Sara Fishko:

When Stravinsky and Nijinsky's ballet, The Rite of Spring, had its notorious premiere on May 29th in the year 1913, audiences acted as if it had come from nowhere. They howled at the stomping, [inaudible 00:00:21] of choreography, and the pulsing, unsettling rhythms and dissonances in the music.

 

Speaker 2:

Utter drivel.

 

Speaker 3:

Go to hell.

 

Sara Fishko:

By now we have multiple movie recreations.

 

Speaker 4:

[crosstalk 00:00:33].

 

Sara Fishko:

Along with the memoirs and PHD dissertations that have told us over the years that this was a modernist landmark. Modernism tended to play with pieces of things, fragments.

 

Speaker 5:

It starts to undermine the meaning, your sense of where anything would go, or to what it belongs.

 

Sara Fishko:

The sense of not going where anything would go, or to what it belongs didn't begin in 1913. But it came to a head in that year. The Rite of Spring, in the Spring in Paris. Then add the Armory show in New York in February 1913. Audiences scandalized by unrecognizable fragmented images, unlike any they had ever seen.

 

Speaker 6:

This was, for the American art public, a shocking event.

 

Sara Fishko:

The futurists in Italy, creating synthesized music based on the noise of newly machinery.

 

Speaker 7:

This made him certain that he was expressing something being struggling. [crosstalk 00:01:36].

 

Sara Fishko:

The poets exploring words for their own sake.

 

Speaker 8:

The words become their own thing, their own entity.

 

Gertrude Stein:

... where one's hearing this one telling about being one being [inaudible 00:01:45]. We're hearing this one telling-

 

Sara Fishko:

In March, Arnold Schoenberg is forced off the stage in Vienna by an angry audience not willing to accept his atonal music. And what becomes clear is that it is not a coincidence what happened in this year.

 

Speaker 9:

It was a confluence.

 

Sara Fishko:

In the 20 years before things had changed with such speed it was incomprehensible.

 

Phillipp Blom:

For the people then, when you read their diaries, their letters, and they say everything is changing so fast, everything is accelerating so fast, I've got the feeling I'm on a fast train and I don't know how the points are set. We don't know how this will end up.

 

Sara Fishko:

1913 was a year when the response to all this change broke out. And there are those who say it was right around this time that the 20th century officially began.

 

Speaker 11:

I think in a lot of ways it was just the beginning of the century of absolute chaos, and a nightmare. And, as so often, the artists heard it and reflected it first.

 

Sara Fishko:

For the next hour, culture shock 1913. I'm Sara Fishko. "Shock is good," said artist Marcel Duchamp. He ought to know, he who sent shock waves through the art world several times first with this painting, Nude Descending a Staircase Number Two, the Armory Show in 1913.

 

Speaker 12:

Or even while you were working in the Cubist style, you nonetheless managed to produce a Cubist painting, the Nude Descending a Staircase, which shocked the Cubists.

 

Marcel Duchamp:

Yes.

 

Speaker 12:

Why did it shock them so much?

 

Marcel Duchamp:

When I came with my Nude Descending the Staircase, they didn't see that it applied to their theory [crosstalk 00:03:35].

 

Sara Fishko:

In Paris, and later in New York, the abstracted image and the irreverent title of Duchamp's famous painting scandalized all who saw it.

 

Marcel Duchamp:

So they thought it was too much, neither one nor Futurist, nor Cubism, and they condemned it.

 

Sara Fishko:

Condemned in Paris, reviled in New York, which is where our story begins. Democrat Woodrow Wilson was just about to take office as the 28th president. Silent movies were all the rage, and Enrico Caruso was a major star, having become a fixture at the Met, and sold millions of records since 1904.

 

Sara Fishko:

Up and down the city, billboards and posters announced the upcoming opening in February of a major art show at the 25th Street and Lexington Avenue Armory, presenting the latest in European art.

 

Speaker 14:

Doctor Brown, now, the Armory at Lexington and 25th street is a [crosstalk 00:04:33].

 

Sara Fishko:

Author and art historian, Milton Brown spoke about it on the Armory Show's 50th Anniversary for the radio program, Observation Point.

 

Milton Brown:

The Armory Show was actually a break in the development of American art. It was probably the most important exhibition that was ever held in this country. And, as an art exhibition, probably had the greatest effect that any ever had. It was the introduction of modern art to America.

 

Sara Fishko:

The introduction of modern art to America. Just think of it.

 

Speaker 16:

What was happening in our art world in 1913? Were we completely conservative or orthodox in our tastes in art?

 

Milton Brown:

I think that was the trouble, nothing was happening. American art was dominated by academic standards and what was called the Academy. There were many academies in the country. They tended to dominate aesthetic standards as well as exhibition facilities, and there was very little opportunity for young, unknown, or progressive artists who were not academic, to show.

 

Sara Fishko:

The interesting thing about the Armory Show is that it was organized not by entrepreneurs, professional art exhibitors, or event producers. It was organized by artists who were fed-up with the tyranny of the Academy. So they formed an Artists Association, and in 1912 three of them, Walt Cune, Arthur B. Davies, and Walter Pock, took the long 10 day journey by boat to Paris to find examples of the art revolution taking place in Europe.

 

Sara Fishko:

In Paris, where W.C. was writing adventurous piano preludes, the Americans encountered young painters like Picasso and Braque, who had started to break apart images in the most dramatic way, altering reality, dividing canvases into fragments and piecing them together. By 1913 others from Italy and Russia had joined them in this. It was a complete departure from the art of conventional portraits and sedate landscapes.

 

Ann Temkin:

What Picasso and Braque were trying to do was invent a new language of painting.

 

Sara Fishko:

Museum of Modern Art, Chief Curator, Ann Temkin.

