The critics of the past had to be fearless – I envy them
Praising a bold new piece of art, music or literature is easy today – but 100 years ago it meant putting your head above the parapet. By Ivan Hewett
The critic baffled by anything modern used to be a familiar figure of fun, because he – and it was always he – so often turned out to be wrong. You could almost guarantee the painting he damned as a “childish scrawl”, or the piece of music he dismissed as an “unutterable cacophony”, would turn out to be the modern masterpiece that everybody now praises.
Nowadays we critics tend not to damn things. Mindful of our forebears’ embarrassing howlers, we tread carefully and give the benefit of the doubt. And in any case the entire grab-bag of “shocking” modernisms has long ago been emptied. We critics are beyond being shocked. We’ve seen and heard it all before.
But imagine for a moment the situation of a critic in the modernist explosion, before the First World War. He had been raised in an artistic culture bound by strict rules. A painting had to display a recognisable likeness, in an aesthetically pleasing way. A poem needed meter and an intelligible relationship between imagery and subject-matter. A symphony had to have a certain form. Granted, romanticism, symbolism, impressionism and the rest had poured some strong acid on the rules, which were now considerably weakened. But those rules were still there.
Now, picture that critic faced with the latest modernist escapade from Picasso or Schoenberg or TS Eliot. How were they meant to respond to things that flew in the face of everything they held dear?
The commonest response was to say the thing wasn’t art at all. That view was often heard during the famous Armory Show of 1913 in New York, when American critics were confronted for the first time with European modernism. Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase was compared by the critic of the The New York Times to Hans Christian Andersen’s “Emperor with no clothes”. A few years earlier, a German critic declared that Schoenberg’s Three Piano Pieces “represent[ed] a methodical negation of all heretofore accepted musical rules… his musical progression represents an anarchic wandering in colours… they are the result of error followed through with ingenious consistency.” The writer for The New York Herald in 1924 was more forthright about Hyperprism by the visionary sound-maker Edgard Varèse. “It cannot be described. It ought not to be… It shrieked, it grunted, it chortled, it mewed, it barked – and it turned all the eight instruments into contortionists. It was not in any key, not even in no key. It was just a ribald outbreak of noise.”
Some critics, in an attempt to make sense of it all, suggested the offending artist or composer must be mad or sick. This stance goes back as least as far as Nietzsche’s diatribes against Wagner. “Wagner’s art is diseased,” he declared. “The problems which he brings to the stage – all of them, problems of hysterics – the convulsiveness of his emotions, his overwrought sensibility, his taste that always demands sharper spices, his instability… all this presents a picture of disease that leaves no doubt.”
Another way to draw the sting of the offending artwork was to declare that the artist could not be serious. One reviewer of TS Eliot’s The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, which appeared in 1915, said that “Mr Eliot is one of those clever young men who find it amusing to pull the leg of a sober reviewer. We can imagine his saying to his friends: ‘See me have a lark out of the old fogeys who don’t know a poem from a peashooter.’” Note that he describes Eliot as “clever”, which was a favourite term of abuse of critics at that time. If the offending artist wasn’t mad, or corrupt, or childish, he was “clever” – meaning “too clever by half ”. What they meant was that these modernists were so consumed by abstruse theories about art that they had lost touch with what the public wanted. The critics were so violently hostile to this shocking new modern art, because it wasn’t just offensive to the sensibilities. It was an attack on civilisation itself.
But all this gnashing of teeth isn’t the whole story about critics, as I discovered during the process of curating an event at the Wigmore Hall, which takes place on Tuesday. It replicates a concert given exactly 101 years ago of new pieces by the most fashionable modernist of them all, Igor Stravinsky, with readings of what the critics thought interspersed with the music. There were no fewer than 13 journalists in the hall, and their responses to Stravinsky’s little folk-songs and string quartet pieces and The Soldier’s Tale were entertainingly extreme, in the ways I’ve just described. Some thought it wasn’t really music, others thought it was primitive, or hyper-modern, or childish, or too clever. But not all of them. Some of them thought it was the most exciting concert they’d ever witnessed. The man from The Telegraph (as was usual in those days, his name was never printed), thought the songs were a delight, and that The Soldier’s Tale was a wickedly entertaining exercise in parody.
These illustrate a more general point about critics of the time. They weren’t all gloomy. Some of them understood that art that broke the rules didn’t have to be chaotic or dark or ugly. It could be beautiful and exciting – but in a new way.
As a critic living in a relativist, postmodern age, I look at those before me with a twinge of envy. For them, praising the new was a risk; it meant taking a stand, not just against the artistic and musical norms of the day, but also the social decorum of which that art was an expression. In 2021, I don’t need to take a stand, and for me to praise a new piece or to blame it is equally costless. That’s why I admire those critics of a bygone era who dared to thrill to the new. The stakes were high, and who knew what posterity might say?