Modern art began in France in the decades following the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. Its emergence was a symptom of radical changes taking place as European culture. This was a time when Europe engaged with issues arising from the emergence of modern secularism and from new disciplines that emphasized ‘hidden’ impersonal modes of causation – such as unconscious drives and social forces beyond the influence of the individual. Throughout the following period there were disruptions in all forms of representation and expression – in literary syntax, in pictorial form, in musical tonality, in dance, in theatre and in architecture. Many of these artistic innovations were inspired by ideas derived from an occult underground itself linked to a popular literary subculture of fantasy and the fantastic.
In the course of its evolution this revolutionary artistic tendency (the tradition of the avant-garde), which began with the Naturalists and the Impressionists and culminated in the aesthetic nihilism of Dada, adopted a bewildering diversity – it generated apparently contradictory theories and dogmas, styles and anti-styles. However, beneath this surface diversity lay one single, unifying factor – the source of all modernist iconoclasm, outrage and provocation: the recognition of the existence of unconscious mental processes. All of the avant-garde movements and breakaway groups were essentially anti-rational and anti-academic. All of them – from Impressionism and Decadence to Symbolism and Expressionism – stemmed from a dawning concern with the irrational and the psychic, with the inner landscape and the inner complexities of modern existence. This is usually the case even if, as in the cases of the Naturalists and the Impressionists the artworks themselves showed a preoccupation with the veridical representation of external realities.
Following a general evaporation of traditional religious observance, the gradual discovery of the existence of the unconscious mind encouraged poets, artists and philosophers to confront a domain of human experience previously the reserve of the priesthood; a world of organic irrationalism, myth and the supernatural. This world provided a unique source of vitality but it also meant that artists found themselves in strange company, occupying as they did an axial position in relation to similar or parallel developments in other spheres. Nationalism, anarchism, fascism, occultism, orientalism and reactionary neo-traditionalism were all contemporary, intertwined phenomena crowding to fill a void of alienation created by the advancement of science, industrialization, increased urbanization and new methods of textual criticism that cast doubt on the traditional reading and validity of sacred books.
In official circles in the French Third Republic the traumas of both the 1789 Revolution and the Franco Prussian War stimulated the implementation of a programmatic, scientific ‘Modernization’ policy. A strong, secular republic was seen as a perquisite for rebuilding a unified society, a society capable of competing with the continuing external threat from Germany and meeting the challenges of the modern world. One sign of this new policy was the foundation of the journal L’Annee Sociologique (1896) edited by sociologist Emile Durkheim. Durkheim developed his ideas of collective representation, ‘social structuring’ and ‘structural determinism’ (Thompson) in order to analyze the multi-layered complexities of modern (and pre-modern) societies and to provide a complete scientific explanation of all religious phenomena.
Durkhiem was opposed to both traditionalist conservative moral philosophy and the Utilitarian individualism of much contemporary political economics and social theory. In many European countries a continuing cultural struggle or Kulturkampf (to use a term from Germany where a Catholic activist attempted to assassinate Bismarck in 1874) characterized the later part of the nineteenth century. The rise of labour movements, the fight for women’s suffrage, the development of the sciences and the prevalence of anti-clerical policies (especially with regard to education and civil marriage) caused upheaval and conflict in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Germany. These were all countries at the forefront of radical, secessionist, anti-academic, modernist movements across all the arts, developing alongside official modernization policies. However, official intervention in the cultural sphere was primarily designed to promote nationalism as a secular religion, encouraging loyalty to the state, which meant that the alternative cultural paradigm of the artistic radicals was usually in conflict with both secular and religious authorities.
In this historical setting the rhetoric and mechanisms of ‘art’ were used to grapple with psycho-spiritual and existential problems which in previous epochs, or different societies, would have been the specialty of the tribal soul-doctor or shaman. So, during that era known as the fin-de-siecle, artists (often labeled maudits, pariahs and obscurantists) found themselves acting as shock-troops in a struggle to confront the alienation and nihilism of modern secular society. In the course of that struggle they redefined the role of artistic creativity in magical terms. They laid the foundations of the ‘modern’ sensibility and were the first to explore a world of relativism and indeterminacy – the world objectified in occult doctrine as The Abyss, the experience of which is called The Dark Night of the Soul – or rather The Dark Night of the Unconscious – or even, The Dark Night of Chaos.
The proliferation of occult organizations and theories at the social margins of the fin-de-siecle era co-existed and intermingled with the various strands of modernism, in poetry and in painting. Like all cultural processes the conjunction was not unprecedented. The artists and occultists of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were the figures who laid the foundations for contemporary developments but they themselves were building upon the earlier work of others. The usage of ‘occult’ factors in artistic activities can be traced back to the early Romantics: figures such as Novalis, Arnim and E. T. A. Hoffmann in Germany, Coleridge and Thomas De Quincey in England and Edgar Allan Poe in America. Among the French Romantics should be mentioned Balzac, Nerval, Esquiros and Nodier. But the most important of all was Baudelaire whose poetic works such as Les Fleurs du Mal were the first examples of truly ‘modern’ writing. It was Baudelaire’s followers – Rimbaud, Lautreamont, Mallarme, Huysmans, Laforgue, Jarry and Artaud who established and pursued the artistic tendency known as ‘The Experience of Limits’ tradition, who made the most significant contribution to modernist-magical poetic writing and exploration.
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AC Evans