Who was the greatest artist of the Twentieth Century?

I.

Who was the greatest artist of the Twentieth Century? Some questions are so huge, so preposterous and so impossible to answer that they are irresistible. This is one of them.

It’s a question that has bothered me for years and has led to some quite serious arguments. People get very wound up by questions like this. Because to rank artists is to assign rank also to the people who happen to like those artists. You are effectively ranking people. And people don’t like that.

But that is no reason not to do it, or at least to attempt an answer. Because yes, this is only an attempt. No answer to a question like this could ever be definitive. There is no way a question of this scope could ever draw anything other than a chorus of booing. But then a brief career in the music industry left me well used to booing. So bring it on.

For the purposes of this piece, an artist is anyone who creates something of aesthetic value, including painters, musicians, poets, sculptors, novelists and all the rest of it. It can also include philosophers at the literary end of the spectrum (hello Nietzsche), but not architects, whose work, though artistic in some measure, is fundamentally practical. That rules them out.

And finally, I should say here at the outset that I have a clear winner in mind.

II.

Yes, you did read that correctly, I did propose Nietzsche as a candidate for the greatest artist of the Twentieth Century. He died in August 1900, and his work went on to have its greatest cultural and political impact during the Twentieth Century, so why not? His work is unquestionably artistic in character — the literary punch of Human, All Too Human, The Birth of Tragedy and especially Zarathustra is undeniable and enormously alluring. It was also influential, not least on people like Camus, who returned repeatedly to Nietzsche in his writing, and who helped to rehabilitate his reputation after his ghastly sister, Elisabeth Förster Nietzsche had done so much to associate her brother’s legacy with Hitlerism.

But the greatest artist of the Twentieth Century? No. He wasn’t that and we can rule him out for reasons that are themselves instructive. Nietzsche’s writing was dense, beautiful and beguiling, but almost everyone who took up his philosophy made something terrible of it. The stuff about “superman” was always going to be misinterpreted by people who mistook him for a political prophet when really he was something very different. And by the time we get to Ecce Homo, poor Friedrich was showing signs of the serious mental illness that would eventually burst out with such disastrous consequences.

But this brings up the first broader point when searching for the greatest artist of the Twentieth Century, which is that this artist, whoever it may be, must not only be outstanding, but must be outstanding in the most outstanding genre of the twentieth century. This pushes us towards the question of whether philosophy was the outstanding artistic form of the Twentieth Century, the one that dominated all others — and the answer to that is clearly no. This is not to denigrate a field of stunning brilliance, only to state a fairly uncontroversial view that philosophy was not the artistic category that won the Twentieth Century.

So we can rule it out, and with it, all the philosophers contained therein. And while we are in the business of ruling out entire categories, are there any others that can be similarly cut away? Yes — sculpture, for one. Giacometti, Brâncusi, Moore, Hepworth and the rest created works of genius. But again, did the sculptors dominate the cultural landscape of the last century? They did not. The dominating age of sculpture can be found in ancient history, in the temples of Karnak, Angkor Watt and Athens. But now the presence of statuary in the public realm has a very different, more contested significance.

Already, some people will not like the direction of this argument. Perhaps they feel Wittgenstein’s Tractatus is the greatest literary work of the Twentieth Century, or that the now-defaced statue of Edward Colston, fished out of the harbour and currently on display in the M Shed in Bristol, is a collaborative sculpted work that captures perfectly the deep impulses of our time.

To these two points I would say only that the Tractatus is impenetrable to most people, and that the Colston statue, which I have seen, has little or no artistic merit to it at all. It is a boring, characterless statue, and its aesthetic value has not been improved by the fact somebody has spray-painted the word “prick” down one side of it.

The words “to most people” in the preceding paragraph are worth pausing over. They bring up another important distinction: that between artistic work that is easy and work that is hard. The Tractatus is hard. Wildly influential, but very hard. Same with Schoenberg. Beckett too, with the exception of Godot. Very hard, especially the novels. (Beckett’s poetry is simply bewildering). On the other hand, Camus is very straightforward — superficially at least. You can follow the storyline of La Peste quite easily, in the same way you can follow the storyline of Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight and Wide Sargasso Sea, or anything by Hemingway. But try Beckett’s The Unnameable, and there isn’t really a story at all, only a consciousness spiraling inwards on itself with terrifying rotational force. Brilliant, but hard.

This gives another line of attack when trying to pin down the greatest artist of the Twentieth Century, which is that their work must not only be influential, but must have mass appeal. This would rule out those artists considered “hard”.

The words “dumbing down” will no doubt be springing to the minds of some readers. But the aim here is not to encourage philistinism, but instead, clarity. Because to look for the greatest artist of the Twentieth Century, you have to ask whether that person should be somewhat obscure, a niche individual who spoke to a small audience. Or should it be a person who took advantage of, and was compatible with, the mass communications systems that arose in the last century? In my view, it should be the latter — we are looking for a person whose work was not only of profound depth and substance, but was also recognised on a global scale.

