will people still gawp at those stinking fragments, awash in their tank of formaldehyde, the relics of Damien Hirst's much-hyped dead shark?

In the end, the value of the "1900" show is bound to bring up such questions--although one cannot be sure that curator Robert Rosenblum was eager to raise them. Most of the fashionable art of our fin-de-siecle is just as lousy as the worst stuff here, and done at a far lower level of skill. Memento mori, and send not to know for whom the bell tolls: cracked though it is, it tolls for us.