The Vertigo Years

by Philipp Blom

  Not everyone was comfortable with this new and formidable power to change experience with the click of a button or the throwing of a switch. As the French priest abbé Mugnier, the confessor of le tout Paris, grumbled in his diary in 1910: ‘One is no longer at home with oneself today. It is only going to get worse. X-rays will penetrate you, Kodaks will photograph your passing, phonographs will engrave your voices. Aeroplanes threaten us from on high.’ Mugnier was only one among many across the Western world who perceived the rapidly changing popular culture as a threat. Another observer, Louis Haugmard, analysed cinema and the effects on viewers, and came to the following, remarkably prescient conclusion:

  Through it [cinema] the charmed masses will learn not to think anymore, to resist all desire to reason and to construct, which will atrophy little by little; they will know only how to open their large and empty eyes, only to look, look, look ... Will cinematography comprise, perhaps, the elegant solution to the social question, if the modern cry is formulated: ‘Bread and cinemas’? …

  And we shall progressively draw near to those menacing days when universal illusion in universal mummery will reign.

  The Beauty of the Masses

  Members of the elite might rage, but the great majority of people eagerly embraced the democratization and globalization of the ways they entertained and informed themselves, of how they thought and what they found beautiful.

  Taking the curve: Jacques Henri Lartigue celebrating the

  excitement of speed.

  Rushing ahead: a photo taken from a racing car,

  by Jacques Henri Lartigue.

  The avant-garde had proclaimed a new kind of beauty - but their strident voice was heard by only a few thousand people around the world. Their paintings were shown (if at all) in smallish galleries away from the mainstream; their novels were often published privately and with print runs of a few hundred copies. Visionary as they may seem today, they were only very rarely noticed, and much less understood. The great majority of people in the West, those who could afford to choose for themselves, lived in surroundings largely disguised under the cloak of history. The prints on their walls and the plaster busts on their piano might be mass-produced, but their ornamental twirls and uplifting messages breathed the easy air of times gone by, for the print was in a gold frame (factory-made, of course) and showed a work by an old master (usually a heliotype, a newly perfected printing technology for colour reproductions). And the composer or poet’s bust in every self-respecting German household celebrated (depending on the household’s progressiveness) Beethoven, Goethe, Friedrich Schiller or perhaps even Heinrich Heine (a poet, an ironist, and a Jew) or Richard Wagner (a nationalist and antisemite). French households of a certain kind might pay homage to Napoleon or might instead display a crucifix (France, the polarized), while their British counterparts glorified Shakespeare.

  Now being produced in large factories, furniture usually imitated the styles of other periods. There were those who set out to produce innovative designs, such as Charles Rennie Mackintosh in Glasgow and Adolf Loos and the Wiener Werkstätte in Vienna, but their work was eyed suspiciously by the European middle classes, who much preferred the solid dignity of historicism or the soft, feminine lines of Jugendstil design. Often elegantly sumptuous, feminine and playful, household furniture was decorated so as to soften the blow dealt to bourgeois pride by mass production. The natural forms, the flowers and nymph-like virgin girls, the climbing plants, enticing blossoms and dripping leaves and the very lushness of its execution made the happy owner overlook that these were objects designed to be mass-produced and assembled in factories, little more than a mock re-enchantment of industrial form. Jugendstil and art nouveau sang softly of natural beauty and the flow of life, but most of their designers worked in modern offices and drew objects to be produced in bulk.

