Artists and Intellectuals in the Waste Land 991Dutch modernist painter, offered two-dimensional abstractions and straight
lines forming grids. Klees fantasies assumed unexpected shapes and distor
tions on the canvas; “the artist must distort,” he contended, “for therein is
nature reborn.”
The expressionist movement, too, had its origins before the war. Beck
mann rejected the label, but he defined the movement when discussing his
own work: “What 1 want to show in my work is the idea which hides itself
behind so-called reality. I am seeking the bridge which leads from the visible
to the invisible.” Expressionist poets rejected linguistic conventions in an
attempt to communicate the emotion buried beneath the human exterior.
Expressionist playwrights ignored long-established conventions of plot,
character, and dialogue to represent what they considered to be unseen real
ity. In his modernist epic Ulysses (1922), the Irish writer James Joyce (1882
1941) abandoned long-accepted stylistic and narrative conventions to
present the chaotic and seemingly unconnected—at least at first glance—
“stream of consciousness” dialogue of three main characters, through which
he revealed all their sensations and feelings. The novels eroticism led it to
be banned in Britain (but not in traditionally prudish Ireland) and in the
United States until 1934.
In 1924, a group of nineteen painters and writers, led by the French
artist and poet Andre Breton (1896-1966), published a “Surrealist Mani
festo.” In it they rejected “traditional humanism” and the respect for reason
that seemed to have so manifestly betrayed mankind. They were not inter
ested in rationality, which seemed defunct, but in what lay beneath it. The
surrealists were obsessed with the crater-pocked landscape of churned-up
earth, tree stumps, and twisted rubble in northern France and Belgium.
They sought to shock audiences and viewers by expressing themselves in a
way that was spontaneous and deeply personal, but still realistic. Breton’s
work sometimes defies interpretation because none was intended.
After four years in the trenches, the German surrealist Max Ernst (1891—
1976) wrote that he had “died on the first of August 1914 and returned to life
on the 11th of November 1918.” Ernst joined a circle of Dadaists in Cologne.
His 1933 painting Europe after the Rain (I) depicts with oil and plaster what
appears to be a distorted, disfigured, and unsettling aerial relief map of Eu
rope. It suggests the mutilation of the continent, which appears to be slowly
swallowing itself. The surrealists were militant leftists, and they were also
among the minority of Europeans who opposed colonial domination.
For his part, the Viennese doctor Sigmund Freud, founding father of psy
choanalysis, believed that the war demonstrated the irrational nature of
mankind. Freud’s scientific analysis of the unconscious, translated into
many languages during the 1920s, had begun to influence sociologists, polit
ical scientists, and cultural anthropologists. They applied ideas drawn from
psychoanalysis to try to understand group behavior and social conflict. The
war lent a sense of urgency to this enterprise. Freud also greatly influenced
surrealists such as Breton, who drew images and words from his dreams.