Axis 5 of twelve · PAR
How far does the work depart from the tradition it inherits, and what did the departure cost? These are one judgment. A deviation that risked nothing was a stylistic accent; a wager placed on a proven path is not a swerve. The axis scores the turn and the stake together.
Gated at 8.5. Formerly split between this axis and a separate risk axis, which triplicated a single fact; the two were merged.
1754 works · summit gate · the rubric
James Joyce · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
The inheritance is plain: Flaubert’s realism, Homer, the encyclopaedic ambition of Dante and Rabelais, and Joyce’s own Portrait, whose Stephen walks back in diminished. The departure is total: an epic of one advertising canvasser’s day; after Scylla and Charybdis a new style for every episode, so the second half has no stable narrator; interior monologue carried to 24,085 words and two full stops; defecation, masturbation and menstruation printed as matter of fact. The stake was paid in full. The Little Review serial was seized and its editors convicted in 1921 over Nausicaa. English printers refused the book, a Paris bookshop published it, customs burned copies, and the United States barred it until 1933.
James Joyce · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
The inheritance is plain: Vico and Bruno, Sterne, Swift and Carroll, the Irish annals, the music hall, and Joyce’s own Ulysses, which had already redirected the novel. The departure is total: a prose fiction in a language made of English and dozens of others, with no narrative surface, ordered by a night instead of a day, whose last word runs back into its first. The safe course was a second Ulysses; Joyce took the other, and staked seventeen years and the readers Ulysses had won. The book states its wager: “The proteiform graph itself is a polyhedron of scripture.” (I.5). Held a tenth below the top only because the break had begun in the late chapters of Ulysses.
Dante Alighieri · Literature
9.7 · Tier V
The inheritance is plain and the poem names it: the sixth book of the Aeneid, the vision literature, the scholastic summa, Brunetto’s Tesoro. The departure is total, and it was paid for. A poem of all being, in the vernacular, with the poet as protagonist, places the living by name and reserves a pope’s place in Hell before he has died: “Dost thou stand there already, Boniface?” (Inf. XIX). It silences Ovid, declares “The sea I sail has never yet been passed” (Par. II), dismisses its own teacher at the gate of Eden, and saves the suicide Cato and the Trojan Ripheus. The stake was real: the poem was written in exile, under sentence.
Richard Wagner · Music
9.5 · Tier V
The inheritance was the opera of numbers, in Weber’s German line and Meyerbeer’s grand opera, and Wagner’s own Lohengrin. The departures are of kind and of scale: one drama across four evenings; continuous music without set numbers, carried by a web of motives in the orchestra; alliterative verse, Stabreim, revived from Germanic poetry in place of rhymed stanzas; a chorus withheld for three evenings; new instruments and a theatre built for the work. The stake was total: no theatre could stage it, Wagner broke off for twelve years, and the festival nearly ruined him. Held below the top because the harmonic swerve that most changed music belongs to Tristan, composed in the break, and because Götterdämmerung, written first, keeps grand opera’s oath scene, vengeance trio and wedding chorus.
Miguel de Cervantes · Literature
9.4 · Tier V
The inheritance is chivalric romance, pastoral, picaresque, Byzantine romance and the Italian novella, and the book argues with each inside its own pages: the scrutiny (I.VI), Ginés against Lazarillo, the canon’s poetics. The turn: a narrator who loses his source in mid-blow and buys the rest in Arabic for half a real (I.IX); a history that calls itself imaginada; a sequel whose characters have read the first part and repair it. The stake is in Part II, which lets a rival’s sequel turn its road from Saragossa to Barcelona and kills the chivalric hero sane in his bed. Held from the top: the satire of romance was a proven path, and the book succeeded at once. Its cost was risked, not paid.
Richard Wagner · Music
9.4 · Tier V
The inheritance is German Romantic and French grand opera, and Wagner’s own Ring, broken off in Siegfried in 1857 to write this. The departures: a harmony in which the tonic is withheld across a whole evening and dissonance is the normal state; no numbers, no recitative, no chorus after Act I, the “endless melody” he named in 1860; an action cut to three situations; a love duet of some forty minutes that is a metaphysical dispute sung together, which his own Oper und Drama (1851) had ruled out. The stake was total: Vienna rehearsed it and gave it up, it waited six years for a king, and its first Tristan was dead within six weeks. Held below the top by its road: Liszt’s chromaticism, Lohengrin’s prelude, Rheingold’s continuous form.
Herman Melville · Literature
9.4 · Tier V
The inheritance is plain: the sea narrative, with Cooper’s Pilot among the Extracts; the whaling literature the book argues with, Scoresby, Beale, Bennett and Chace; the learned anatomy of Burton, Browne and Rabelais. The turn: eighty extracts before a word of story, whales classed as folios and octavos, a five-chapter play inside a first-person novel, a narrator who fades to silence and returns only to say he lived. The text names its stake: readers “might scout at Moby Dick as a monstrous fable” (ch. 45). The cost was paid in hostile reviews, a London edition cut and without the Epilogue, small sales, and a standing never recovered in Melville’s lifetime. Each device has a precedent; the swerve is in the combination and the scale.
Michelangelo · Visual art
9.3 · Tier V
The inheritance is the Last Judgment as a court in rows: Torcello, Giotto at Padua, Fra Angelico, Signorelli at Orvieto (1499–1504), with an enthroned judge, the saved and the damned in ordered bands, and architecture to keep them apart. The departure is on the wall: no frame, no ground, no registers, one field of bodies in a blue void; Christ beardless and athletic, half rising, not enthroned; angels without wings; saints naked; Dante’s pagan ferryman and judge on the altar wall of the papal chapel. The cost was paid and is on record: Biagio’s complaint, Aretino’s letter, Gilio’s dialogue, the order of 1564, and in 1565 the draperies and a passage destroyed. The stake was the work itself, and part of it was lost.
Igor Stravinsky · Music
9.2 · Tier V
The inheritance is the Russian school of Rimsky-Korsakov, Stravinsky’s teacher, and the Paris ballet of Diaghilev’s first seasons. The departures are many: rhythm made the agent of form, irregular accent, changing metres and ostinato replacing melody and progression; dissonance held and hammered as sonority, not resolved; form made of blocks cut off rather than developed; folk tunes broken into cells and hidden; the orchestra, strings included, used as percussion. The stake was real: after The Firebird and Petrushka Stravinsky had Paris, this score risked it, and the disturbance at the premiere shows the risk was taken. Held below the top by his own path: Petrushka had already cut blocks against one another and superimposed keys.
William Blake · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Milton’s epic and blank verse, the prophets, the emblem book, the illuminated manuscript and the reproductive engraving Blake was trained in. The departure is total in each: an epic with no narrative line, set in the mind of a sleeping giant who is also London; a long line of free cadence, defended on plate 3 as poetry unchained; a hundred plates written, etched, printed and coloured by one man, with no publisher; a mythology invented whole. The stake was everything: about sixteen years of etching for a public that did not exist, and late in life Blake wrote that he did not expect a buyer. Held a step below the top because the prophetic mode had been tried already in his own Milton and The Four Zoas.
