Classicism of the Twenties
Classicism of the
Twenties
Art, Music, and Literature
theodore ziolkowski
The University of Chicago Press ó Chicago and London
theodore
ziolkowski is professor
emeritus of German and
comparative literature at
Princeton University.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2015 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2015.
Printed in the United States of America
24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 1 2 3 4 5
isbn-­13: 978-­0-­226-­18398-­5 (cloth)
isbn-­13: 978-­0-­226-­18403-­6 (e-­book)
doi: 10.7208/chicago/9780226184036.001.0001
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014029537
a This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso
z39.48-­1992 (Permanence of Paper).
For Ilhi Synn
President, Keimyung University,
a student who became a friend,
in admiration of his achievements
in support of the arts and humanities
in South Korea and globally
Contents
List of Figures ix
Preface xi
part 1 the theory
1
Prewar Classicism 3
Classicism as Term 4
Classicism as Reaction 10
Prewar Classicism 12
An Ironic Retrospective 27
2
Classicism of the Twenties 35
Wartime Transitions 35
The Turning Point 44
The Dissemination 52
The Turn to Antiquity 60
part 2 the practice
3
Three Exemplary Figures 71
The Composer: Igor Stravinsky 73
The Artist: Pablo Picasso 91
The Writer: T. S. Eliot 109
Summary 120
part 3 test cases
4 The Writers 125
James Joyce 127
Jean Cocteau 131
Hans Henny Jahnn 135
Paul Valéry 139
5
The Artists 146
Giorgio de Chirico 146
Gino Severini, Fernand Léger, and Others 154
Francis Picabia 159
6 The Composers 163
Paul Hindemith 163
Alfredo Casella 175
part 4 conclusions
7
Classicism of the Twenties? 189
Notes 199
Index 231
Figures
figure 1 Giorgio de Chirico, Song of Love (1914) 43
figure 2 Pablo Picasso, Studies (1920) 94
figure 3Pablo Picasso, Bacchanal with
Minotaur (1933/34) 102
figure 4Pablo Picasso, Two Women Running on
the Beach (1922) 103
figure 5Pablo Picasso, Three Women at the
Spring (1921) 105
figure 6 Pablo Picasso, Woman in White (1923) 107
figure 7Giorgio de Chirico, The Joys and Enigmas of a
Strange Hour (1941) 150
figure 8 Giorgio de Chirico, Roman Villa (1922) 151
figure 9Giorgio de Chirico, Departure of the
Argonauts (1921) 152
figure 10Fernand Léger, Three Women
by a Garden (1922) 158
Preface
I undertook this study initially in order to provide myself with
a “scholarly” excuse for indulging several personal predilections:
for the music of Stravinsky, the paintings of Picasso, and the
poetry of T. S. Eliot—­works that fall outside the normal scope
of my research as a scholar of comparative literature but all of
which I have treated, at least in passing, in earlier books. I began
to wonder if there might be some common denominators linking
the works of these three masters, who are routinely labeled (neo)
classicists at one stage in their careers and who were bound to
one another in various relationships of friendship and respect. It
was my hope to detect a common set of values—­the “theory”—­
underlying the works of the trio and their fellow (neo)classicists
of the twenties and then to determine whether there were common means—­the “practice”—­through which they achieved the
realization of those values in music, art, and literature.
Interdisciplinarity is currently a fashionable endeavor, as evidenced by the articles and reviews in such journals as Cardozo
Studies in Law and Literature, SUNY–­Albany Press’s Literature
and Medicine, and Oxford University Press’s Literature and The­
ology. But the study of literature and the other arts is honored
more frequently in theory than in practice. The Oxford Hand­
book of Interdisciplinarity (2010) devotes fewer than fifteen of its
xii
Preface
almost six hundred pages to music and art, and few studies deal
in a common vocabulary with the interdisciplinary relationships
among the arts. Indeed, some influential theorists such as René
Wellek—­in his chapter “Literature and the Other Arts” in René
Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (1948)—­have
even expressed skepticism concerning the possibility of determining any common and comparable elements among the arts.
A notable exception was Leonard B. Meyer’s Music, the Arts,
and Ideas: Patterns and Predictions in Twentieth-­Century Culture
(1967). In his brilliant synthesis, Meyer makes the case for an
“aesthetics of stability” in the twentieth century, in which various
styles coexist and past styles are productively recovered by various
techniques for use in contemporary art forms. I found Meyer’s
work encouraging because it demonstrates the possibility of determining a common vocabulary with which comparisons may
be drawn across the arts. But because he was concerned with
twentieth-­century culture generally and not with what I call the
classicism of the twenties, his book did not address the specific
questions that intrigued me. As Meyer correctly emphasizes, the
different concurrent styles of modernism are governed by utterly
different criteria. More recently, Christopher Butler, undertaking a similar, albeit temporally more limited, challenge in his
Early Modernism: Art, Music, and Painting in Europe, 1900–­1916
(1994), approached the subject thematically rather than through
the analysis of specific works and mentioned (neo)classicism
only briefly in connection with vorticism.
