ESeweek6.htm

Student Led Seminar Presentation and Summary
Leaders: Jeff Gibson and Michelle Ramsgate

Summary Conclusion Questions Bibliography

The Modernist Movement in the United States and Brazil

    A new nation has many questions about its identity and for what it stands. The United States and Brazil, both breaking ties from England and Portugal respectively, needed to find answers to these questions. They sought this through the early twentieth century movement called Modernism. Both nations rebelled from traditional movements: Brazil against Parnassianism and the U.S. from Victorianism. Parnassianism was a nineteenth century French school adopted by Brazil through Portuguese colonists. Mainly concerned with form, meter, rhyme scheme, and strophe, Parnassianism denied romanticism, strong emotions, and hyperbole. (Perrone. 3) Victorianism was also a nineteenth century European movement, whose culture was characterized by its historicism, the notion that the explanation of the nature of things is gained from the description of their histories. (Cantor)
    After 1900, Victorian culture soon lacked conviction, inspiration, and vitality. Intellectuals and artists thought it was tiresome, losing its resiliency, and its main assumptions appeared trivial and redundant. Intellectuals rebelled, looking for new ways to express themselves, thus developing anti-Victorian views (Cantor 28). Parnassianism lost its efficacy when its principal artists died. The remaining artists were weak and lacked the strength needed in promoting Parnassian ideas. Even after their break with Portugal, Brazil was still strongly influenced by Europe. Such things as futurism, dadaism, and cubism circulated throughout the nation. Brazil was immature as a nation but also wanted to have their own ideas. So they sought an identity they could associate themselves with that was independent from Europe.
    During the first twenty years of the new century, the United States and Brazil were taking hold of the industrial revolution. Technology was creating a faster pace of life in almost every field. In literature appeared the printing press. Railroads were becoming a more efficient means of travel for artists to view other techniques. Automobiles helped give modernists a sensation of speed. Photography was invented, paving the way for motion pictures. Also, the working class rose up and became educated due to the free secondary education that became available during the last couple decades of the nineteenth century. These were all essential driving forces behind the Modernist movement. The most affected and most influential fields of this movement were literature, poetry, visual arts, and film. Other fields and interests such as the interior design (art deco), architecture, music, and radio were brought on or influenced by modernism, but it is the previously mentioned four fields that we will focus on.
Before discussing these fields and their effects on Brazil and the U.S. it is important to note the primary features of the Modernist movement . Along with the United States’ anti-Victorianism and Brazil’s anti-Parnassianism, both became preoccupied with the self-referential, that is anything that is examined constitutes a self-enclosed world. The text is simply what it is; the painting does not represent something external to itself; the poem does not illustrate a story. All exist in and for themselves, and show a world that always refers back to itself.
    Another feature both modernist movements had in common was a questioning of the assumption about continuity and sequential order. With modernism, sequentiality and continuity could not be presupposed or anticipated. It was more likely one would be faced with discontinuity in the study of an object.
    A third feature of modernism was a rejection of absolute polarities. Both countries agreed that the polarity of male and female, high and low, etc. were integrated with one another, being interactive, related, and functions of one another. Mario de Andrade once said, "Speed and synthesis, they are intimately conjoined. Some wish to relate the speed of the modernist poet to the very speed of modern day life. It is true." (Martins. 36)
    A fourth aspect of modernism was an elitist attitude. In the belief in complexity and difficulty, Modernism addressed a narrow, highly selective, audience of the learned and professional audience the cultural vanguard. The modernist culture was not accessible to the naïve and unprepared person.
    A fifth feature of modernism was an openness to sexuality. Modernism produced a new frankness in the interaction about sexual relationships and had a tendency toward vulgar manners of speaking. This can be seen in Manuel Bandeira’s poem Spiritual Wedding: "observe the starlike marvel of this nudity that knows no shame…" This feature also integrated the rejection of polarities with its sympathy toward feminism, homosexuality, and bisexuality. The male and female were not separated on moral, biological, or psychological grounds.
    The sixth and final quality both modernist movements had in common was its attention to the cultural consequences of a new technological world. Modernism was a product of the age of railroad and steamship, which made it easier for artists to see other artists’ techniques. This was a main factor of modernism in Brazil, because of a continuing theme on speed. Technological advances lent to a faster pace in life.
    When talking about anything concerning U.S. Modernism, it is nearly impossible to exclude European Modernism, because so much was influenced by the European artists’ techniques. American modernists were emigrating to Europe, and European modernists were emigrating to America. One of Modernist expression’s prime vehicles was the novel, because of its easy access to the educated people. It has been argued, with little opposition, that Anglo-American Henry James in the 1890s, though an author of novellas, was the front-runner of the modernist novel. (Cantor) James understood the importance and purpose of his successors’ efforts. Though only a small representation of the modern novelists, the following were among the most influential and significant to the modernist movement: Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and Virginia Woolf (though English).
