George Gregory Rozsa Writing Sample 1

“Look, Bill, if this is about reliving the 60's, you can forget about it, buddy.
The movement is dead.”
“Yes, of course! Hence the name: movement. It moves a certain distance, then it stops, you see?
A revolution gets its name by always coming back around in your face.” 1

Plurality: Multiple Meanings and Modernisms in Modern Art

What is Modernism? The answer to that question depends on to whom you are asking,

and more importantly, when. On one hand, “Modernism was rebellion. Modernism was ‘make it

new.’ (It) was resistance, rupture… the antidote to the poison of tradition, obligation” (Friedman

493). On the other hand, “Modernism was elitism. Modernism was the Establishment. ‘High

Culture’ lifting its skirts against the taint of the ‘low,’ the masses, … (It) was the supreme

fiction, the master narrative, … the enemy. Postmodernism is the antidote to the poison of

tradition, obligation” (Friedman 494). One gets a sense of what we are dealing with here. There

is no consensus if there is no meeting of the minds. Modernism both was and is. As a movement,

it is long dead and cremated; its ashes have been regulated to the “dustbins of history”

(Papastergiadis 466). As a cultural representation of modernity, it is revolutionary, but like all

revolutionary movements, modernism contains the seeds of its own undoing. The more

successful it becomes, “the more codified … authoritative … institutionalized, the avant-garde of

rupture becomes the new Establishment to be revoked in the making of new avant-gardes”

(Friedman 504).

This paper seeks to address the question: what is Modernism? Our fundamental premise

is that Modernism is a revolution and not merely a movement; therefore, it is in constant flux and

exists in a state of permanent contradiction. In doing so, we make only one underlying

assumption, that Modernism, Anti-modernism, and Post-modernism all fall under our general

definition of Modernism. We will look to Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937), Salvador Dali’s

1
Tom Breaker to William Strannix in Warner Bros.’ Under Siege (1992)
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Metamorphosis of Narcissus (1937), and Andy Warhol’s 200 Campbell’s Soup Cans (1962) to

find not only multiple meanings of Modernism, but more importantly, multiple meanings of

Modernism’s engagement with modernity. We begin with Picasso’s Guernica (1937).

Picasso was living in France as an expatriate when the Civil War broke out in Spain in

July 1937. As a deeply committed pacifist, he refused to serve in either World War, nor would he

allow his pacifism to be compromised here. This is not to imply that he was neither engaged nor

emotionally invested in its denouement. On the contrary, Picasso supported the democratically

elected Republican government from its inception, contributing more than 400,000 francs to its

cause. He also produced for its benefit an eighteen-image “caricatural narrative of fascist

brutality” entitled, The Dream and Lie of Franco (1937), which was converted into postcards and

sold to raise badly needed revenue for the war effort (Leighten, Response 41). Picasso’s

engagement in the civil war, however, was more than pecuniary. When hostilities broke out, the

Republican government of Spain offered him the directorship of the Museo del Prado in Madrid

and commissioned him to paint a mural for the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris Exposition

International des Arts et Techniques of 1937. In one of his first official acts as director, Picasso

made an unprecedented speech to the American people stating that, “all the necessary measures

to protect the artistic treasures of Spain during this cruel and unjust war” had been taken;

furthermore, he challenged American artists not to remain indifferent “to a conflict in which the

highest values of humanity and civilization (were) at stake” (Leighten, Response 41).

Contrary to popular notions (Wischnitzer 165, Cantelupe 19), this was not Picasso’s first

foray into the political – his early days were spent in Barcelona in the company of anarchists and

intellectuals who frequented the café Els Quatre Gats, home to the modernistes (Leighten,

Response 36). Here, he would find for himself a place amongst them, partaking of their

experimental style and their radical political debates, which also included the Catalan
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independence movement. Patricia Leighten believes that Picasso’s Andalusian heritage made

him sympathetic to Catalan resistance (Response 37). This will become a prime focal point of

our analysis of Picasso’s Guernica below.

Picasso was already working on his commissioned mural when the first bombs fell on the

Basque town of Guernica on 26 April 1937. British journalist and Basque sympathizer George

Steer’s first person account of the horrific bombing appeared in The Times on 28 April 1937 and

was subsequently reprinted in L’ Humanite the following day where it was read by Picasso. Stern

had also been present in both Abyssinia and Durango when each was leveled to the ground by

aerial bombardment; however, it would be at Guernica that “modern warfare came of age”

(Preston 13). According to his report, Guernica was saturated for three and a quarter hours of

heavy bombardment of 1,000 lbs. bombs and thousands of two-pound incendiaries. Those who

fled from the carnage were mowed down by German fighters who machine-gunned them as they

attempted to make their escape (Preston 15).

