The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God (15 page)

But Joe Andrew, professor of Russian literature at Keele University, adds that this “cult” went further than compassion, “for Chekhov believed especially in the individual’s potential for heroic action within his own life, which would in turn serve as an example.” He was all too well aware that few among his countrymen would share his views, or aspire to such heights. But he insisted that a start could be made, that there was much that the “concrete individual” could achieve in his own life. “First was the absolute necessity to abandon illusion, to realize the truth of one’s life and only then could one even think of worthwhile achievements.” As Andrew points out, “for all the gloominess of the endings of
Uncle Vanya
and
The Three Sisters
the characters left on stage—Vanya and Sonya and the three sisters—have at least made this crucial first step. . . . For Chekhov a very genuine form of heroism was to see the world as it is and still love it”—very similar to what Santayana was saying. Then the task is to transform one’s life, either by striving for inner freedom or by
practical
work for one’s fellow men. Giving in or giving up is not an option.
51

For Chekhov, there was no transcendental meaning to life. All one can do is give its arbitrary pattern a coherence by means of one’s
work and example
in the cause of humanity. “One must seek, seek on one’s own, all alone with one’s conscience”—this was the only faith on offer. He thought the very concept of “salvation” to be misguided and wrong, distracting us from improving our material conditions, which he found especially backward in Russia. Dostoevskian apocalyptics were for him beside the point. For him, we should not look into the distance, the distant future or
the afterlife, but instead concern ourselves with taking that first step
out and away
from our mediocrity. That way heroism lay—the small efforts involved in improving everyday life, for oneself and others; these actions were to be well understood
as
heroisms. At the same time, once that first step had been taken, who knows where else it might lead? His own life was testimony to that. But that first step had to be taken first. This is the beginning of heroism.

5

Visions of Eden: The Worship of Color, Metal, Speed and the Moment

P
ablo Picasso, the archetypal modern artist, was born in 1881. The first twenty-five years of his life witnessed the most astounding array of technological innovations the world had ever seen, innovations that shaped war and peace alike: the recoiling machine gun in 1882; the first synthetic fiber, 1883; the steam turbine, 1884; coated photographic paper, 1885; the electric motor, the Kodak box camera and the Dunlop pneumatic tire, 1888; cordite, 1889; the Diesel engine, 1892; the Ford car, 1893; the cinematograph and the gramophone record, 1894. The following year, Röntgen discovered X-rays, Marconi invented radiotelegraphy, the Lumière brothers introduced the movie camera, Freud published the first of his theories on hysteria and the unconscious. And so it went on—the discovery of radium, of the electron, the magnetic recording of sound, the first voice radio transmissions, the first powered flight, the special theory of relativity and the photon theory of light, the discovery of the gene. Together, they amounted to the greatest alteration in man’s view of the universe since Isaac Newton. As the French writer Charles Péguy put it in 1913: “The world has changed less since the time of Jesus Christ than it has in the last thirty years.”
1

Alongside these revolutionary changes, enacted primarily in Europe and America in the half-century between 1880 and 1930, took place one of the supreme cultural experiments in history. And if we accept that art then had a social importance it can no longer claim today, we should not
be surprised to find that it had quite a bit to say about how to live—how to live amid the new technology and the new world it was making, how to live in a world without God. A lot of it was
implied
in the paintings and sculpture of the time, but it was there, and there in abundance.

At the most basic level, with very few exceptions (Chagall, Rouault), the art of modernism was a secular art—religious themes are notable by their absence. In Robert Hughes’s seminal book
The Shock of the New
, for example, covering the period 1874–1991, of 268 illustrations, only nine could be considered religious (Munch’s
Madonna
, Gaudí’s cathedral in Barcelona, Rothko’s chapel on the grounds of the Menil Collection in Houston). Modern art is a celebration of the secular.

Though important, crucial even, this was not totally new. There had been no shortage of secular painting in the eighteenth or the nineteenth centuries. But what was new, what was a major break, occurred in painting with the innovations of Impressionism, the patchwork compositions of Cézanne, the Pointillism of Seurat and the Cubist works of Braque and Picasso. Here the very foundations of reality—of seeing, of understanding seeing—were being experimented with, just as the experiments in physics taking place at much the same time were yielding—in the X-ray, radio waves and the electron, for instance—new building blocks of nature. Painting was overwhelmed by these innovations: they changed the very idea of art and how we are to understand ourselves.

