Hunges R. The Shock of the New

Knopf, 2013 — 448 p.This book grew out of a television series I wrote and narrated for the BBC. From the first take to the last, The Shock of the New ate up three years of research, writing, and filming; and having addressed the camera from places as remote from one another, geographically and spiritually, as the Japanese bridge of Monet’s lily-pond in Giverny, the crematorium at Dachau, a roof in Brasília, the edge of the Grand Canyon, and the ruins of the Marquis de Sade’s château, I find – adding up the air tickets – that I covered more than a quarter of a million miles doing it. The soul, some Arabs believe, can only travel at the pace of a trotting camel. They are right.
From the start, the producers, directors, and I agreed that The Shock of the New should be, as Kenneth Clark put it more than ten years ago in his subtitle to Civilisation, a personal view of the art of our century. Eight hours sounds like a lot of air time, and it is; but it is totally inadequate to the task of doing a formal history of modern art on television, with every artist who did anything significant given his or her just place and explication. There are no footnotes on the Box. Instead, we decided to do eight essays about eight separate subjects that seemed important to an understanding of modernism. We would start with a programme about the blossoming of a sense of modernity in European culture – roughly from 1880 to 1914 – in which the myth of the Future was born in the atmosphere of millenarian optimism that surrounded the high machine age, as the nineteenth century clicked over into the twentieth century. We would finish with a film that tried to describe how art gradually lost that sense of newness and possibility, as the idea of the avant-garde petered out in the institutionalized culture of late modernism. In between, we would have six programmes dealing with six subjects – visual essays on the relationship of painting, and to a lesser degree sculpture and architecture, to some of the great cultural issues of the last hundred years. How has art created images of dissent, propaganda, and political coercion? How has it defined the world of pleasure, of sensuous communion with worldly delights? How has it tried to bring about Utopia? What has been its relation to the irrational and the unconscious? How has it dealt with the great inherited themes of Romanticism, the sense of the world as a theatre of despair or religious exaltation? And what changes were forced on art by the example and pressure of mass media, which displaced painting and sculpture from their old centrality as public speech? Obviously, these are only some of the themes of modern art. Equally obviously, neither eight chapters nor eight programmes can cover them fully. But to tackle themes rather than a formal, sequential history seemed the best way to present at least some of this vast subject in so limited a frame, and to give a fairly wide panorama of the relations of art to ideas and to life in the modernist century.