Celebrating the Joy of Modern Arts

Book

The Art of Celebration: Twentieth-Century Painting, Literature, Sculpture, Photography, and Jazz

by Alfred Appel, Jr.

Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

Harvard undergraduates will immediately recognize the true nature of Alfred Appel Jr.'s Art of Celebration--it is essentially a Literature and Arts B Core course on 20th-century modernism. And like good old Lit. & Arts B, the plum of the Core requirement, it is full of pretty pictures, music and references to movies and contemporary pop culture (FUN!). You'll enjoy yourself, pick up a good mouthful of cocktail party fodder, and, astonishingly, learn something as well.

The premise of the book is that modernism is a heartening enterprise, a celebration, and should be recognized and applauded as such. Modernist "primitivism" in the vein of Picasso, Derain, Lachaise and Matisse was an attempt to reinvigorate culture, to rediscover the visceral in art, and its impact was a widespread and undeniable celebration of the senses, from Picasso's "The Race" (painted in 1922, the same year as Ulysses and "The Waste Land") to Josephine Baker's Paris performances to the jazz rage of the 1920s and 1930's. Modernism brought with it a sense of sophisticated gusto. It seemed to whoop an uninhibited "Yes!"

Upon this premise, Appel cantilevers the argument that "Yes" versus "No" is the primary aesthetic division of the 20th century. He outlines a hypothetical, prescriptive bookshelf spanning the range of 20th century art. The "No" shelf includes Kafka, T.S. Eliot, George Grosz and the pantheon of Pop art, which emphasize chaos and mass hysteria in the modern age and the mob of mankind. This is the "No" that is countered by the affirmative "Yes" of Matisse, Lachaise, Brancusi and Delaunay, Joyce, Nabokov and Chagall, along with "Yes" shelfmates W. B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Richard Wilbur, Hemingway, Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Mondrian, Brancusi and Alexander Calder.

As Appel leads the way through this bound gallery, he delivers the heart and soul of any Lit. and Arts B course. Themes! Yes, themes abound, wonderfully packaged and ready for short-answer essays. Vitality and Birth are set off in verbal neon and illustrated with Lachaise's rather indelicate nudes. Like Nighttown in Joyce's Ulysses, the modernist future is promising. Molly Bloom is celebrated in all her fecund glory.

Modernist celebration of (highlight now) the vernacular is another theme that crops up repeatedly in The Art of Celebration. Gerald Murphy's "Razor" (1924), for instance, is a "signal work in the evolution of a self-conscious American vernacular art," a celebration of "small technological advances and the utilitarian elegance of industrial design." After High Modernism has run its course, Appel points to the resurrection of the vernacular in the wake of 1970's pop art.

Appel also applauds the modernist glorification of construction, the city and technological innovation. Fernand Leger's "The City" (1919) is his point of departure, its "grandly optimistic if not utopian" vista ushering in a hopeful era of activity and communication. Likewise, Stuart Davis's painting "Swing Landscape" (1938), with its jazz dance composition, suggests a sense of connection, counter to T.S. Eliot's charge of "nothing connects" in "The Waste Land."

In Lewis Hine's 1932 Men At Work photographs, the worker is celebrated as "premier dancer and creator--choreographing, conducting, constructing, bringing the city to life--the Michelangelo of Manhattan." Ever conscious of his pedagogical responsibility to forge connections between these artists, Appel hammers home an academic comparison of Hine and Mondrian. Artist parallels worker, as a nexis, forging form from chaos.

Appel's critical stance on modernism is that of a fan, a supporter verging on groupie status. He urges that we "properly appreciate an enriching body of work that can be called `celebratory modernism,' and that we do so before the works in question have grown even dimmer or have disappeared entirely behind the newest academic fog banks." And his point is well taken. After all, Bauhaus vests trust in our aesthetic judgement and hopes for the future. It is a positive statement of mankind's ability to engineer his environment and there's something to be said for that, even if it is responsible for those monstrosities on Memorial Drive.

Appel also criticizes postmodernism, which he accuses of fostering a particularly nasty brand of cynicism. Something has gone awry, he writes, when our media-induced cynicism spreads to the degree that "we find ourselves blinking with astonishment and perhaps shame at the televised spectacle of dissident Chinese students carrying a twenty-foot-high paper-mache statue of Miss Liberty in Beijing's Tienanmen Square, and dying for it a few days later."

He ventures that 1989, the year that Barthelme died and the Berlin Wall fell, "heralds the end of postmodernism. Coldly academic formulations are of course deathless."

Appel, a professor of English and American Culture at Northwestern University, makes his points digestible by dividing the 231-page book into 41 minichapters ideally suited for the undergraduate attention span. Although his survey format is somewhat arbitrary, Appel's arguments do cohere.

Occasionally, The Art of Celebration becomes a bit precious, like when Appel asks, "Do the people who collect classic modern plates ever actually use them? Does one's use of the rhetorical question and the impersonal pronoun disguise one's uneasiness with the subject, a fear of sounding effete about dishware? Why doesn't the Design Collection have any beer mugs on display? Is the form art-proof by definition? Is some wine-bound snobbery at work, even in utopia?" But you forgive the prof, `cause, ya know, this education thing is an uphill climb. A spoonful of sugar helps the culture go down, and, fortunately for us, Alfred Appel Jr. is as hopeful as the modernist masters he celebrates.