100 years later, still making sense of Modernism

Whatever we are, we're sure not modern anymore.

Yet the Modern era retains its disorienting power over us. We haven't caught up yet.

By many reckonings, the Modern era began sometime around or before 1900, and ended with Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Startling: Many of the great events and works of the Modern Era are now a century old. The famous Armory Show of February-March 1913, an international exhibit that traveled from New York to Boston and Chicago, is often said to have brought modernism to the United States.

Much of that show lives near you now.

The most controversial piece there, Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2, now descends, shattering, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Constantin Brâncusi's sculpture Portrait of Mademoiselle Pogany, still an affront and a delight, is there, too. Georges Seurat's The Models and Henri Matisse's The Red Turban, both now at the Barnes, were there, too.

At the Grand Palais in Paris, they've just opened a big retrospective of the work of Georges Braque, who, with Pablo Picasso, helped invent cubism and other kinds of Modern art. One star of this show is a 1913 artwork titled Woman With a Guitar. Like Modernism itself, she bristles with challenging energy.

It's the 100th birthday of another great Modern milestone: The Rite of Spring by Igor Stravinsky - another still-startling icon-smasher, which received its U.S. premiere in Philly in 1922 thanks to Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra.

Elsewhere in 1913, the modern age was rising from the bayou. Louis Armstrong, then just 12, was playing the coronet in the band of the New Orleans Home for Colored Waifs. Within a couple of years, he was helping invent jazz, that crucial American contribution to world culture, foster mother of swing, soul, rock, and hip-hop.

In the spring, Thomas Brothers of Duke University will publish Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism. Brothers writes by e-mail that Armstrong created two modern musics: one in the 1920s for black audiences, using musical approaches derived ultimately from African music, and another for white audiences, a music that challenged "Victorian conventions and also white assumptions of African American primitivism. . . . Both audiences heard his music as black, as modern and as beautiful, though with different definitions of each of these terms."

The Philadelphia era contributed mightily to the Modern age. No fewer than four prominent Modernist poets came through here. William Carlos Williams got his M.D. at Penn in 1906. Ezra Pound, who had grown up in Wyncote, drove his teachers at Penn nuts before taking his M.A. in romantic languages in 1906. Pound's companion Hilda Doolittle flailed around at Penn and Bryn Mawr. At the latter, she met sister poet Marianne Moore in 1905. Within a few years, all were publishing poetry. The outpour was on.

What a year for Pound. In 1913, he met James Joyce in London and shared a Sussex cottage with W.B. Yeats. In the April 1913 issue of Poetry magazine, he published "In a Station of the Metro," one of the most famous poems of the century. He said he wrote it after seeing, in the Paris subway, one face after another come out of the dark. Here's the whole poem:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

Disturbing, verbless. Apparition means "appearance" but carries a ghostly aura. Then that semicolon, after which - what, exactly? A link? A comparison? A disconnect? How are faces in a crowd "like," or how "are" they, petals? No help; we imagine for ourselves. That bough, wet and black . . . a kind of beauty, but hard, inexplicable. There's much unspoken, hidden, haiku-like about it.

Michael Levenson of Duke University just wrote an article for the Atlantic titled "Why We're Still Struggling to Make Sense of Modernism." He tells me by e-mail that T.S. Eliot thought that since civilization is the way it is, poets "must be difficult." Pound's "Metro" is simple but also maddeningly hard. We get it and don't. It eludes us. Levenson writes: "My own sense is that the world is no less complicated and demanding now." So we're still in the predicament these trailblazers felt a century ago.

Some folks think film was the quintessential Modern art. Well, over at 20th and Indiana in Philly, Siegmund Lubin was at the height of his success as a filmmaker in 1913, with the three-reeler When the Earth Trembled, about the San Francisco earthquake, plus three other features. But he was about to be passed up. Near year's end, Cecil B. DeMille started filming The Squaw Man, a six-reeler often called the first Hollywood feature.

And in 1913, Marcel Proust published The Way by Swann's, the first of his seven-volume masterwork, In Search of Lost Time, which would keep appearing well past his death.

Not just the arts. In 1913, Henry Ford introduced the conveyor belt. And the modern state was born, some believe, when the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified, establishing a national income tax.

Renewal, a new start, a housecleaning, shock and freshness, that's what Modernism . . . was.

In the next 32 years, Modernism would give us so much - wars, existentialism, the bomb, the World's Fair of 1939-40, science fiction, penicillin, nylon. God would die and be reborn a thousand times. The seeds of social revolutions in women's lives, race relations, and sexual mores all were planted deep by the time the era ended. If it ever did.

No, we're not modern. Levenson writes that we've lost "the confidence that culture is vocation, and that it can suggest new possibilities for everyday life and alternative paths for history." So we're past Modernism. But only in time. In many ways, it's way beyond us. We still haven't caught up.