Surprisingly, despite the vast secondary literature overwhelming the oeuvre of the three modern masters in their various fields,
few studies venture beyond their areas of specialization in musicology, art history, and literary criticism. Many of the studies aspiring to comparison deal with such specifically delimited topics
as ekphrasis: the representation of the visual arts in literature, as
in W. H. Auden’s depiction of a Bruegel painting in his “Musée
des Beaux Arts” or Rainer Maria Rilke’s portrayal of preclassical sculptures in his “Früher Apollo” and “Archaïscher Torso
Apollos.” Other such specific topics concern the influence of a
Preface xiii
painting on a poem (e.g., Picasso’s Les saltimbanques in the fifth
of Rilke’s Duino Elegies); the musicalization of a literary work
(e.g., Rilke’s Das Marienleben in Paul Hindemith’s setting); the
representation of paintings in music (e.g., Modest Mussorgsky’s
Pictures at an Exhibition); musical motifs in art (e.g., the violins
and guitars in paintings by Picasso and Georges Braque); and so
forth.
But we rarely encounter attempts to demonstrate general
analogies and stylistic similarities among the paired or tripled
examples or to posit similar criteria for their disparate arts. The
occasional exhibitions of “classical” art of the twentieth century,
which have a great deal to teach us about the paintings and
sculptures on display, rarely look across to music and literature
of the same period. Among these, the one that I found most
helpful was Canto d’Amore: Classicism in Modern Art and Music,
1914–­1935, the catalog accompanying the exhibition of that title
at the Basel Kunstmuseum in 1996. The volume, beautifully edited and in part written by Gottfried Boehm, Ulrich Mosch, and
Katharina Schmidt, contains five substantial introductory essays
plus some sixty briefer commentaries on specific works of music and art. Despite the generally high quality of the contributions, however, few of the authors look beyond the boundaries
of their own disciplines to note similarities among the compositions and artworks presented there. More recently, New York’s
Guggenheim Museum mounted a splendid exhibition entitled
Chaos and Classicism: Art in France, Italy, and Germany, 1918–­1936,
but the essays in the informative catalog edited by Kenneth E.
Silver (2010) restrict themselves wholly to the visual arts of that
period.
When I say “classicism of the twenties,” I wish no one to infer
that it was the only or even the predominant aesthetic style of
that decade. Many movements were competing for attention under the common label of “modernism”—­expressionism, surrealism, New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit), and various Marxist
tendencies (socialist realism, Brecht’s epic theater), among
others—­and the criteria of the one do not apply to the others.
xiv
Preface
Hence the appropriate plural form in the title of the recent Ox­
ford Handbook of Modernisms (2010). It is not my ambition here
to discuss the currently fashionable but still loose concept of
“modernism” or what in German is somewhat confusingly called
“klassische Moderne” but, rather, to identify certain criteria that
characterize the (neo)classical movement of that period, to understand to what extent those criteria are shared by the music,
art, and literature of the period, and to ascertain the motives
underlying the movement. This book should not be confused, in
other words, with works from the increasingly popular field of
modernism studies.
It is my goal to inquire to what extent the stylistic character­
istics—­the “practice”—­are directly related to the theory of classicism that emerged independently and simultaneously in various
European cultures. I am aware that there is considerable disagreement on the extent to which the arts and their embracing cultures are mutually interdependent. (The conflicting views
have been summarized by Leonard B. Meyer in his chapter
“Varieties of Style Change.”) Many scholars do not believe that
external forces, such as war, directly cause style change. Yet even
if the Viennese classical music of Mozart and Beethoven was not
directly influenced by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic
Wars, I believe it can be demonstrated that World War I provided the direct instigation for the resurgence of classicism—­
first in theory and then in practice—­during the twenties.
In an effort to find common terms applicable to all the arts
and to make the following chapters accessible to readers who are
not specialists in all the fields, I have avoided, whenever possible,
the sometimes abstruse technical and theoretical terminology of
art history, literary criticism, and musicology. If specialists note
any loss of precision, I hope that they will find a corresponding
gain in lucidity and general accessibility.
I want to express my gratitude to Alan Thomas, who took an
early interest in my project and guided it through the editorial
Preface xv
process. I benefited from the suggestions in three incisive readers’
reports, which helped me to sharpen my argument. Randy Petilos
responded to my frequent technical queries with admirable patience and skill. I am grateful to India Cooper for the meticulous
and sensitive care with which she copyedited my manuscript.