  Jugendstil and art nouveau and their various national forms or antecedents such as the Arts and Crafts movement were creatures of the nineteenth century, emerging from an artistic response to the encroaching reality of mass production and industrial aesthetic, and soon overtaken by commercial interests. They had been an attempt to re-enchant an increasingly prosaic world by giving it new beauty, but even they faced determined opposition. Outraged by the Viennese culture of façade in emotional economy as in architecture, Loos had declared ornament a crime. Only Gaudì in Barcelona could still summon the courage to build animist architecture writhing with gargoyles, mysterious beasts and symbolic forms. The new design was the product of a world without spirits, a world that had lost or freed itself of animism; it was preoccupied not with the evil eye but with functionality, mechanization, production processes and costs; it belonged to a different, industrial world. How elegant it could be was demonstrated by the functional simplicity of the Thonet Brothers’ steam-bent wooden furniture. But even though the Thonet factory produced more than 2 million units in 1912 alone, and despite their grace and comfort, the pure lines of Thonet’s objects made their way into ordinary households only slowly. People simply preferred the dignified look of historical quotation.

  Palaces of the People?

  Items produced in huge quantities needed outlets, and the new tribe of urban consumers needed places to shop. The hour of the department store had struck: huge smooth selling machines whose commercial engine rooms, lift boys, chic terrasses and multi-storey elegance had more than a passing resemblance to fashionable ocean liners.

  Shopping at Selfridges

  A pleasure - A pastime - A relaxation

  promised posters alerting Londoners to the 1909 opening of the city’s latest big-selling establishment, in which nothing had been left to chance: exhausted husbands could be entertained in a separate, reassuringly club-like smoking room.

  The Paris grands magasins (Bon Marché and Louvre, Printemps and Galeries Lafayette), Macy’s in New York, London colossi like Harrods, Whiteleys and Derry and Toms, Moscow’s Muir & Mirrilees, Innovation in Brussels, Holzer and Fischer in Budapest, or Wertheim, Schocken and Tietz in Germany: these were no mere shops, but shopping experiences striving to offer everything customers might conceivably desire from food to live animals, from clothes to massages, from cars to perfumes and stationery. And they did everything in the name of customer service and convenience. As early as 1894 the Paris Bon Marché, one of Europe’s oldest and most elegant department stores, had a mailing list of 1.5 million addresses for its catalogues. Ten years later its owners presided over an expanding empire with branches in Brixton, Southport and Gloucester and a total of 7,000 employees. In 1905, Harrods established a 24-hour telephone ordering service. The great Paris stores delivered to Trouville and other fashionable beach resorts so loved by their clientele during the summer months, and Muir & Mirrilees in Moscow dispatched its wares throughout the Russian empire. Settled unhappily in Yalta, Anton Chekhov was so dependent on their quality goods that he named his two dogs Muir & Mirrilees.

  Mixing the thrill of buying with the greater promises of creating a new reality that was at once exciting and convenient, commercial centres and events attracted huge crowds. When the 1904 Salon de l’automobile opened its doors in the Paris Grand Palais, 40,000 people visited the sales exhibition on the first day (compared with 10,000 who had attended the opening of the Salon de la peinture that year). What they had come to see, however, was not just a collection of new cars, but a new vision of things, new and exciting possibilities, as one journalist explained:

  You must come at nightfall. Come out into the world from the entrance to the Métro, you stand stupefied by so much noise, movement, and light. A rotating spotlight with its quadruple blue ray, sweeps the sky and dazzles you; two hundred automobiles in battle formation look at you with their large fiery eyes ... Inside, the spectacle is of a rare and undeniable beauty. The large nave has become a prodigious temple of Fire; each of its iron arches is outlined with orange flames; its cupola carpeted with white flames, with those fixed as it were solid flames of incandescent lamps: fire is made ma
tter, and they have built from it. The air is charged with a golden haze, which the moving rays of the projectors cross with their iridescent pencils …

  Flooded with light from 200,000 light bulbs, the Grand Palais dominated the city like a gigantic jewel.

