In Depth: 1913, The Year of Modernism

One hundred years ago, modernism exploded onto the cultural stage when a series of seminal works and exhibitions establishing a new aesthetic found their way to a wider public. From the Armory Show in New York to the birth of modernist groups in Florence, Dresden, Munich, and Saint Petersburg, bold experiments with abstract forms in literature and the visual arts, daring combinations of traditional or invented genres, and innovative designs for published media like books and magazines all tried to capture the rhythm and reality of modern life. Paris was still the center—and often the subject—of new effervescent creations, but by 1913 the modernist spirit had developed into a truly international idiom. One year later, war of an unprecedented brutality would engulf the world, and the exhilaration and dynamism that had evolved in the twilight of the Belle Époque would give way to a climate of pessimism and irrationality. The exhibition 1913: The Year of Modernism celebrates the centennial of this pivotal year and its aftermath and highlights key aspects of modernist movements—from Expressionism to Futurism, from visual poetry to Dadaist provocations.

The spirit of 1913 and its revolutionary effect finds probably its most iconic materialization in The Prose of the Trans-Siberian—the “simultaneous poem” jointly produced that year by poet Blaise Cendrars and painter Sonia Delaunay. On one long folded sheet, this book merges image and text to weave fictions of Paris and the world, of voyage and war, of the individual caught in the swirl of modern life. Examples of crosspollination between literature and the visual arts abound in this period, and dialogues between artists and writers resulted in further innovations in the illustrated book, such as the collaboration between Cendrars and Fernand Léger on The End of the World Filmed by the Angel N.-D. (1919). The poet became the subject of paintings, such as Modigliani’s portrait of his friend the poet, playwright, and filmmaker Jean Cocteau. Poets also aspired to be painters—like Guillaume Apollinaire, who initially gave the title I, Too, Am a Painter to his visual poetry collection, Calligrammes: Poems of Peace and War (1918), in which he arranged the text of his poems to form images. Formal  experimentation ranged from the intense subjectivity of the German Expressionists of Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter to Georges Braque’s and Pablo Picasso’s cubist depictions of everyday objects.

Eugène Atget’s photographs from the period document the shacks, shop windows, and street scenes of nineteenth-century Paris that were quickly disappearing with the evolution of the modern city in the twentieth century. The sense of a vanishing world captured in these photographs took a different direction, and was dramatically amplified, when artists engaged with the social and political reality of the First World War. In magazines like L’Elan and Le Mot, assertions of fierce nationalism collided with expressions of horror at the unprecedented scope of violence. Avant-garde groups formed before, during, and after the war aimed not only to innovate modern aesthetic forms but also to change the world around them. The Italian Futurists radically rejected the past and attempted to express the energy of technological progress. Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti had glorified war as a precursor to sweeping social change in his 1912 book Zang Tumb Tuuum, in which he expressed the chaos of the battlefield of the First Balkan War in free verse. Russian and British responses to Futurism also privileged speed, dynamism, and the machine as signs of a new world order.

Not all modernist artists and writers embraced the war as a welcome harbinger of social change. The Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich gave birth to Dada, a movement formulated in 1916 as a direct reaction against xenophobic patriotism and the carnage of war. Similar movements quickly developed in Berlin, New York, and Paris. Dada artists employed performance art, sound poetry, collage, the display of found objects, and other absurdist strategies to ridicule a rational bourgeois society and to question the idea of modernity itself. The magazine format proved perfectly suited to Dada’s international identity and its investment in ephemeral art practices. In the years following the war, George Grosz, one of the founders of Berlin Dada, took a particularly strong political stance in his art and illustrations, protesting the moral corruption and social chaos of the Weimar Republic in scathing satirical drawings published in subversive left-wing political journals.

The cataclysmic events of World War I galvanized the multifaceted modernist aesthetic of 1913 in various ways. During the next two decades, trends in formal experimentation and modes of engagement with the world that were initiated by the avant-garde movements persisted and evolved. The exhibition closes with works that evoke the legacies of 1913: Paul Klee’s 1930 watercolor points to an ongoing exploration of abstraction; Chaïm Soutine’s painting of dead poultry from 1926 offers an expressionist interpretation of a mundane subject that leaves a visceral impression of violence; and Pablo Picasso’s masterpiece Minotauromachy (1935) distills the political unrest of the 1930s and foretells the rise of Fascism and the catastrophes of the Second World War.
 

Efthymia Rentzou
Assistant Professor of French and Italian

Calvin Brown
Associate Curator of Prints and Drawings