Gay's enthusiasms and his insights are unevenly distributed. On painting, especially 19th-century painting, he rarely rises above banality. Edvard Munch, a second-rater by most estimates, gets promoted to the first rank, largely because his psychological obsessions dovetail with Gay's Freudianism.
Literature, music and architecture, especially the pioneering architectural and design work of the Bauhaus movement, bring out his most insightful writing. Gay, in the chapter Eccentrics and Barbarians, takes a bit of a detour to profile wayward figures like Charles Ives and Knut Hamsun, the "anti-modern modernists." These are the most engaging pages in the book, offering shrewd analyses that reveal how easily Modernism could embrace retrograde political thinkers and the seeming paradox, in the case of Ives, of an artistic revolutionary and small-town philistine inhabiting the same man.
The Freudian tinge lends a distinctive coloration to familiar material. Gay does have the odd habit of checking in from time to time to see what Freud thought of this or that Modernist, to no particular purpose. But he also delivers a splendid Freudian interpretation of Kafka's work as embodying displaced conflict with his father. He also calls T.S. Eliot sharply to account, rejecting Eliot's assertion that the poet hovers above the poem, an impersonal artificer. As implicated in Modernism's interior voyage as any other poet, "Eliot was wrong."
After World War II, Gay finds "much talent and little genius." Pop Art's erasure of distinctions between high and low art, crucial in his mind to the Modernist project, spelled the end of the great human adventure that began a century or more earlier. But Gay is not quite ready to sign the death certificate, especially after a visit to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, designed by Frank Gehry. A twitch here, a jerk there, and who knows? There may indeed be life after death.
Modernism: The Lure of Heresy From Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond
By Peter Gay
610 pages
W.W. Norton and Co
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