There certainly is an aesthetic which can be generalised from the programmatic writings of the figures you list, augmented by contributions from Yeats, Valery, Proust, Joyce, Rimbaud, Pound, Gertrude Stein and many others. Comparing and contrasting their aesthetic prescriptions it becomes possible to arrive at a careful compound synthesis of what drove the modernists. However, your question is more difficult. The modernist synthesis is realised differentially in different artists and particular art works. As Wittgenstein might have said, there are marked family resemblances but also unique artistic performances and identities. If your aim is to understand specific works of art you may end up asking yourself whether constructing the synthesis was worthwhile, given that its realisation in the unique work of art is only partial. Art appreciation and theory of art are not always aligned - in fact, hardly ever.

Dear Laurence, that is very illustrating. Thank you very much for your help.

Bastante de acuerdo con lo que explica Laurence Wright

Gracias Amelina.

Mucha suerte con tu investigación, César Velandia Silva!! Ahora estoy dirigiendo una tesis doctoral sobre la influencia de Nietzsche en la literatura española.

All the above challenged traditional views or simply the accepted views of their day and against institutional views of personality (Freud), the nature of writing (Joyce, Woolf), morality and vocabulary (Rimbaud) , Eliots reconstruction of classics posed the individual as the authority and seer. Picasso's intense individuality and his assumption that he knew better and that he lived his life according to subjective rules, his use of colour referencing subjective values of palatte and perspective.

Dear Stanley, thanks for your comment.

Estimado César existen tres textos donde puedes encontrar estas relaciones. El primero es Modernidad de Peter Gay, el segundo es La edad de la nada de Peter Watson y por supuesto, el libro de los pasajes de Walter Benjamin, donde existe un texto especifico sobre Baudelaire

Genial, estimado Fabián. Voy a consultarlos. Gracias por tu ayuda.

Dear All:

I found an article titled "The Porter Paradox" written by Jed Perl. He states that Woolf, Porter, and Schuyler want to capture in art the most unexpected things in life. And just as Woolf's unconventional forms of fiction may seem to mirror the irregular sexual and social relationships in Bloomsbury, so that the strange compositions in Fairfield Porter's paintings may seem to reflect a complicated life, the emphasis on the flow of the moment to moment in Woolf's novels points to his evident rejection of the fixations of the Victorian mind. The emphasis on the ephemeral, the atmospheric, in modern art and literature signals a rejection of the absolute structures of neoclassical messianism before modern art.

Perl, J. (2000). The Porter Paradox. The New Republic. (223) 14, p.31-37. EBSCO Religion and Philosophy Collection

Aesthetics of the ordinary. Baudelaire in Paris, Wittgenstein in Vienna

To understand modernity, we approach it from language. Words and their sounds build senses from the mind, and will even be charged with power. However, their paradigms, on the one hand, will be the complexity of meanings, and, on the other hand, silence. Wittgenstein said, "words crumble in the mouth like rotten mushrooms."

From Wittgenstein, we can speak of a philosophy of language. The central consideration that explains his work is found within the "origin" of the linguistic turn as a philosophical movement of the 20th century. In a passage in the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein quotes Augustine stating that "a concrete figure of the essence of human language is that the words of language name objects, sentences are combinations of those names." And this is why Wittgenstein will go deeper into language games than into language itself. To reveal these games as puzzles to be solved whose formulation rests on "the lack of understanding of the logic of our language." These language games represent "the whole formed by language and the actions with which it is interwoven." The meaning of words and their structuring into sentences will be determined by the use made of them in a specific, particular, and practical context. That is, in the sphere of the everyday and ordinary.

Thus, the function of language is to reflect reality. Wittgenstein's philosophy of ordinary or everyday language aims to analyze the discourse of normal people in their normal contexts. This means it maintains its essential idea as a philosophical paradigm, which emphasizes the particularity and difference of each phenomenon or linguistic game, and which lays the foundations of what has been called the pragmatic philosophy of language.

Meanwhile, Baudelaire, through Spleen de Paris, shows the daily life of the big city that becomes a metropolis before his eyes. Baudelaire uses storytelling to show us the world around him as an external witness to the "parade of fashionable life and the thousands of floating existences." He will present ordinary life as the habit of big cities, the endless meeting of their paths. For Baudelaire, poetry is not adequate to describe the ordinary of modern life. We need a new form of expression, prose poems.