Could this be said of any of the poets? Yeats? Perhaps. The war poets? Maybe. Frost, Eliot, Plath or Thomas? Yes. But again, it is worth turning to the issue of whether poetry was the defining medium of the last century and the answer is evidently no. It seems absurd and perhaps a little horrifying to dismiss poetry in this way when you step back and consider it in all its glory. But poetry was not the form that won the Twentieth Century. It did not enter the mass consciousness, and capture it, dominating all other forms.

The same can be said of the novel (yes, I am aware this is absurd, but I did give a warning). It is a judgement that is harder to make than for poetry, because the novel remained a vital and at times preeminent cultural form for much of the Twentieth Century. Nabokov, Orwell, Bulgakov and all the others did much to capture the viciousness, beauty and insanity of the age. The novel also gelled with the systems of mass communication to give rise to literary megastars, such as Agatha Christie, whose books became films with drove demand for yet more books and so on. Estimates vary, but Christie has sold at least 2bn books. The upper estimates suggest double that figure.

And yet, the novel’s dominance was undermined by precisely the systems of mass communication that so benefited Christie. The radio, TV and cinema all mounted a challenge to the dominance of the novel, which had perhaps reached something of a pinnacle in the nineteenth century. It seems churlish to say so, considering that Proust polished off A la Recherche du Temps Perdu in the twenties. But there’s no doubt that the advance of mass entertainment undercut the status of fiction, or at least that it diverted people’s attentions elsewhere.

III.

But where? If the Twentieth Century was a period in which mass communication took people away from the novel, then where did all that attention go? To the theatre? It certainly did so in the first half of the twentieth century, and especially if the score was by Cole Porter or George Gershwin. But the theatre itself didn’t become the dominant Twentieth Century format. It has adapted, certainly, such that the animal savagery of Tennessee Williams found its later-day expression in the work of Sarah Kane. But theatre did not dominate the cultural landscape.

However, the painters did dominate — in part. Picasso, Dali, Kahlo, Pollock, Rothko, Matisse, Bacon, Freud, so colossally famous they need only one name, were purely of the Twentieth Century. It is not hard to imagine, in a thousand years time, when histories are written of the Twentieth Century, a book appearing with a painting by Picasso on its front cover (if books still exist, of course).

Work by the pictorial artists of the Twentieth Century brings with it, however, the question of commodification. What can be said about a painting like Picasso’s “Femmes d’Alger”, when its most striking characteristic is that it is worth 180 million dollars? It’s a preposterous amount of money, one that gets in the way of the piece of work itself and which inevitably re-shapes our view of it. The price tag becomes part of the artwork, something that Picasso surely never intended and the logic of that unhappy fusion of art and cash leads ever-downward, to the moneyfied horrors of Koons and Hirst.

This is the problem with the great paintings of the Twentieth Century. That although they are supreme works of art, the legacy of the artists has become clouded by the motives of the buyers — all those oligarchs and petro-state despots. It would be comforting to imagine that the aesthetic and artistic qualities of the works themselves persist independently of the absurdities of the art market, but they can’t quite escape it. The gravitational pull of the money is too great, and it weighs on these painters. In the end, their greatest works have been reduced to the status of assets.

Even if this argument alone does not rule out the painters, the question of whether the form itself dominated the Twentieth Century settles the matter. They did not and could not. A painting sits on a wall, or in a bank vault, and there it remains. Paintings are not happy travellers. The vital qualities they retain are inevitably diminished when the image is replicated and transmitted. You can’t capture Frank Aeurbach’s layers of paint on a postcard. The painters? No. We cannot have one of them as the greatest artist. Not of the Twentieth Century at least. They had their moment during the Renaissance.

The cinema then? Was that the winning medium? Perhaps. And what’s more, the movies have the benefit of being a creation of the last century and of being more “of the time” than any of the formats mentioned so far. But the question that springs up immediately is how all those movies will age. Consider Chaplin, for example. Watch one of his movies now. We can appreciate the brilliance, but do we laugh in the same way as the audiences of the 30s? Similarly, “Citizen Kane” was a dazzling piece of moviemaking — in its day. But to the modern eye, the acting looks a little mannered and the special effects, so brilliantly deployed by Welles, seem cumbersome in comparison to modern CGI.

This, then is the problem for cinema — the technological advances in moviemaking have been so rapid that even the greatest works have aged very quickly, to the point where, in some cases, they look a little absurd. The shark in “Jaws” appears so artificial to the modern eye it’s almost comic.