The church—God—had no part in this new self-understanding, which, taking a leaf out of the new sciences, was
experimental
in approach. Instead, the paintings of this half-century explored the constituent elements of visual experience—color, light, form—building innovation upon innovation in what was essentially an optimistic adulation of the new world coming into being at that time. Not everyone was equally optimistic, and some not at all, but on balance turn-of-the-century artists were exuberant about their new freedoms and luxuriated in the comforts newly available.

This is easy to overlook. The Impressionists and those who came immediately after them seemed entirely untroubled by the death of God.
This
life, in all its novelty (an inadequate word, trivializing what were transformative innovations), was more than sufficient. For them, as their paint
ings show, the conditions of the new life were bountiful, and for many that was enough.

AN UNTROUBLED SENSE OF WHOLENESS

Claude Monet was the most explicit. In 1892, the year Ellis Island became a reception center for immigrants to the United States and Tchaikovsky premiered his
Nutcracker
ballet, Monet rented a room opposite the west front of Rouen Cathedral. Over the following weeks he made around twenty paintings of the same façade under different conditions of light. “Certainly, he had no religious motive in painting the building. Monet was not a pious Frenchman. Never had so famous a religious object been treated in so secular a way.” Here was a Gothic cathedral, with all the lugubrious associations that went with the Middle Ages. But Monet’s brilliantly simple vision and his limpid technique implied that consciousness was more important than religion; his subject was not a view but the act of seeing that view, “a process of mind, unfolding subjectively, never fixed, always becoming.” The fixed certainties of religion, its fixed beauties, were—by this act—dispelled. Consciousness and the will were what counted. Religion, religious beauty, are a function of the human mind.
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Monet’s treatment of the great Parisian railroad stations was not dissimilar.
His
stations were not the ugly, dirty behemoths of an industrial world, but the locus of the dramas of departure and arrival. Here the excited worship of the locomotive and of the power and beauty of steam, out of which the paintings seem to be constructed, the new experience of travel that railways make possible, confirm the terminus as the new focus of cities, a position that cathedrals once occupied and around which life coalesces.

Later, after Monet moved into his property at Giverny and began to paint what he owned, he concentrated—as the world knows—on water lilies and his pond. The pond, as one critic saw, was a “slice of infinity.” “To seize the infinite; to fix what is unstable; to give form and location to sights so evanescent and complex that they could hardly be named—these were the basic ambitions of modernism, and they went against the smug view
of determined reality that materialism and positivism give us.”
3
Monet saw what Wallace Stevens was to put into words: that infinity is itself a poetic idea.

The secular world of pleasure—middle-class pleasure, not aristocratic—was nowhere better caught than by the Impressionists, whose first show, in 1874, preceded Nietzsche’s pronouncements by nearly a decade, though the ascendency of the secular world could already be seen everywhere. Alfred Sisley and Gustave Caillebotte, Degas, Pissarro and Renoir were each very different in artistic style, but they did have something in common. “It was a feeling that the life of the city and the village, the cafés and the bois, the salons and the bedrooms, the boulevards, the seaside and the banks of the Seine, could become a vision of Eden—a world of ripeness and bloom, projecting an untroubled sense of wholeness.” Yes, wholeness. In the Impressionist world God was not missed. More than that, the Impressionists showed us that pleasures, truths, are fugitive, evanescent, may not outlast the moment. In Impressionism there is no difference between the moment and eternity.

Seurat, however, wasn’t satisfied with the inherently fugitive nature of Impressionism. He wanted something more stable, even more monumental; and as a child of the nineteenth century, and in particular of the scientific-positivist nineteenth century, he wanted to bring science—or elements of science—into his art. Particle physics hadn’t yet emerged, but the periodic table had been established by the Russian Dmitri Mendeleev (in 1869), and the elements were regarded as the constituent units of reality—the building blocks of nature. Seurat attempted something parallel in his theory of Pointillism, based on published theories of color perception and organized around small dots of pure color that the eye converted into an image. The stipples were so small—little cells of color—that all manner of variations could be incorporated; Pointillism lent itself to calm, hieratic, luminous subjects rather than dramatic or violent ones.
4

Robert Hughes describes Seurat’s
Port of Gravelines Channel
(1890) as a “landscape of thought.” This landscape is notable for its complete lack of incident; its subject is light, the hazy luminosity of the north coast of France. A third of the picture is of the sky, the heavens, but for Seurat heaven is Gravelines itself on an afternoon such as this, when nothing
moves because everything is in its rightful place. Slow down, Seurat is saying to the spectator, slow down and stop, stop and
look
. Don’t let heaven pass you by.

