Expression and Existence

Salvador Dalí and Piet Mondrian both created works of visual art during the era commonly labeled the “Age of Anxiety,” the time period between World War I and World War II. The Age of Anxiety was so-named for the massive societal upheaval occurring globally, and particularly in Europe, as a product of the desolation brought about by World War I and the shifting tides in philosophy and the arts. The world was going through drastic changes in this brief period of time, and we find in the work of these two artists a diversity of expression and perspective. Mondrian, affiliated with the art movement de Stijl, created simple paintings of right-angled lines and neutral and primary colors in an effort to find a truer experience of essential reality. Dalí, on the other hand, was found in the Surrealist camp, a group heavily influenced by Sigmund Freud’s ideas about dreams and the human unconscious. Dalí sought to understand the world through the irrational processes of the mind, and his art reflected this through his uncensored, eclectic imagery performed with masterful precision. These two dynamically different artists were both greatly influenced by the Age in which they lived, and they both left their mark on history as they attempted through their art to face the questions of life and existence. This article is available in JCCC Honors Journal: http://scholarspace.jccc.edu/honors_journal/vol3/iss1/1 The period of human history from the end of World War I to the beginning of World War II, particularly in Europe, has come to be labeled as the “Age of Anxiety.” After the catastrophe that was World War I, along with the shifting tides in culture and philosophy, many people were experiencing overwhelming disorder in their lives and consequential disillusionment with their previously held optimistic beliefs. Suddenly the world was changing in ways no one was able to predict (Benton and DiYanni 380). It appeared that society was unraveling around itself. As William Butler Yeats so eloquently put it in his famous poem “The Second Coming,” “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold... The darkness drops again but now I know/ That twenty centuries of stony sleep/ Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle...” (Yeats) The world was awaking from its sleep, but the sight they found was not the dawn for which they had hoped. Though some would take years to shake off the lethargy, there were a small number of people that rose with vigor above the crowd to process what was actually happening around them. Salvador Dalí and Piet Mondrian were two artists who created some of their most significant artwork during this Age of Anxiety, but their expressions of the Age were drastically different. In analyzing their work, one finds that many of the core philosophical bases of the pieces are polar opposites, while some are the same. We find in Mondrian and Dalí an extraordinary diversity of expressions of one of the most intense periods of change in modern history, and in order to understand these contrasting expressions, we must first understand the time that created them. We must look at the political events, the philosophical notions, and the artistic movements that set the stage for and became influential players during this era of history. World War I, the Great War, the “war to end all wars,” has the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand on June 28, 1914, as its commonly decided starting point, and it lasted until Germany finally negotiated an armistice with the Allies, finalized at 11 o’clock am on November 1 Rockrohr: Expression and Existence Published by ScholarSpace @ JCCC, 2012 11, 1918, “the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month” (Duffy). After 1,500 days of some of the most brutal warfare the world has ever seen, the death toll of the battlefields was around nine million human lives (“Introduction to the Great War”). This war scarred the European landscape with thousands of miles of trenches and buildings demolished by air raids as far as the eye could see. It saw giant leaps in warfare technology, such as the fully automatic machine gun developed by Hiram Maxim, an American inventor who did not become successful until he moved to Europe and was told about the lucrative venture of warfare technology. As he said, “In 1882 I was in Vienna, where I met an American whom I had known in the States. He said: ‘Hang your chemistry and electricity! If you want to make a pile of money, invent something that will enable these Europeans to cut each others' throats with greater facility’” (Browne). Maxim went on to do just that, creating the weapon that was the cause of much of the casualty rate in World War I. Before the destruction caused by the war, western culture had generally been optimistic about what increases in technology would bring. The world had undergone a massive Industrial Revolution, blazing the trail for continually growing progress in technology. People got excited about this; the many issues globally dealt with would finally be able to be solved, and the means would be technology. Unfortunately, the Great War showed them all that the world they created was not what they had envisioned. “You get this notion that modernization actually didn’t make the world a better place” (Conrad). The events in the world were growing ever more chaotic, and the presumed sense of order was falling apart. Political factions were rising up to take over where society was losing its grip, factions such as the Communist Party in Russia and Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party in Germany. Economic collapses were occurring all over the world, especially in the United States with the Great Depression brought on by a crash in the stock 2 JCCC Honors Journal, Vol. 3 [2012], Iss. 1, Art. 1 http://scholarspace.jccc.edu/honors_journal/vol3/iss1/1 market. The world was struck with the stark concept that they really did not have as much control as they had imagined and their foundations were crumbling. Because of all these things, there was a profound loss of optimism in society at large during that era (Conrad). As Ernest Hemingway wrote in the epigraph to The Sun Also Rises, quoting Gertrude Stein, “You are all a lost generation” (“Ernest M. Hemingway”). Martin Heidegger, a philosopher during and after the period, put forth the following idea: “Anxiety arises when we realize our whole system of meanings and our values have no ultimate ground other than that this is how our historical tradition has developed. This makes us realize that what we are is not what we could choose to be” (Lawhead 541). It is no wonder that this period was called the Age of Anxiety. Apart from the influence these political events and movements would have on the expressions of artists such as Dalí and Mondrian, the philosophical ideas being discussed and developed just prior to and during this era also had an incredible impact on the arts. One philosophy that was prior to the Age of Anxiety but had a tremendous impact upon it was the concept of existentialism, which has its roots in Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard in the early to midnineteenth century and Nietzsche in the midto late nineteenth century (Conrad). Fyodor Dostoevsky was one of the first to question society’s optimistic, scientific view of human nature. He also questioned their view of human history being a rationally designed course of events. He voiced his opposition to that view through the mouth of one of his literary characters: “One may say anything about the history of the world – anything that might enter the most disordered imagination. The only thing one cannot say is that it is rational. The very word sticks in one’s throat” (Lawhead 356). In the same critical mood as Dostoevsky, Søren Kierkegaard challenged prior philosophy’s focus on speculative metaphysics. He believed that to build a logical philosophical 3 Rockrohr: Expression and Existence Published by ScholarSpace @ JCCC, 2012 system of existence was like building an enormous, magnificent castle while you live in the small wooden shed next door (Lawhead 406). Kierkegaard viewed existential truth as something that can only be understood subjectively, in the context of an individual’s life and choices. He saw knowing existential truth as more similar to being physically fit than to understanding a mathematical formula. Physical fitness is something that can only be known through the process of doing. It is a knowledge that cannot be taught but can only be obtained on one’s own; whereas a mathematical formula is something that can be taught by another and is the same in whatever context in which it is obtained (Lawhead 404). To Kierkegaard, life is a thing which cannot be understood or lived passively but must be taken ahold of and directed passionately. His opinion was that life cannot be lived objectively in the third person but subjectively in the first, and good philosophy should be understood the same way. Friedrich Nietzsche joined in Kierkegaard’s philosophical stream in that he also questioned what we can objectively know. However, he took that skepticism much farther than Kierkegaard, presenting the idea that we cannot know anything. Nietzsche held a view called “perspectivism,” which said that every truth is interpreted through a certain perspective, depending on the subject who holds that perspective. “According to Nietzsche, three things can be said about perspectives: they are unavoidable, they are false, and yet they are useful” (Lawhead 418). In other words, we all have perspectives of truth, and they never perfectly correspond to objective reality. However, we must utilize our perspectives in order to live in the world, an idea that would much later be expounded upon in the pragmatic postmodernism of Richard Rorty. Now, as for the grand scheme of Nietzsche’s philosophy, we find in it a persistent central thread of nihilism, which is “the belief that there are no enduring values on which to build our 4 JCCC Honors Journal, Vol.