Yes, there are outliers, directors whose work seems to sit alone, beyond the thread of time. Tarkovsky is one, and perhaps also Godard, though his love of style will perhaps date his movies more than those of his dour, Soviet colleague. But then we come back to the question of mass appeal — films like “Zona”, “Solaris” and “Ivan’s Childhood” are all stunning, but they are really of the arthouse realm. And if we are looking for the most influential artist of the Twentieth Century, then he or she much go beyond the narrow boundaries of the in-crowd. Some of the auteurs came close to this, but on nothing like the necessary scale, not if they are to come out on top in this contest.

So, not cinema either. It dates too quickly. Opera, then? “Tosca” was debuted in 1900, making Puccini a possible candidate. But no — the place of opera in the Twentieth Century has shifted into something quite odd, where it remains a highly respected and loved art form, but one so luxurious and expensive that it must be propped up by enormous government intervention — at last, that is the case in Britain. The composers are miraculous, not least Puccini, but really it is opera’s social position that excludes it from contention. The form itself has failed to recruit new enthusiasts, with the result that it now occupies a niche position in cultural life. I say this as a fan.

IV.

In the course of this admittedly preposterous and entirely flawed argument, I have sought to dismiss opera, painting, sculpture, architecture, poetry, cinema, theatre and the novel as artistic formats that could yield the greatest artist of the twentieth century. With heavy heart, I must also disagree with CLR James, who argued in Beyond a Boundary that cricket should be considered an artform. I do not think it is. Sir Garfield Sobers, alas, is not eligible.

Having arranged all these pieces on the board, we now come to the winning art form, to the medium that, without doubt, won the twentieth century — music. Can there really be any argument? Blues. Rock n’ roll. Soul. Jazz. Hip hop. R&B. All were products of the last century. To meet a person with no interest in poetry, or painting, or sculpture wouldn’t be especially surprising. But to meet someone who didn’t like music would be a surprise, a shock, even. You might wonder whether there was something wrong with them.

Everyone loves at least some form of music, and now, thanks to online streaming and smartphones, it’s possible to listen to everything, everywhere, all the time. No other art form has woven itself so thoroughly into the current of life, becoming synonymous with cultural movements, revolutions, social tension, urban decay, city life, the countryside, hard times, outright hedonism, highbrow artistry, crass commercialisation — everything. Music is bound up with all of these things.

The greatest musician of the Twentieth Century, then, could well be a candidate for the greatest artist of that period. Who are the contenders?

The greatest musician cannot simply be the “hardest”, or most avant-garde. Cage and Schoenberg are therefore out, along with the other experimentalists such as Ligeti and Penderecki. We can also cut out the electronica of Stockhausen, Richard James and all the rest.

We are not looking for a fashionably obscure, or cult artist. We can also discount the music that goes too far the other way, for example the pop of Buddy Holly and the Beatles. Their music was undeniably brilliant, but also highly derivative. The Beatles, it should be remembered, started out as a covers band, soaked in the traditions of Black American blues and R&B. The same goes for the Stones, who were, in their musical form, essentially a blues band.

But there are some strains of music that combine both characteristics. They are “hard” in the sense of being technically exacting, and also “popular” for being harmonically and melodically pleasing. Take Ravel, for example. Even at his most doom-laden, such as his black-as-night meditation “Le Gibet”, (1908) you can still hear the melodic lines quite clearly. Ravel was far ahead of his time, and was already experimenting with modal forms of music, which were picked up fifty years later by musicians including Bill Evans and Miles Davis and deployed on the wildly popular album “Kind of Blue”. In Ravel and Davis, we have highly complex works, produced by technically sophisticated artists and yet which still have mass appeal.

This is the crucial combination — technical complexity and mass appeal — that the greatest musician, and therefore artist, of the Twentieth Century must have. Bob Dylan, perhaps? Winning the Nobel for literature is not to be sniffed at. But it does indicate quite clearly that the man’s lyrics are the main thing. It is unclear how long his musical legacy will last. That rasping voice and nails-down-a-blackboard harmonica will not age well.

Dylan also suffered from being in the wrong section of the record store. Country music is always going to have limited appeal as a genre, especially now that ever more of us live in cities. Which is not to say that country music can only be listened to by people who live in the countryside — I am not quite that blinkered. But there is no doubt that the most insistent music of the last century derived its sense of urgency from the city. When blues went electric in Chicago, it came alive. Hip hop is the sound of the South Bronx housing projects. Motown even named itself after its home city.

Jazz also emerged in the cities. It was also the first musical form to be a product of the Twentieth Century alone (the origins of the blues go far back into the plantations of the 1800s.) The origins of the word “jazz” are uncertain, but one suggestion is that it derives from the French Creole word used by prostitutes going out on the game: la chasse (literally “the hunt”). Pronounced in a broad New Orleans accent, it works. As for the new syncopated style, another story too good to check was that down-at-heel bars across the South couldn’t afford new pianos, so bought second hand instruments, many of which had been shot up in the saloons of the wild west. This led pianists to develop styles that took into account their instruments’ missing notes and the new rhythm was born.