    Ernest Hemingway, along with William Faulkner, was the leading American modern novelist. Hemingway expatriated to Paris where his novels reflected a self-conscious Midwestern muscularity. His technique moved action forward through dialogue, and the reader was not informed clearly about off-stage events. (Cantor) Hemingway’s aesthetic theory stated that omitting the right thing from a story could actually strengthen it. He equated this theory with the structure of an iceberg where only 1/8 of the iceberg could be seen above water while the remaining 7/8 under the surface provided the dignity of motion and contributed to its momentum. Hemingway felt a story could be constructed the same way and this theory shows up in his early vignettes.
    William Faulkner emigrated to Europe for a time, but returned home soon after and began a series of baroque, brooding novels set in a mythical county. The Sound And The Fury was one of these novels. To create a mood, Faulkner occasionally let one of his complex, convoluted sentences run on for more than a page. He juggled time, spliced narratives, experimented with multiple narrators, and interrupted simple stories with rambling, stream-of-consciousness soliloquies. With his complex narrative style, and the local color of the southern tradition typically drawn on by his stories, Faulkner’s early works alienated many readers. But when extracts of his work was republished in a chronological sequence by the critic Malcolm Cowley in 1946, Faulkner’s work became more accessible to readers and he was considered as one of the greatest American novelists of the twentieth century. (Microsoft Encarta)
Virginia Woolf was one of the most influential feminist writers of the twentieth century. In the feminist treatise A Room of One’s Own, Woolf advocated cultural and intellectual independence for women. (Cantor) She spoke about the realization of women’s artistic and intellectual possibilities and social benefits. Her writing technique included stream of consciousness, which revealed the lives of her characters by revealing their thoughts and associations. Woolf’s works are dynamically engaged with the political, philosophical, historical, and materialist issues of her time. (Cantor)
    The search for a national identity and the concept of artistic modernization in Brazil were evident among the artists and intellectuals who organized and took part in the movement. The Modern Art Week of 1922, mentioned below, was strong evidence of this and had a profound effect on the directions of Brazilian literature, poetry, and painting. In Brazil, Mario de Andrade was a key constituent in the movement. His novel Macunaima has a place in Brazilian literature equivalent to that of James Joyce’s Ulysses in English literature. The main character in the novel is said to be a hero without an identity. This represents what Brazil was going through in the early twentieth century. This novel also encouraged the break from traditional Portugal forms prominent in previous pieces of Brazilian literature by reflecting the language of Brazil.
    The female writer Rachel de Queirzo was also involved in this new literary movement. Novels such as O Quinze (The Year 1915, 1930), reflected her feminist perspective of the poor conditions in Brazilian society. The 1939 novel, As tres Marias (The Three Marias), further exposed the social problems with which Brazilians were faced. She was an influential writer of the modernist movement, and her work continued well into the post-modernist movement of the 1960s.
    Also taking an active part in the movement, not only in his writing but in his politics was Jorge Amado. Though he was repeatedly exiled from Brazil due to his radical politics, his novels were significant contributions because of their stark realism, irony, psychological insights, and mixture of naturalistic themes and obscene humor.
    Though Modernist poetry reached its peak in America around 1930, it was another of the prime vehicles behind the expression of Modernism. The poets of this movement set the standard for subsequent twentieth-century poetry. Among the many influential poets of this time: T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Robert Frost.
    T. S. Eliot, along with Ezra Pound, became the leader of literary modernism in Britain after immigrating from America. Eliot replaced Victorianism’s historical approach with a concentration on symbolic meaning. He gave lectures at universities, defining modernist poetry. Eliot aimed at exactitude in his poetry, which he believed could be achieved by extremely dense and concrete imagery that would express deep feeling. He detested the Victorian poet, believing poetry does not talk about feeling, it is feeling. (Cantor) He pursued the method of the "objective correlative," which fully and intrinsically communicated sensibility in the language of the poem. This pursuit was marked by his complete mastery of imagery and ability to achieve density. (Cantor) Eliot learned from his peer, Ezra Pound, who was editor to his most famous poem The Waste Land. Pound reduced the poem significantly before Pound worked on it, the original was three times as long as the published version teaching Eliot about conciseness. Eliot also became the first and most important of the modernist critics. Through his academic lectures, establishment of the journal of criticism, Criterion, and partnership and role as consultant to publishers of the leading publishing house Faber & Faber, Eliot gained enormous influence and prestige. (Cantor)