The true horror of the event was that Guernica was a peaceful city. It was the oldest

Basque town with their richest cultural heritage. As a civilian target it had neither strategic nor

military value, though Beverly Ray claims that Guernica was the center of Republican resistance

in the north (168); clearly, the sole objective was “the demoralization of the civil population and

the destruction of the cradle of the Basque race” (Preston 15). Upon reading these gruesome

details of Stern’s account, Picasso abandoned his current project for a new one, and on May 1, he

began sketching out themes for what would arguably become his greatest work, Guernica

(Preston 15).

This begs us to address the question, what makes Guernica great? Thematically,

Guernica is beyond reproach, yet there is no consensus on its meaning. Perhaps this is because

Picasso refused to explain its symbolism stating only that, “It isn’t up to the painter to define the
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symbols. Otherwise it would be better if he write them out in so many words!” (Ray 169).

Picasso wanted each viewer to reach his own conclusion. C. Fred Alfred concurs. He believes

that symbols only become meaningful when we attach personal meaning to them (Alfred 46),

which gets quite complicated rather quickly the more widely circulated an image becomes. Anna

C. Chave notes, “Poststructuralist and reception theories have shown that all publicly circulated

images accrue meanings beyond their maker’s intent and control;” furthermore, she warns that

“in the act of interpreting art works critics shape their significance by shaping how and what the

public sees” (Chave 598). This could help explain Guernica’s endearment over time given that

contemporary patrons of its exhibition in 1937 largely dismissed and ignored “what was to

become one of the most influential paintings of the twentieth century” (Ray 169).

Guernica is more “visceral” than “intellectual” appealing to our emotions rather than our

thoughts (Trifonas 1). Upon close inspection we realize we are witnessing a scene of utter

destruction and total chaos. The woman to the right is engulfed in flames. Her screams are cries

of terror and the unbearable pain of being burnt alive. Apparently the woman next to her is

running away from the carnage, running towards the safety of the light. Her eyes focus on the

source of its illumination, not the artificial light of an electric light bulb, but rather the true light

an oil lamp held in the outstretched arm of the woman above her. Directly below the oil lamp, a

mortally wounded horse rears; speared, it writhes its neck in pain. It tramples a fallen soldier, or

what we first perceive to be a soldier, which are actually the shattered remains of a statue of a

soldier. In one of its dismembered limbs it clutches a broken sword. Next to the sword a flower

blooms. To the left, a woman clutches her dead lifeless child, which rests limp in her arms. Her

cries mimic those of the woman on the far right; though, they appear to be cries of anguish for

the loss of her child and not of impending physical pain. Beyond her stands a bull, which appears

as though it is not a party to the unfolding action; he merely witnesses it. Formally, the mural is
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painted in monotones of black and while, and various shades of gray. The figures are highly

stylized and flattened, almost cubist. Geometric shapes, lines, and angles proliferate the picture

space formed by alternating patches of light and dark. Something bad has happened, and like

spectator slowing along a moving highway, we are drawn in closer for a deeper look into the

accident unfolding before our eyes.

Peter Trifonas sees Guernica as Picasso’s “invective against war;” his use of “splayed

fingers and distended limbs convey a feeling of despair and urgency,” while the “grotesquely

arched neck of the weeping woman … the slumped body of a baby… faces of tortured men …

alongside the heads of suffering animals … reinforce the symbolic significance of the breakdown

of natural order” (7). Guernica is not meant to be a literal representation of the bombing of the

Basque town, but rather a symbolic one. Picasso’s choice and placement of imagery creates “a

semantic web of meaning” which must be read metaphorically (Trifonas 7). Complicating this

matter is Picasso’s own words, which have inadvertently or deliberately biased interpretation. To

quote Picasso, “The bull is not fascism: brutality and darkness, yes, but not fascism” (Cantelupe

20), while the horse stood for the Spanish people (Wischnitzer 153).

Juan Larrea and Vincente Marrero, two Spanish authors familiar with Spanish tradition

and folklore have interpreted Guernica’s bull differently. Larrea sees the bull as “the totemic

animal of Spain” representing the Spanish People (Gottlieb 106). This interpretation is supported

by Picasso’s earlier work, The Dream and Lie of Franco, which depicts the bull as Franco’s

adversary (Gottlieb 106); however, Marrero views the bull in context of Picasso’s statement and

early work, where the bull is depicted as a universal symbol of “cruelty and brutality” (Gottlieb

106). Spanish folklore would tend to support Larrea. Here, the bull represents tradition; however,

in 1937, Picasso saw Spanish tradition as a “dark force” in events leading up to the Civil War