Pablo Picasso · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the European figure tradition at its most sanctioned: the group of nudes, Cézanne’s bathers and Ingres’s bath, Manet’s prostitute who looks out, and Picasso’s own Rose Period, the manner that had begun to sell. The departure is on the canvas: single-point perspective abandoned for planes tilted toward the viewer; the body broken into facets with its contour left raw; three faces in three systems, the Iberian schema at the left and centre, the hatched masks at the right; the drapery as solid as the flesh. The stake is in the history of the object: friends who saw it in the studio were dismayed, and it stayed there, unsold and unshown, for nine years, while the painter turned to a slower Cubism. A painter of twenty-five with a market risked it. Held a step below the top because Cézanne’s bathers had prepared the group.
Kazimir Malevich · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the whole of painting as the depiction of something, and its most advanced form in 1915, Cubism and Futurism, which Malevich had practised at the front of the Russian avant-garde. The departure is total: no object, no space, no composition in the inherited sense, one form on a ground. Precedents for the look exist, the joke black canvases of Allais and others in the 1880s, and they were jokes, which is the measure of the risk: to stake a career on a form that had been a gag. The stake was paid twice. The canvas was mocked from its first showing, and his whole position later fell under the official turn against the avant-garde: he was arrested in 1930, and returned to figuration. Held a step from the top only because Kandinsky’s abstraction and Kupka’s had opened the way two or three years before.
Anonymous · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
The inherited tradition is inside the book. The friends speak the wisdom of retribution, “who ever perished, being innocent?” (4:7), and the frame keeps the old tale of loss and restoration that Mesopotamian sufferer poems, Ludlul bēl nēmeqi and the Babylonian Theodicy, already told. The swerve is the verdict: the orthodox speakers are condemned and the protester declared right (42:7), in a canon that elsewhere teaches retribution. The cost shows in what followed: the Greek softened Job’s speeches, and one rabbinic view held that Job never existed (Bava Batra 15a). Held below the summit by the inherited restoration, and because, with the date unknown, the direction of its allusions cannot be shown.
Leo Tolstoy · Literature
9.4 · Tier V
The inheritance is the historical romance, the family chronicle, the society novel and the battle-piece, with Stendhal’s Waterloo the nearest precedent. The turn: a battle told by a man who “could not understand or make out anything” (III.XVII) and by a civilian in a white hat; a novel that stops at its joints to argue with named historians, and ends in a treatise without a character: “History is the life of nations and of humanity” (Ep. II.I). The stake was paid in the reception: Flaubert complained in 1880 that the book repeats itself and philosophises, and Henry James in 1908 made it his type of the loose, baggy novel. Held from the top because the departure stands beside an inherited comic close: two marriages, the debts paid, an estate nearly bought back.
Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus · Architecture
9.4 · Tier V
The inheritance was two traditions never joined at scale: the long, timber-roofed, processional basilica of both earlier churches on the site; and the centralised domed space of the Pantheon, the bath, the martyrium and Sts Sergius and Bacchus in the same city. The departure: a dome of about thirty-one metres on pendentives over a square, at a scale nobody had attempted; that dome drawn out along the axis by semidomes and exedrae, so that a central space becomes a longitudinal one; and the walls turned into screens of columns and windows, the support hidden behind veneer. The stake was real: a new structural system, by two geometers, raised in under six years. Held below the top because dome and pendentive were both inherited elements.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · Literature
9.4 · Tier V
The inheritance is the Historia von D. Johann Fausten (1587) and Marlowe’s damnation (printed 1604). The departures are total: the pact turned into a wager whose terms define the human; a girl’s tragedy of seduction and infanticide set inside the scholar’s legend; a tragedy whose hero is saved; a second part that crosses three thousand years and moves from Greek trimeter to Baroque alexandrine, from masque to opera to mystery play, against every convention of the stage, Weimar’s included. The stake was real: Goethe gave his last six years to Part Two, sealed it, and five days before his death called it “diese sehr ernsten Scherze”, “these very serious jests”. Held below the summit: Shakespeare and Calderón had already mixed forms, and the frame is Job’s.
Marcel Proust · Literature
9.4 · Tier V
The inheritance is plain, and acknowledged inside the work: Balzac’s recurring characters, Saint-Simon’s Versailles, Ruskin, whom Proust translated, and the precursors the last volume names, Chateaubriand, Nerval and Baudelaire. The turn is in what a novel attends to: a plot dissolved into habit, told as what used to happen; a sentence that runs, even in English, to nearly six hundred words; a love affair told in the third person inside a first-person book; more than a million words closed in a circle; homosexuality in the open in 1921–22. The stake was paid: several publishers, the NRF among them, refused the first volume. Held below the top because the syntax is classical and the novel of society is Balzac’s.
Giotto di Bondone · Visual art
9.3 · Tier V
The inheritance is the maniera greca and Cimabue, Cavallini and Torriti in Rome, Assisi, whatever Giotto’s share there, and the Pisani’s sculpture. The departure is carried through a whole programme: bodies with weight on a ground under one light; blue skies in place of gold in every field; feeling in faces and gestures; painted stone that imitates sculpture and painted rooms that imitate space; scenes cut to a shallow stage. The stake was a rich man’s private chapel, without gold grounds, in a manner no prior cycle had carried through. Dante records the result: “ora ha Giotto il grido” (Purg. XI.95). The turn was under way in Rome and Assisi, and Giotto was already known, which holds the axis off the top.
Ludwig van Beethoven · Music
9.3 · Tier V
The inheritance is the four-movement Viennese symphony, already enlarged by Beethoven. The departures are many: voices and text in a symphony’s finale; the scherzo placed second; a first-movement second group in B flat, not the relative major; a finale that reviews and rejects the earlier movements in recitative; Turkish percussion; more than twice the length of a late Haydn symphony. The stake was real: a London commission, a deaf composer, a finale thought misjudged for decades. Held below the top by precedent, partly his own. The Choral Fantasy, Op. 80 (1808), had already built from instruments to a choral hymn on a plain tune, and Haydn’s “Military” Symphony had brought in the Turkish band.
Walt Whitman · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
The inheritance was the metred, rhymed, stanzaic English lyric and the American poetry of Longfellow and Bryant. The turn was total: an unrhymed long line on the cadence of the English Bible and of oratory; the catalogue as structure; a lyric “I” that is everyone; the body and sex named in verse; the slang of the city and the trades beside the language of the soul. “I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world” (§52) states the departure. The stake was paid: a first edition self-published without the author’s name on its title page, reviews that called it obscene and formless, the edition of 1881 withdrawn in Boston under threat of prosecution. Whitman kept the poems. Held a hair below the top because the long line had precedents in the Psalms, Macpherson’s Ossian and Blake’s prophecies, and the expansive self had Emerson’s essays behind it.