  Another Paris institution combined commercial splendour with social prophecy. Georges Dufayel (1855-1916) offered a department store with a difference. The grand palace of commerce that Dufayel had erected close to Montmartre (at prodigious cost) in 1895 symbolized consumer dreams and the very universe of commerce. ‘On entering Dufayel’s store by the main door it seems as though you are entering a palace rather than a shop,’ wrote one visitor, suitably impressed by the three supreme symbols on the façade: two statues to either side of the monumental door represented Credit and Publicity, the pillars of this empire, while high above, a gigantic clock reminded everyone that time is money. On the inside the reality of commerce was adorned by 200 statues, 180 paintings, ornamented pillars, shining figures in bronze holding brightly lit candelabra, painted glass and a grand staircase leading up to a theatre seating 3,000 spectators and encasing them in white and gold, in silk curtains and a sea of light reflected into infinity by gigantic mirrors. In the basement, a Cinematograph Hall offered a four-hour programme to 1,500 visitors. At night, the glass cupola of the building was illuminated with the power of 10 million candles, a landmark visible for twelve miles and rivalling the legendary searchlight of the Eiffel Tower.

  Putting on a front: the

  Magasin Dufayel in Paris, a

  palace of commerce and

  credit.

  Dufayel was different from other department stores: customers only had to make a downpayment of 20 per cent of the purchase price and could pay the rest in weekly instalments against a commission of 18 per cent. Around 1900, the firm had 3 million customers on its books and 3,000 clerks administering the system. The statue of Credit by its entrance door was there with good reason.

  The goods sold by Dufayel through an empire of 400 branches in the French provinces targeted not moneyed society folk, but people of more modest means. Imitating the taste of the rich, these stores sold simulacra of wealth and success. Mass-produced silk dresses for women and prefabricated suits for men; rabbit pelts processed to look like precious furs; extravagant feather arrangements imitating rare and exotic birds; electroplated tin tableware made to look like solid silver; brilliantly coloured artificial flowers; soft furnishings with sumptuous velvet; and machine-made book cases filled with cheap, gold-embossed editions of classic literature, all these combined to create a world of pretended wealth.

  Many observers threw up their hands at so much vulgarity, but not all dismissed this new reality as decadence. The historian George d’Avenel (1855-1939) made it his life’s work to analyse this fascinating new phenomenon and its social implications. Self-appointed aesthetes who deplored the lowering of standards had simply missed the point, he argued: ‘Each time [industries] extend their reach, the life of a great number of individuals gains a new satisfaction; they allow the pale and illusory but sweet reflection of opulence to penetrate even to the humble. These vulgarizations are the work of our century: they honour it greatly.’ If there was no spark of individual genius in this appearance of wealth and individuality, this new, mass-produced happiness still represented progress: ‘The character of the new luxury is to be banal. Let us not complain too much, if you please: before, there was nothing banal but misery. Let us not fall into this childish but nevertheless common contradiction which consists of welcoming the development of industry while deploring the results of industrialism.’

  The results of industrialism were most strongly felt in the United States, where no different legal systems, customs and national borders obstructed the flourishing consumer market. Sophisticated distribution networks and consumer research encouraged new, rationalized ways of selling goods, and allowed businessmen like John Hartford to carpet the country with his A & P chain stores. Between 1912 and 1915 a new store would be opened every three days. Mail-order catalogues allowed even isolated farming families to partake in the blessings of mass-produced comforts, and brought modern consumer goods even to the remotest pioneers. Sears Roebuck & Company, the most famous of these mail-order firms, produced tomes of almost biblical proportions, and in prodigious numbers: their 500-page illustrated catalogue of commercial promises of a better life through consumption had reached a circulation of a million copies in 1904, and rose by a further million or so every year. Together with the Bible, the Sears catalogue was America’s most widely read and distributed book. Its short texts and lively illustrations even made it a favourite reading primer for small-town schools, where children would learn spelling from the product descriptions and arithmetic by adding up orders.

  An early advertisement for Kellogg’s.

  This new consumer world of statistics standardized not only production, but also consumers. With measuring tape, slide rule and statistics, researchers plotted the standard human body and its most common sizings so that manufacturers could produce ready-made clothes efficiently. As the number of life insurances rocketed throughout the West, actuaries, trained mathematicians, were hired by insurance firms to calculate the likelihood of injury and death to their clients and therefore the repayments and conditions. Traffic planners and urbanists used statistical evidence to work out everything from roads to sewage systems, tramway seats and prison capacities. In this modern world, men and women were numbers first, individuals second.