In the Spleen de Paris, he describes the ordinary as a way of transmitting the life of the beginnings of modernity during the 19th century, through apparent banalities described in brief anecdotes and satires, he describes characters ignored in literature: workers, poor people, prostitutes. But Baudelaire is witnessing the misery of modern life where life lacks hope and where ideals are unattainable.

Baudelaire and Wittgenstein, in their approaches to the ordinary, produce a sequence of understanding of the world. In which they become modern, being aware of modernity and its contradictions. Baudelaire at the beginning of poetic modernity and Wittgenstein at the beginning of the modern metalanguage of philosophy. In both of them lies an aesthetics of the ordinary, through an epistemology of philosophy of ordinary language. From the appreciation of the ordinary, of daily life, and the transformed urban environment, the decadent city of the industrial revolution at the beginning of the machine age.

References

Baudelaire, Ch. (2011). The Poems and Prose Poems of Charles Baudelaire. The Project Gutenberg eBook, Edited by James Huneker. Release Date: May 31, 2011 [EBook #36287] http://www.gutenberg.org/files/36287/36287-h/36287-h.htm

Chacón Díaz, E. & Ramírez Angarita, C. (2012). Wittgenstein: pilar de la filosofía del lenguaje. Filosofía UIS. 11 (1). 253-268. Retrieved from https://revistas.uis.edu.co/index.php/revistafilosofiauis/article/download/3173/5462

Fielding, J. (2014). An Aesthetics of the Ordinary: Wittgenstein and John Cage. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 72(2), 157-167. Retrieved October 18, 2020, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/43282323

Wittgenstein, L. (1994). Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Barcelona: Altaya.

Wittgenstein, L. (2008). Investigaciones filosóficas. Barcelona: Crítica.

http://wittgensteinrepository.org/ojs/index.php/agora-wab/article/view/2937/3595

The unachieved desire for modernity: visions of Baudelaire, Freud, Nietzsche and Woolf

The use of the memory of these thinkers I want to direct it to the development of the vision of modernity in these authors. And one way of doing this, from my perspective, is reflected in the work of art. Modern art is the constant representation of an unfinished and unachieved desire for the making and practice of modernity. From the literary and philosophical-scientific work, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Freud, and Woolf build knowledge about the modern, while in parallel, modern art is being developed. My question is: Is this possible? Is there an aesthetic of modernity, based on the ideas of these thinkers, represented in the modern work of art?

Flâneurs and the Man of Nietszche

W. Benjamin finds the point of support to develop a theory of experience rooted in the experience of the city that seeks to elevate every day, the fragmentary, the brief, and the apparently insignificant. With modernity, the opposite happens. The temporal limits of the phenomenon are debatable, it affects the entire Western world, and although its state of crisis is recognized and although we live immersed in it until we reach the conclusion that there is no alternative to modernity, this represents the very paradigm of modernity. In Benjamin, as in Baudelaire, there seems to be no interest in the natural, but rather full recognition of a new situation, in which "the city is the forest of modernity. In Baudelaire's work, the relationship between words and the space of the city is paradigmatic in Paris.

There are several points that determine the importance of Baudelaire in the reflection carried out by Benjamin in his attempt at a philosophical and historical reconstruction of the nineteenth century: modernity, the new social masses, the flâneur, Paris, "the artificial paradise" in the face of nature inherited from history.

With the publication of The Flowers of Evil, Gay sets the beginning of modernity in 1857, both because of the scandal provoked by this work and its relationship with the rejection and censorship of the critics and the public of the plastic artists in the salons of Paris. The memory for the anti-classical results in the link between Baudelaire and the artists because there is no word to define the crisis of the avant-garde. At the same time, Nietzsche questions modernity by finding the rupture of the subject-object as an expression of modernity. The value of the modern individual to recover the injustice whose valorizing action agrees that every moral action of the individual is given in the sense of recovering its true nature in the form of memory.

In Freud: Inventor of the Modern Mind, Kramer argues that it is impossible to imagine the modern without Freud. The inner monologue or stream of consciousness, latent in the novels of Joyce and Woolf, bears the mark of Freud's method of psychoanalysis, with its reliance on the flow of associations to the psyche. The dense symbolism and wordplay of Eliot, Pound, and Nabokov pay unwitting tribute to Freud's account of the coded effects of his hidden and repressed desires.

Nature in Woolf's Women and Freud's Fears

According to Watson, in The Age of Nothing, "every artistic creation founded on nothing is an optimistic celebration of life. The 20th century explores the limits between art and life, understanding creativity through the prism of the values of originality and spontaneity, both linked to human consciousness-and unconsciousness". Simultaneously, the era lived a scientific process of the world, Darwin's theory of evolution broke the determinism about the self in front of its origins and therefore its ends, at the same time that psychoanalysis assumes that every event finds its explanation in the deepest traumas of the psyche.