For their assistance in obtaining copies of the artworks for this
volume, and the authorization to use them, I would also like
to thank Kay Menick of Art Resource and J’Aimee Cronin of
Artists Rights Society.
As so often before, I am indebted to my wife, Yetta—­not only
for her constant encouragement but especially for her extensive
knowledge of art and art history. She has been my constantly
stimulating muse during our visits to the splendid collections
featuring Picasso at the Musée Picasso in Paris, the Sammlung
Berggruen in Berlin, and the 2013 exhibition of Picasso’s prints
at Berlin’s Kulturforum, as well as other museums featuring art
of the twentieth century.
Theodore Ziolkowski
Princeton, New Jersey
December 2013
part 1
The Theory
1
Prewar Classicism
“Classicism,” a term originating in the early nineteenth century,
is probably one of the last words that spring to mind when we
think of the twenties, whether Roaring or Golden, that followed
the destruction and deprivations of the Great War in Europe.
Some may recall the visual and verbal clichés that fill Woody Allen’s comedy Midnight in Paris (2011) as the Lost Generation of
American writers gathered in Gertrude Stein’s Paris salon. Others may visualize the expressionistic horrors of The Cabinet of
Dr. Caligari or the Weimar Germany of The Blue Angel. The Jazz
Age with its marathon dances, its flappers, and its Charleston
also brought to Europe a surge of fascination with African art
and the Harlem Renaissance as represented by Josephine Baker
and other African American stars. When one emerged from the
salons, dance halls, nightclubs, and thriving new movie theaters
featuring the comic antics of Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp or
the sublime propaganda of Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin and tore one’s eyes away from the omnipresent art déco, the
scene seemed to be dominated by the twelve-­tone compositions
of the Second Viennese School, by the fantasies of surrealism,
by the inanities of dada, by late or so-­called synthetic cubism.
Meanwhile, in the background the political arena was dominated
by the fierce and often brutal struggle between adversaries from
4
Chapter One
Left and Right. Where, amidst this cultural turmoil, was there
room for anything as sedate and conservative as classicism? Yet
when we remind ourselves that the chief representatives of that
movement in the twenties were none other than Igor Stravinsky,
Pablo Picasso, and T. S. Eliot, surely we must pause to give it due
consideration.
Classicism as Term
“Classicism” remains one of the more slippery terms of cultural
criticism. Stemming from the Latin word classis, which basically
means simply a grouping—­divisions of the army, for instance, or
fleets of the navy—­it was appropriated in the sixth century BCE
to designate the five classes into which Roman society, not least
for purposes of taxation, was divided by Servius Tullius. By the
second century CE, as we know from the encyclopedic Noctes Atticae of Aulus Gellius, the adjectival form classicus was restricted
to designate citizens of the top economic class: classici dicebantur
non omnes, qui in quinque classibus erant, sed primae tantum classis
homines (6.13.1; “not all who were in the five classes were called
‘classici’ but only men of the first class”)—­those worth at least
125,000 Roman asses (a vaguely defined but considerable fortune)
and distinguished by the taste and elegance associated with their
wealth. (The four lower classes were regarded as infra classem.)
Consistent with this meaning, the adjective was expanded to
designate writers appropriate to that estate—­classicus assiduusque
aliquis scriptor, non proletarius (“some classic and prosperous writer,
not a proletarian one”; Noctes Atticae, 19.8.15)—­in contrast to the
merely popular ones whose appeal was more to the lower classes
and tastes.
From that general implication came the vernacular meaning
of “classic,” which today is used broadly and loosely both as an
adjective and a noun to designate items regarded as the representative best of their category, often with the implication that
their heyday is past. As the German composer Wolfgang Rihm
Prewar Classicism 5
rather drastically put it, “something of the present can never
be classic. Classicism always is when it has been. . . . Classicism
becomes.”1 The Classic Car Club of America defines classic cars
as those built between 1925 and 1948—­expensive cars suitable for
the uppermost socioeconomic class embracing what the Romans
called classici. “Jazz classics” are commonly associated with musicians already deceased (Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, and
Miles Davis, among others). In this sense the term “classic” has
been expanded to encompass works in fields ranging from physics, children’s literature, crime fiction, and film to protest poetry,
rock music, rap, or hip-­hop. As a critical term the word has become virtually meaningless—­or, at least, valueless.
