The Crack-Up

No one reading this last of Peter Gay’s five volumes on the 19th century middle classes (just now making its appearance in bookstores in paperback) will be inclined to bash the bourgeoisie any longer, at least not much. This superb and exhaustive tableau of the tortured highways and byways that gradually led to modernism--in painting, sculpture, music, architecture and literature--documents the ambiguities and ambivalences of Victorian culture all over Europe. Gay shows incontrovertibly that modernism could not have come into being without the bourgeoisie. He details the profusion of interlocking motives that enticed some wealthy men to buy innovative art and others to resist it, the various relations that developed between patrons and artists, and the growing influence of critics. His history is in the details, as he substantiates how specific creative endeavors caught the imagination--and subsequent support--of one or another member of the upper bourgeoisie. Despite some of its philistinism, the bourgeoisie ultimately furthered avant-garde art.

Of course, there are contradictions, and Gay carefully points to them throughout the book. As most of us were taught, Flaubert was the first modernist. Gay too leads off with “Gustavus Flaubertus”--the signature Flaubert adopted while laboring over his first novel, “Madame Bovary.” He was born into the bourgeoisie he hated and labelled as cowardly, colorless, censorious, sentimental and devious, totally materialistic and “lacking all sense for the exotic, the adventurous, the extraordinary.” Nevertheless, he had Emma Bovary admire Rouen and be dazzled by its houses, ships at anchor and roaring factories. Actually, Rouen’s (mostly petite) bourgeoisie was a small minority. Before long, it supported a literary periodical, the Revue de Rouen; and one of its cotton traders and shipbuilders donated 53 paintings, mostly minor Impressionists, to the local museum. But Flaubert kept holding on to his phobic hate of those he thought were “running and ruining his country.”

Other modern writers, composers and artists as well denigrated the very civilization--improvements in transport, communication, capital formation and industrialization--that inspired them to break conventions. Gay refers to the bashers as “bourgeoisophobes.” And he reminds us that Goethe’s Werther and Moliere’s bourgeois gentilhomme already had depicted the bourgeoisie as money-grubbing, vain and coarse; as uneducable and mediocre; as unable to comprehend the rebellious, creative spirit of the artist. It is as if disdain for the bourgeoisie did as much to unite talent across national boundaries as the working class promised to do, according to the “Communist Manifesto.” Even Baudelaire had stated that “there are so many bourgeois among artists,” some of them unconventional and others traditional. Altogether, by the end of the 19th century, the comfortable classes were attacked, for instance, by Zola in France, Shaw in Britain, Strindberg in Sweden and Ibsen in Norway and Germany as princes of cant and paragons of conventionality.

In the Salon of 1845, a few of the more successful entrepreneurs already were trying to comprehend the profusion of new styles and seriously looked at imaginative canvases, although “middling and lower bourgeois still had their facsimiles and their fantasies.” Actually, only a few could afford to dabble in art. Gay demonstrates this point by means of income statistics. In 1862, for instance, Max Liebermann was paid 3,000 marks for his painting of peasant women plucking geese in a barn, “Die Ganserupferinnen,” which was an enormous sum at a time when an independent craftsman earned around 1,500 marks a year; and millions of petit bourgeois families toiled to make ends meet in order to maintain themselves above working-class standards. Still, in order to lift themselves, they too wanted to display art on their walls (and be seen at musical performances) and therefore settled for buying “affordable masterpieces”--knockoffs and reproductions, engravings and illustrations, mostly old masters, but also some of the new. (Orchestral and virtuoso performances as well originally were sponsored by a few wealthy patrons.) Thus they read the commentaries by art and music critics who espoused the new art. These arbiters of taste, and their opinions, induced yet more successful entrepreneurs to trust and indulge their fancies. Thereby, and despite resistance, the bourgeoisie’s upper crust increasingly supported the arts and ended up creating what became an “art market.”

