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Introduction
| Modernism 1900-1950 High culture 1950-2000After the catastrophic disruptions of World War II, traditional high culture became increasingly out of date and irrelevant. It moved away from its European élitist origins and found a whole new world in the New World. However, in the latter part of the century, the rise of mass entertainment pushed traditional high culture into élite ghettos, where it was enjoyed mainly by people who had benefited from higher education. By the 1950s, as abstract expressionism took over from surrealism as the cutting-edge style, New York prided itself on having replaced Paris as the centre of the visual arts. US artists such as Jackson Pollock dripped and splashed paint on to their canvases, while Mark Rothko painted large expanses of a single colour. The New York art market also began to discover boom times in the sales of old masters and newly fashionable artists. Great painters – such as Francis Bacon from Ireland and the German/British Lucien Freud, grandson of the psychoanalyst – occasionally appeared, but the energy seemed to have gone elsewhere. Then, suddenly, there was pop art, a movement that emerged in Britain and the US at the start of the 1960s, using the imagery of mass culture for its inspiration. Actually, its roots ran a little deeper: many critics believe that the 1956 collage What is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing? by British artist Richard Hamilton signalled the beginning of pop art. Later New York pop art exemplars were Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg and Claes Oldenburg. In Britain, Peter Blake, who also designed the iconic record sleeve for The Beatles's Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), and David Hockney were the main practitioners. Although energetic and youthful, much pop art seemed merely to celebrate capitalism in one of its heroic phases, boosting celebrity culture rather than criticising it. By the last quarter of the century, the most controversial artists tended to be practitioners of conceptual art, such as Damien Hirst in Britain. Artists who deliberately mixed different forms (for example, theatre and video) seemed to be attempting to avoid cultural exhaustion. In architecture, the international style of box-glass skyscrapers and post-modern extravaganza changed the urban environments of Brasília, Hong Kong and Mexico City, as much as it already had New York's. The second half of the 20th century saw an explosion in design, from the baroque excesses of 1950s' Detroit cars to the sleek 1990s' Ikea furnishings. What was once exclusive to rich individuals became marketed to everyone, especially in the West, and made demands on the human acquisitive instinct that some radicals saw as both stressful and immoral. Film Western Europe produced innovative films, especially Italy (with its neo-realism) and France. The experimentalism taking place in the latter was particularly striking. The term La nouvelle vague (New Wave) refers to the work of a group of French film-makers between 1958 and 1964. The directors who formed the core of this group – François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette and Eric Rohmer – had once all been film critics for the magazine Cahiers du cinéma. The 1950s and 1960s were also a golden age for Hollywood, with directors such as Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder and Stanley Kubrick. As well as commercial Hollywood movies, films by the Japanese Akira Kurosawa and the Bengali Satyajit Ray, among other internationally renowned directors, became art house staples. Cinema audiences began to fall from the start of the 1960s, as people preferred the domestic entertainment offered by television. But the film industry fought back, first with the invention of Cinemascope – you couldn't get that on your TV set! – and then with an increasing reliance on special effects. Perhaps the first films that depended on SFX for their success were George Lucas's Star Wars (1977) and its sequels. However, they were quickly followed by an innumerable number of other effects-laden (and script-poor) movies, culminating in 1996 with Independence Day. With the written word, high culture found itself more embattled, as public taste was drawn to the newer art forms of cinema and television, not to forget fiction bestsellers, which at this time were often well-written British spy novels. The French nouvelle roman of the 1950s and 1960s, for example, appealed only to small intellectual audiences. Yet the majority of serious British novelists were less radical than the early modernist masters. The Beats (or Beat Generation) were a group of American writers, including novelist Jack Kerouac (who wrote the seminal On the Road in 1957) and poets Gregory Corso and Laurence Ferlinghetti, who emerged in the 1950s, rejecting conventional society and its values. Praising authenticity and individual experiment, poet Allen Ginsberg was also a key figure, writing the classic Howl (1957) and hanging out with experimental writers such as William Burroughs (Naked Lunch, 1959). The Beat Generation mixed some of the ideas of high art – absurdism and existentialism – with popular forms, and did much to prepare Western society for the hippie counterculture. Most literary criticism was carried out at universities, where intellectual commentaries on old and new texts became a massive industry, and exam requirements gave renewed life to old classics. With poets writing for other poets and not for the public, high culture turned in on itself, especially in its more obscure post-modern phase (from the late 1960s onwards). However, Irish poetry – as exemplified by Seamus Heaney – flourished. The Nobel prize for literature, which had been previously given almost exclusively to Europeans (like Heaney), was now awarded to people from all over the world. Winners such as the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez (1982), the Nigerian Wole Soyinka (1986), the Egyptian Naguib Mafouz (1988) and the West Indian Derek Walcott (1992) became bestsellers. In London, theatre boomed after the emergence – with the first performances of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger – of the 'Angry Young Men' in 1956, although it needed periodic injections of talent from Ireland and the US, and remained a minority taste. Playwrights such as Irish-born/Paris-based Samuel Beckett reacted with a European absurdist sensibility to such horrors as the concentration camps and the atom bomb, their work stressing the indifference of God and the surreality of life. Music Composers such as Hans Werner Henze and Benjamin Britten produced good work, but the excitement of the musical modernists of the early part of the century had vanished. Many composers, such as the minimalist John Cage, played to coterie audiences. A similar trend affected jazz, which in the 1950s and 1960s fractured into cool jazz, bebop, hard bop and free jazz, with musicians such as Charlie Parker, Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan giving way to more cult tastes of the likes of Charlie Mingus, Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman. Repression and the arts The Communist regimes of the Soviet Union and China produced masses of dull official art but very little to galvanise the imagination of the rest of the world. The main exceptions were poets and novelists, such as Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, Joseph Brodsky and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, because their art could be practised in private, away from government control. In eastern Europe, the situation was different. Here, the film industry flourished – in Poland (Andrzej Wajda), Hungary (Istvan Szabo) and Czechoslovakia (Milos Forman), especially during the lead-up to the Prague Spring of 1968. The link between political repression and creativity in modern arts was also evident in the magic realist novels coming out of Latin America, and the fiction and radical theatre of South Africa. Likewise, the rise of Jewish novelists such as Saul Bellow, Philip Roth and Chaim Potok perhaps reflected a collective need to come to terms with the trauma of the Holocaust. |
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