This attitude is developed further in what is arguably his greatest work,
A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte
(1884–86). It is afternoon again, a
Sunday
afternoon. People are not at church, not worshipping. They are picnicking, promenading, sailing, playing, walking the dog, enjoying themselves and the weather—what the city and nature have to offer. To the right, near the foreground, stand a very fashionable couple, dressed in gray and black. Have they just been to church? They survey the scene from the (moral?) high ground, taking in the countless people enjoying themselves in very secular ways, most with their backs turned. But there is more context to this picture than in the view of Gravelines. This is a large painting, the size of history paintings in the French tradition, designed essentially for public contemplation. The painting is, if anything, overpopulated, but that serves only to emphasize that all the figures—the dandy with his cane, the girl skipping, the people lounging on the grass—are treated with a monumentality, a nobility and grace that were once reserved for gods and kings. This was an early sighting of what was to be a major theme in twentieth-century art, in writing as much as in painting—namely, the heroism of everyday life, particularly life in the city with all its tensions, antagonisms, brutalities and dirt. In
Sunday Afternoon
there is no tension, no dirt, no brutality.

But this vision of pleasure has a seriousness about it. “Seurat had grasped that there is something atomized, divided, and analytical about modernist awareness. . . . To build a unified meaning, in this state of extreme self-consciousness, meant that the subject had to be broken down into molecules and then re-assembled under the eye of formal order. Reality became permanent when it was displayed as a web of tiny, distinct stillnesses.”
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This prefigures T. S. Eliot’s admonition in “Ash Wednesday” (1930): “Teach us to sit still.”

COLOR AS MEANING

Matisse’s aims coincided with Monet’s and Seurat’s, and built on them. Born in 1869, the year the
Cutty Sark
was launched, he died in 1954, the year the first hydrogen bomb exploded at Bikini Atoll. He lived through some of the worst political traumas, but you would never know it from his art. Nowhere in Matisse does one feel the alienation or conflict that the modern world seems to have stimulated in so many. His studio was a “place of equilibrium” that for more than fifty years produced a world within a world, “images of comfort, refuge, and balanced satisfaction.” Much impressed by Manet and Cézanne (he bought one of the latter’s works very early on), he was also influenced by Seurat, becoming friends with Seurat’s closest follower, Paul Signac. Signac did several paintings of St. Tropez that were instrumental in attracting Matisse to the South of France—and the Mediterranean.

In particular he was very taken with one of Signac’s large works,
In the Time of Harmony
, which shows an Arcadia, a scene of “relaxation and farming by the sea,” a visualization of Signac’s anarchist beliefs. This seems to have been one of the inspirations for Matisse’s own
Luxe, Calme et Volupté
(1904–5), nudists picnicking by the sea near St. Tropez. It was, as Hughes has it, Matisse’s first attempt to depict the Mediterranean “as a state of mind.” Not long after, he produced the first of what would become a familiar motif—the sea, the Mediterranean, seen through a window. The bright, discordant—even garish—colors shocked many people to begin with, as did Matisse’s depiction of individuals in a pre-civilized world,
Eden before the Fall
, showing figures in their original state, languid as plants or unbridled as animals in the wild. In the two notable works he did for the Russian collector Sergey Shchukin,
The Dance
and
Music
, Matisse takes us back into deep antiquity, before even the red-figure vases of ancient Greece, all the way back to the caves. In the former painting he is showing us the ecstasy the ancients obtained from acts of primitive worship, and in the latter, a group of hunter-gatherers engaging in music and song, one of the basic pleasures of life that may have been born with religion. Here there is an overlap, knowing or not, with Laban.

The sensuality of such works is present in
The Red Studio
of 1911, a closed space in which the “windows” are provided by Matisse’s own paint
ings dotted about the walls. All have red in them so that, with the flat red of the studio walls which encompasses everything, this is red beyond ordinary experience. The loveliness of the whole is part of the point; this is a self-contained work, celebrating the self-contained world that art can offer, a “republic of pleasure, a parenthesis within the real world—a paradise.”
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During the war years Matisse moved to the South of France—the Mediterranean—and found a large studio in Nice from where he continued to produce paintings in which the common theme was “the act of contemplating a benevolent world from a position of utter security.”
7
In a painting like
Porte-Fenêtre à Collioure
(1914), ambitiously near-abstract, he was, he admitted, painting his emotions. The purples and blacks and grays, however, are not—as might be conventionally imagined—depressive in their effect. On the contrary, this daring composition—looking forward to Rothko decades later—has a self-confidence about it; it is a perfect example of Matisse’s aim, to combine the familiar and the new, to show that the new world of the twentieth century, its innovations, ideas and discoveries, did not have to be worrying and dislocating, that in fact dislocation could be managed, even beautiful.