Gay further documents the growth of connoisseurship in the upper classes when he writes that “the education of Parisian bourgeois in art did not match that enjoyed by Berlin’s Burger. . . . Manchester’s way of cultivating the pleasures of music or painting would have been unrecognizable in Munich. . . . And international exhibitions, peripatetic collectors, traveling art dealers, mobile conductors and virtuosi made [Victorian high culture] increasingly cosmopolitan and increasingly autonomous.” Whereas in 1845, the Manchester Times hailed the cities’ reforms, Friedrich Engels stigmatized its middle-class philanthropy as “bourgeois greed taking a hypocritical, civilized form.” Yet, by early 1893, when Manchester performers and musical amateurs wanted a conservatory, they already could enlist the help of the lord mayor to convene a town meeting in order to raise additional money for a building--which was opened in October of that year. The city’s Whitworth Art Gallery did equally well and was hailed as a source of perpetual gratification and as contributing to “the highest character in the direction of technical education.” Clearly, high culture and high profits had become compatible. In Munich, culture primarily was furthered by the Bavarian kings, so that its Bildungsburgertum became a “nest of contentions and contradictions,” whereas in Vienna, Kaiser and Burgertum apparently were more attuned to each other. Altogether, individual tastes furthered national styles.

Gay’s chapter on “Acknowledged Legislators” goes into the ways in which Theophile Gautier, Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve and Theodor Fontane in France, George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde in England, and Eduard Hanslick in Vienna, among dozens of others--with polemics and praise--caught the attention of an ever-larger slice of the upwardly mobile bourgeoisie. He reminds us also that now, after Freud, we know that individual choices in all of the arts are based, among other things, on elusive inner resistances and urges and on buried memories of critics, readers, buyers. Gay describes buyers as indefatigable hunters and gatherers of paintings and etchings, sculpture and autographs. Collectors hunted for signed pieces of furniture and anonymous faience and for relics and rare cabinets. There were items for every pocketbook, every taste. “Among the keenest pleasures of life in hope, in acquisition, memory, there is hardly one to surpass the Collector’s joy,” stated an American enthusiast in 1898. Among them, Jews appeared to be especially attuned to innovative arts and were disproportionately represented. And boundaries were blurring as friendships ripened between artists and their aficionados. However, there were bourgeoisie, like Andrew Carnegie in America and Alfred Krupp in Germany, whose social and economic calculations dominated their aesthetic decisions. Still, whatever the motives of collectors had been, states Gay, when they donated or bequeathed their treasures to a local museum or the state, they all became “movers,” though not every one of them was a “shaker.”

Among the shakers were art and music lovers who helped shore up faltering institutions: They rescued their local museums from rich American buyers, founded private societies and associations, became public donors of both risky and risk-free art, and supported their idiosyncratic tastes by helping individual artists, composers and orchestras. Increasingly, these institutions would have to be housed, which, in turn, encouraged the construction of modern buildings.

Altogether, the defenders of the past clashed with the heralds of the future of high culture, which, in turn, was being played out in public debates. The question of what to do about modernist challenges became acute, as the scales already were tipped to the side of modernism. Gay does not have a simple definition for its many faces. But he notes that all modernists, whether Realists, Symbolists, Expressionists or other innovators, detested formulas, called for authenticity, defied stifling rules and traditions and strove for an honesty that “came from within.” He gives many examples of how, “paradoxically, this inward serfdom belonged to the modernist’s quest for absolute freedom.” Artists had large disagreements among themselves and managed the shock of the new in their own ways. Thus collectors might admire Impressionists but not Cezanne, might like the Fauves but not Kandinsky and so on. Secessions all suffered internal stresses and were succeeded by yet other secessions. Artistic revolutions abounded. Many modernists founded movements and edited periodicals, such as “New Age,” “La Jeune Revue Litteraire” and “Jong Vlaanderen” in Belgium; “Jugend” in Germany; and “Arte Joven” in Madrid. Unlike Young Germany or the Young Hegelians in the 1830s, the youthful rebels of the 1880s were persistent, cultivated frenzy and were oriented to the future. They were “consistent in their inconsistency.”

Altogether, the Victorians were transforming their society’s formerly tightly woven fabric into a tattered tapestry. Gay notes that artists were liberating themselves from moral, religious and aesthetic constraints and that the bourgeois experience required ever more adjustments. This atmosphere, in turn, encouraged modernism to flourish. And as many more bourgeois became receptive to experimentation, Hermann Bahr, the Austrian drama critic, playwright and novelist, could quip that he never met a trend he didn’t like. With the rising prices of modernist paintings, bourgeois lovers of experimental art were joined by others who began to speculate in it. Plus ca change. . . .

Whereas in his previous four volumes Gay explored the history of the inner life of the Victorian bourgeoisie--the education of its senses, passions, cultivation of hatred and of their hearts--this last volume, on their “Pleasure Wars,” crowns his 25-year effort. He has succeeded in writing a superb book to which justice cannot be done in a short review. And as he incontrovertibly proves, much of bourgeois taste was discerning and, in spite of manifold resistances against the new, it finally won out.