 

Ann Temkin:

So that a shoulder did not look like a shoulder. A shoulder looked like a group of lines that intersected, not because they needed to show people what a shoulder was, but because of the intersection of that group of lines made for an interesting looking structure on a canvas. So the priority was shifted completely away from being true to what you would see, for example in a photograph, and instead emphasizing that what was on the canvas was an interesting thing to look at, even if it didn't look like anything that you could identify.

 

Sara Fishko:

Photography has more or less made this demand of painters. Neuropsychiatrist, and Nobel Laureate, Dr. Eric Candell reminds us artists had to find something else to do once they didn't have to represent reality.

 

Eric Candell:

So, that led art into two directions. One is to emphasize expression, emotion, much more than photography could. And the other Cezanne, and then moving onto Cubism, and then ultimately to abstract art.

 

Sara Fishko:

The American painters abroad visited artists who led them to other artists. They went to galleries and studios, and found hundreds of the most interesting works to bring back to America in crates on another long boat ride. How they managed to engineer all this it is hard to imagine.

 

Milton Brown:

And so they felt that if they could get together and do a mammoth exhibition, they could really wake America up.

 

Speaker 20:

And how many paintings were in this exhibition in 1913?

 

Milton Brown:

We can't be exact about it, but approximately 13 hundred.

 

Sara Fishko:

13 hundred European and American artworks.

 

Speaker 21:

I'm here to see Captain [Jendron 00:08:38].

 

Sara Fishko:

For $5000 the artist organizers rented not a gallery, not a space intended for art,

 

Speaker 21:

The door on the left?

 

Sara Fishko:

But 69th Regiment Armory, which had just been built a few years before.

 

Speaker 22:

[crosstalk 00:08:49] the door on the-

 

Sara Fishko:

Giant space.

 

Speaker 9:

Okay.

 

Sara Fishko:

The building takes up a little more than an acre. 62,235 square feet.

 

Speaker 22:

Welcome.

 

Speaker 9:

Thank you.

 

Speaker 22:

First time here?

 

Speaker 9:

It is.

 

Speaker 22:

[crosstalk 00:08:59].

 

Sara Fishko:

The Armory at 25th Street and Lexington still hangs a reproduction of Nude Descending a Staircase in a special display window devoted to this chapter in its cultural history.

 

Speaker 22:

But I believe it came out from this wall here. [crosstalk 00:09:13].

 

Sara Fishko:

The artists liked the fact that the Armory wasn't a museum, or a gallery. They wanted a big open space where they could pack people in.

 

Speaker 22:

[crosstalk 00:09:20] is the art show of 1913. That's the space as it looked in 1906. The drawer floor is a total of 26,000 square feet. So, I can actually walk [crosstalk 00:09:29].

 

Sara Fishko:

The Association built multiple octagonal walls to divide the giant area into room-like spaces devoted to various artists and styles. The show featured many American paintings of different kinds. And in one area, which became known as the Chamber of Horrors, were Cubist paintings by Picasso, Braque, Leger, and several works of Marcel Duchamp, including the notorious Nude Descending a Staircase Number 2.

 

Sara Fishko:

That painting, above all others with the dark background, with angular flesh-colored shapes defined by black mostly vertical lines, with vague allusions to a human body moving downward diagonally, created a mass uproar. Art historian Kimberley [Orka 00:10:12] reminds us.

 

Kimberley O.:

A lot of the complaints of Duchamp's Nude, really in the end take the form of the question, "Where is the nude?" They want to be able to immediately discern the nude, and this idea that a painting would purposefully not express what the title is, was considered kind of a breach.

 

Sara Fishko:

It came across as a break in the kind of unspoken contract between artist and viewer, which had been pretty straight forward up to this point. A title, and a subject, that could be clearly comprehended. With the Cubists and Abstract painters, all bets were off. Author Alec Nevala-Lee.

 

Alec Nevala-Lee:

A newspaper offered a prize for the first person who could spot the nude in that painting.

 

Sara Fishko:

And there was that title, which itself violated well-established about what a nude in a painting was permitted to do.

 

Alec Nevala-Lee:

Nudes were allowed to recline, they were allowed to stand. But the idea of a nude getting up and going downstairs, I think, is what upset people more than anything else.

 

Sara Fishko:

And the artist had tried to compress the nude's whole walk down the staircase into one image.

 

Kimberley O.:

Duchamp's great angle in making the picture is putting her in motion. So, doing something that's photographic, not even photographic, filmic with something on a canvas.

 

Sara Fishko:

filmic had real meaning at that time. Film was an emerging form of art, and even more, entertainment. Right then in 1913 D.W. Griffith had just finished making 450 short films over the last five years during a period when brand new notions of movement, storytelling, and editing were being born. Tom Gunning is a film historian and a Griffith scholar.

 

Tom Gunning:

What Griffith does do is begin to think about how can you tell stories without dialogue. With a minimum of words there are a few very brief uses of inter-titles and editing becomes his tool, which is to say, you know, articulating the film into fragments and those fragments are fragments of space and time.

 

Sara Fishko:

Before this moment filmmakers would set up a camera, say 10 or 12 feet away from their subjects and shoot. What Griffith, and a few of his contemporaries began to create was the modern language of film. They realized they could vary the impact of an image by shooting close-ups, by cutting the length of shots, and by cross-cutting from one scene to another.

 

Tom Gunning:

So that you're telling a story by the way that you control viewpoint and detail, and emphasis.

 

Sara Fishko:

Film, which was able to distort time, and create its own shocking images, had a growing popular audience, as well an audience of artists.

 

Tom Gunning:

So this image of a kind of modern, unstable, crazy world, Surrealism before Surrealism is invented is there in the cinema. And definitely Picasso, Braque, all these people are crazy about the movies.