Samuel Beckett · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
The departure is total in kind: no plot, no exposition, no development and no outcome; characters with no history the play will confirm; a second act that declines to differ from its first. Vivian Mercier’s summary is the measure: “a play in which nothing happens, twice”. The stake was real. It was its author’s first play to reach a stage, staked on non-event in a small Paris theatre, and London audiences walked out. Held below the top because it was not made from nothing. Maeterlinck’s Les Aveugles (1890) had staged a group waiting for a guide who does not come; Chekhov had made waiting a subject; Jarry, Pirandello and the music hall had broken the well-made play; and Ionesco’s La Cantatrice chauve reached a Paris stage in 1950, before Godot did.
Stanley Kubrick · Film
9.1 · Tier V
The inheritance was science fiction cinema: Menzies’ Things to Come (1936), Pal’s Destination Moon (1950), Forbidden Planet (1956) and the creature features. The departures: a studio roadshow epic told almost without speech; an opening with no human being in it; concert recordings, Ligeti’s avant-garde choral music among them, in place of a score; an ending with no explanation. They were made together, in one film, each against what a studio spectacle was expected to give. The stake was MGM’s money and about four years of the director’s working life, and the cost came due: the premiere drew walkouts and hostile reviews. Held below the top by its precedents — Universe (1960) for the look of space, the abstract animation of Jordan Belson and the Whitneys behind the Star Gate, Antonioni’s slowed time — and by a cushioned stake: a studio backing a director coming off a success.
Stanley Kubrick · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the social-problem film and the literary adaptation, and the departures were absolute. Violence staged as choreography and set to Rossini; a rape sung to a Hollywood tune; a narrator speaking an invented slang in which the audience is made fluent in minutes; Beethoven as the criminal’s love and the state’s weapon; a wide-angle, handheld, pop-art England of flat blocks and furniture made from women. The stake was real and was paid: an X rating in the United States, a press campaign in Britain linking the film to crimes, and Kubrick’s own withdrawal of it from British distribution, where it was not shown again until after his death. Held just below the top only because the material and the argument were Burgess’s.
William Shakespeare · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
Every source restores the king: King Leir (printed 1605), Holinshed, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Spenser. In the chronicles Cordelia dies later, by her own hand. The play hangs her before her father’s eyes and gives the chronicle ending to her murderer as a cover story: “To lay the blame upon her own despair / That she fordid herself” (5.3). It grafts on Sidney’s Paphlagonian king to make a second family, sets a Fool at the centre of a tragedy, and ends a pagan world without providence. The stake was real: Tate’s happy ending of 1681 held the stage for about a century and a half. Held below the summit by a proven form and an inherited Machiavel.
John Milton · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
The inheritance is chosen: Homer, Virgil, Tasso, Genesis, the whole epic machinery. The departure comes from inside the form. The argument is “Not less but more heroick” than Achilles’ wrath (IX.14), setting aside “Wars, hitherto the only argument / Heroick deem’d” (IX.28–29) for “the better fortitude / Of patience” (IX.31–32). The adversary has the epic virtues. It is the first English heroic poem in blank verse, “Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme” (I.16), and its angels eat “with keen dispatch / Of real hunger” (V.436–437). The stake was real: a blind poet whose prose had just been burned writes “fallen on evil days” (VII.25). The frame is inherited, not invented, and that holds the axis below the top.
Michelangelo · Visual art
9.5 · Tier V
The inheritance is plain: Piermatteo d’Amelia’s painted starry sky, which this replaced; Pinturicchio’s vaults; Mantegna’s illusionistic oculus at Mantua; Signorelli’s nudes at Orvieto; a papal plan for twelve apostles. Michelangelo’s letter of 1523, saying he warned the Pope that plan would be poor and was given a free hand, is his own later account and is discounted. The departure stands on the vault: several hundred figures, every meaning carried by the body; twenty nude youths in a papal chapel with no text to warrant them; God in flight, seen from behind; no single vanishing point. The stake was real: a sculptor, who called himself no painter in a sonnet on the work, undertaking fresco at this scale.
Murasaki Shikibu · Literature
9.3 · Tier V
The inheritance was low. Tales, monogatari, were a pastime for women and children. Before Genji stood the tale of the bamboo-cutter, Utsubo, Ochikubo, the poem-tale of Ise and the women’s diaries in kana. The turn was total in kind: a prose fiction of fifty-four chapters, its people ageing across four reigns, its inner life rendered in kana, its poems absorbed into the narrative. The tale states its wager in Hotaru (ch. 25), where Genji says the official histories show only one side and the tales hold the detail, and the stake was the standing of a form its own culture held cheap. Then it swerves inside itself: it lets the hero die offstage and goes on for thirteen chapters without him. Held from the top because the kana prose and the poem-tale were inherited instruments.
Michelangelo · Visual art
9.2 · Tier V
The inheritance is the Florentine David: Donatello’s marble and bronze, Verrocchio’s bronze, small or life-size, slight, triumphant over the severed head. The departure stands on the base: the figure made colossal; fully nude, with an adult’s musculature; the moment of decision, not of victory; Goliath abolished. The stake was concrete. A sculptor of twenty-six took on a block others had given up, already cut and too shallow, where one misjudged cut would ruin it. Part of the swerve runs along a proven path: the antique colossus and the heroic nude were the most authoritative models there were. To revive antiquity is to leave the local tradition by leaning on an older one, and the axis is held there.
Gustave Flaubert · Literature
9.2 · Tier V
The inheritance is Balzac’s novel of provincial life, Stendhal’s, the Romantic novel of passion Emma herself reads, and the moralising realism of the 1840s. The turn: an adultery in a market town told with no authorial comment and no moral, the narrator withdrawn so far that the prosecutor could not find whom to blame; style made the substance, a book about nothing carried by its sentences; free indirect discourse made the method of a whole novel, so that a character’s clichés are given from within and judged by their placing alone. The stake was paid: four and a half years at a few pages a week, the lyric manner of the Tentation abandoned, editorial cuts, and the prosecution of author, printer and publisher. Free indirect style was not Flaubert’s invention, and Balzac had made provincial life a subject; that holds the axis off the very top.
Leonardo da Vinci · Visual art
9.2 · Tier V
The inheritance is the Florentine refectory Last Supper, Castagno’s at Sant’Apollonia and Ghirlandaio’s at the Ognissanti and San Marco: a static row of haloed apostles, John asleep on Christ’s breast, Judas alone on the near side of the table. The departure: Judas is moved among the others and marked by gesture and shadow; there are no haloes; John is awake and leaning away; the row becomes four groups and one wave of reaction to a single sentence; the room’s perspective is centred on Christ’s head; and a slow, revisable wall of tempera and oil replaces fresco. The stake was real, and the last item paid it: the painting was failing within twenty years. Held a step down: nothing in it was censured in its day.