A later and secondary derivation of the word since late antiquity, notably in the Romance languages, connected classicus with
students who attend school classes—­an association that was
broadened to include the authoritative texts that the students
studied as models of excellence, both stylistically and contextually. Hence “classic” was applied to the finest works of Greek
and Roman antiquity. In universities today the Departments of
Classics teach the architecture, art, history, and literature of ancient Greece and Rome, and “classicist” designates the students
and professors who specialize in those fields. In an even more
specific sense the term is often narrowed down to refer to what
is regarded as the high point of classical antiquity: the culture
of Periclean Athens. In this restricted sense, suggests one critic,
Aeschylus would be regarded as archaic and not yet classic and
Euripides as postclassic and Baroque.2
The noun “classicism,” a fairly recent coinage in most modern languages,3 refers to the principles underlying the works of
classical antiquity, such as proportion and moderation. In this
sense “classicism” has been appropriated by scholars to designate
periods within various modern literatures and the visual arts that
have sought to emulate the arts of antiquity and their principles
and are held to represent high points of their respective cultures.4
These principles, as enunciated in particular by Aristotle and
6
Chapter One
Horace, were differently evaluated. In Italy, “classicism” refers
to various periods in the history of Italian literature, from the
classicism of the ninth-­century Carolingian revival and twelfth-­
century scholasticism by way of humanism and the Renaissance
down to the early eighteenth-­century Arcadia era.5 Their tradition of Latinity led French classicists of the later seventeenth
century (Boileau, Corneille, Racine, and Molière, among others)
to look mainly to ancient Rome for their models, while borrowing from Aristotle the formal criteria—­notably the three unities
of time, place, and action—­suggested in his Poetics.6
In Germany, although as late as 1730 Johann Christoph Gottsched still prefaced his Versuch einer critischen Dichtkunst (Essay
toward a critical art of poetry) with a translation of Horace’s poetics, the principal writers regarded today as “classical”—­Goethe,
Schiller, Wieland, and Herder—­turned to ancient Greece, rather
than Rome, for their models.7 In his early and influential essay Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei
und Bildhauerkunst (1755; Thoughts on the imitation of Greek
works in painting and sculpture), Johann Joachim Winckelmann
coined the phrase that caught the imagination of his generation as
characterizing the works of Greek antiquity: edle Einfalt und stille
Größe (“noble simplicity and quiet grandeur”). With his chapters
on dramatic art (Hamburgische Dramaturgie, 1767/68), Gotthold
Ephraim Lessing rejected the French-­
classicist formal reading
of Aristotle’s Poetics and emphasized instead his conception of
catharsis as a vehicle for emotional purification. In England the
popularity of Greek architecture produced a wave of “neoclassical”
buildings in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.8 Indeed, as
Salvatore Settis points out in his stimulating essay on “the classical,” Western civilization, in contrast to other great but culturally
static civilizations (Chinese, Indian, and others), is unique in its
notion of the cyclical return of “classical” periods.9
In yet another variant, historians of music, which has few ancient models to imitate, have appropriated the term “classical”
to designate works of music that, in contrast to contemporary
popular musical forms, are considered to be analogous in their
Prewar Classicism 7
excellence to the works of fifth-­century Athens. As a German
musicologist puts it:
In music history, unlike the history of art and architecture, the term
usually applies either to a nineteenth-­century recourse to genres
from the late seventeenth or eighteenth century such as the suite,
courtly dances such as the gavotte, technical models such as the motet style, or to a general quality of formal clarity and sublimity that
characterizes the great masterworks of this period.10
Accordingly, on “classical” radio stations one hears a great deal of
Bach along with Gregorian chants, Renaissance gavottes, symphonies from Beethoven to Mahler, and opera from Monteverdi
to Stravinsky. In fact, Aaron Copland, who was in Paris at the
time, has pointed out that before the terms “classicism” or “neoclassicism” became common in the later 1920s to designate a
movement in contemporary music, the phrase “back-­to-­Bach”
was commonly used.11 More narrowly, the term is often restricted to apply to the late compositions of Haydn and Mozart
(often in contrast to the more “romantic” Beethoven), who were
roughly contemporaneous with Weimar Classicism in literature.
“Classicism” is sometimes used to designate two separate aesthetic phenomena of the early twentieth century. First, its writers and artists often took themes from Greek and Roman history
and mythology as their subjects, as did Joyce when he borrowed
the tale of Odysseus as the prefigurative pattern for his Ulysses
(1922). Second, writers, artists, and musicians sought to achieve
in their own works the form and the values of simplicity and
order that epitomized ancient classicism, as when the purity of
line evident in the works of Picasso’s so-­called classical period
in the 1920s is said to correspond to the elegant forms of Greek
sculpture.
In the chapters that follow we shall have occasion to examine the specific manifestations of this thematic and formal emulation of the past in various works by modern writers, artists,
and musicians. This classicism of the early twentieth century
has been labeled in various ways and with various restrictions.