 

Sara Fishko:

And it's hard not to conclude that these fragments of a story being pieced together to make a film, this radical way of seeing images, found its way into visual art, paintings. It's hard not to associate this to ideas about relativity, as Einstein's theories about time and space had just emerged too between 1905 and 1911.

 

Sara Fishko:

The Armory Show was everything it was intended to be and more. It was eventually seen by half million people. Former president Teddy Roosevelt turned up at the shop, and in an Op Et piece he called the artists who were creating modern work, Extremists, and he alluded to Duchamp's painting by describing in his words, "A picture of a misshapen nude woman, repellent from every standpoint."

 

Sara Fishko:

The show changed American art for the next several generations, right up to now. Thanks to the activist artists who made the show happen, the art gained traction. Much of it was purchased by American collectors. And Abstraction, and Modernism, could break the hold of the academic tradition, which they certainly did.

 

Sara Fishko:

When artists and creators had been presenting these challenges for a while, to look for a new approach to a visual structure you could walk over to the Eiffel Tower, for example, which had already knocked people for a loop in 1889.

 

Speaker 26:

It's just that I would like to go up in it to see what it looks like from the inside.

 

Speaker 27:

[Foreign Language 00:14:34].

 

Sara Fishko:

If you were in Paris in the late 1880s you were for it or against it. It was what is now seen as an early Modernist masterpiece, that tall tower built by Gustav Eiffel out of around 18000 pre-constructed interchangeable parts. It had been built as a temporary thing to dress up the universal exhibition.

 

Speaker 28:

We are here to see an iconic structure, which is much talked about, so we don't mind waiting the two hours probably today because only the one lift is working.

 

Sara Fishko:

The line to climb the Eiffel Tower snakes around, and packs the plaza in front of the tower, pretty much every day.

 

Speaker 28:

Probably it's a wonder of the world, so we just want to see what it looks like.

 

Sara Fishko:

People pouring in and out of the lift to the top-

 

Speaker 29:

[Foreign Language 00:15:20].

 

Sara Fishko:

... eager to see the Paris rooftops from the tower's height of about 81 stories.

 

Speaker 29:

[Foreign Language 00:15:26] exhibition shops [Foreign Language 00:15:29].

 

Sara Fishko:

You could not escape the tower, or the late Robert Hughes, in his book The Shock of the New. It was, and is, the one structure that can be seen from every point in the city. The tower became the symbol of Paris overnight, and in doing so it proclaimed, [Foreign Language 00:15:47], the City of Lights, to be the monument's capital.

 

Sara Fishko:

Ann Temkin of the Museum of Modern Art says, the tower then the tallest manmade structure in the world, was a catalyst for all kinds of debates and emotions about modernity.

 

Ann Temkin:

Do you know that over 30 million people went to Paris that Summer in 1889 to see this universal exhibition? I mean, imagine in the 19th century, 30 million people getting themselves to Paris. I think it was 200 acres of Paris were overtaken with special exhibitions about modern technology, modern design, of course, modern art.

 

Sara Fishko:

The Eiffel Tower remained the tallest structure in the world until 1930 when it was supplanted by the Chrysler building. You can imagine how invigorating it must have been to see a display of such scope and currency, and how terrifying. It makes you understand that not every artist could embrace the present in that period and into the future. There were other ways to respond to change and the growth of cities and technology that had overtaken the culture.

 

Ann Temkin:

So you think of somebody like Van Gogh going down to the South of France. I mean, if you look at Van Gog's paintings you would have no idea there were trains, and steam engines, and factories and so on. And that wasn't far enough for Goghan, he had to take himself to Tahiti. I think the greatest example of this is the Monet water lilies paintings that Monet painted in his garden for 20 years throughout the teens and the '20s. You know, this absolutely natural paradise-like subject in the middle of all this change.

 

Ann Temkin:

And that the same time that Monet was off in his garden, yes, you had the Futurists painting trains, and cars, and machines, and scenes of war, and many other artists as well thrusting that new environment into their work.

 

Sara Fishko:

More on the Futurists later. Meanwhile, back at the Eiffel Tower, do visitors know its history, when it was built, that it was created not by an artist, or an architect, but by an engineer? By the time it was introduced to Paris, pre Wright brothers, only a handful of builders and climbers had ever been up that high. It provided a new vantage point from which to observe the world.

 

Sara Fishko:

Here on the ground, still waiting in line, a group of 18 from India.

 

Speaker 30:

We know it was made for exhibition at some point of time to be demolished after the exhibition. But somehow people liked it, and in the beginning there was a reaction I think that it's not so good. And then once you see the thing, you probably like it, so that it stayed around.

 

Sara Fishko:

It's true. There were massive protests from artists and non-artists alike who feared the Tower would be a hideous blight on the beautiful city of Paris, even after it was built they protested. Popular writer Gide [Foreign Language 00:18:47] famously ate lunch at the base of the Tower every day. He said it was the only place in Paris he could have lunch where he didn't have to look at the Eiffel Tower.

 

Speaker 30:

Yeah, it looked ugly to people in the beginning, and once you start looking at the same thing you probably start liking it I think.

 

Sara Fishko:

It looks ugly at the beginning, but then you look at it, and you look at it, and you start to like it. The story of culture shock. The story of Modernism in a nutshell.

 

Ann Temkin:

So much of Modernism, whether you're listening to is, or reading it, or seeing it, initially is ugly because I think one way of defining beauty in a funny way is the familiar. What's beautiful to you is what you recognize, what you know, and what's ugly is what you can't fit into your expectation of what something should look like and sound like.

 

Ann Temkin:

And so, invariably, throughout the course of this 100 year period, whether we're talking about paintings by Matisse, or various concerts, various books, the critics' initial reaction, let along the general public's was, "This is absolute baloney."