     Generally regarded as the poet most responsible for defining and promoting a modernist aesthetic in poetry, Ezra Pound is now considered to be Eliot’s equal, if not superior. Pound represented the avant-garde with his role in the formation of Imagism, which advocated concreteness and free verse, and Vorticism, which opposed representational art in favor of abstract forms. Pound opposed Futurist principles. As James Wilhelm states, Pound "was strongly opposed… to the gimmick-ridden futurists with their odes to automobiles and desire to sweep away all existing art." (Rainey. 12) In the 1930s, Pound applied more energy in fascist politics than on his writing. His eventual incarceration for treason against the U.S. brought about an artistic recovery before his death, producing such works as Pisan Cantos (1948).
     Robert Frost was a quintessential modern poet in his adherence to language as it is spoken and the way he infused layers of ambiguity and irony in his works. After the publications of his collections A Boy’s Will and South of Boston, Frost became the most celebrated poet in America. His poems, often associated with rural New England, obscurely deliberated on universal themes. Though his verse forms were traditional, his use of vocabulary, meter, and rhyme were purely experimental. (Microsoft Encarta)
Manuel Bandeira’s poems redefined the traditionalist view of poetry in Brazil. His work began in the Parnassian era and continued into the post-Modernist era. His early poems reflected symbolism, which belonged to the Parassian structure, and was not studied as much. Critics considered these early works to be the dawning of a great poet. As his style developed, Bandeira showed signs of rebellion in his writings by using the free-verse method. Humor and irony provided him with a new form of spiritual catharsis. This was fueled further by an acceptance from the movement’s critics. He promoted the use of a "common" language in his writings, which was the popular language that was spoken on the streets of Brazil. His idea was to keep it simple and free.
    Oswald de Andrade also believed in using the language of the people. His literature focused mainly on the nationalistic aspects of Modernism. Oswald wanted Brazil to become conscious of its own legacy. He is most famous for his manifesto Pau Brasil (1925; Brazil Wood), a rejection of Portugal’s social and literary pretense. He also founded the Antropofagia (Cannibalism) literary movement. It branched out of the modernist movement by emphasizing folklore and native themes. Oswald de Andrade is important in the movement because of his experimentation of poetry and language.
     Also a believer in experimentation of poetic forms was Carlos Drummond de Andrade. He founded the literary magazine A Revista (Review) in 1925. Not only was he a poet, but also an author of a short fiction essay called cronicas. His style of writing focused mainly around the plight of the Brazilian modern man in his battle for liberty and dignity. As well as addressing the urban lifestyles and how city residents were tired and bored of their daily routine. His most famous poem, "In the Middle of the Road", has been the most recited and most discussed of his poetic works.
     It is said modernist painting created the most important and productive era since the High Renaissance in the early sixteenth century in terms of color to canvas. (Cantor) Modernist painters believed craftsmanship was paramount. No matter what was being painted, the painter concentrated mostly on the use of color and the application of paint to canvas. This was an example of the modernist principle of self-referentiality. (Cantor) With the appearance of photography, painters were forced to focus on the mind’s eye, rather than physical and material portrayals. The first World War brought about the subject of the technological civilization’s impact. This was sometimes referred to as constructivism, futurism, or surrealism. Brazil liked the futurist ideas that originated in Italy, but due to their desire for independence, Brazil wanted to call it modernism.
     Just as Henry James was the front-runner of the modernist novel, Paul Cezanne, working from the late 1880s until 1906, was the front-runner of modernist painting. (Cantor) Cezanne claimed art as a harmony parallel to nature, existing in and for itself. In 1913, some artists rented out an armory in New York City and filled it with art from all over the world. This Armory Show was the first major exhibition of modern art in the U.S. and introduced the avant-garde European styles to American artists. This exposed Americans to cubism, and lead to a creation of synchronism, an abstract style that stressed color rhythms, and precisionism, a focused and stylized realism that combined cubism’s object-flattening and pictorial space. (Microsoft Encarta) Most notable of the painters in the modernist movement were Europeans such as Vincent Van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Matisse. But equally as notable in America was Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, and Grant Wood.
     Edmund Marsden Hartley’s work was influenced by cubists in Paris and expressionists in Berlin, and followed Cezanne’s methods while working in France. He painted vivid and abstract compositions, until the 1930s, when his style became more personal. In such paintings as Lobster Fishermen (1941, Metropolitan Museum, New York City), Hartley filled dissonant colors and broadly outlined landscapes with mountains and fishermen. (Microsoft Encarta)
     Often considered the most original artist of his generation, Arthur Dove was among the first artists to create nonrepresentational paintings. (Microsoft Encarta) While in Europe from 1907 to 1909, Dove drew inspiration from Matisse’s broad, flat areas of bright colors. Dove’s abstract qualities demonstrated his belief in the interconnectedness of the spiritual and physical, suggesting meanings through lines, shapes, and colors. (Microsoft Encarta) Living majority of his life near the water, Dove found inspiration in his environment, as illustrated in The Fog (1929, Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, Colorado).