(Wischnitzer 169). Other critics and historians have weighed into the discussion about the
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symbolism in Guernica. For Wilhelm Boek, the bull is the embodiment of Spanish nation, a

symbol of its continued survival after the war, while Carla Gottlieb sees in the bull, non-

interventionist France as it turns and retreats from the conflict (Wischnitzer 165). This

interpretation, however, conflicts with Rudolf Arnheim’s reading of the electric light bulb, which

“hovers over the seen … but illuminates nothing” (Green 67). For Arnheim, this light represents

“the coldness of an inefficient power … a symbol of detached ‘awareness,’ of a world informed

but not engaged” (Green 67). Therefore, Gottlieb’s reading of the bull is already incorporated

into the non-interventionist stance of the Western democracies of which France was a member.

Similarly, the horse in Guernica also lends itself to multiple interpretations. Taking

center stage, Guernica’s horse can be seen as the main actor in the unfolding drama. It has been

wounded from above, a reference to the aerial bombardment of the village. Even in its death-

throes, it rises in defiantly against its oppressor. It is an obvious symbol of tortuous pain and

suffering and resistance. Larrea though, interprets the horse as Nationalist Spain (Gottlieb 106),

an unlikely candidate given the horse’s victimization, which in itself leads Marrero, Boek, and

Gottlieb to conclude that it represents the massacred victims of Guernica (Gottlieb 111). This

interpretation is also supported by The Dream and Lie of Franco in which Franco is “mounted

upon a wounded horse, thus abusing it until it is prostrated” (Gottlieb 106). It is also supported

by Picasso’s artistic rendering of the horse, which closely resembles newsprint. Given the light

thrown on the situation from the woman with the oil lamb above, the light of truth and source of

true illumination, Picasso is referencing the account of the bombing and by extension, all those

who suffered, but what about the statue?

The horse appears to be trampling a statue or the remains of one, if we are to agree that

the horse represents the denizens of the Basque town, then what agency do these “victims” have

to inflict damage on anything or anyone else? This statue is no ordinary statue, but one of a
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warrior, a soldier. Furthermore, this soldier’s sword has been broken. In the first state of the

Painting on 11 May 1937, Rachel Wischnitzer notes, “The soldier, suddenly alive, raises his

right arm – a strong muscular arm with a clenched fist, a Communist salute” (Wischnitzer 156).

Wischnitzer would be correct in characterizing this as a symbol of resistance and defiance, which

Picasso would later replace with the arching neck of the horse; however, what she misidentifies

as a Communist salute is in fact the Spanish Republican salute. Combined with his broken

sword, we would be justified in interpreting the broken statue of the solder as Republican Spain

along with its defeat at the hands of the Nationalists. Gottlieb further interprets the statue as a

universal symbol of civilization and therefore a civilization destroyed by war (112). The broken

sword would then support Trifonas’ interpretation of Guernica as an invective against war and

Picasso’s own pacifist beliefs. Whether the statue represents the destruction of Spain, Republican

Spain, or civilization, Picasso gives us hope. Next to the broken sword, a flower grows. There

will be new life after this conflict, a rebirth and a renewal.

Few critics however, have given Guernica a thorough biographical analysis, and even

fewer have noted the potential demoralizing effect of the Barcelona May Day riots on

Guernica’s production. Picasso began his sketches for Guernica on 1 May 1937, just two days

after reading Stern’s account of the bombing in L’ Humanite. He worked consistently on

sketches and studies for the mural up until May 3 then stopped for no apparent reason until May

8 when he took up work on the mural once more – why?

On 3 May 1937 Republican forces of the Assault Guard in conjunction with the Stalinist-

backed Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia (PSUC) stormed the Anarchist-controlled (CNT)

telephone and telegraph offices in Barcelona. What ensued became known as the Barcelona May

Days as the city came to a standstill. When it was all over, 500 lay dead and another thousand

wounded. Never mind Franco and the Nationalists, the Republican camp was killing its own.
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Picasso, a former resident of Barcelona in his youth with ties to the anarchist CNT, could only

have felt disheartened, even disillusioned with the Republican cause. When he took up the mural

once more on May 8, the woman holding “a beacon of light” had been replaced with a woman

“carrying a dead child” (Kaplan 181). As Kaplan notes, “It is hard to resist concluding that for

Picasso, the light of hope had gone out with the repression in Barcelona” (181).