 

Sara Fishko:

Which brings us back to Marcel Duchamp, by any critic's standards one of history's most brilliant and persuasive baloney makers. Duchamp, having rocked the art world with his Cubist Futurist painting of a well-concealed descending nude, pretty much gave up painting all together in favor of something he called a ready-made.

 

Marcel Duchamp:

Ready-made. I claim that word for ready-made objects, which are designated as works of art by simply signing them.

 

Sara Fishko:

The artist talked about it later in an interview.

 

Marcel Duchamp:

The first one was in 1913. It was a bicycle wheel, an ordinary, the bicycle wheel on a stand. I would turn it as I passed by. The movement of it would be like a fire in a fireplace, you know, it has that attraction of something moving in the room while you think about something else.

 

Sara Fishko:

They, the ready-mades were an entirely new idea of what art could be, things, objects. You could buy them, sign them, and put them on a pedestal like a piece of sculpture. Money was not the issue, and neither was artistry as it had been understood up to that moment.

 

Marcel Duchamp:

Then the second one was a bottle dryer, you know they have in cellars, in the French cellars. And then the third one was a snow shovel, which I'd bought in a hardware shop. And it's now ... One replica of it is in Yale.

 

Sara Fishko:

The most famous ready-made was a porcelain urinal called Fountain.

 

Ann Temkin:

A word that's very in fashion at this moment, a kind made up word, is de-skilling, de dash skilling.

 

Sara Fishko:

Ann Temkin.

 

Ann Temkin:

So it's artists who make work, obviously de-emphasizing skill and emphasizing something else. Emphasizing in fact a kind of ostentatious lack of skill. So, that's a very 2012 usage and it goes back particularly to this moment in 1912/13.

 

Sara Fishko:

It goes back to Duchamp really, one the earliest de-skillers you could say.

 

Ann Temkin:

For Duchamp, if what doesn't matter is how well you can draw a line, or how beautifully you can mix oil paints, which basically anybody can learn to do. His point, which has had umpteen kinds of spin-offs in the time since, is what counts is the statement. And if it actually took no skill at all, who cares?

 

Sara Fishko:

That's a hard thing to understand right now, let alone in 1913. And throughout the years following Duchamp's mind was on fire.

 

Marcel Duchamp:

I call it The Reciprocal Ready-Made. You take a painting by Rembrandt, and instead of looking at it you use it plainly as an ironing board. You iron your clothes on it. So it becomes a ready-made, a reciprocal.

 

Speaker 31:

It'd be rather hard on the Renoir.

 

Marcel Duchamp:

It is, but we had to be. I can not [inaudible 00:23:21] them.

 

Sara Fishko:

Duchamp thought adventurously in sound too. This is a composition of his from our year 1913. You're listening to WNYC's Culture Shock 1914. I'm Sara Fishko, coming up Sigmund Freud complicates the picture and Arnold Schoenberg sparks a riot. Back in a minute.

 

Sara Fishko:

I'm Sara Fishko. This WNYC's Culture Shock 1913, looking at that landmark cultural year, and the many things leading up to its calendar of unsettling events. So you have to ask, what had happened to the culture to allow and encourage these powerful art excursions into new territory, what was going on. You could say European culture in general was in a state of shock.

 

Phillipp Blom:

I think it was a shock.

 

Sara Fishko:

Phillipp Blom, whose book about pre-World War 1 Europe is called the Vertigo Years, maintains this era threw people off balance. It was exhilarating, but also dizzying to witness so much dramatic change so fast.

 

Phillipp Blom:

The realities on the ground had become completely different. Where there had been a city of 100,000 there was now a city of two million. Where your parents had worked in a rhythm that was dictated by weeks, you were now in a rhythm that was dictated by minutes because you had to clock-in, and the telephone rang, and things like that.

 

Frederic Morton:

Nothing traditional really makes sense any more, and satisfies any more.

 

Sara Fishko:

Frederic Morton wrote Thunder at Twilight about 1913 and 14 in Vienna.

 

Frederic Morton:

There is something other that is real. So, Picasso's Cubism and the Italian Futurism, and later on the Soviet Russian Constructivism, they were all related. Not the things that we have seen until and that we have seen on canvasses, or that we heard on concert halls. It does not respond to our real needs.

 

Sara Fishko:

There were complicated needs brought about by even more complicated internal revelations.

 

Phillipp Blom:

Think of Freud who said that your sexual impulses that are repressed because you have to be a decent person, you can't be seen to covet someone, you can't be behaving in a way that is not acceptable to society. Well that's actually bad for you, and you should learn to get in touch with those urges, and you should accept the fact that children have sexual thoughts. These were frightening things. These were terrible things at the time. I think they are still frightening and rather terrible to some people today.

 

Sara Fishko:

And even this science, which was introducing those terrifying ideas for the first time, had its own factions and uncertainties right at that moment. The Austrian neurologist and the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung had been excitedly corresponding and comparing notes on practices, problems and dreams.

 

Diane Freemont:

Jung was very interested in dreams, he was very interested in his own dreams.

 

Sara Fishko:

Later, Jungian analyst, Diane Freemont notes Freud and Jung traveled together.

 

Diane Freemont:

Then on this trip to America they were analyzing each other's dreams, and disagreeing about how to analyze them.

 

Sara Fishko:

That was in 1909. By 1913 they found themselves in the same room at the same time at the Fourth International Psychoanalytic Conference. It was September of 1913.

 

Frederic Morton:

Oh, of course, I mean that was the time of the great civil war within psychoanalysis. Jung really, for the first time, came out against Freud. That Psychoanalytic Congress in Munich really produced a show down between the two.

 

Speaker 37:

I couldn't agree with quite a number of his ideas.

 

Sara Fishko:

Carl Jung was interviewed about Freud many years later.