     During the 1930s, some American painters reacted against foreign influences and turned to portraying the American scene in their own ways. Grant Wood was a leader among these regionalists. Strongly influenced by the subject manner and technique of Renaissance-era German painters, Wood’s paintings depicted the scenes and people of his native state Iowa with a touch of irony and realism. (Encarta) His most famous work is the satirical double portrait American Gothic (1930, Art Institute of Chicago).
In 1917, a woman named Anita Malfatti opened an exhibition of her art in the Brazilian city called Sao Paulo. What was to be known today as The Anita Malfatti Affair sparked a match that helped ignite the modernist movement. Not only did it excite the city, but it brought about a new criticism by the critics, in particular from one Monteiro Lobato. Anita did another show that year in November, which Lobato closely examined. This was the first attack on Malfatti’s style. His quarrel focused mainly on this new school of painting, rather than the artist herself. Malfatti’s exhibition introduced Brazil to a monumental esthetic debate that had dominated artistic circles in Europe since the turn of the century (Martins 26). Malfatti opened a can of worms that led to the Modern Art Week of 1922. This occasion shook the art world in Brazil and helped make it an independent modern nation with its own ideas and styles.
Tarsila do Amaral was a Brazilian painter whose paintings were influential in the progress of her nation’s modernist painting. She returned to Paris from Brazil, studying French cubist painters such as Andre Lhote, Fernand Leger, and Albert Gleizes. Using vivid colors and flattened geometric forms, her paintings reflected the Brazilian landscape with its vegetation and animals of the forest. She was interested in the African origins of Brazilian culture and wanted to integrate this into her work. Do Amaral jumped around many different schools of art. In the 1920s, she began to paint a series of dreamlike landscapes influenced by French surrealists.
    During the 1920s a painter by the name of Candido Portinari, helped motivate Brazil toward the development of its own style of painting unique from that of Europe. He was a painter of Italian descent and his work showed the influence of movements such as cubism and expressionism. In school Portinari was granted a scholarship that allowed him to travel to Europe, where he discovered fresco painting. His work has been compared to American regionalist painter Grant Wood for its depiction of the landscape and common people in their homeland, use of rich colors in a harmonious light, and subtle hints toward patriotism.
     Although not always glorious due to the rise of marketing in art, modernist art achieved a central role in cultural life, through which people’s aesthetic values changed. Today our clothes, colors, and furniture have all been shaped through and by modernist painting. (Cantor)
     A new art form was generated through modernist culture: film. The development of film was predominately developed by Americans and Frenchmen. Though Brazil had an interest in cinema, the majority was influenced by the English until the 1950s when the cinema novo (new cinema) movement occurred. Charlie Chaplin and Mack Sennett first attracted audiences with slap-stick comedies, though it is debated Chaplin went further, creating a universal figure who confronts the forces of power and technology. This message is evident in his feature-length film Modern Times (1936). D. W. Griffith’s Old South epic The Birth of a Nation (1915) marked him as the first master of film. His extended narrations and concoction of what have become basic techniques of filmmaking was a bizarre combination of vanguard technique and obsolete Victorian culture, which was why he was unable to intellectually exploit his mastery of technique. (Cantor)
     The German expressionist style of film, which tried to adopt techniques of painting and ideas from the modernist novel, influenced Hollywood when many German filmmakers fled to the United States from the rise of the Nazi power. Hollywood creativity reached an all-time high in the late thirties that hasn’t been matched since. German expressionist filmmakers were a cause of this. The young Austrian Billy Wilder was one of these German expatriates who found a following in Hollywood. Many of the "film noirs," a form of German expressionist film that consisted of dark lighting and subject manner, were directed by Billy Wilder. His 1944 film Double Indemnity, starring Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck, pursued the same theme of sadomasochistic sexuality that Josef von Sternberg’s 1930 film The Blue Angel did. Both are said to be among the greatest films of all time. Orson Welles’ masterpiece Citizen Kane (1941) took its roots in the narrative method and brooding ambiance of the film noir and German expressionist tradition in filmmaking. The expressionist heritage in Hollywood resulted in an artistic decline upon the resurgence of neo-Victorian sensibility during World War II. Some have argued it has never recovered since. (Cantor)
    During the 1940s, the modernist movement reached its zenith and its motivation was exhausted. Many of the modern artists were dying, and a pre-modernist revival was occurring. This revival was evident in the neo-Victorian sensibility that arose from the World Wars, the Great Depression, Marxism, and fascism. Despite strenuous efforts to relate modernism to the political Left, the movement never generated a clear political consequence. Interrupted by the other coexisting upheavals in the socioeconomic and political spheres, Modernism produced a host of ambiguities and ambivalences, which had a negative effect on its articulation. (Cantor) There was a dissatisfaction with current national and international thinking in poetry that led to an advocacy of new forms. One of these new forms was Imagism, which had been practiced in the U.S. since 1909 by Ezra Pound (among others), and relied primarily on the use of sharp images as a means of poetic expression. Nevertheless, the modernist movement proved to be a guiding light toward a cultural identity for the United States and Brazil.

