Perhaps the most-often-quoted line concerning the origins of modernism comes from a 1924 lecture given by Virginia Woolf, who proclaimed that "on or about December 1910, human character changed." Provocative in its vagueness as much as its hyperbole, Woolf's statement was pointing toward the rich potential released in modernist explorations of consciousness, explorations that continue into the 21st century.
Over the past five decades, Gay has written landmark histories of the Enlightenment, Victorian culture, and Freudianism. "Modernism" is as ambitious as any of his books, ranging across literature, painting, architecture, music, drama, dance, design, and film. After conceding the impossibility of a comprehensive history of so many different genres, Gay identifies two distinctive characteristics of modernism.
First, modernists self-consciously attempted, in the phrase of Ezra Pound, to "make it new," to reject prevailing standards of propriety and methods of expression and embrace heretical ideas and experimental techniques. Second, modernists' commitment to "self-scrutiny" led them to explore previously undiagnosed dimensions of subjectivity, including the fuzzy lines between love and hate, sex and death.
Modernism defies quick summary because it includes a vast cast of fascinating characters. Charles Baudelaire, Edouard Manet, and Oscar Wilde open Gay's account by thumbing their nose at convention. The self-conscious avant-garde he examines allied with one another only in their rebelliousness. Painters such as Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, and Vasili Kandinsky modified and eventually jettisoned representation. Novelists Woolf, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and Franz Kafka probed interiority to unprecedented depths. Composers Arnold Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky, and John Cage dispensed with conventional scales, harmonies, and even sound.
