by Philipp Blom
Mauthner’s philosophical project culminated in an all-embracing but godless mysticism. Ernst Mach (1838-1916) took the opposite direction. A distinguished scientist and professor of experimental physics at Prague’s German university, Mach dissected not only language, but also experience and personality. In the final analysis, he recognized nothing but a constant stream of physiological sensations; everything else was just a mass of baseless suppositions, a gigantic shoal of philosophical red herrings. Sensations were everything: ‘As soon as we have perceived that the supposed unities “body” and “ego” are only makeshifts, designed for provisional orientation and for definite practical ends (so that we may take hold of bodies, protect ourselves against pain, and so forth), we find ourselves obliged, in many more advanced scientific investigations, to abandon them as insufficient and inappropriate.’
Abandoning the fiction of immutable selfhood (also a philosophical metaphor of the vacuum at the heart of the Austro-Hungarian state) had dramatic consequences, Mach argued: ‘The ego must be given up. It is partly the perception of this fact, partly the fear of it, that has given rise to the many extravagances of pessimism and optimism, and to numerous religious, ascetic, and philosophical absurdities. In the long run we shall not be able to close our eyes to this simple truth, which is the immediate outcome of psychological analysis.’ There was nothing but physiology, everything else was make-believe, no truth out there, no hidden reality, and certainly no creator. Man was nothing but a mass of highly unstable perceptions creating the impression of personality, a thesis that was taken up and popularized by the Austrian writer Hermann Bahr in his famous essay Das unrettbare Ich (The Irretrievable Self, 1907).
If language was not necessarily on the speaker’s side and outside influences intruded upon the fiction of the self, then the language of music was bound to be affected. Viennese composers were at the forefront of the cultural investigation of perception, of the unreliability of language, and its underlying rules. Building on the sound world imagined by his fellow student Hans Rott (who had died, aged twenty-six, in 1884), the young Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) created his First Symphony (1888) which, with a single unisono tone played by the strings and interrupted by bird calls that finally bring movement into the immobile sound, created the perfect image of a mind stirred by external impulses. Later in the piece, other gleanings from the outside world create dramatic musical conflicts: a military march (as a boy, Mahler had lived next to a military drill ground), a dance tune, nature sounds - the world mirrored as an impressionistic interior space. In his later symphonies Mahler would use the childlike simplicity of folksong texts to escape the complications and contradictions of analysis.
Mahler dramatized the conflict between direct experience and conventional (symphonic) form. Composers such as Arnold Schönberg (1874-1951) and his friends and pupils Alban Berg and Anton Webern went a step further. Like Mauthner, they investigated the structure and function of their language - music - by attempting to reduce it to its most elemental form: the series of twelve semitones making up a full octave. Rather than the romantic, richly ornamented self of the classical tradition, they trusted the unassailable truth of structures based on the simplest form possible. All of them were gifted composers in the late romantic style, but they turned away from the sweltering sweetness of Wagnerian chromaticism and towards a method of composing that offered mathematical rigour - though not always emotional satisfaction. If the self was little more than a linguistic trick, then artistic creation was best based on the solidity of rational structure.
At play: Gustav Mahler relaxing during
the summer holidays.
Philosophical scepticism about language, reality, and the ability of words to communicate effectively was most famously carried to its conceptual extremes by Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), who had been educated at his father’s home in close proximity to the country’s artistic and intellectual elite, and who had chosen to further his studies in the congenially positivist environment of Cambridge, where Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore were then the ruling gods of analytical philosophy. A searching spirit with the mental drive of a medieval martyr, Wittgenstein retreated to a Norwegian fjord to find the peace that allowed him to formulate, in 1913, the central thoughts of what was to become one of the century’s most influential works of philosophy, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (published 1921), in which he set out to delineate in sentences of almost mathematical rigour the extent to which language can serve as an instrument of meaningful communication.
In this environment, with its heightened attention to how things could and should be said, style and literary elegance had their very own literary guardian angel, the irascible publicist Karl Kraus (1874-1936), whose work effectively consisted of a compilation of malicious commentaries on other people’s writings. ‘People still think that human content can be excellent despite bad style and that one’s moral disposition could be established independently of it,’ wrote Kraus, ‘but I hold ... that nothing is more necessary than to remainder these people like so many bad books. Alternatively, a parliament should be convened for language, and hand out rewards, as now for killed snakes, for every cliché killed.’
Nothing was more apt to make Kraus despair than stylistic carelessness, bad metaphors and empty phrases, and it is an eloquent testament to the intellectual climate of his day that a man who today might send a stream of irate reader’s letters to newspaper editors had his very own journal, Die Fackel (The Torch), which he wrote entirely on his own. While other countries, notably the United States, built on a robust, quasi-religious trust in words and the truth behind them - the very principle of advertising which was then beginning its reign on billboards across the American continent - thinkers in the multilingual Dual Monarchy were all but paralysed by their scepticism towards the very words they used. On the other hand, this struggle with truth gave the search for it an almost spiritual importance.