Concerning the woman with the baby, there is a quaint anecdote Picasso once told

Francoise Gilot, which might give additional meaning to its symbolization. As Picasso recollects:

I was painting Guernica in the big studio … Dora Maar was with me. Marie-Therese

dropped in and when she found Dora there, she grew angry and said to her, ‘I have a

child by this man. It is my place to be here with him. You can leave right now.’ Dora

said, ‘I have as much reason to be here with him …’ I kept on painting and they kept on

arguing. Finally Marie-Therese turned to me and said, ‘Make up your mind. Which one

of us goes?’ … I told them they’d have to fight it out themselves. So they began to

wrestle. It’s one of my choicest memories (Darr 338).

Could events from Picasso’s own life make their way into the painting? Was Marie-Therese and

their daughter, Maya, the inspiration of the weeping woman and child? Does her proximity to the

bull and apparent “pleas” to it hint at Picasso’s involvement in the mural? Picasso often

portrayed himself as the bull in his early work. Could the bull be Picasso? It would give new

meaning to his earlier quote that the bull is a symbol of darkness. Perhaps as an expatriate, miles

away from a war brewing in his former homeland, he feels “the guilt of the expatriate”

(Wischnitzer 165). Impotent and defeated, the bull turns and walks away.

Notwithstanding the horrible things man could do and did to one another with the aid of

modern technology, Guernica is declaration of hope and survival in the face of such modernity;

furthermore, it is a warning to the present and future generations. Moderism was an active
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engagement with modernity – Guernica was a criticism of non-engagement, directed at both

himself, and at the non-interventionist Western Democracies, which sat idly by and not only let

Guernica happen, but failed to mete out sanctions to those responsible. Picasso lived through

both World Wars and remained a pacifist, sometimes at great peril to himself. He remained in

France at a time when almost every other major painter had fled to the Americas.

Dali, on the other hand, engaged modernity in a completely different way. “Surrealism

was a revolutionary, subversive movement that aimed at challenging the world by tapping and

liberating the forces latent in the psyche” (Murphy 771). Modernity ushered in the modern era,

and with it came new and competing demands, which taxed ones mental and physical energies.

As a true counterrevolutionary, however, Dali dispensed with the modern “task of representing

visible, outer reality for the sake of depicting the invisible, inner reality of the unconscious”

(Rothman, Dali 495).

Automatism was originally conceived to produce images unattainable through conscious

action, or as André Breton, the father of Surrealism, described it as “a true photography of

thought” (Harris 729). However unconscious the images produced under automatism were, they

were never fully the realization of an autonomous mind, but rather reconstituted images of the

unconscious informed by mnemic preconscious memories (Harris 730). Salvador Dali objected

to this processional passiveness, and in 1932 he wrote “Object as Revealed in Surrealist

Experiment” stating that automatism’s “passive and arbitrary aspects of the ‘revolution by night’

of dream accounts … would be succeeded by the ‘revolution by day’ of the simulation of

paranoia” (Harris 731). This was the origin of Dali’s critical paranoia methodology. In contrast

to Breton’s automatism, critical paranoia was an active “interpretation of reality, rather than

subject to interpretation” (Harris 731). For Dali, this made it superior to automatism and its

outmoded “stagnant methods,” which suffered from two fundamental problems: first, the images
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produced were not real in the sense that they could affect one’s life, and secondly, they could be

rationalized according to some preconceived notion (Harris 732). Furthermore, critical paranoia

offered up a multiplicity of discernable images, which engaged the viewer and required his

active participation.

Dali used his critical paranoia technique in creating the Metamorphosis of Narcissus, but

unlike The Great Paranoiac (1936) or Apparition of Face and Fruit Dish on Beach (1938), in

which Dali’s use of double images is quite apparent and easily discernable, Dali internalizes the

painting’s double image into the literal text of both the painting and the poem, also written in

1937. Both are based on Ovid’s Metamorphosis as an allegory of unrequited and self-love, in

which Echo, a nymph, falls madly in love with Narcissus, a handsome young man, but due to his

rejection, her body turns to stone and she withers away until she is just a voice that lives among

the hills. Many suitors shared Narcissus’ rejection. One in particular prayed to the God Nemesis,

"If he should love deny him what he loves!" (Ovid 581). Nemesis obliged. One day while

Narcissus bent down to drink from a glassy spring, he caught a glimpse of his own reflected

image in the mirrored pool and fell in love with it. Cursed, he was never able to meld with it and

died of rejection. Though in the end, Narcissus’ body is transformed into the gold and white

flower, which bares his name.

Little in the painting conforms to the literal text of Ovid’s myth yet much is alluded too.

