Open Volume | Where did modernism begin? Paris in 1900 is calling

Uncoiling

Where did modernism originate? Einstein, Freud, Planck, Russell, Whitman, Rimbaud, Picasso... More than a hundred years ago, these names, which are so loud today, experienced the doubts, misunderstandings, ridicule, indifference, and even self-doubt and denial that all pioneers inevitably endured from the old world and old thinking. The Pioneers of Modernism: A Genealogy of 20th-Century Thought (William M. R. Everdel, translated by Zhang Longhua and Yang Minghui, Nanjing University Press, 2023.5) takes the lives of representatives in various fields of the formation period of modernism as the context, describes the creative activities and intellectual breakthroughs of the pioneers of modernism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, reproduces the innovative atmosphere of Paris, Vienna, St. Louis and Petersburg at the turn of the century, and presents a popular and vivid history of the development of modern thought.

Original text: "The Unavoidable Paris is Calling"

Author | William S. R. Everdel/by Zhang Longhua, Yang Minghui, et al

Image | Internet

Vienna belongs to the end of the 19th century, this is from Paris; But Paris in 1900 was not at the end of the century, but at the beginning of a new century. As early as the 80s and 90s of the 19th century, Paris provided the medium (and stage) for the production of modern poetry. By 1900, Impressionism had established itself in Parisian galleries as department store magnates rushed to buy Monet and Sisley's works. By this time, the decadent magazines and reviews still popular in Vienna were moribund. In Paris, philosophical circles have begun to dissect the scientism and positivism still taught in Vienna. France is more open to creation than any other country. It even became a source of anarchism in Paris. With various purposes, people flocked to Paris, including temporary visitors and settlers, natives and foreigners, poets, painters, physicists and politicians, until they overwhelmed the natives. They turned an elegant 19th-century city into the center of modernism. Paris in 1900 became the center of world culture in the 20th century and maintained that status for more than two generations.

Attracting a group of the most creative young talents

With the influx of immigrants, Paris in 1898 had already attracted some of the most creative young talents in the Western world. On the second and a half floors of rue Cassette 7 in Paris, a Breton man named Alfred Jarry is writing. Although he was addicted to drugs, what he wrote would deeply touch a Polish named Marie Curie. Marie Curie, who lived in a humble shack near the physics department of the University of Paris, was extracting small amounts of radium from tons of Czech pitchblende. In the same city, the ailing Malléne Mallarmé is presiding over his "Tuesday Poets' Gathering"; Professor Henri Poincare is discovering new ideas about the Cantor set and Maxwell's laws of electromagnetic radiation; And composers Gabriel Fauré, Claude Debussy and Erik Satie are pushing the key sign to the limit. A German painter named Hansen, who lived in Montmartre, although unknown at the time, would in the future become one of the founders of expressionism, like Emil Nolde; Frantisek Kupka, a Czech who also lived there, soon became one of the pioneers of the Abstraction. Near Fontainebleau lived an English composer named Frederick Delius, who had lived here since the 1889 World's Fair, where he composed Paris: Song of the Metropolis in 1899.

By 1900, fame had risen in Paris with the respected American painter James Whistler and scandalous Irish playwright Oscar Wilde. Wilde's compatriot, William Butler Yeats, had learned symbolism here after being brought to Paris in 1896 by his friend, the British critic Arthur Symons. Simmons wrote the History of the Symbolists in 1899, while the Greek Jean Morris wrote the Symbolists' Manifesto in 1886. Two Poles, Wyzewa and Krysinska, and two Americans, Merrill and Vielé-Griffin, also moved to Paris in the 80s of the 19th century to participate in the symbolist movement, which they gave Whitman's style characteristics. There are also many Belgian writers in Paris, such as the Whitman-style poet Emile Verhaeren; Symbolist novelist Georges Rodenbach, author of Bruges la Morte, died in Paris in 1898; and Maurice Maeterlinck, a playwright who moved to Paris in 1896, wrote the classic symbolist play Pelleas and Melisande, and has lived there permanently since 1897.