The Ethics of Style
Style was a matter of moral honesty for a young generation of artists openly rebelling against inherited ways of representation. ‘Life is changing,’ the critic Hermann Bahr (1863-1934) wrote, ‘but the spirit remained old and immobile and did not stir and did not move and now it is suffering helplessly, because it is lonely and deserted by life ... The past is great, often beautiful. We will hold solemn funeral orations for it.’
The architect Adolf Loos (1870-1933), had worked for some years in the Chicago office of Louis Sullivan, the creator of some of the world’s first skyscrapers, such as the Guaranty Building in Buffalo (1895), whose strictly functionalist aesthetic set new standards for its time. The young Viennese architect was a fervent admirer of both the sceptical, Anglo-Saxon spirit and the can-do attitude he had found in the United States - a glaring contrast to the endemic inertia of Habsburg Vienna. Talented and ambitious, Loos was burning to make his mark and to bring the gospel of aesthetic purity right into the heart of the capital. He worked hard to become noticed and to acquire a reputation as a modernizer; his efforts were finally rewarded with a commission to build a bank in a uniquely privileged location - in the very heart of the city, directly opposite the imperial palace’s Michaelertor in all its nineteenth-century splendour of columns, Hercules statues, ornamental vases and neo-baroque putti. He knew that his chance had come.
Imperial affront: Adolf Loos’s ‘House without Eyebrows’
opposite the Hofburg palace.
When the scaffolding came off the new Goldman and Salatsch building in 1910 and the public could for the first time lay eyes on it, there was an outcry in the press and the city council ordered the building stopped. Right in the Highest Presence of His Majesty across the square, this was a house of almost aggressive functionality, a building with no ornament, no façade. No nude, muscular heroes supported window frames, no winged toddlers, nymphs or flower arrangements beautified what might otherwise look offensively stark. Instead, there were straight, green marble columns at the entry and above them nothing
- nothing but rows of square windows. The staggering lack of respect for the feelings of the imperial family appeared particularly shocking. Archduke Franz Ferdinand vowed never again to use the Michaelerplatz entrance to the Hofburg and the Emperor himself decreed that all curtains must be shut whenever he spent time in a room with a view of the offending building.
The architect himself was not afraid to shock and throw down the gauntlet to the old guard by confronting it directly with his ideas. Art and architecture, he believed, must emancipate themselves from the tyranny of bad taste and the inherent hypocrisy of middle-class aesthetics:
The better someone can imitate, the more the public loves him. The reverence for expensive materials, the most certain sign for the parvenu status of our people, dictates this fact ... During the last decades, imitation has dominated all our buildings. The wallpaper is made of paper, but must under no circumstances show it. It had to be printed with silk damask, gobelins, or carpet patterns. The doors and windows are made of soft wood. But as hard woods are more expensive, they have to be painted as such. Iron had to imitate precious metal with the help of bronze or copper paints. Concrete, a material of our own century, was regarded with utter helplessness. But what a splendid material it is in itself …
Stuck in a world of wordless lies, of imitation this and faux that, architecture and design, Loos argued, had to rediscover the honesty of form. ‘This furniture lacks all style,’ he had written approvingly about avant-garde chairs at a fair in 1898, ‘they are neither Egyptian nor Greek, neither Romanesque nor Gothic, neither Renaissance nor Baroque. Everyone can see immediately: these are pieces of furniture from 1898. It is a style that will not last. After it, the style of 1899 will have its day, and will be entirely different.’ Dishonesty and decoration were two sides of the same fake coin: ornament, Loos wrote, is crime.
I have made the following discovery and have given it to humankind: evolution of culture is equivalent to the removal of ornaments from items of use ... As ornament (a remnant of a previous, animistic culture) no longer has an organic connection with our culture, it is no longer the expression of our culture. Ornaments which are made today have no connection with us ourselves, no connection with the order of the world. It is stuck in the past.
This was more than an artistic position; it was a political point. If Loos was the most spectacular among the architectural rebels (his building on the Michaelerplatz could only be completed in 1912 because he agreed to the installation of window boxes), the most astonishing story is probably the conversion of Otto Wagner (1841-1918), successor to the high priests of the historicist Vienna Ringstrasse architecture and one of the most important and most prolifically creative of architects in Austria-Hungary. No architect in the world had created grander and more beautiful historicist fata morganas than Wagner. In his plans for a complete restructuring of Vienna (which were never realized), visions look like Piranesi sanitized, with their lofty vaults and grand ideas, their noble columns shining in white marble, veritable masterpieces of historicist art. After this epic and highly successful spree of gorging himself on the beauty of the past came what Wagner described as his ‘artistic hangover’ - a result of aesthetic overeating.
Wagner was already approaching sixty, an age at which most of his colleagues thought of retiring, when he changed his own style and so, too, the course of architectural history. He had redesigned Vienna’s transport system and had already proved that the needs of a modern city and elegant functional design can be triumphantly united: his Metro stations and his two Danube bridges still stand as monuments to his art, as do several blocks of apartments throughout the Habsburg capital. He had established himself as the most intelligent, most masterful, most sumptuous realizer of the backward-looking utopias of the grande bourgeoisie, the class into which he had been born. In his elegant flats in which no detail had been left to chance, in his neo-Renaissance splendour, every professor and banker could feel himself a Medici.