On the left hand side a figure is poised above his own reflection. Given the title, this figure

would seem to represent Narcissus. Adjacent to Narcissus on the right hand side is a cold grey

hand holding an egg from which a gold and white flower is blooming. The hand, presumably

once alive, has ossified and turned to stone, yet in Ovid’s poem it is Echo whose bones have

turned to stone from Narcissus’ rejection while Narcissus is transformed into a flower. In Dali’s

painting however, this ossified hand is congruent to the shape and size of Narcissus. Though
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Narcissus is painted in warm bodily colors, this hand is depicted in corpse-like grays and blues

reminiscent of drowning victims. Rounding out this decaying image is a crack that snakes its

way down the thumbnail while ants forage for a meal. Notwithstanding these death-like

undertones, this hand holds the key to the mystery of metamorphosis, an egg from which a

Narcissus flower blooms. A semiotic reading of this image would indicate that the hand is an

echo of Narcissus, a figurative embodiment of Ovid’s account of his metamorphosis.

Dali’s Metamorphosis however, is more than just a narrative of Ovid’s poem; it

underwrites both the Surrealist movement and Dali’s own life. It is autobiographical. The

metamorphosis of base metals into gold is the legend of alchemy. Alchemy, according to Breton,

was a tool for acquiring, “the profound, the veritable occultation of Surrealism;” therefore, both

alchemists and Surrealists were vying for the creation the Philosopher’s stone, which Breton

perceived had the agency to “enable man’s imagination to take a stunning revenge on all things

… to liberate once and for all the imagination” (Heyd 122). Furthermore, Milly Heyd informs us

that Dali’s own works (both visual and textual) are peppered with explicit alchemical references

including one regarding a well-known Catalan philosopher, Raymond Lully with whom Dali had

particular veneration. “Like (Lully),” Dali acknowledged, “I believe in the transmutation of

bodies” (123). Transmutation is the basis of both Dali’s and Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

In Dali’s painting, this transmutation is represented by the egg from which the Narcissus

flower blossoms. The egg, according to Heyd, is an alchemic symbol of the Philosopher’s stone

(122), “a microcosm,” from which, “all is contained in it: the beginning and the end,” from the

first stages of life to the empty shell (124). In essence, the egg represents the cycle of life from

which metamorphosis springs. In Dali’s work, however, the egg often makes its appearance in

some “undefined form;” specifically in the Metamorphosis, Heyd believes this is represented by

Narcissus’ embryonic head, which “looks like a chunk of raw material out of which new forms
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will be created” (124). Furthermore, there is an apparent slit in Narcissus’ “embryonic” head,

which corresponds to the split in the egg from which the Narcissus grows. This is explicitly

stated in the last stanza of Dali’s poem:

When that head slits

when that head splits
when that head bursts,
it will be the flower,
The new Narcissus,
Gala –
my narcissus (Dali 5).

The apparent slit in Narcissus’ head gives birth to the new Narcissus, Gala, Dali’s wife. Dali’s

reference to Gala begs for deeper critical reading of the Metamorphosis searching for other

autobiographical references, which might underwrite a personal meaning for Dali himself.

References to Dali’s dead brother abound the painting. His brother, for whom he was

named, died of meningitis when he was just seven years old. Dali’s parents, believing him to be

the re-incarnation of their dead son also named him Salvador (Murphy 768). This haunted Dali

from an early age, living in his brother’s shadow (Heyd 128). He wrote about his feelings in The

Secret Life stating that, “when (he) looked in his mother’s eyes what (he) saw not (his) own

reflection but a ghost” (Murphy 768), and in the Unspeakable Confessions, he admitted seeing

his dead brother hidden in the shadows and faces of his reflection in the water, “trying to capture

and pull him down to the kingdom of Hades” (Heyd 128). If one looks closely at the reflections

in the water of Metamorphosis one can identify a hidden face, presumably cast by the mountains

above. Perhaps this is Salvador’s dead brother, calling to Dali in the figure of Narcissus, to meld

with him in the waters below.

The tale of water-spirits spiriting away one’s soul was a familiar myth among the Greeks.

They believed that these spirits inhabited the waters and if one starred at his own reflection long

enough, they would steal one’s soul and carry it away down into the murky depths (Heyd 128).
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This Greek myth was later reformulated by Jacques Lacan into his “mirror stage” hypothesis

where a “child looks at himself in the mirror without realizing that it is he” (Heyd 128). For

Lacan, this subject-reflection identification implied death. Perhaps what Narcissus sees in his

reflection is not his own image, but rather that of his brother and a brooding foreshadowing of

his own death, not his brother’s.

Dali’s brother died of meningitis. Whenever Dali would go out, his mother would warn

him, “Take your muffler, cover yourself up; if not, you’ll die like your brother … of meningitis”

(Murphy 769). Could the slit in Narcissus’ head represent his fears of contracting the disease

(Heyd 129)? For Heyd, this may very well be the case; furthermore, she identifies the Narcissus

flower growing from the corresponding split in the egg as Dali’s redemption (129). Dali already

identified Gala as the Narcissus flower; therefore, Gala could be seen to symbolize his salvation.

