This is a book of essays on modernism in the arts, in various fields. Ekbom was chiefly an art critic, but he writes freely on literature, architecture and music as well. The book is structured as a tour of the world through various cities in the period of about 1890-1930. The cities are Paris, London, Vienna, Stockholm, Helsinki, Moscow and New York.
The opening chapter discusses the concept of modernism, its validity, and its origins. He spends some time of the notion of the avantgarde too. His eclectic and synoptic style shines through already in these opening pages, with breezy crossreferences between time periods and disciplines. He isn’t shy about including examples of musical notation to prove a point.
Then he’s off to Paris, where we meet Satie, Picabia, le Corbusier in 10-15 page essays. He dives more deeply into specific works too, with essays on Roussel’s Locus Solus (a favorite of Michel Foucault), artist de Chirico’s only novel Hebdomeros (1929) and an obligatory piece on Joyce’s struggle with Finnegan’s Wake.
Crossing the channel to London, he finds time to explore the ins and outs of British modernism, and proposes the idea that they weren’t daring enough to be as extreme as their Parisian or Viennese counterparts. What was vorticism, really? Something about Idaho-born Ezra Pound and a little ditty on Virginia Woolf.
The Austrian chapter is heavy on architecture (Loos, Otto Wagner) and music (Schönberg and Berg), not much literature. Four pages on Schiele and Klimt.
Stockholm is the next stop, included because Ekbom is Swedish, and because he knows a lot about the artists. He chooses to write about later artists in this chapter, possibly because he was friends with some of them (Öyvind Fahlström, Åke Hodell). But he does a pioneering effort in unearthing Hilma af Klint, who has had a revival in recent years, and also describes the work of GAN and OG Carlsund.
Helsinki is just across the Baltic Sea, where he describes the distinctly Finnish design sensibilities of Alvar Aalto and poets like Rabbe Enckell and Gunnar Björling.
Further East is Moscow, where there is some discussion of constructivism, Vertovian collage and the writings of Mayakovsky and Bulgakov. Fascinating story about George Costakis, the Greek art collector-chauffeur who single-handedly saved a lot of Russian artworks from being lost by decades of dedicated collecting.
The last stop is New York, where focus is lost a bit with digressions on Frank Lloyd Wright, Robert Smithson and William Burrough’s cut-up technique. More enlivening were the bits on George Herriman and e e cummings. This chapter, and the book, ends with a long piece on John Cage and the notion of silence.
It was fun to be in Ekbom’s company for a while. Also: a bit exhausting.
Kinship of all Species 