  Few people lost much sleep over their numerical existence. The result of the modern way of planning and producing things gave ordinary people unprecedented opportunities to improve their circumstances, or that, at least, was what advertisements stated with a loud and incessant voice, as Kellogg’s, Singer sewing machines, Kodak, Quaker Oats and Coca-Cola (advertising budget in 1900: $100,000) became household names. For most people, the attraction of this society of convenience and supposedly endless possibility was irresistible, though here and there a preacher or an artist might see the pitfalls inherent in it. Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle, for instance, which describes the cruel working lives of recent immigrants in the Chicago meat industry, warned of the dehumanization by mechanized production that was to become one of the leading themes of the twentieth century:

  The carcass hog was then again strung up by machinery and sent upon another trolley ride; this time passing between two lines of men ... upon a raised platform, each doing a certain single thing to the carcass as it came to him. One scraped the outside of a leg; another scraped the inside of the same leg. One with a swift stroke cut the throat ... Another made a slit down the body; a second opened the body wider; a third with a saw cut the breastbone; a fourth loosened the entrails; a fifth pulled them out ... There were men to scrape each side and men to scrape the back; there were men to clean the carcass inside, to trim it and wash it. Looking down this room one saw creeping slowly a line of dangling hogs ... and for every yard there was a man working as if a demon were after him.

  Chicago’s new-found assembly-line efficiency was to be one of the inspirations of the automobile assembly lines in the factories of Henry Ford. It is hard to escape the impression that it also presaged the mechanized slaughter of two world wars.

  In his 1895 movie Charcuterie méchanique the film pioneer Louis Lumière had demonstrated not only the surprising effects of trick photography (in this case a backward screening), but also the tenuous and increasingly convoluted relationship between the living individual and mass production. In the sequence, sausages vanish into the meat grinder and eventually reconstitute themselves into pork halves and, finally, a happy, living pig. Mechanized convenience and individual life somehow appeared to be at opposite ends of the spectrum in which most people’s stories played themselves out. This dichotomy created fear, and hordes of prophets preached against ‘Americanization’, vulgarity and the decline of good taste.

  Other, sharper observers caught sight of u
nderlying problems that were all the more serious for being obscured by the sheer dazzle of it all. The surface of things had never been more dazzling than during that great celebration of the culture of consumption at the dawn of the century, the 1900 Paris World Fair; Maurice Talmeyr (1850-1933), a journalist for a Catholic periodical, described the virtual reality of the fair in a series of articles. What the visitor saw, Talmeyr wrote, was no representation of anything known, but rather the result of a striving for maximum effect and entertainment. The ‘Hindu temples, savage huts, pagodas, souks, Algerian alleys, Chinese, Japanese, Sudanese, Senegalese, Siamese, Cambodian quarters ... a bazaar of climates, architectural styles, smells, colours, cuisine and music’ had nothing to do with life in any of these countries, and everything with the organizer’s desire to see more tickets sold. In the Indian section, visitors could see a group of stuffed animals including a trumpeting elephant, a flock of hens, a wild boar, and a serpent ready to strike, and, close by, a jaguar family and a rose ibis that was ‘evidently surprised’ to be surrounded by so many different animals. Reality was being effaced by commercially inspired fantasy:

  The notion of such an India, of an India-warehouse, so magnificent and so partially true as it may be, is true only partially, so partially as to be false, and all these overflowing rooms ... speak to me only of an incomplete and truncated India, that of the cashiers. And the other? That of the famine? For this land of enormous and sumptuous trade is equally that of frightening local degeneracy, of a horrifying indigenous misery. A whole phantom-race dies there and suffers in famine. India is not only a warehouse, it is a cemetery.