 

Carl Jung:

Well, chiefly it is his purely personal approach, and his disregard of the historical conditions of man. [crosstalk 00:28:24]

 

Sara Fishko:

There's no question that the presence of two ambitious thinkers, studying and writing, and attending conferences, and arguing about the unconscious mind, and dreams, and sexual impulses, had a profound effect. The thinking of both them was radical.

 

Eric Candell:

Up until about 1850 the sort of dominant view was the view of the Enlightenment, the age of reason, which in its extreme form thought of human beings as being very specially created by God to be rational creatures, and to be guided by deep insight.

 

Sara Fishko:

Neuroscientist and Nobel Laureate Doctor Eric Candell says this long-held view was challenged by Modernism.

 

Eric Candell:

Modernists were influenced by Darwin who argued that human beings were not specially created, but evolved from simple animal ancestors. And there was very good evidence through the work of Freud that human beings were not completely rational, but driven importantly by unconscious instincts, as Darwin had suggested and as Freud elaborated.

 

Sara Fishko:

This radical re-thinking that had come about at the end of the 19th Century, and the earliest years of the 20th was now building, and it was reflected in the art.

 

Diane Freemont:

Many artists and writers were reading Freud and Jung, and reading psychological work. So there was an inter-fermentation, I think, certainly in the culture at that time. And there was much less delineation between art, writing, literature, psychology. Jung had these conferences yearly where scientists, artists, writers, everyone would come together and talk about ideas.

 

Eric Candell:

They were coffee houses that had very important social roles, where people of different disciplines met. And people were less afraid of artists speaking with scientists, and vice versa.

 

Sara Fishko:

Just around this time, composer Arnold Schoenberg wrote to his friend, the painter, Kandinsky, "Art," he said, "belongs to the unconscious." On to Vienna where a Schoenberg scandal was about to erupt.

 

Speaker 39:

First of all I'd like to welcome all of you here, and thank you very much for visiting our house. We are standing right in the middle of the so-called Musikverein already because normally [crosstalk 00:30:41].

 

Sara Fishko:

I'm with a group taking a tour of Vienna's greatest, most historic concert hall, The Musikverein. They're doing a little construction here but you can still see the massive amounts of gold leaf. I feel the great history of the place. Johannes Brahms was the director here in the 19th century. Every great international concert artist has performed here. In fact this is the place where, every new year's eve, for the last century and more, Viennese waltzes have rung out the old and rung in the new.

 

Sara Fishko:

But Magdelena [Manhara 00:31:16], our tour guide says people still talk about what happened in this very spot in March of 1913.

 

Magdelena Manha:

The most famous incident is the ... we call it [Foreign Language 00:31:25], in English means if you slap somebody's face. It happened in 1913 when Vienna Philharmonic-

 

Sara Fishko:

The slap in the face was mutual. The audience felt slapped in the face by the face by the music. The conductor, Arnold Schoenberg, was almost slapped in the face by the audience not long after he got on stage to conduct a performance of music of his own, as well as pieces by his colleagues Berg and Webern.

 

Sara Fishko:

After a short time, there were protests in this bastion of respectable classical music. Music critic, Alex Ross.

 

Alex Ross:

It had to be stopped, the uproar was too extreme. Fights had broken out, the police were called because it really had dissolved completely into chaos.

 

Sara Fishko:

And the golden hall of the Musikverein was cleared of all audience members by a combination of police, firefighters and other officials who sensed a-

 

Magdelena Manha:

[crosstalk 00:32:28].

 

Sara Fishko:

... riot in the making. Schoenberg was almost linched. People climbing on stage. Supporters and opponents of the music arguing aggressively.

 

Magdelena Manha:

It was the most famous scandal of the beginning of the 20th century. It filled newspapers for weeks. [crosstalk 00:32:44].

 

Sara Fishko:

Tourists may chuckle about it now, but in 1913 it was very serious business. But, as dramatic as it sounds, it had building up to this point for a while. What Schoenberg, Berg and Webern were doing, the music that provoked what is now known as the Skandalkonzert of 1913 was an extension of a breaking apart of tradition that had started a while back.

 

Jeremy D.:

Especially in the decade of the 1880s.

 

Sara Fishko:

Audiences were already starting to feel a certain unease about some departures from tradition, particular chords and musical combinations.

 

Jeremy D.:

That was the period when Liszt was writing his final works, Debussy was beginning to explore these new areas of harmony.

 

Sara Fishko:

"And they floated around tonality in a new way," says Pianist Jeremy [Danck 00:33:35]

 

Jeremy D.:

Until the harmony is floating completely away. You would never do ... in that music. It never ... Ah, it's like the antithesis of that music is to resolve it. It's about something else.

 

Jeremy D.:

But it was really not until the very beginning of the 20th century that audiences began to perceive this new harmonic language, and began to take fright at it, in a sense.

 

Sara Fishko:

Schoenberg and his colleagues were using a free atonal style, which later evolved into his famous 12 tone system in which, as he said, "The notes were related only to each other rather than to a particular key." In 1913 his radical Pierrot Lunaire was heard in Berlin. His massive cantata Gurre-Lieder was heard in Vienna. And then this Skandalkonzert in which public sentiment was so super-charged, and so anti-Schoenberg, the concert was stopped in the first half hour.

 

Allen Shawn:

I think part of it is actually that Schoenberg has a complete language in this works.

 

Sara Fishko:

Composer and Schoenberg biographer, Allen Shawn.

 

Allen Shawn:

The coherence, the density, the quality of it makes it kind of monolithic. If you don't enter it, you don't enter it. You know?

 

Sara Fishko:

The abandonment of conventional musical rules was a shock even for the people rating the music. They had left tonality and couldn't turn back. And especially, Anton Webern felt it acutely.

