Perverse Modernism: 1884-1900

Date of Award

Spring 1-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

History of Art

First Advisor

Armstrong, Carol

Abstract

This dissertation makes a novel methodological intervention into debates about art and politics, offers a transnational and interdisciplinary account of the origins of modernism, and sets capitalism at the root of that tale. Perverse Modernism: 1884-1900 is a wide-ranging cultural history of trans-European art, literature, and philosophy from the 1884 "Scramble for Africa" to the 1900 Paris World's Fair. It addresses a moment when leading European theorists imagined the consequences of capital’s acceleration under the aegis of ‘perversion’: imperial hypertrophy, racial degeneration, and the fin du monde. In that period, artists, writers, and philosophers across Europe produced work notable for startling formal transgression. From London to Moscow, creators inverted, converted, and, finally, perverted the formal expectations of their fields. I contend that there is a link between these two phenomena: the crisis of capitalism, on the one hand, and the formal experimentation of late-nineteenth-century artists, writers, and philosophers, on the other. To make that connection, this dissertation develops a novel motif-based methodology. Tracking four motifs (tendril, garden, twilight, and globe) from London and Paris to Brussels, Berlin, Vienna, St. Petersburg, and Oslo, I reveal a vision of modernism rooted in a venal transnationalism. I contend that motifs, as slippery representational forms, embody anxieties about power that otherwise resist articulation. In a motif, a concept or idea contends with the formal concerns that structure representation. Motifs are not beholden to any medium, style, or national tradition, nor are they the property of any political position or ideological myth. Nevertheless, they are inflected by these contexts. With their ability to travel and metaphorize, motifs take on fraught, and, often, contradictory valences as they move between fields and ideologies. In these movements, I theorize European modernism as a transnational phenomenon arose in reply to – but in tension with – the national, imperial, and cosmopolitan forces encouraged by capitalism. My introduction offers a novel interpretation of one of the most important works of late-nineteenth-century criticism: Max Nordau’s notoriously-titled tract, Degeneration. Scholarship tends to see that text as typical of a fin-de-siècle obsession with sexual ‘perversion,’ but I argue that Nordau sets another pair of aberrations at the root of modern crisis: capital and form. Working in four languages, I bring together unexpected pairings in succeeding chapters. “Tendril” reinterprets a seemingly familiar fairytale. Centering Edward Burne-Jones’s Briar Rose, begun the same year as the “Scramble for Africa,” I ask how a motif so redolent of growth came to symbolize collapse. Tracking tendrils from Burne-Jones’s painting into works by the philosopher Henri Bergson, the architect Victor Horta, the designer William Morris, and the art historian Alois Riegl, I argue that the motif diagnoses a link between capitalism and discourses of extinction and regeneration. Taking on another botanical motif, “Garden” reframes that site as more than a winsome pastime. In the nineteenth century, gardens reached their apogee as bourgeois mainstays, but Octave Mirbeau’s The Torture Garden, a floriferous hellscape set in a Cantonese prison, is home to uneasy collisions and messy subversions. Though Mirbeau’s garden was derided as sexually – and decadently – deviant, I suggest that its shock-value combination of sex, torture, and flowers masks a formal transgression. In The Torture Garden, illustrated by Rodin and influenced by Tolstoy, discourses like vegetarianism, penal reform, and art nouveau coalesce into a celebration of waste – and critique of empire. “Twilight” investigates the skies that burn in Edvard Munch’s The Scream. That painting is often seen as a vague emblem of angst, but I contend that its dusky setting intervenes in a specific lineage of works that theorized modern crisis under the sign of twilight. Richard Wagner’s Twilight of the Gods, Friedrich Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols, and Max Nordau’s “Twilight of Nations” saw Europe in all manner of decline: cultural decay, epistemic confusion, and racial degeneration. However, they disagreed as to cause. What drove the continent’s so-called ‘twilight’ – capital or values? My final chapter, “Globe,” takes us to the century’s turn. At the Paris World’s Fair of 1900, I unfold a tale of two globes: a lilliputian egg fashioned by the Tsar’s jeweler Peter-Carl Fabergé and a never-built cosmorama designed by the radical theorist Élisée Reclus. Between globalization, on the one hand, and the fin du monde, on the other, what did it mean to imagine worlds at the century’s end? In 1900, goldsmiths and anarchists alike turned to the globe to stage visions for the new century.

This document is currently not available here.

Share

COinS