Cultural Ferment 813Erik Satie (1866-1925) composed music by the dim light of lampposts as
he returned in an alcoholic haze from his favorite cafes, where he would eat
only foods white in color. Both Satie and his countryman Claude Debussy
(1862-1918) set out to free music from all constraints. Saties composi
tions, with fanciful titles like Three Pieces in the Form of a Pearf explored
new relationships between chords that surprised listeners, outraging some
while delighting others with their humor. The Austrian composer Arnold
Schoenberg (1874—1951) began to break the patterns of traditional har
monies to write free atonal music, beginning with his String Quartet No. 2
(1908). He believed atonality realistically and subliminally followed the
dictates, instincts, and sometimes suffering of his psyche: “What counts is
the capacity to hear oneself, to look deep inside oneself.... Inside, where
the man of instinct begins, there, fortunately, all theory breaks down.” For
Schoenberg, the self became a refuge from the outside world.
The artists, writers, and composers of the avant-garde believed that art
could reveal what is hidden in the unconscious, and thus open up new vis
tas of experience that could be communicated to viewers and audiences.
The poet Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918), whose work defied stylistic
convention, wrote reviews of books that only existed in his mind. Master of
ambiguity, he abandoned direct statement and even punctuation and con
ventional word order to encourage readers to find new meanings in his work.
One contemporary, affirming the particularly close link between symbol
ism and music, urged writers to “drop a syllable into a state of pure con
sciousness and listen for the reverberations.”
Postimpressionists painted subjects in ways that even more consciously
than impressionism distanced the artist from the subject. Georges Seurat
(1859—1891) claimed that painters could evoke emotions through the visual
suggestions of discontinuous lines, colors, and tones. Symbolist writers, who
believed that symbols would stimulate memory through free association,
were intrigued by Seurat's paintings because they consisted of thousands
of dots of color forming figures and landscapes. This bold style, called
“pointillism,” influenced by the development of photography, left Seurat’s
figures appearing strangely mechanical and separate from each other. This
may suggest the alienation, social division, and isolation of modern urban
life. Yet in A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (1884), Seurat may have sought to
portray social cohesion through the social mix of bourgeois and workers
enjoying a Sunday afternoon along the Seine River in Paris.
Expressionist painters used daring distortions, curious juxtaposition,
and bold, unfamiliar color schemes to express what lay deep inside them
and to obtain an emotional response in viewers. They were greatly influ
enced by the art of “primitive” societies. The French painter Paul Gauguin
(1848-1903) abandoned a comfortable living as a stockbroker for the
uncertainty of a career as a painter. His lengthy stay on the Pacific Ocean
island of Tahiti shaped the appearance of his painting. Edvard Munch
(1863-1944), a Norwegian artist who came to Paris in 1893, demon