 

Allen Shawn:

Webern uses the word 'panic' about that moment in their work when they realized that it, no longer, actually was true to the piece to pretend that it had been tonal. To simply display a tonal coat of arms, to use Schoenberg's phrase, at the end of a piece when it hasn't been tonal at any other point felt dishonest and ridiculous.

 

Sara Fishko:

Like an artificial façade perhaps.

 

Phillipp Blom:

There seems to have been a great preoccupation with facades and what's behind them.

 

Sara Fishko:

Philipp Blom, author of The Vertigo Years.

 

Phillipp Blom:

So, already you had a feeling of a disjunction between what was shown and what was actually happening behind that. And you see that. You see that very strongly in the writings of Sigmund Freud for instance who, of course, writes about that you say the bourgeois façades that we have to put on. They may actually be bad for us. And any way, they don't represent what's really going on inside us. And that is something that you see very strongly in the art of that time, that people try to look behind the façade of a tradition at what is really functioning, how things really work.

 

Phillipp Blom:

And you can think of Schoenberg in that context and think, "Well, he really wanted to break down music to its constituent's elements." But you also see the early architecture that does that. You say, "Let's get rid of this façade. Let's just expose the functional elements of a building." You say that in painting where, as it were, the paintings are stripped down right to the bare minimum.

 

Sara Fishko:

After the Skandalkonzert of March 1913, Arnold Schoenberg stood firm, says Cellist Fred Sherry.

 

Fred Sherry:

Schoenberg, of all the composers, never retraced his steps. As soon as he wrote a piece, the next piece was already evolving, it had already taken place.

 

Sara Fishko:

It's a real question, where does an artist get the courage to go out on a limb? For Schoenberg there were many factors Alex Ross believes.

 

Alex Ross:

You have the musical pressure toward innovation, toward experimentation, Schoenberg's sense of wanting to catch up the painters and poets around him. That's certainly one factor. The sense of being a young Jewish man in Vienna at a time when anti-Semitism was on the rise. But it was certainly not a cold and calculated act. Nor was he any kind of provocateur, he was an incredibly serious man. A man deeply devoted to classical traditionally.

 

Sara Fishko:

But a man committed to the new, his way into the new.

 

Alex Ross:

I would say he is the most radical thinker of this entire period. And there's no doubt in mind, you know, of the two great riots that occurred in the year 1913, the Schoenberg riot in Vienna, March 31st, was the more severe, the more serious, the more violent. That was a real break. That was a real confrontation between a composer and the audience, many of whom very strongly rejected what he was proposing.

 

Sara Fishko:

These confrontations do happen in this year, all over. Coming up fulminating Futurists, shattered syntax, and the riot over the Rite of Spring. Back in a minute.

 

Sara Fishko:

I'm Sara Fishko and you're listening to WNYC's Culture Shock 1913 exploring the astonishing explosion of, then shocking, modernist ideas, and creative works, in that early 20th century period.

 

Leon Botstein:

So you have to look at what happened in 1913 in a generational manner. People born all around the same time, came of age confronting a set of common problems.

 

Sara Fishko:

Conductor and educator, Leon Botstein.

 

Leon Botstein:

In the same way we talk about ... You know we read in the paper all the time about how our life is going to change because there's Facebook, and there's the internet, and cellphone, these people did it all the time. There's electric light, there was the automobile, there was much more than a cellphone. And people were ... the elevator, and people were telling them that, you know, forget what you know, it's going to be irrelevant.

 

Sara Fishko:

Forget what you know. That was certainly how the Italian Futurists looked at it. Luigi Russolo created The Art of Noise. "Silence," he said, "was a 19th century thing."

 

Otto Mergin:

He developed these Intonarumori, or noise intoners.

 

Sara Fishko:

NYU Italian Studies Professor, Otto Mergin.

 

Otto Mergin:

In order to experiment with various sounds, many of which were drawn from the urban environment.

 

Sara Fishko:

Russolo and his compatriots were eager to bury the past, burn the old paintings, shatter the quiet of the past century. Many miles away, Russian Futurism was alive as well. Velimir Khlebnikov, futurist poet wrote, "We rang for room service and the year 1913 answered. It gave planet earth a valiant new race of people, the heroic futurians." Russian painter Kazimir Malevich painted the first black square painting in 1913. Just that, a black square on a white background. He was the founder of the abstract art movement known as Suprematism.

 

Ann Temkin:

Within all of these isms, the individual artists have very distinct voices.

 

Sara Fishko:

Museum of Modern Art curator, Ann Temkin.

 

Ann Temkin:

However, one thing that I think was important to all of these artists was that the value was placed on being new. And this is an absolute contradiction to what the 19th academic tradition would have been, which is to do what the people before you were doing, perfectly or even better.

 

Sara Fishko:

Just to excel in what you were taught, and conform to what you were taught had been enough before this.

 

Ann Temkin:

And instead, with Modernism, the idea was absolutely toss away what it is one would have been taught in school, and invent something that nobody in the world had thought up before you thought it up.

 

Karen Ludwig:

What is the use of a violent kind of delightful ness if there is no pleasure in not getting tired of it? The question does not come before there is quotation. In any kind of place there is a [crosstalk 00:42:50].

 

Sara Fishko:

Joyce was working on Ulysses, Kafka, Proust and [Pound 00:42:53] were working on soon to be celebrated works. And Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons, just written in 1912, was about to be published. And the fragments that were finding their way into paintings and music were affecting structure, and sound, and syntax.

 

Karen Ludwig:

... is to slip away, and wear it, and then be reckless. Be reckless and resolved on returning gratitude.

 

Sara Fishko:

In Tender Buttons, Stein's words shatter structure.

 

Karen Ludwig:

Any neglect of many particles to a cracking, any neglect of this makes around it what is lead in color, and certainly discolor, in silver.

 

Charles B.:

So in this poem she really invents wordiness.

 

Sara Fishko:

Poet and teacher, Charles Bernstein.

