The Elfin Blog

Note: As usual I make no claims of accuracy or good writing in the following document, so if you plagiarize, you’re probably screwing yourself. This short paper was written for a course on European Intellectual and Cultural History I took my senior year of college. By the looks of things, it was no doubt written around three in the morning the night before it was due, which was my habit by senior year. Enjoy.

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By the year 1900, many changes had already taken place in the world that the Positivism of the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century could no longer account for, and more changes were occurring every day. The religion of humanity, it seems, was not suited for the technological onslaught of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Man was fast realizing that science was not always a way to order or find discipline in a chaotic world. In fact, as was apparent with the dawn of the twentieth century, science, better known as modernization, created even more chaos in reality. Man’s entire understanding of even the fundamental notions of space and time were altered by the rapidly progressing forces of technology, a still new and unfamiliar monster in the early twentieth century. The intellectual realization of this fact and attempts to accommodate it are known as modernity, and modernity and those who promoted it had no room for the outdated notions that Positivism put forth. It was time for Positivism to be rewritten to fit the new fast paced and smaller world. Further, an artistic rejection of naturalization coincided with the intellectual denial of Positivism.

Out of this need to find a better, a more modern way to explain our world many different intellectual and cultural movements took place. Most of these movements seem to share the similar traits of Symbolism and Impressionism. While both of these are literary and artistic movements in themselves, they also seem to be basic aspects in all of modernity’s movements. Two thinkers of this time period that not only show a rejection of Positivism and Naturalization, but are also good examples of the new directions in which intellectuals and artists were going are Sigmund Freud and Wassily Kandinsky.

One of the most powerful examples of modernist thought would be Sigmund Feud. Freud’s theories on dream interpretation are the ultimate example of the rejection of Positivistic science and the use of Symbolism. Freud thought that dreams were symbolic of other things and that through a scientific analysis of dreams, one could come to a better understanding of one’s self or other people. Freud points out, “…what stands in the foreground of our interest is the question of the significance of dreams…it seeks to discover whether dreams can be interpreted, whether the content of individual dreams has a ‘meaning’, such as we are accustomed to find in other psychical structures.” (Freud, 38). Freud also says, “If we adopt the method of interpreting dreams which I have indicated here, we shall find that dreams really have a meaning and are far from being the expression of a fragmentary activity of the brain….” (Freud, 38). Freud believed, “When the work of interpretation has been completed, we perceive a dream is the fulfillment of a wish.” (Freud, 38). This line of thought is a wonderful example of the new scientific attitude that was taking place in the early twentieth century. Freud wanted his thinking on the symbolic nature of dreams to be a scientific basis for further study. This is significant because a scientist who studies dreams, and wants to give them scientific basis is completely contrary to all that Positivism had tried to do. A Positivist, after all, was someone who, as described by Wassily Kandinsky, only recognizes “…those things which can be weighed and measured. Anything beyond that they consider as rather discreditable nonsense….” (Kandinsky, 112). Freud, then, shook the Positivist world at its foundations.

Freud’s writing is also significant in a discussion of the new forms of art that were emerging during this time period. Not only did dreams become a favorite subject of the art and literature of the period, but Freud’s thoughts on consciousness also became fundamental to new art of the period. Some of Freud’s writing on writers and day-dreaming is valuable to a discussion of arts’ rejection of naturalization. Freud points out about creative writers (which also applies to all artists) that, “The creative writer does the same as the child at play. He creates a world of phantasy which he takes very seriously - that is, which he invests large amounts of emotion - while separating it sharply from reality.” (Freud, 39). This description can be applied not only to the writers of this period, but also painters and other artists. Painters of this period diverged from reality in their work, toying with the new concepts of space and time, and challenging the previous century’s thinking at every turn, much like Freud did.

During the period of the early 1900’s, a modernist sense of time and space became evidenced in paintings. For example, with the invention of the telephone and its mass use during this period, man can now, at least figuratively, be in two places at once. There is a concurrent multiplication of spaces in paintings of this period. Some Postimpressionist paintings of this period, as an example, tried to show more than one perspective at a time, such as Cezanne’s Portaite of Gustave Geoffrey. This sense of simultaneity is one of the fundamental trends of intellectual and artistic thought during this period. There is in art a defamiliarization with a painting’s subject, reality no longer has to be depicted in terms of “realism.” Naturalism is rejected in the painting of the early twentieth century, as a response to the new modernist sense of time and space and motion. These concepts, which lie beyond the realm of solid objects, never the less needed to be dealt with. What better medium to deal with them than painting, and art in general.

Wassily Kandinsky, a commentator and advocate for new art during this period, says, “That which has no material existence cannot be subjected to material classification. That which belongs to the spirit of the future can only be realized in feeling, and to this feeling the talent of the artist is the only road.” (Kandinsky, 113). Kandinsky argued for “pure composition.” He wanted the spirituality in a painting to be apparent before any recognition of the painting’s subject necessarily took place. He is perfect example of a modernist thinker. He says, “When we remember, however, that spiritual experience is quickening, that positive science, the firmest basis of human thought, is tottering, that dissolution of matter is imminent, we have reason to hope that the hour of pure composition is not far away.” (Kandinsky, 118). This wonderful quote speaks volumes, for it reminds the reader of the period that all that science had previously thought was being overturned and uprooted and rewritten every day, and the scientific thought of the present day would be re-written again the next (as Kandinsky points out page 112). At the same time it shows Kandinsky’s hopes for painting of pure artistic expression, free from the bonds of naturalistic space and perspective. Pure composition, for Kandinsky, is painting brought forth from an artist’s soul, and should be judged as good or bad depending on whether or not it brings “forth corresponding vibrations of the soul.” (Kandinsky, 122). Kandinsky says, “The spectator is too ready to look for a meaning in a picture…. Our materialistic age has produced a type of spectator or ‘connoisseur,’ who is not content to put himself opposite a picture and let it say its own message.” (Kandinsky, 119). Essentially, Kandinsky in perfect anti-naturalization fashion, wants paintings to be able to ignore naturalist and positivist understandings of the world, and come from an artist’s heart. Similarly, he wishes for the paintings viewer to understand this and attempt to see the painting for what it is, not for what it is of.

In short, Freud and Kandinsky are two excellent examples of how modernist thinkers rejected positivistic thought and naturalistic art, and attempted to forge new understandings of a new world, which had been turned upside down by rapid technological growth and expansion. There are many aspects to the many movements of this period, all of which were responses to this new modern age, but Symbolism and Impressionism are the threads that run through all of the intellectual and cultural movements of this period. The world it would seem is still adjusting to many of these theories and new forms of art, including painting, appear all the time which seem to come a little closer to Kandinsky’s vision of spirituality on painting. Perhaps this is because the age of modernity is still upon us, and we are still trying to catch up.

By Tom Kersey, 1996, proving yet again that I have been a dork for a while.