Given Dali and Gala’s relationship, this would not be a stretch of the imagination.

Before he met Gala, Dali believed he would die if he had sex with a woman, “transsexuals were

his ideal escort … the next best thing” (Murphy 767). Gala tempered these fears. Furthermore,

Dali was incapable of taking care of himself and was perpetually in need of care giving. Gala

stepped in to fill the void left in the wake of his mother’s death (Murphy 769). He was utterly

dependent upon her and she saw to all of his needs. They were inseparable, “like Siamese twins,

they existed together harmoniously, ‘living’ off of each other” (Murphy 770).

Dali’s Metamorphosis of Narcissus’ engagement with modernity was introspective;

though, his narrative discourse with viewer set him apart from other Modernists who broke away

from representational art. Dali was not interested in discovering the inner truth. He preferred the

surface of things and his use of the Old Masters techniques was a slap in the face to the avant-

garde. Surrealism may have been revolutionary; however, Dali’s work was counterrevolutionary.

We next turn to an artist who was in the right place at the right time. He did not find modernity,
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modernity found him.

In the 1960’s Pop Art was the new kid on the block. Jasper Johns had already created his

Painted Bronze sculptures of two Ballantine ale cans and a coffee can with paintbrushes; Allan

Kaprow exhibited his Yard, which was comprised of a mound of automobile tires; Claes

Oldenburg opened The Store, a parody of a storefront with plaster consumables for sale, and

Arman of the Nouveaux Réalistes had displayed his ready-mades (Menand 7). Pop was in, and it

was exclusively an American product. Andy Warhol did not invent Pop; however, he took it to

the next level. When Roy Lichtenstein said that “he was trying to get away from ‘the European

brushstroke,’” he was a subtly attacking Abstract Expressionism (Menand 7). Warhol challenged

Pop itself. Menand believes that Warhol viewed other Pop artists as hypocritically “doing high-

art things with low-art materials … operating safely behind the ramparts of highbrow tastes”

(Menand 8), so when Johns was making Flag on Orange Field, Warhol created his Gold

Marilyn Monroe; when Oldenburg made sculptures of consumables, Warhol made sculptures of

things that consumables came in. Robert Rauschenberg’s silk-screens were of magazines and

newspapers; Warhol’s were of money. “Warhol looked at the players sitting around the table of

New York avant-garde, and he raised the ante” (Menand 8); Louis Menand described him as “a

great risk-taker” (2).

In 1962, Warhol was given his first major exhibition at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles.

For his show, Warhol produced an instillation thirty-two nearly identical paintings of

Campbell’s Soup cans, one for each variety available at the time (Buchloh 30). The presentation

of these paintings was no less important than their “serial repetition,” as each painting stood on

small white shelves that mimicked their real-life counterparts in grocery stores (Buchloh 30). As

if thirty-two cans were not enough, later that year he produced his 200 Campbell’s Soup Cans

(1962), taking it up just another notch more. According to Robert Hughes, “Warhol’s work …
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was a baleful mimicry of advertising, without the gloss. It was about the way advertising

promises that the same pap with different labels will give you special, unrepeatable

gratifications” (Shock 348).

When trying to ascertain exactly why he choose Campbell’s Soup, or about the

presentation of his work and what it all was supposed to mean, nobody can describe it as

succinctly as Warhol himself:

I adore America and these are some comments on it. My image is a statement of the

symbols of the harsh, impersonal products and brash materialistic objects on which

America is built today. It is a projection of everything that can be bought and sold, the

practical but permanent symbols that sustain us (Warhol 42).

To Menand, “The essence of Warhol’s genius was to eliminate the one aspect of a thing without

which that thing would … cease to be itself;” amazingly enough, “almost every time he did this

it didn’t make any difference. His (paintings and boxes) were received as art” (2). Even Marcel

Duchamp, father of the ready-mades, loved Warhol’s work. One did not have to stare at them to

understand them (Menand 6).

The real genius of Warhol was his iconography: Campbell’s, Brillo, Coca-Cola, even

movie stars. They were all Amercana. At a time when America had its finger on the pulse of the

world, Warhol had his finger on the pulse of America. He single-handedly turned the art world

into the Art Market, and with it went all the pretensions of “High Culture” as well as the last

vestiges of the avant-garde.