 

Charles B.:

You feel the words themselves stripped of, or liberated from their burden of representation, or the necessity for them to function as representations. So, what would it be like for language to convey just its own verbal ness, it's wordiness?

 

Karen Ludwig:

... all this, altogether made address. And suppose it was actual, suppose the mean way to state it was occasional. If you suppose this in August, and even more melodiously, if you suppose this in even the necessary-

 

Sara Fishko:

Stein continued along these lines for decades, and it still sounded new much later, as in If I Told Him, a completed portrait of Picasso, which Stein herself recorded in the '30s.

 

Gertrude Stein:

And he and, as he and he. He is and, as he is and, as he is and he is, he is and as he and he, and as he is and he-

 

Sara Fishko:

They were the same familiar individual words combined and manipulated so as to catch the ear in a completely new way, which leads us to the Rite of Spring.

 

Sara Fishko:

The most famous bassoon solo in the history of music, even just that played in the extreme high register of an instrument known best for its lowness was enough to send chills up the spines of the privileged audience hearing its legendary first performance in Paris that Spring of 1913.

 

Sara Fishko:

The famous first night of the Ballets Russes production of the Rite of Spring is probably the best known cultural reset, the best known one night revolution ever. Its kind of before and after status has put it in a special touchstone category.

 

Leon Botstein:

The famous event in all of 1913 artistic history which-

 

Sara Fishko:

Leon Botstein who has been giving lectures lately about the score and the scandal-

 

Leon Botstein:

The year of the Rite of Spring.

 

Sara Fishko:

... says its hard to remember a time when art made a difference, which on that night it certainly did.

 

Leon Botstein:

And then people were actually scandalized by what they considered to be an offensive artistic pretense. So, it's fascinating to look back at a time where people got upset about what music was being written. And the response was either to ignore it, or just to shut it off.

 

Sara Fishko:

"They couldn't shut it off on May 29th, 1913, at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris; Not the music by Stravinsky, not the costumes and scenic design by Nicholas Roerich, not the choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky," says New York writer and author Joan [Accacello 00:46:20].

 

Joan A.:

It could not have been more anti-balletic, more different from ballet if it had tried.

 

Sara Fishko:

Ballet, in the late 19th century was fluid and beautiful. It was defined by a soft, curving style.

 

Joan A.:

You can think of the music in that way, but also the ballet with the beautifully curved arms, the beautifully separated fingers. All of this is rounded, gradual, sweet, lyrical. It looks like ... Well, I mean in the crudest case, it looks like something that would be on the cover of a card, a greeting card.

 

Sara Fishko:

In the Rite of Spring, the dancing and the music were perfect examples of that moment's interest in what was then called Primitivism.

 

Joan A.:

It involved bent knees, feet either straight forward or turned in, pigeon toe, shuffling, jumping on flat feet. Well, nobody had ever seen anything like it before.

 

Sara Fishko:

Empty stage. That doesn't happen very often.

 

Sara Fishko:

Looking around inside the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées where it all happened is like walking on hallowed ground knowing that the flat feet, bent knees and audience apoplexy played out right here.

 

Michel Franck:

And you don't have a single straight line. Everything is round and curved.

 

Sara Fishko:

Michel Franck is the director of the theater now, and he lives with this history.

 

Michel Franck:

In one day the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées went world famous. That was a kind of turning point. Everything was different after Rite of Spring.

 

Sara Fishko:

The theater itself had just opened in April of that year, and even the place itself had generated controversy. A far cry from the highly decorated Garnier opera. It had simple lines, nothing ornate about it. Built of concrete, with large areas encased in French white marble. And it was, and is, on the ritziest street in the Western part of Paris.

 

Michel Franck:

We are located on the Avenue Montaigne where you've got all the luxury brands are located here, as Dior, and Vuitton, and Chanel. So, it was already like this at the beginning of the century. The rich part of Paris, near the Champs-Élysées, the audience was already of the upper class definitely.

 

Sara Fishko:

Not that they felt especially compelled to behave in an elegant fashion at the theater that night.

 

Speaker 52:

[Foreign Language 00:48:56]. (Laughing).

 

Sara Fishko:

The shocking premiere has been dramatized in several movies, including the pretty trashy Herbert Ross biopic Nijinsky.

 

Speaker 53:

[Foreign Language 00:49:11].

 

Joan A.:

We are told that poor Nijinsky stood in the wings screaming the counts to the dancers because the noise in the theater was so loud that the dancers could not hear the orchestra. That is the story.

 

Speaker 55:

Let the performance ... Let the performance continue!

 

Sara Fishko:

So, how to understand an audience making this scene.

 

Joan A.:

There is a continuing controversy about what the riot was really over, the music or the choreography.

 

Sara Fishko:

Joan Accacello says, Stravinsky wrote in an early memoir that he thought it was about the choreography of course.

 

Joan A.:

He said that Nijinsky was ignorant music, the choreography was bad, and that this is what the riot was over. Many people feel, on the contrary, that what sparked the riot was really the music. And the kind of primitive stuff ...

 

Alex Ross:

This rhythm, this pulsing rhythm ...

 

Joan A.:

People ... I think their jaws dropped over this.

 

Alex Ross:

Accents keep landing in different places.

 

Sara Fishko:

Author and critic, Alex Ross.

 

Alex Ross:

What we now think it is this enormous vitality. But at the time I think it must have seemed like this really alien force bearing down on the audience, and they rebelled.

 

Sara Fishko:

And then there was the response to the dissenters who were making so much noise.

 

Alex Ross:

Protesting, mumbling, muttering, whistling. The enthusiasts struck back very loudly, very violently. After a certain point people couldn't even have been listening to the music.