In The Porter Paradox, Perl states that Woolf, Porter, and Schuyler want to capture in art the most unexpected things in life. And just as Woolf's unconventional forms of fiction may seem to mirror the irregular sexual and social relationships in Bloomsbury, so that the strange compositions in Porter's paintings may seem to reflect a complicated life, the emphasis on the flow of the moment to moment in Woolf's novels points to his evident rejection of the fixations of the Victorian mind. The emphasis on the ephemeral, the atmospheric, in modern art and literature signals a rejection of the absolute structures of neoclassical messianism prior to modern art.

On the other hand, Gay states in Modernism that this idea, vision, or memory does not come from the world of art theory, but from the world of Freudian psychology. However, Teachout in The Cult of the Difficult criticizes Gay, in that the image of the artist was inconsistent with the complex reality of middle-class life and with the receptivity to modern art shown by the hateful bourgeoisie of the time. In the end, the elites fed the modernity. Despite this, the difficulty per se is a significant indicator of the validity of modern art, while the modernists who opted for what Copland called "imposed simplicity" and that art does not have to be complex to be truly modern, and that expression is so simple that it will reverberate through decades of modern art and architecture. The use of memory in modern thinkers was both complex and simple, filled with the repressed self of sexuality, the connoisseur's vision of the city, his new way of dressing, his anti-nostalgic and contradictory narrative of fear of the future, which transcends the very presence of his moment and is latent in the aesthetics of modern art.

References

Gay, P. 2007. Modernidad. Madrid: Planeta

Kramer, P. (2009). Freud: Inventor of the Modern Mind. New York: Harper Collins

Perl, J. (2000). The Porter Paradox. New Republic. (223) 14, p31-37. EBSCO Religion and Philosophy Collection

Supelano-Gross C. (2014) ¡Cómo hacen frente las cosas a las miradas! Walter Benjamin y la mirada de lo urbano. Universitas Philosophica 62, año 31: 147-168 enero-junio, Bogotá, Colombia. Retrieved from http://www.scielo.org.co/pdf/unph/v31n62/v31n62a07.pdf

Teachout, T. (2007). The Cult of the Difficult. Commentary. EBSCO Religion and Philosophy Collection. Dec (124) 5, p66-69

Watson P. (2014). La edad de la nada. El mundo después de la muerte de Dios Planeta Barcelona,

Estudios de Teoría Literaria Revista digital: artes, letras y humanidades Año 5, Nro. 9, marzo 2016 Facultad de Humanidades / UNMDP

The original remit of Modern Art was to try and represent the unseen, which of course is a bit of an oxymoron and also they weren't necessarily right in their thinking.

This was fuelled by the Theosophy of Madam Blavatsky and ideas of the occult and the 4th dimension (Linda Dalrymple Henderson 'Modern Art and the 4th dimension').

Their aim was to free themselves of the constraints of perspective and somehow liberate art but in doing so they had a mistaken idea of fractured space which was an attempt to fuse inner and outer realities akin to thought process/memory/imagination but in reality it's unworkable as there is no such thing as fractured space on a Cartesian level.

There is a pictorial solution and it is the transcendental pictorial context of perspective where all 2D data is uber-form representative however articulating this in order to see it is virtually impossible as yet because we see the appearance of things in order to negotiate the perceived external world.

A square can represent a trapezohedron but it still looks like a square.

This problem is a bit of a Catch-22 equation boiled down to 'the transcendental pictorial conundrum' (I only see a square) versus 'the transcendental pictorial context of perspective' (I know there's the possibility of there being a representation in perspective of a trapezohedron).

This is what Cezanne's painting explores with respect to visual cognition.

I've written a short declaration called The Unifying Theory of Art which explains this issue in a bit more detail (see my profile).

I doubt this translates sucessfully to literature, since it's an image-processing issue.

Recently I've become increasingly impressed by the importance of Poe in the formation of European literary modernism. He resonates significantly with Baudelaire and company, with Huysmans, Laforgue, Valéry, Remy de Gourmont, André Gide, Arthur Symons, W. B. Yeats, George Moore, Oscar Wilde and others, not excluding ‘modernising’ painters such as Manet, Gauguin and Whistler. Remarkable, especially for one who was, in my view, an execrable stylist.

Thanks Peter and Lawrence. Very interesting.