At the beginning of this paper we asked, “What is Modernism?” Having examined the

multiplicity of meanings in Picasso’s, Dali’s, and Warhol’s work provides us with the tools we

need to answer this fundamental question. Modernism is a critical engagement with modernity. It

is contemporary. According to Clement Greenberg, “Anything in its own time can be called
 George Gregory Rozsa Writing Sample 16

modern” (2); therefore, it is pluralistic. There are many modernisms. For Guillaume Apollinaire,

modernity itself was “the moment in which the present is no longer compatible with the past and

seeks to do away with it” (Rothman, Melancholy 7). Modernism has a short memory – and as

Paul de Man proffers, a tenacity for “ruthless forgetting,” the drive to eradicate all vestiges of

earlier movements (Friedman 12). This rupture with the past, however, is misleading as

modernity only eschews its most recent predecessor, forsaking the immediate for a more distant

past (Friedman 12). That it makes its entrance on the back of earlier movements, Greenberg

declared, Modernism is an attitude, or an orientation, of looking backward to the best of the past

(Greenberg 3).

This attitude contradicts our notion of the “enthusiastic, future-oriented avant-garde” who

challenges and rebels against a “melancholic, past-oriented traditionalism” (Rothman,

Melancholy 5). Thierry de Duve has postulated:

Melancholy is at the root of every avant-garde art practice at least since Charles

Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Manet. Yet it is not alone: enthusiasm and

melancholy are … the twin feelings of avant-garde art. The former has … to do with the

active anticipation of an indeterminate future, the latter with the detached contemplation

of an overdetermined past. (Rothman, Melancholy 7).

To accept de Duve’s argument is to accept the internal contradictions of Modernism itself, that in

its insistence upon the here and now, it establishes “a cult of the new,” which must necessarily

extricate itself from a stagnant tradition (Friedman 11). This, “embrace of the new (carries) with

it an inescapable feeling of loss” (Rothman, Melancholy 24), and the seeds of its own antithesis,

anti-modernism. Such is the nature of revolution and counterrevolution, from which, form the

essential character of Modernism.

What we typically think of Modernism, David Harvey in The Condition of Postmodernity

 George Gregory Rozsa Writing Sample 17

terms High Modernism, and equates with the Enlightenment project of the “development of

rational forms of social organization and rational modes of thought” (Friedman 10). This High

Modernism, was forged out of the scientific and technological innovations stemming from the

second industrial revolution, resulting in a zealous belief in man’s continued progress and his

ability to master nature (Friedman 3). Modernity was ushered in by rail, ferried across the great

oceans by steamship, flown in over the highest mountains on the airplane, and raced along the

countryside in new automobiles. This zeal resulted in a Modernism that was “positivist,

technocratic, and rationalistic … (and) was imposed as the work of an elite avant-garde of

planners, artists, architects, critics, and other guardians of high taste” (Friedman 5). Mobility

may have been the spirit of modernity, but the city was its muse.

The city was a treasure trove of artistic inspiration, a place where the artist could

contemplate “urban life’s neglected fragments and hidden forms” (Papastergiadis 467). Bound to

this inspiration, however, was a deep and pervasive fear of deception (Rothman, Dali 493).

Georg Simmel proposed that “by virtue of its grand scale and its enormous population – too large

to know intimately – the city was a place where interpersonal suspicion becomes, by necessity, a

normal feature of everyday life” (Rothman, Dali 493). Simmel extended his argument to include

man’s relation to the exchange of everyday goods and services, which further produced urban

anxieties related to consumerism. Roger Rothman advanced Simmel’s argument into the sphere

of modern art, where, although he acknowledges the existence of multiple modernisms, he

proposes that one underlying theme binds them together under the banner of modernity, and that

was the avant-garde’s preoccupation with authenticity (Rothman, Dali 489).

“The true purpose of painting,” advised Jacques Riviere, “is to represent objects as they

really are; that is to say, differently from the way we see them… this is why the image it forms

does not resemble their appearance …” (Rothman, Dali 492). According to Rothman, what the
 George Gregory Rozsa Writing Sample 18

avant-garde found objectionable with respect to the Old Masters was their perceived

superficiality, which only seemed to illuminate the “surface of things” (Dali 492). The avant-

garde was in crisis; they needed a pictorial language that could expose Riviere’s inner reality.

Susan Friedman perceived this crisis ensuing from the moment “the idea of the radical and

innovating arts, the experimental, technical, aesthetic ideal that had been growing forward from

Romanticism, (reached) formal crisis – in which myth, structure and organization in a traditional

sense (collapsed)” (3). This crisis for avant-garde, as Alain Badiou indicated, has materialized

into a “deep-seated, irrational impulse to destroy any and all conventions in the name of

unmediated experience” (Rothman, Dali 492).

In 1900 Henri Bergson further articulated the imperatives of the modern artist:

Between nature and ourselves … a veil is interposed: a veil that is dense and opaque for

the common herd, – thin, almost transparent, for the artist … so art … has no other object

than to brush aside … everything that veils reality from us, in order to bring us face to

face with reality itself (Rothman, Dali 493).