Conclusion

We discovered that when asking a question about the evolution, or a quality of art it is best to narrow what can be seen as a general term to something more specific, that is ask about music, painting, or poetry, instead about art. Otherwise, a discussion will touch on various topics and will lack a coherent focal point. Such became the case in seminar when one person mentioned painting and another mentioned music as responses to the same question. One must be careful when narrowing the generality of art, because it can lead to a question of what is art?
This necessity of narrowness became evident when we discussed whether an openness to sexuality still continues in art. Participants of the discussion all agreed that the boundaries of sexuality do continue to be pushed, but they all cited a variety of artistic mediums as examples (i.e. musician Boy George and a particular art exhibit).
Modernist art contained an elitist quality since its amount of complexity required an audience that was learned and was able to understand the themes expressed. It was not a goal of the modern artists to narrow the audience, rather the education was a necessity in order to understand the artists’ intentions. This elitism was perceived as peculiar since the themes confronted by art are supposed to be related to by everybody and only a certain group could enjoy it.
Nobody can get away from their background. But they can go beyond it. This has been seen in such modern artists as William Faulkner, who wrote stories set in a particular region, but their themes were universal. This provokes a question of what makes William Faulkner’s novels American? The "local color" of the American South is a particular aspect that can not be reflected in any other part of the world. This may include racial attitudes, manners of speech, or historical beliefs in sex roles. The same may be drawn from other novels, such as Dona Barbara. What makes Dona Barbara a Venezuelan novel?
Lastly, a question was left to consider: how can an openness to sexuality in art shape one’s nationality?

Questions

The following were questions we asked the class:

1) How has an openness to sexuality continued in art (if at all)?

2) Does art still have an elitist quality?

3) Is there still a sense of nationalism reflected in art?

Bibliography

Cantor, Norman F. The American Century: Varieties of Culture in Modern Times. New York City, New York: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. 1997.

Martins, Wilson. The Modernist Idea: A Critical Survey of Brazilian Writing in the Twentieth Century. New York City, New York: New York University Press, 1970.

Foster, David William. Modern Latin American Literature Volume 1. United States of America: Fredrick Ungar Publishers Co. 1975

Perrone, Charles A. Seven Faces: Brazilian Poetry Since Modernism. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996.

Microsoft Encarta Online Encyclopedia 2000. http://encarta.msn.com 1997-2000 Microsoft Corporation

Rainey, Lawrence. Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998.

Tapscott, Stephen (ed.). Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1999.