Modernism’s aesthetic withdrawal from reality was a retreat from politics

Evidence

That Modernism tends to involve precisely the kind of aesthetic withdrawal from reality described by Schmitt and Moretti can be shown by numerous examples: I shall give but two. One of Klimt’s greatest works is his ‘Beethoven Frieze’, painted for the 1902 exhibition at the Secession building in Vienna in honour of Max Klinger’s statue of the composer. Schorske contrasts the frieze with the grim view of politics in Klimt’s earlier ‘Jurisprudence’, which had offered ‘the frightening spectacle of the law as ruthless punishment, consuming its victims’. Now Klimt took as his theme Beethoven’s Ninth, but transformed the revolutionary Promethianism of the symphony, and of Schiller’s ‘Ode to Joy’ into ‘a manifestation of narcissistic regression and utopian bliss … Where politics had brought defeat and suffering, art provided escape and comfort.’ … For Klimt, the sentiment is not heroic but purely erotic. More remarkable still, the kiss and embrace takes place in a womb.’ Schorske calls the frieze Klimt’s ‘fullest statement of the ideal of art as a refuge from modern life. In “Beethoven”, the dreamer’s utopia, wholly abstracted from that life’s historical concreteness, is itself imprisonment in the womb, a fulfilment through regression.’ — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 216

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly relevant to the ‘On Sacrifice’ essay’s theme of regression from shared political life into private fulfillment — Klimt reframes Schiller’s fraternal kiss into an erotic, womb-enclosed retreat, a small act of withdrawal rather than decorum toward the corpse of political idealism.
• XREF: connects to: Avant-garde art depends on concrete political conditions, not just aesthetic logic — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 243; Political defeat turned Viennese bourgeois assimilation into a retreat into art — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 207; Modernism’s decline stems from political defeats rather than economic change — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 216 (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• Modernism’s form carried a political charge its academic interpreters denied #corroborates (0.80) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 679
• Modernism’s decline stems from political defeats rather than economic change #complicates (0.75) — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 216
• Modernism emerged from a specific industrial-capitalist conjuncture that postwar capitalism destroyed #expands (0.75) — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 562
• The New Left’s cultural-political self-conception drove postmodernism’s turn to aesthetics. #qualifies (0.75) — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 2200
• Abandoning modernist becoming leaves only aestheticized spatial politics #complicates (0.72) — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 1934