(Alamy)

This is the background from which Louis Armstrong emerged (pictured above). He was a street kid who grew up in the roughest part of New Orleans and was adopted by a Lithuanian Jewish family. His trumpet-playing style influenced waves of later artists, Miles Davis among them. He also brought to mass attention, for the first time, the idea that music could simply be made upon the spot. A player could improvise.

Armstrong was colossally successful and with his low, bear-like voice, instantly recognisable. But when the new sound of Bebop started coming out of New York in the 40s and 50s, he couldn’t get his head round it, referring to it somewhat indelicately as “Chinese music”. Jazz went tearing off in this new direction, and he wasn’t able — or willing — to keep up with it. Which is fair enough. Bebop is hard music, played fast and often while very high. Though Armstrong was no slouch on either front, he was overtaken by a younger generation, with different ideas and a greater taste for technical experimentation. Old Satchmo got a bit left behind.

Though revelatory, the Bebop era didn’t give us the greatest artist of the century, though it did produce Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and John Coltrane — of the three, Coltrane has perhaps the greatest claim. A long way further down the line came the great jazz populariser — Frank Sinatra. But no, not him (and not the great rock ‘n roll populariser — Elvis — either). Both were brilliant, wildly successful and supremely gifted. But they were cultural interlopers, borrowing from African American music to their own ends. I do not mean to say that they were therefore remiss, that they should not have performed or that they should be cancelled for cultural appropriation. Not a bit of it. I love them both, especially Sinatra. Only, they were not originators. They were in that sense, derivative, which rules them out.

All of which means we are looking for an artist who is a musician, whose music was technically demanding without being considered “hard”, whose work achieved mass appeal without being insubstantial and whose reputation and popularity endures. It should be a person whose work is not derivative, who is uniquely and unmistakably themself, and who simply did it far, far better than everyone else. And when you apply these parameters to the reams of Twentieth Century musicians, one name comes jumping out at you: Ella Fitzgerald.

V.

Fitzgerald was a towering genius. She was raised on the street, put into an asylum for orphans, was a busker in New York and aged 17 won an amateur night at the Harlem Apollo. In the very earliest recordings, her voice has a slight twang to it, but as she aged, that voice turned into one of the greatest — perhaps the greatest — ever recorded.

There is no point in trying to describe Fitzgerald’s magisterial brilliance in words. It can only be heard. Almost everything she did was stunning, the series of “songbook” recordings especially so. In these albums, she worked her way through the great American songbook, creating definitive versions of some of the greatest music in modern history, by composers including Duke Ellington, George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern and Irving Berlin. Ira Gershwin, who wrote lyrics for his brother George, said: “I never knew how good our songs were until I heard Ella Fitzgerald sing them”.

Her technical abilities were astounding — no one could scat the way she did, and that unmatched vocal agility was her way of showing she could keep pace with the wildest of the Bebop soloists. But at the same time, she had formidable musical discipline, as shown on the 1956 album, Ella and Louis, a collection of duets recorded with Armstrong. She didn’t over-embroider the melodies. When she sang, she sang the song with phrasing so perfect, once Ella had sung it, it was hard to hear the thing any other way.

Her music was technically complex without being “hard” on the listener. She was so good, she made it all sound easy, thought it really wasn’t. She had mass appeal, was extraordinarily influential and her work is there, on Spotify, for everyone. And she never made a bad record.

Ella Fitzgerald, watched adoringly by Dizzy Gillespie at The Downbeat Club, NY, 1947 (Alamy)

There will be many objections to this essay, to its reasoning, to its absurdly sweeping judgements and to its conclusion. Many, many objections. For one, it is too western-centric. There are no Asian, or African artists mentioned here. And how could we omit Bob Marley, the one artist from the developing world whose legacy retains a truly global appeal? And what about the great photographers? To put an American as the greatest artist of the twentieth century ends up feeling like cultural imperialism. Well, perhaps so. But if that is the case, it is a reflection of the cultural and political trends of the twentieth century itself.

It can be argued, I think convincingly, that the US was the dominant cultural centre of the Twentieth Century. The creation of rock ‘n roll alone is reason enough to reach that conclusion. But Fitzgerald was more than just another American singer. She was an African American who rose to global renown by singing the compositions of Jewish American immigrants. Her cultural span was much broader than it appeared, giving her music an appeal of enormous depth and taking her voice far beyond the clubs and dive bars of 52^nd Street and out into the global consciousness where she will remain, long after many others have been forgotten.