Modernist playwrights also came here from various European countries. Irish playwright George Moore came to Paris as early as 1873, where he befriended Mallarmé and Dujardin, and brought important messages of symbolism back to the English-speaking world. The Austrian theater critic Hermann Barr studied decadence in Paris in 1888, while his friend Playwright Artur Schnitzler visited Paris in the spring of 1897. While living in Paris from 1891 to 1895, German Frank Widkind frequented circuses and cabarets and began drafting plays about the prostitute Lulu. The Norwegian Bjrnstjerne Bjrnson, who came to Paris in the 80s, wrote realist plays before Ibsen; He met the talented Swedish dramatist August Strindberg in a cabaret in 1883 and got into an argument with him. Strindberg visited Paris as early as 1876 and returned again from 1894 to 1896 to experiment with alchemy and create the "Diary of a Madman". Paris also welcomed some Russians. Chekhov came to Paris twice, in 1891 and 1897. Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, a young revolutionary known only to the Russian police and a few comrades, made several trips to Paris in 1895; In 1908, the revolutionary, who later changed his name to Lenin, transferred all of the Russian Social Democrats to Paris, the "City of Light."

It's full of incomparable vibrancy

Although the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1900 had not yet opened, Becker and Westerhoff went to the fairgrounds on the right bank of Bordeaux on February 25, from where they peeked into the large art exhibition hall called the Grand Palais, and found "poor little apprentices of sculptors from the night school... is doing stucco work". One of them could be Henri Matisse. To make a living, Matisse, 31, and his friend Albert Marquet are painting laurel leaves for the cornices of the Grand Palace roof. Becker didn't know who Matisse was in 1900, and almost no one else knew about him. Matisse was a gifted student of the arts, and in 1896 he had an exhibition that was exhibited by Maurice Smith. Maurice Denis called it "the Mallarmé of painting." Of the small income from painting laurel leaves, Matisse spent a large part of it – 1,300 francs – on an oil painting by the late impressionist painter Cezanne. Cézanne lives in his beloved Aixen Provence and is still painting at the age of 61, but not many people know him. Wealthy collectors did not like his strange perspective painting and "infinite subdivision of colored planes". Roger Max struggled to hang three Cézanne paintings in the French section of the Grand Palais. The only merchant in Paris who owned Cézanne's work was Ambroise Vollard. Born on the Indian Ocean island of Reunion, Wallard owned a small art shop on Rue Lafite in Montmartre and was one of the few merchants who could sell Gauguin's work, from whom Matisse bought one in 1898. Becker never knew Matisse, but in late May 1900 she discovered Wallard's shop and saw Cézanne's work for the first time. These works strengthened her faith and changed her life. These are all things that happened in Paris in 1900.

The France they came to was still pre-industrial. Toilet paper is still unfamiliar, and sewers are as rare as bathtubs and toothbrushes. Strindberg once called France "a nasty country" in 1883, but it is full of unparalleled vitality. According to Eugen Weber, there are 2,857 publications published in Paris, including more than 70 daily newspapers. Perhaps Americans will be shocked that Paris has nearly 350,000 electric lights and more than 3,000 cars in France, but in fact, the development of French cars, like bicycles, is far ahead of the United States. At that time, the first Michelin Guide had just been published, nearly a hundred cars from different countries were on display in the Civil Engineering Building, and the bus line from the Eiffel Tower to the Champ de Mars had just opened; Moreover, the Buffalo Cycling Arena, the world's most advanced indoor cycling arena at the time, had just been built, and its founder, Buffalo Bill, made cowboy theater popular in 1889.

The article is originally published in the 8th edition of the 1869 issue of the Social Science Daily, and is prohibited from being reproduced without permission, and the content of the article only represents the author's views, and does not represent the position of this newspaper.

Responsible editor of this issue: Wang Liyao