It is at this point in which Salvador Dali’s anti-modernist embrace of the Old Masters puts him at

odds with his contemporaries. While they were committed to stripping away this “superficial veil

of appearance,” Dali embraced it (Rothman, Dali 494). His whole grasp of the unconscious was

“understood through the lens of the illusory and the fake” (Rothman, Dali 490). Furthermore,

Dali’s wholesale rejection of modernist techniques can be seen as a counterrevolutionary critique

of Modernism itself, which he also credits Bergson for infecting it with a “lingering

impressionism” that “(responded) to the threat of deception by shrinking back” instead of

confronting it directly, which for Dali, was to “embrace the illusion itself” (Rothman, Dali 495).

Modernist painting for him, was just a “reified form of bourgeois consciousness” (Lubar 231).

With his irreverence towards the institutionalized authority of modernist painting, Dali viewed
 George Gregory Rozsa Writing Sample 19

himself as “modernism’s counter-muse, its ethical conscious, and … its redeemer” (Lubar 231).

Modernism was still at the crossroads of modernity when the avant-garde, Modernism’s

cultural gatekeepers, broke with tradition and embraced a spirit of progressiveness that

“promised to reveal the fullness of human creativity (and provide) new insights into the

perception of and links to the world” (Papastergiadis 466). Unlike Rothman who believed

Modernism could be minimized to the quest of authenticity, Nikos Papastergiadis claims that two

main streams dominated the cultural landscape of Modernism. The first was premised on belief

that the “formal innovations of abstraction were … the foundations of a new universal

language,” which looked to experimentations “in colour, form and the fundamental contours of

space” (466). The second, involved an active engagement with the establishment,

“(incorporating) … direct political content” in an effort to “represent daily struggle” and “bring

the function of art closer to everyday life” (Papastergiadis 466). Jerry Seigel believed that the

true nature of Modernism lie in the avant-garde’s idea, “that language, set free from discursive

reason and released from the object world of referents, can evoke and create an alternative

world” (Silverman 97).

Picasso embodied both streams of thought. What made Picasso truly revolutionary, was

that he resisted both the classical representation of figuration and the “spatial illusionism of the

one-point perspective” (Chave 607). Leighten credits Picasso’s anarchist credentials for

subverting the traditional, academic rules of art (Response 38). Picasso helped tear down the

centuries-old conventions of “simulating three-dimensional forms on a two-dimensional surface”

(Silverman 98). Politically, his “self-consciously rebellious” choice of subject matter fell in line

with his anarchist critique of modernity; and according to Leighten, he identified modernist

techniques with “new ways of thinking and a concomitant break from a bourgeois order allied to

imitative academicism” (Leighten, Response 38). That Picasso intentionally perverts both
 George Gregory Rozsa Writing Sample 20

conventional form and subject matter of tradition, “gives his art an extra power to offend”

(Leighten, Anarchiste 36). As with all Modernisms, Picasso’s was an active engagement and

therefore “ a necessary dialogue with the classical tradition” (Leighten, Anarchiste 36).

By the 1960s however, the art world had dropped its romantic and sentimental

pretensions and a burgeoning art market had begun. The avant-garde as an ideal “still seemed to

be alive,” but “it was collapsing from within, undermined by the encroaching art market”

(Hughes, Rise 5). Modernism had remade itself in the image of modernity, the mass market of

consumption. Enter Andy Warhol. “By mass producing his images of mass production …

(Warhol) had entered a permanent state of ‘anaesthetic revolutionary practice’” (Hughes, Rise 8).

Warhol was attacking the very bourgeois highbrow aesthetics necessary for the markets

propagation – his personal critique of modernity. “In demonstrating that art today is a

commodity of the art market,” stated Harold Rosenberg, “Warhol has liquidated the century-old

tension between the serious artist and the majority culture” (Hughes, Rise 10).

The cycle is now complete. All prevailing hegemonies have been countered by their

progeny. New hegemonies have risen in their stead. Have we come to the end of the line? If

capitalism is the new hegemony, we dare not say so; however, if capitalism in the art world is to

be challenged, what must the new Modernism look like. Enter Banksy, enter culture jamming

and the like – art to make a point, to challenge our modernity, not to earn a buck. Then again,

Banksy’s Space Girl & Bird sold for $576,000 in 2007, which just proves the point: the more

reactionary one is – the more popular one becomes. The more popular one is – the more

mainstream one becomes. The more mainstream one is – the more dominant one becomes. The

more dominant one is – the more it is open to attacks by a new rival. Repeat, ad infinitum.

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