Wagner had always thought and written about form and function, about the fact that ‘nothing impractical can be beautiful’ and that only a profound understanding of the purpose of each architectural element could create works of true beauty. Whereas Adolf Loos had refused all ornamentation and had effectively torn down the façade of his own buildings, Wagner went a step further by revealing the aesthetic grace of well-designed constructive elements.
Entering his Postsparkasse, the Postal Savings Bank, in Vienna’s central district (1903/4), it is impossible not to be exhilarated by the purity of the sweeping forms, the arched glass roof of the hall, the sense of light and austere beauty, punctuated aluminium ducts looking like pieces of abstract sculpture. Wagner’s was not a sheer functionalism, as was Loos’s and later that of Le Corbusier and his followers, but a more modulated symbolic union of beauty and utility which never privileged one above the other. Spaces such as this one were positions defined and occupied in the battle for the aesthetic soul of the twentieth-century city. Loos believed that the stakes were high, that a civilization’s morality was at stake, and many of his colleagues agreed.
Built for a new
world: the AEG
turbine hall in
Berlin by Peter
Behrens.
No art form is more public than architecture, and none more political: one can choose not to read a book, not to enter a gallery, but it is much more difficult to avoid seeing certain buildings or parts of a city, and as the aesthetic and generational conflict between historicism and early modernity progressed it left visible traces in cities all over the world, beacons of a different way of thinking about beauty, and about human nature. In the United States, a great inspiration for innovative spirits such as Loos, new cities unencumbered by tradition, combined with the new possibilities created by building materials such as improved steel and reinforced concrete and by the perfection of the elevator, had already given birth to a new kind of structure: the skyscraper. Europe followed suit with steel-frame structures such as the Royal Liver Building in Liverpool in 1911. The modernist aesthetic asserted itself powerfully around 1910. In 1909 the architect Peter Behrens built a turbine hall for Germany’s burgeoning manufacturer AEG (Allgemeine Elektrizitäts-Gesellschaft) that was also a monument to the functional design heralded by mass production, and the administrative block of the Fagus works near Hanover in Germany (1914) designed by young Walter Gropius is a building whose functionalist austerity would prove truly prophetic.
Fourteen years after the historicist orgy of the 1900 World Fair a new aesthetic had arrived. Such extremes of artistic purity were not the only way forward, though, and in all art forms the development of the arts was less a question of progression than of branching out: composers such as Sibelius, Elgar, Puccini and Max Reger worked at the same time as the more obviously adventurous Schönberg and Debussy; outstanding ‘conventional’ painters such as Max Beckmann or Ilya Repin were active alongside rebels such as Malevich and Kandinsky. In architecture the range spread - geographically as well as artistically - from masters of organic forms like Antonio Gaudí and Josep Maria Jujol i Gibert in Barcelona to modern interpretations of traditional forms by Fedor Shekhtel and Vladimir and Georgii Kosiakov in St Petersburg and Moscow.
Hardliner: The
Fagus works by
Walter Gropius
give no quarter
to historicism.
In Vienna architecture and painting made common cause in their fight for a synthesis of form and function. Joseph Maria Olbrich’s 1898 temple-like building for the Secession artists’ group proclaimed this partnership. A stone’s throw away from the august neo-Renaissance Academy of Arts and its professors (who might have altered the future course of history by admitting the young Adolf Hitler: he applied there unsuccessfully in 1907), it was a statement of open rebellion against the artistic establishment.
One of the founding members of the Secession group was the painter Gustav Klimt (1862-1918), who had himself undergone an artistic conversion simil
ar to Wagner’s. Every age needs its scandalous genius, and with his long tunics, his succession of liaisons and his at times copiously explicit painterly eroticism, Klimt was the apostle of a freer life. Whether genuine eccentricity or clever ruse, the master was allowed his foibles and drew innumerable admirers as well as huge prices for his works. Like Wagner, Klimt emphasized the symbolic nature of his works, and his symbolism was dangerously suggestive. Nuda veritas, Naked Truth, was the motto of the group he had helped to found, and whose periodical publication Ver Sacrum emphasized their belief in artistic truth over academic convention. The Secession’s truth was sensual and subversive, undermining Vienna’s perfect social façade with its seductive appeal. Klimt’s mythological portraits (some of which bear the features of women from ‘good’ society) abandoned the turn-of-the-century decorum that so safely enveloped bodies in unnatural forms and acres of choice fabric. The defiant lasciviousness staring from these canvases was no longer content to bathe demurely in the pool of legend, but was determined to explore hidden depths that good manners thought it prudent to deny. The nymphs of academic art had been created to titillate from a safe distance; these new goddesses confronted the viewer with his own desires and, more shockingly, with those of the women portrayed.
