The Great Upheaval, Guggenheim, NY

Sense of life: Franz Marc’s ‘Yellow Cow’

Imagine a global survey of art from the past decade: how many masterpieces would it contain? Who among today’s prosperous art stars will be a household name even a decade from now? And what portion of their teeming production will anchor museum collections a century hence? It’s hard to imagine that the future will look back in wonder at the early 21st century the way visitors to the New York Guggenheim can now behold the first years of the 20th.

The Great Upheaval bears witness to how dazzlingly fruitful an eight-year period can be. The gargantuan exhibit starts in 1910, when innovation ignited simultaneously in Munich, Vienna, Barcelona, Paris, St Petersburg, Milan and Berlin, flitting across national and class boundaries and bursting into a creative bonfire before it was consumed by the inferno of the first world war.

At the Guggenheim, this explosion of the imagination snaps into an orderly progression along the spiral ramp. Near the beginning, Frantisek Kupka’s “Planes by Colours, Large Nude” organises perspective not with lines or scale, but with hues. Darkness indicates depth: the naked body casts blue shadows, and one plum-coloured thigh recedes into the distance behind its frosty pink companion.

Up towards the museum’s skylight, Modigliani’s sensuously sculptural “Nude” from 1917 sprawls diagonally across the frame, dividing light from dark – pale sheet below, brown wall above – anticipating the neoclassical retreat of the 1920s.

Between these two signposts lies a radical panorama of awesome variety. In the brief interlude before the outbreak of war, original ideas sprang up in such profusion that a single metaphor cannot contain them: they skyrocketed, snowballed, mushroomed, and multiplied. The results of this flowering went beyond mere novelty. Some of the participants wanted to blaze alternative paths to beauty. Many believed that artistic revolt could spiritually renew the world or rejig social hierarchies.

The Great Upheaval is a sort of prequel to the Guggenheim’s fabulous From Chaos to Classicism last year, which delineated the international drift towards antiquity between the wars. (That show has now moved on to Guggenheim Bilbao.) The current exhibit illustrates the assortment of revolutionary tendencies – Cubism, Futurism, Orphism, Rayonism, Expressionism, Abstraction – that finally frightened artists into retrenchment in the 1920s and 1930s. The birth of Modernism may be an old story by now, but The Great Upheaval carries out the exhortation of that ur-Modernist, Ezra Pound, to “make it new”.

The title comes from the first Blaue Reiter exhibit in 1911, which announced the coming of a “new inner Renaissance”. The group’s founders, Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, threw down the gauntlet for the avant-garde, calling for new forms that would interweave symbol and spirit, painting and music, spontaneity and universality.

The movement’s mascot, and one of the Guggenheim show’s highlights, is Marc’s lemon-coloured cow, which frolics exuberantly, kicking up its back legs and thrusting forward with a joyous moo. Marc saw in beasts an innocent vitality that contrasted with human corruption. “People with their lack of piety, especially men, never touched my true feelings,” he wrote. “But animals with their virginal sense of life awakened all that was good in me.” The philosopher-painters of the Blaue Reiter hailed colours that thrummed with emotion and channelled inner states of mind. In 1911 Marc also painted a blameless white bull, curled protectively upon itself, its hindquarters stained ominously red.

The Blaue Reiter’s debut provoked a fusillade of vituperation. Maximilian Karl Rohe, a critic sympathetic to novelty, pronounced: “There are only two possible ways to explain this absurd exhibition: either one assumes that the majority of members and guests of the Association are incurably insane, or else one deals here with brazen bluffers who know the desire for sensation of our time only too well and are trying to make use of this boom.”

Yet in retrospect, it Is staggering to see how a single show in the provincial city of Munich could unveil vast horizons of innovation. Besides Marc’s allusive animals and Kandinsky’s riots of ecstatic colour, it included pictures by Picasso, Henri Rousseau and Robert Delaunay, whose jagged, intersecting planes record the vital dissonances of urban life. Delaunay’s “Red Eiffel Tower” looks like someone framed the monument in a mirror and then smashed the glass. “Windows” (1912), shimmers with sensual, translucent pigment. Delaunay entertained “visions of catastrophic insight ... cosmic shakings, desire for the great clean-up, for burying the old, the past”. His multiplicitous palette and lofty aspirations urged Kandinsky and Marc on to ever-bolder feats of rainbow-hued abstraction.

The Futurists, too, inhaled Delauney’s potent mix, treating it as a stimulant for their own love affair with urban life. To capture the speed and vibrancy of Italy’s cities, they splintered the bodies of people and machines into kaleidoscopes of interpenetrating planes. In Umberto Boccioni’s “Dynamism of a Cyclist”, gold, green, fuchsia and indigo shards collide and rearrange themselves into a portrait of pure, hectic energy. The rebellious excitement that whipped around a dissolving Europe reasserts itself at the Guggenheim – a rare instance of a museum rekindling the original thrill of invention.

It is true that the curators, drawing exclusively on the Guggenheim’s permanent collection, have trotted out a crowd of old favourites: Picasso, especially, has reached threat-level red for overexposure. But in this superheated context, even the cool Parisian cubists acquire a fresh glow of clarity. Because the paintings are hung by chronological proximity, we see the revolution being fought on simultaneous fronts. Picasso, Braque, Gleizes, Metzinger, and Duchamp methodically reorganised three-dimensional space in a dour range of browns, beiges and greys, while Marc, Kandinsky and Chagall opened up new frontiers of polychrome brilliance – all at the same time that others were remapping music, dance, the atom, the novel, and the universe. Not bad for a scant decade.

‘The Great Upheaval: Modern Art from the Guggenheim Collection, 1910-1918’ runs to June 1.

Guggenheim New York