Jan van Eyck · Visual art
9.2 · Tier V
The inheritance is the gold-ground tempera altarpiece and the International Gothic, with the Limbourg brothers’ landscapes at its furthest reach. The departure: a meadow, hills and a city in place of gold, at the scale of an altar; Adam and Eve at near life size as observed bodies; the two Johns as painted stone and an Annunciation in a real room; oil glazes carried through a polyptych. The stake was real, though no censure is on record: an untried naturalism across twenty faces of the largest panel commission of its region, one painter dead mid-work. Held off the top because the turn was not the Van Eycks’ alone: the Master of Flémalle was moving the same way.
Claude Debussy · Music
9.1 · Tier V
The inheritance is Wagner, Tristan and Parsifal above all, and behind it the French lyric stage of Gounod and Massenet. Debussy keeps Wagner’s apparatus, the continuous act, the orchestra under every word, the motifs, Tristan’s own situation, and reverses its rhetoric. Where Tristan says everything, this says “Je t’aime” once, with the orchestra silent; where Wagner’s harmony suspends resolution, Debussy’s removes the need for it; where the Wagnerian voice sings, this voice speaks on pitch; no numbers, no ensemble, no duet, one fortissimo in two and a half hours. The stake was total: nine years, a laughed-at rehearsal, the playwright’s public curse, and a method that produced no second opera, not even by its author. Held below Tristan and the Rite by its road, Mussorgsky, Maeterlinck and Debussy’s own songs, and because the turn is in part a withdrawal.
William Faulkner · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
The inheritance is the Southern family romance and its plantation legend, Joyce’s interior monologue and Conrad’s several tellers. The turn: the novel opens inside the mind of a man without speech or a sense of time, in a syntax of bare perception, and gives the reader no narrator to reconcile its four tellings until the last. The woman the book is about has no section. Time is marked only by a change of type. The stake was real. Faulkner’s previous novel, Flags in the Dust, had been refused and cut, and appeared as Sartoris in 1929; this one sold little. Held below the top because Joyce had made the interior monologue and Ulysses the novel of several minds. The first section, which has no evident precedent, is the purest swerve of the four.
Alban Berg · Music
9.1 · Tier V
The inheritance is Wagner’s through-composed music drama and the opera of the poor. The departures: a full-length opera without a tonal centre, the first to hold a theatre for an evening; each scene cast in an absolute instrumental form, suite, passacaglia, sonata, fugue, inventions; Sprechstimme and graded speech brought into the opera house; a hero who is a poor soldier, an object of science and a murderer, with no aria of self-justification. The stake was real: Berg was little known, the theatres thought the score unperformable, and he printed it himself. Held below the top because the language was Schoenberg’s, Erwartung having made atonal music drama possible in 1909, and the play had been on the stage since 1913.
Ludwig van Beethoven · Music
9.1 · Tier V
The inheritance is the four-movement quartet of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven’s Opp. 18 and 59. The departures are many: seven movements joined without a pause; a slow fugue first, and no sonata form until the finale; a second movement on the Neapolitan, a semitone above the home key; two movements that are only hinges; the centre of gravity in a variation set; sul ponticello in 1826. The stake was real: the Great Fugue had baffled Op. 130’s first audience in March 1826, and he answered, on no commission, with a more radical form. Held below the top by his own path: Op. 130 had six movements and Op. 132 five, and the sonatas Opp. 101 and 110 had joined movements.
Caravaggio · Visual art
9.0 · Tier V
The inheritance stands over the canvas: d’Arpino’s frescoes on the chapel vault, graceful, idealised and evenly lit, where sacred history happens in a timeless elsewhere among figures drawn from other paintings. The departure: sacred history set in a Roman room of 1600, swords at the hips; faces painted from life, with no drawings; a single raking light for even illumination; a Matthew who stays seated where the verse has him rise. The stake was real: a first public commission, at a scale he had not attempted, and within two years his first altarpiece for the chapel was refused. Baglione reports that Federico Zuccaro saw in this canvas only Giorgione’s idea: a dismissal, and evidence that the turn was seen.
Orson Welles · Film
9.0 · Tier V
The inheritance is the studio biography and the newspaper picture. The departures were many and made at once: a life told backward through five witnesses whose accounts overlap and disagree; a newsreel pastiche as exposition; Toland’s deep focus, long takes and faces lit from below; sound mixed as overlap and as transition; a protagonist the film does not like. The stake was the largest a first film has carried: RKO gave a twenty-five-year-old from radio final cut, and the film attacked the most powerful publisher in the country, who answered through his papers. The attack cost Welles the independence he had been given. Held from the top because the techniques had precedents, in Toland’s work for Ford on The Long Voyage Home (1940) among others, which the film gathered rather than invented.
Francesco Borromini · Architecture
9.0 · Tier V
The inheritance was the Roman church of Vignola and Maderno, walls as flat planes with an order applied, a façade of pilasters tied by volutes; and beside it Bernini’s decorum, the human body as the measure. The departure: the wall made one continuous undulating surface, the entablature bending with it; the plan generated from geometry rather than from the orders; the orders bent and a cornice broken by a medallion; a corner dissolved into a tower over a fountain. The stake was paid in full: a first commission at thirty-five, for a poor patron; the rival’s scorn; a name a byword for a century and a half; the façade half-built at his suicide. Held a step below the top because the oval was Vignola’s, Michelangelo had bent the orders first, and Cortona was moving the same way in 1635.
Imhotep, under Djoser · Architecture
8.9 · Tier IV
The tradition was the royal tomb as a mastaba of mudbrick with a separate panelled enclosure of brick, as at Abydos. The departure is double: everything is translated into cut stone, and the tomb is stacked upward into a form no one had built. The stake was as large as any building had placed: a quarry, a workforce and a reign committed to a material never used at this scale, and a design changed in mid course more than once. The stone copies of reed and timber are the visible cost. Held short of the top because the turn came in stages, and the forms stay close to their brick and plant models.
Édouard Manet · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the most protected genre of the Salon, the female nude, licensed by myth, history or the Orient, modelled in soft gradations and idealised; in 1863 Napoleon III bought Cabanel’s Birth of Venus from that year’s Salon. The departure: Titian’s composition, recognisable to every educated viewer, filled with a woman of the present whose look is unsmiling and appraising; the light thrown flat from the front, so that the body is modelled by contour and a few half-tones rather than by shadow; the outline drawn dark; the sheets and the body brought up against the picture plane. The stake was paid in public. Manet kept the canvas back for two years after the scandal of the Déjeuner sur l’herbe, showed it at the Salon of 1865, and drew the most violent press of his career. Held a step below the top only because the Déjeuner took the first blow.
Samuel Beckett · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the novel from Cervantes to Joyce and Proust, with Kafka, Dostoevsky’s underground monologue, Dante’s afterlife, and Descartes and Geulincx in the philosophy behind it. The turn is the largest the novel had then taken: it removes plot, character, setting, time and even the paragraph, and keeps only a voice speaking of why it cannot speak of itself. Where Joyce moved towards totality, this moves towards impoverishment, in a language its author had adopted. The stake was real. Beckett was in his forties and barely published; Murphy had sold little and Watt had no publisher; the trilogy appeared only because Jérôme Lindon took Molloy for Minuit. Held a step below the top only because Molloy and Malone meurt took the first steps of the turn this book completes.