 

Sara Fishko:

From the diaries of Count Harry Kessler, Paris, May 29th, 1913. "In the evening the premiere of The Rite of Spring. A thoroughly new vision. Something never before seen," he writes, "Enthralling, persuasive. A new kind of wildness both un-art and art at the same time. The public ... The most elegant house I have ever seen in Paris was from the beginning restless, laughing, whistling, making jokes. Here and there some stood up."

 

Sara Fishko:

Kessler goes on to describe quarreling in the load between the composer Debussy and the Italian writer and nationalist D'Annunzio. As arguments of loud clapping and stomping broke out, "The dancers," he wrote, "without flinching danced fervently in a prehistoric fashion."

 

Sara Fishko:

That eyewitness account tells us something about what this particular museum director, patron and patriot thought at the time. And we know that some of the people responsible for the production were not all that upset.

 

Leon Botstein:

Certainly, [Deogalif 00:52:18], the promoter was thrilled. I mean, scandal is good. I wish for scandal. I wish desperately that every concert I give would anger somebody.

 

Sara Fishko:

Conductor Leon Botstein.

 

Leon Botstein:

Outrage someone.

 

Tim Page:

Stravinsky tried on a lot of different hats over the years.

 

Sara Fishko:

Writer and USC Professor Tim Page.

 

Tim Page:

But I don't think he ever got quite as completely radical and shocking as he did with Rite of Spring.

 

Tim Page:

And audiences love it because it's a sensual thrill. It makes a racket. It is absolutely riveting to listen to. Because he was writing movie music before there were movies. It was a scenario.

 

Sara Fishko:

Even the composer himself wasn't sure exactly where the score came from.

 

Tim Page:

And you can really believe Stravinsky when he said, he was just sitting there and this music just seemed to visit him. It seemed to come through him from some unknown source.

 

Tim Page:

It's just extraordinary to think about him sitting there and creating this piece bar by bar.

 

Fred Sherry:

I got a chance to see a copy of the manuscript of the Rite of Spring.

 

Sara Fishko:

Cellist, Fred Sherry.

 

Fred Sherry:

And you could see how fast Stravinsky wrote that because its like you see in some Bach manuscripts that the way he wrote is on a slant like he couldn't write fast enough. Just writing it in this slant because the music is facing forward even on the page.

 

Fred Sherry:

And after it was done, he never stopped tinkering with it. Every time you'll say, "Oh he'd conduct company because that [inaudible 00:54:26], no that Timpani note. But you put it here. There must have been that he heard like, "Why didn't I do that?" And the answer is, he wrote it too fast to even be able to think about some of the niceties of editing.

 

Sara Fishko:

Although everyone agrees that one of its contributions is editing, the way it brazenly moves from one section to the next. This is a piece of music that simply cuts to where it wants to be, and hang the transitions, it is pretty shocking.

 

Sara Fishko:

As for that riotous first night, you have to figure the Parisians affection for scandal must have played a role too. Because after giving six performances of The Rite the Ballets Russes moved on and went to the Drury Lane Theater in London where the British audience gave the ballet a measured reception with polite applause.

 

Sara Fishko:

And the fact is, after the initial shock, people fell in love with the music. Even the French. Later Disney used it, film composers copied it.

 

Speaker 59:

Fredo.

 

Sara Fishko:

You can find it hidden in plain sight in any number of the most beloved movie scores including Godfather Two.

 

Speaker 59:

Fredo.

 

Sara Fishko:

But it is revered still. The Eiffel Tower principle applies once again. People thought it was ugly, then they kept hearing it. And then after a while they admired it. This is a cultural moment full of that kind of shock.

 

Sara Fishko:

And of course the next chapter of the story would take us to World War I. In fact, 1913 is of even greater interest because it came just before 1914, and that most earth shaking and world changing event.

 

Sara Fishko:

The French poet Char [Paggee 00:56:30] didn't even know it was coming when he said, in our year 1912, and I quote, "The world has changed less since the time of Jesus Christ than it has in the last 30 years."

 

Ann Temkin:

It's interesting to me to hear that quote because I think I hear people say that so much today about even the last decade, that what has happened, essentially digitally has so completely transformed our world. And certainly, one of the things that Modernism, with a capital M, has in common with whatever we are today is the underlying anxiety.

 

Phillipp Blom:

Today there is a multitude of power centers and possibilities, and social visions, and market economic ideas. And we don't know who or what will win. That was very much something that I think people before the first world war also felt. They felt there were all these forces swirling around, and they didn't know which one would really dominate, and which one would be sucked under again.

 

Phillipp Blom:

And then, of course, there's the historical change that we've had to come to terms with. A complete change in our societies in their social structure. All that has happened in the last four or five generations. And we still have so much to digest from the century that preceded us.

 

Sara Fishko:

So maybe this is our time to process the last decades and the last century. It could be we're about to experience the next great cultural explosion when artists, as they did a century ago, help us sort it out with sometimes shocking results.

 

Sara Fishko:

You've been listening to Culture Shock 1913, which was produced at WNYC. Associate Producer was Laura Mayer. Editor was Karen Frillmann. Mix Engineer was Wayne Shulmister, with additional mixing by Edward Haber. Our intern was Carla Greene. We had invaluable help from Frederic Castel, and Evan Spritzer in Paris, and Kerry Skyring in Vienna. Gertrude Stein readings were by Karen Ludwig.

 

Sara Fishko:

Special thanks to WNYC colleagues, Dean Cappello, Chris Bannon and Kathleen Erlich. I'm Sara Fishko.

 

Speaker 12:

When you set out to challenge all the established values your means were shock. You shocked the Cubists, you shocked the public, you shocked the buying public.

 

Marcel Duchamp:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yes.

 

Speaker 12:

Do you think the public can be shocked anymore by anything .

 

Speaker 12:

No, no. Finish. Finish. That's over. You cannot shock a public.

 

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