Modernism, Neoclassicism, and Irony

This chapter discusses the relation between neoclassicism and modernism. It sets Satie’s ‘Symphonic Drama’ on texts of Plato, Socrate, in the context of post-First World War neoclassicism in France. In this work, Satie presents a ‘white’ antiquity, and his provocative cultivation of boredom and monotony is read as an embracing of qualities decried by the critics of neoclassicism. The trademark irony of Plato’s Socrates emerges in Satie’s work as a modernist deadpan. The figure of Socrates familiar from the earlier neoclassicism of Jacques-Louis David’s painting of Socrates taking the hemlock is shorn of ethical and philosophical content by Satie, and Socrates’ exemplarity is located purely in gesture. The chapter analyses the poetics of simplicity, which in this work leaves the audience suspended between sublimity and boredom. Taking the story up to more recent times, the chapter ends with Robert Mapplethorpe’s classicizing photography of the naked body and his close-up on the face of the Apollo Belvedere (in the photograph Apollo) and also briefly considers Leo Caillard’s playful clothing of a neoclassical sculpture with a Nike T-shirt.