Paul Cézanne · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the nude, the Salon’s central genre, and behind it the pastoral of bathers, Giorgione, Titian, Poussin, Rubens, and nearer, Manet’s Déjeuner and Renoir’s Large Bathers of 1884–87, which had answered Impressionism with Girardon and a hard contour. The departure: a nude painted without a model, from memory and academy drawings; anatomy given up to architecture, bodies bent to the lean of trees; the contour broken into repeated blue lines; the face abolished; the canvas left bare in places; all at the scale of a Salon machine, to make of Impressionism something solid like the art of the museums, as Denis reports him saying. The stake: a decade of a dying man’s strength on three canvases he could not finish, in the genre where he was most mocked and least sure. He lost the wager in his lifetime. Held below the top because the turn was prepared in thirty years of small bathers.
Laurence Sterne · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Rabelais, Cervantes, Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, Swift’s Tale of a Tub, Locke’s Essay, and, closest and youngest, the English novel of Richardson and Fielding, barely twenty years old. The turn is against the novel at its birth: a life that does not reach its hero’s birth for two volumes and leaves him behind for most of the rest; a narration that discusses its own progress, addresses the reader and draws its plot as a line; the printed page itself made an instrument, black, marbled and blank. The stake was real: a Yorkshire parson published the first volumes at York at his own risk, under a persona, with matter that drew charges of indecency unfit for a clergyman, and continued for eight years against reviewers who turned hostile. Held a step from the top only because nearly every device has a precedent in the learned wit of Rabelais and Swift; the swerve is in making them a novel.
John Cage · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Western concert work: a composed sequence of sounds, intended by the composer, delivered by a performer to a silent audience. The turn goes as far as the tradition allows while keeping its outward form. The composer intends no sound, and the audience’s silence becomes the material. The stake was real. Cage proposed a silent piece in a lecture at Vassar in 1948 and, by his own account, held it back until 1952 for fear of not being taken seriously; the premiere drew anger. Held below the top by precedent: Rauschenberg’s White Paintings had made the empty frame in painting a year before. The swerve is to make silence the proposition, in earnest, at concert length.
Marcel Duchamp · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the whole of Western sculpture as the made thing: material shaped by a hand, a skill shown, an object offered to the eye for its form. The departure is the largest a single object has made. The work is chosen, not made; offered for an idea, not to the eye; and submitted, by a member of the board, to the most open exhibition America had yet held, to see whether it would be refused. It was. The cost was partly paid: Duchamp resigned, the object vanished, and the work had no standing for a generation. Held below the top for two reasons. The readymade was four years old, from the Bicycle Wheel of 1913, so this is its first public test, not its first act. And the stake was shielded by a pseudonym, whoever stood behind it.
Fyodor Dostoevsky · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
The inherited form is the sensation novel: a sealed envelope, secret knocks, a foretold fit, a drugged sleep. Ivan names the contrivance: “it all seems to happen at once, as though it were planned” (Pt. II, Bk. V, ch. 6). The turn comes in four places. The murder is withheld at the window and solved privately before the trial, so fourteen chapters of courtroom run on irony. The saint decays, and the book keeps its faith. The devil is a shabby poor relation, not a Satan “with scorched wings” (Pt. IV, Bk. XI, ch. 9). The case against faith gets the strongest voice, and the answer comes as a saint’s life. The stake was real: the novel ran in a conservative journal, and Dostoevsky meant the sixth book as his answer to the fifth. Held lower because the path was proven: the crime novel of ideas had been his own since Crime and Punishment (1866).
William Shakespeare · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
The sources are Saxo Grammaticus’s Amleth, of about 1200, Belleforest’s retelling of 1570, and a lost English Hamlet on the stage by about 1589; Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy had already set the ghost, the delay, the madness and the play within the play. In Saxo and Belleforest the madness is policy, and Amleth succeeds and rules. Here the revenge play is turned inward and interiority made the action: the revenger doubts the ghost, “The spirit that I have seen / May be the devil” (2.2), kills the wrong man first, and kills the King only when dying, by the King’s own device; the soliloquy becomes thought. Held below the top on the stake: story and form were proven, and with the old play lost the turn from it cannot be measured.
Ovid · Literature
9.3 · Tier V
The inheritance is plain: hexameter epic a generation after the Aeneid, Hesiod’s catalogue of origins, Lucretius’ cosmos for the frame, and a collection form already old. The turn is stated in one line (1.4), which joins deducere, the word for Callimachus’ fine-spun poem, to perpetuum, the continuous epic he scorned. Inside Virgil’s metre it swerves against Virgil: the Aeneid in 954 lines, Dido in four (14.78 to 81), and combat displaced by a debate that eloquence wins (13.382 to 383). The stake was real: a rival to Virgil on the Roman foundation, under Augustus, closing on a panegyric whose sincerity has been questioned ever since, by a poet relegated in the year of its completion. Held below the top because subject and collection form were inherited; the swerve is in scale, register and binding.
Fyodor Dostoevsky · Literature
9.3 · Tier V
The inheritance was the crime story and the feuilleton: Sue, Balzac’s question of whether one would kill a mandarin for a fortune, Hugo’s condemned man, and the Russian novel of poverty, Dostoevsky’s own among it. The swerve was to end the first part with the murder and spend five sixths of the book on its consequence inside one mind, so that the reader knows the killer from the start and the detective plot becomes a plot of conscience. It made the novel of ideas a thriller, and the thriller a tragedy. The wager was a novel that gives away its murderer before a fifth of it is read. Held below the top because the crime plot, the fallen woman and the investigating magistrate were inherited, and the many-voiced form this book begins is completed in later ones.
Cao Xueqin · Literature
9.3 · Tier V
The inheritance is the vernacular chapter-novel: the storyteller’s formulas and couplet titles, the household novel of Jin Ping Mei, the scholar-and-beauty romance, and the dream narrative from the Tang tales to Tang Xianzu’s plays. The turn: a novel that makes the reader’s belief its subject; a household turned from appetite to consciousness, with the girls at the centre of value; the stock romance mocked inside the text, by the stone (ch. 1) and by Grandmother Jia (ch. 54); the lyric taken into the novel, each poem a character’s. The stake was real: a family ruined in the confiscation of 1728, and a book revised over a decade in poverty in the Western Hills, “披阅十载，增删五次”
“read and revised over ten years, five times added to and cut” (ch. 1), never printed in its author’s life. Held from the top by Jin Ping Mei, which had already made a household a novel’s world.
Plato · Literature
9.2 · Tier V
The inheritance is threefold: Homer and tragedy as the educators of Greece, the sophists’ speeches, and the short Socratic dialogue ending in perplexity. The swerve breaks all three. Book I is a Socratic dialogue the book declares insufficient; from Book II the form is a construction, a city built in speech, at a scale without real precedent. The stake is named: Socrates expects waves of laughter, and proposes women among the rulers, the end of the family for the guardians and philosophers as kings, against every Athenian norm. The largest risk is turned on its own medium: a poet of the first rank banishes mimetic poetry and names “palaia men tis diaphora philosophiāi te kai poiētikēi”
“an ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry” (607b), in a work that is itself mimetic and ends in a myth.
