Art Of The Extreme 1905-14
Philip Hook Profile £30
★★★★★
For centuries, since the Renaissance, artists pottered along producing largely representational material – still life, portraiture, landscape – and then at the turn of the 20th Century all hell broke loose: the Modernists arrived with their discordant compositions and dubious morals.
In Art Of The Extreme, Philip Hook conjures up all the excitement, danger and absurdity of the period, reminding us of the bracing origins of now-famous names – Picasso, Matisse, Munch – while unearthing the antics of some forgotten figures.
The decade before the First World War, from 1905 to 1914, was a period of spiritualism and psychoanalysis, fading empires and new technology. That sense of flux was also evident in the art world, where tentative experimentation soon snowballed to abstraction. Hook deftly explains how the triumvirate of Cézanne, Van Gogh and Gauguin paved the way for a tornado of ‘isms’ – Futurism, Fauvism, Cubism, Orphism, and more. It created confusion, often comically so, for audience and artists alike. Standing in front of pictures, viewers asked: ‘What is it?’
Hook enlivens avant-garde concepts – the Vorticists produced a batty manifesto that touched on mysticism, cricket and English weather – by focusing on the principal players and their various appetites. He situates art in the maelstrom of their everyday lives, its messiness and passions, blunders and vanities. The painter’s canvas is cleverly woven into a larger tapestry, full of grubby bed sheets and society tablecloths.
And erotic misadventures fill these pages: the Russian expressionist Oskar Kokoschka made do with a life-size doll of his ex-lover; Viennese abortionists were kept busy by Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele; and in London, John Currie shot his model in a fit of jealousy (before turning the gun on himself). As Hook observes: ‘Across the Modernist studios of Europe, female victims of the assertion of male instinct accumulated.’
Even Rodin, a generation older, ‘had operated most of his life on the principle that not to make a pass at a woman was caddish behaviour’.
When out of unsuitable beds, these extremists were often holed up in sanatoriums. Their plight is signalled with a light touch. ‘If they weren’t about to be carried off by tuberculosis,’ Hook writes, they ‘were in danger of succumbing to death by boredom.’ Suicide was always a face-saving option when women or critics struck a nerve. In 1908, the lovelorn Austrian painter Richard Gerstl hanged himself in Vienna; he simultaneously stabbed himself in the heart and watched the scene unfold in his studio mirror. Sigmund Freud’s clinic was just over the road.
The ‘painterly pyrotechnics’ are vividly recreated, but it is the vim of these rebels that really impresses. It is hard to imagine today’s contemporary artists being so energetically scandalous. Hook’s wonderful book captures a window of time when artistic ideals were shattered and reassembled in dynamic ways.