Ludwig van Beethoven · Music
9.2 · Tier V
The inheritance is the symphony of Haydn and Mozart, and Beethoven’s own first two. The departures are many: a first movement of a new scale, whose coda is a second development; a dissonance held in the development past any precedent in a symphony; a new theme in the development; the horn’s early entry, which Ries, by his own account, took for a mistake; a funeral march in place of a slow movement; a trio for three horns; a finale of variations on a bass that begins bare and pizzicato. The stake was real: a public of 1805 that found it too long, and a dedication withdrawn from the most famous man in Europe. Held below the top by a road Beethoven had prepared himself, in the piano variations Op. 35 on the same theme, and by movement types stretched but still the classical four.
Gustav Mahler · Music
9.2 · Tier V
The inheritance is the Austro-German symphony after Bruckner, and Mahler’s own eight with Das Lied von der Erde. The departures: two slow movements of twenty-five minutes or more framing the fast ones; a first movement built not on themes but on fragments over a halting rhythm, in waves to a catastrophe; a plan that descends a semitone and does not return; coarseness and burlesque as structural principles; an ending that ceases rather than closes. The stake: eighty minutes with no triumph, no fast finale and no voices, by a composer who knew he might not live to defend it. Held below the top by his own road: Das Lied had ended by dissolving, and the Third with an Adagio.
Charles Baudelaire · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
The inheritance was the Romantic lyric of Lamartine, Hugo, Musset and Vigny, and the formal impeccability of Gautier, to whom the book is dedicated. Baudelaire kept the alexandrine and the sonnet and filled them with what the lyric had excluded: carrion, the prostitute, the gambling den, the drunk ragpicker, lesbian love, a litany to Satan, and the bored self that enjoys its own wound, “Je suis la plaie et le couteau!”
“I am the wound and the knife!” (“L’Héautontimorouménos”). The swerve is the pairing: classical form held against the modern city and the modern vice. The stake was paid in full: prosecution, conviction, six poems struck, a fine, and the name of a pornographer that followed him to his death. Held off the top because the form itself is conservative; the formal departure came in the prose poems, which are not part of this book.
Pablo Picasso · Visual art
9.1 · Tier V
The inheritance is the history painting of massacre and war: Goya’s Third of May and the Disasters, Poussin’s Massacre of the Innocents, Rubens, Delacroix. Its rule is a legible event, with the act shown. The departure: neither the act nor the actor is shown; the space is not one place; the event is told in the language of Cubism and the Surrealist distortions of the 1920s, never before used for a public commission on a public atrocity; and it is in black and white, like the photographs and papers through which Paris knew of the bombing. The stake was real: a propaganda commission for a government at war, shown in the exposition of the German and Soviet pavilions. The tools were already Picasso’s own; the swerve is the use he made of them.
Emily Brontë · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
The inheritance is the Gothic novel, Scott’s regional romance, Byron’s hero and the domestic novel of the 1840s. The swerve: Gothic terror moved from castle and abbey into a working farmhouse and its kitchen; a story told by two narrators who are neither the author nor reliable, a fashionable fool and a servant with her own stake and her own grudges, with no voice above them to judge; a hero never redeemed and a heroine who dies at the centre; and the refusal of a moral frame, when the English novel was built on one. The stake was paid: the reviews of 1847 and 1848 were puzzled and in part repelled, and in 1850 the author’s sister wrote, “Whether it is right or advisable to create beings like Heathcliff, I do not know: I scarcely think it is.” Held off the top by its debts: Byron and the Gothic were the materials, and the turn is in what was done with them.
T. S. Eliot · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
The inheritance is the long English poem with a governing voice, from Wordsworth to Tennyson, and the Georgian lyric of Eliot’s own decade. The departure is near total: no speaker, but a field of voices cut against one another without transitions; quotation in six languages as the poem’s own matter; a pub monologue set beside Shakespeare and the Upanishads; a scholarly apparatus attached to a lyric. The stake was real and was paid: on publication the poem was mocked as a hoax and a parody. Held below the top because the ground was shared: Laforgue and Pound had made the voice of collage, Pound’s early Cantos and Joyce’s Ulysses, of the same year, were making the mythical method, and Eliot’s own “Prufrock” and “Gerontion” had begun the turn.
Jorge Luis Borges · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
The inheritance: Poe’s tale of ratiocination, Chesterton’s paradoxes, Stevenson, Kafka (whom Borges translated), Schwob’s imaginary lives, Carlyle’s book about an imaginary book, and the ornate realist story of the Spanish-language tradition. The departure is the fiction as essay: the review of a book that does not exist, the encyclopedia article, the footnote and the false citation as narrative, metaphysics made into plot. The stake was real. Borges was known as a poet and an essayist, and the Argentine national prize passed over the 1941 volume, which was charged with being foreign, bookish and without humanity, the charge the swerve had risked. Held below the top because Borges had already made the move in “El acercamiento a Almotásim” (1936) and Historia universal de la infamia (1935), and Chesterton and Kafka had cleared much of the ground.
William Blake · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
The inheritance is the hymn and moral song for children, above all Isaac Watts’s Divine Songs (1715), with the ballad and the emblem book beside it; and the trade book, set in type by one press and illustrated by another hand. The swerve is double. In form, Blake made the book himself, words and images etched together on one plate, printed and coloured by hand, outside the book trade altogether. In matter, he took the children’s hymn and its voice of trust and made it the instrument of an indictment of church, state and family that the trusting voice does not make and the reader cannot avoid; then he wrote a second book that answers the first. The stake was real and was paid: the copies were few, and their maker died poor and was read as eccentric or mad. Held just off the top only because the hymn form is kept whole even as it is turned.
Francisco Goya · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance: Callot’s Les Grandes Misères de la guerre of 1633, with its distant crowds, orderly hangings and moral verses, and battle and history painting, in which war is victory and the commander’s glory. Goya turns from all of it. The viewer stands at arm’s length; there is no commander, no victory, no battle in the sense of a field; victims and killers alike are anonymous; the captions are not morals but a witness’s mutters, rejoinders and refusals. The stake was total: its satires of clergy and regime, and its refusal of the patriotic story, made the series unpublishable under the restored monarchy, and Goya never issued it. Held a tenth below the top because its means, etching and aquatint, were inherited and mastered rather than abolished.
Modest Mussorgsky · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the opera of the 1860s, Italian and French in the imperial theatres, and Glinka’s Russian line. The departures are many: a libretto built from a chronicle play of separate tableaux; declamation that follows the stress and contour of Russian speech, grown from Mussorgsky’s setting of Gogol’s Marriage and from Dargomyzhsky’s The Stone Guest; harmony drawn from folk polyphony and church modes, with progressions that do not function as the textbooks taught; a people as protagonist; an ending on a holy fool alone. The stake was real: a composer without conservatory training, a first version rejected, hostile reviews, and a few seasons in the repertory. Held below the top because the revision conceded ground to convention.
Emily Dickinson · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Protestant hymn of Watts, Herbert’s conceit, Emerson’s lyric of the mind and the sentimental verse of her American contemporaries, and she kept its measure, common metre, the most proven in English. The turn is made inside it, and there it is total, because the hymn’s work is assurance. She keeps the metre and takes away the certainty: the rhyme slants where faith would close it, the dash suspends where the hymn would resolve, the syntax drops its connectives, and the stanza addressed to God or to death asks what the hymn answered. The stake was paid in the hardest coin. Higginson, to whom she sent poems in 1862, counselled delay; she published almost nothing, kept the fascicles in a drawer, and was printed after her death in a regularised form that undid the swerve for sixty-five years. Held a step short of the top because the departure stayed within the stanza, where her contemporary Whitman broke the same field by leaving metre and stanza altogether.
Masaccio · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Florentine altarpiece and wall painting of the 1420s: gold or flat fields, figures scaled by rank, space given by convention. The departure is to construct the whole picture as one space in a single central perspective, at monumental scale, on a church wall, with the viewer’s eye as the origin of the construction, and to put a Trinity inside it. The stake was real and public: a young painter, in one of the city’s principal Dominican churches, staking a sacred image on a method not yet proven in paint, where an error of construction would have been plain to every eye and the sacred figures exposed to a physics they had never been subject to. The turn and the risk are one judgment, and both are large.
Thomas Pynchon · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The book departs from the American novel it inherited, at full risk. It refuses a stable protagonist, since its hero dissolves; a stable register, setting calculus, ballistics and organic chemistry beside comic song, pornography and the Book of Revelation; and the settled order of cause and effect, opening on a weapon whose effect comes before its sound. The wager was on no proven path: no novel had yet made technology, the cartel and the systems of postwar power its whole matter. The cost was paid in public. In 1974 the Pulitzer fiction jury recommended the book, the board refused it, and no fiction prize was given that year; the same year it shared the National Book Award for fiction.
Virginia Woolf · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance was the novel of social life, which Woolf had already bent in Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse through free indirect consciousness. Here she broke with it. No narrator, no scene in the ordinary sense, no dialogue; characters known only through formal soliloquies in one idiom that none of them would actually speak, framed by prose poems with no people in them. The stake was real: she had a following won by To the Lighthouse and by Orlando, her best seller, and she put it on a book she feared would go unread. Held off the very top because the stream of consciousness and the lyric novel were already in the air, in Joyce, in Dorothy Richardson and in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930) with its rotating monologues. Neither Joyce nor Faulkner gave up plot, scene and individual idiom together; this book did, and it is the most extreme term of a movement rather than alone in it.
Michel de Montaigne · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the humanist commonplace book and the moral treatise: Erasmus’s Adagia, the collections of exempla and sayings, Plutarch’s Moralia in Amyot’s French (1572), Seneca’s letters, the Stoic consolation. The early chapters of Book I belong to it. The swerve is from compilation to self-portrait: a gentleman, in the vernacular, takes himself as the matter of a book and calls the result an essai, a trial of judgment. The stake was real. He wrote the charge of vanity into the address to the reader, calling his subject frivolous and vain, and Pascal later made the charge in earnest; the Apology risked the theologians, and the book went on the Index in 1676. Held below the top because the turn was gradual, grown from Plutarch’s and Seneca’s own personal voice.
François Rabelais · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance is a popular chapbook, Les grandes et inestimables Cronicques of the giant Gargantua, sold at the Lyon fairs in 1532, with the chivalric romance and the scholastic commentary behind it. The turn: a book of giants made the vehicle of the whole humanist programme, Greek, law, medicine, theology and the reform of education, in a prose that mixes every register of French from the Latinate to the market; and from the Tiers Livre on, a comic chronicle turned into a philosophical quest that does not conclude. The stake could be mortal: the condemnations of the Paris Faculty of Theology, Calvin’s hostility, and in 1546 the burning of Étienne Dolet, who had printed Rabelais. The first books appeared under an anagram. Held below the top only because the first book’s turn was taken a step at a time.
Friedrich Nietzsche · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the German philosophical treatise, the aphorism Nietzsche had practised since Human, All Too Human, and, as model and target at once, the Gospel and Luther’s Bible. The swerve is total: philosophy written as a prophetic narrative with parables, songs and a comic fourth part, its prophet a teacher who drives away his disciples and laughs at his own animals when they recite his doctrine as a “Leier-Lied”, a barrel-organ song. No book in German before it did this with philosophy; the nearest forms, Hölderlin’s Hyperion, the wisdom books and Emerson, are partial. The stake was real and paid: the parts sold almost nothing, the fourth was printed at the author’s own cost for a handful of friends, and the form cost him the hearing of academic philosophy for a generation. Held off the very top only because the scriptural register, his chosen instrument, is also an inheritance he could not wholly bend.
Jean-Luc Godard · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
The inherited form is the French studio film of the 1950s, the “tradition of quality” Truffaut had attacked in print, and behind it the American crime picture. The departures compound: jump cuts used openly, as a rhythm and not an error; a handheld camera and available light in the street, among passers-by; a lead who talks to the camera in the first minutes; a quarter of a crime film given to idle talk in one room; a killing staged in fragments, without suspense. The stake was real: a first feature on a small budget, staking a critic’s name and a producer’s money on breaking continuity. Held below the top by precedent: Rouch, the neorealists and, months before, Les Quatre Cents Coups and Hiroshima mon amour.
Arthur Rimbaud · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Baudelaire’s Petits poèmes en prose, and behind it Aloysius Bertrand’s Gaspard de la nuit, together with the French alexandrine that Rimbaud had himself mastered by sixteen. The departure is total. Baudelaire’s prose poem keeps the anecdote, the moral and the stroller in the city street; Rimbaud drops all three: no narrator in a street, no story carried to its end, no lesson, only juxtaposed images whose syntax will not settle their relations. “Marine” and “Mouvement” break the line altogether, among the first French verse to do so. The stake was the whole of it. The work was written by a poet who then left poetry, given no order and no title of certain authorship, and left in the hands of others; it could have been lost, and it was published as the work of a man thought dead. Turn and stake are one fact here, and both stand at the edge of the scale.
Hector Berlioz · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Viennese symphony, three years after Beethoven’s death, and his Pastoral above all: five movements, a scene in the country, a storm, titled movements. The departures: a symphony told in the first person with a printed programme; one theme carried through every movement as a character and changed by the story; a waltz as a symphonic movement; a slow movement whose subject is absence; a finale that parodies the liturgy and sets chant against a fugato; the orchestra as a new instrument. The stake was real: a man of twenty-six with no standing, who had failed the Prix de Rome repeatedly, mounted it himself. Held off the top by the Pastoral, the road this swerve leaves from, and by Weber’s Wolf’s Glen behind the finale.
The Velvet Underground · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
The departures from the rock LP of 1966 and 1967 are many, and they run against the year: drone from the New York avant-garde on an electric viola inside rock songs; a guitar tuned to one pitch, feedback, minutes of noise; drumming without cymbals or fills, played standing, by a woman; addiction, sadomasochism and the drug buy reported without comment; seven-minute songs shaped by changes of tempo; a raw sound in the year of the elaborate studio record. The stake was paid: no single radio would play, a release delayed by its label, a chart place near the bottom. Precedents exist in La Monte Young, the Fugs, Dylan and doo-wop, and four songs keep established pop forms.
William Blake · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Swedenborg, whose Memorable Relations the Fancies parody and whose Heaven and Hell the title answers; Milton, re-read against his own theology; the Hebrew prophets; and the satire of Swift. The turn runs every way at once. A form with no precedent: prose argument, aphorism, satiric vision and revolutionary song joined in one book made by hand, image and word on the same plate, by a process Blake devised. A theology inverted: the Devil’s party, desire before restraint, the Bible to be read “in its infernal or diabolical sense”. A master repudiated: “Swedenborg has not written one new truth”, from a man who had annotated him closely. The stake was total: a heterodox book, leaning toward sedition, by an engraver with no public, printed in a few copies and unread for seventy years. Held a little below the top only because the vision form and the anatomy were not themselves new.
William Blake · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the English epic, and Milton is that inheritance by name: the title page carries his own “To Justify the Ways of God to Men”. The swerve is total. The hero is the precursor himself, brought back from heaven to correct his own errors, and the crisis is the dead poet entering the living poet’s body. Milton’s blank verse is answered by fourteeners; the epic’s narrative time is replaced by a single moment opened from within. The book is not printed but etched by Blake’s own relief method, words and designs on one copper plate, against the trade of reproductive engraving that fed him. The stake was paid in full: four copies in his lifetime, almost no readers, and half a century after his death unknown as a poem. Held a fraction below the top because the composite method had been made in the earlier illuminated books; this one carries it to epic scale.
The Jimi Hendrix Experience · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the electric blues and rhythm and blues of the American circuit Hendrix had played as a sideman, and the London guitar of 1966, Clapton, Beck and Townshend, which had begun to use volume and feedback. The turn is large: the electric guitar ceases to be an instrument that plays notes through an amplifier and becomes a source of sound, feedback, sustain, distortion and tape, shaped as deliberately as a melody. Third Stone and the title track leave song form; Manic Depression puts a jazz-phrased drummer under a rock waltz. The stake was real: an unknown American in London built a trio around a sound no record company had sold, on a debut with no singles on it. Held below the top by the Who’s and the Yardbirds’ feedback, and by the blues frame that keeps most songs near home.
Georges Seurat · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Impressionism at its height: the open-air scene of modern leisure painted quickly, in broken colour, to fix an instant of light. Seurat kept the subject and reversed every other term. The instant became permanence; the quick sketch became two years of studies; the small canvas painted on the spot became a three-metre composition built in the studio; the intuitive touch became a system of separate colours set side by side according to the optical theory of Chevreul and Rood, to be mixed in the eye; the passing figure became a figure fixed in profile like a frieze. The stake was large and was paid: a painter of about twenty-five put his whole method on one canvas, showed it at the last Impressionist exhibition over the objections of founders of the group, was mocked in the press, and did not sell it in his lifetime. Held a step below the top because the scandal it met was a smaller one.
Wassily Kandinsky · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the European picture as a window onto things, with figure, ground, space and a subject that can be named; behind his own path stand Jugendstil, the Russian folk print, the Fauves, the Murnau landscapes and Bavarian glass painting. The departure here is near total: a history painting of the largest subjects at the largest size he had attempted, every object dissolved, colour and line made to bear the whole meaning on the analogy with music he argued in print. The stake was real: a trained lawyer in his forties, publicly ridiculed, whose Composition V had been refused in 1911. Held below the top for the date. By 1913 the turn was three years old in his own Improvisations, and Kupka and Delaunay were in parallel: this is its culmination, not its first act.
Claude Lanzmann · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the documentary of the camps, above all Resnais’ Night and Fog (1955), with its archival images and spoken commentary, and the interview documentary of television and of Marcel Ophuls’ The Sorrow and the Pity (1969). Lanzmann departs from all of it at once: no archival image of the dead, no commentary, no score; the past told only in the present tense, by the living, at the places, often in re-staging, Bomba’s shop, the hired locomotive, Srebnik’s boat; perpetrators filmed with a hidden camera; and a length no distributor wanted. The stake was eleven years of the maker’s life and repeated failures of money. It is a turn and a wager together, made once.
Jørn Utzon · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the opera house as a type from Garnier’s Paris onward, a horseshoe in a palace with a fly tower behind and a façade to a street; the International Style box; and the shell structures of Candela and Nervi, with the sculptural turn of Ronchamp. The departure: two halls side by side on a platform, no street front and no fly tower on the skyline, the roof the whole building’s figure, seen from every side and from above. The stake was as great as any building of its century took on: the shells could not be built as drawn, the solution took years, the cost rose many times over the estimate, and the architect lost the building. Held below the top because the shell roof as expressive form was already in the air.
Ornette Coleman · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
The inherited tradition is the jazz of 1959, bebop and hard bop: the soloist running a fixed cycle of chord changes, the piano setting the harmony every bar. The turn is from the cycle to the line. The soloist follows the melody’s implications; the bass follows the soloist; the piano, the instrument that would have enforced the grid, is gone. Pitch is bent toward the voice, with an intonation many players then heard as wrong. The stake was a career: a near-unknown from Los Angeles placed his first record for a major jazz label on a method established players rejected. Held a step below the top by its own preparation: two records for Contemporary had already made much of the turn, and the head, solos and head, the swing and the blues are kept.
Jackson Pollock · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is easel painting as such: a stretched canvas upright, a brush touching it, a line that bounds a shape, a figure on a ground, a centre; behind it Benton’s rhythmic diagrams, Siqueiros’s poured Duco, the sand painting made on the ground. The departure is all on this canvas: the canvas on the floor, worked from four sides, the painter able to “literally be in the painting”; paint that never meets a brush on the canvas; a line that bounds nothing; no figure, ground, centre, top or bottom until it was raised. Each had a precedent; none made the pour the whole of painting at five metres. The stake was his whole standing: Time printed “chaos” over his Venice showing, he cabled “NO CHAOS DAMN IT”, and within a year he was back in black and the figure. Held a little below the top because by 1950 the swerve was three years old: this is its perfection, not its first act.
Homer · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
The turn from the war epic is deliberate: cunning for force, the household for the field, survival for glory. The poem names its own novelty, “For novel lays attract our ravish’d ears” (I.351–352), rests its hero’s fame on wiles (IX.19–20), and gives epic dignity to a swineherd, a nurse and a dog. It builds a narrative no surviving earlier poem has: the hero absent for four books, two plots joined in the sixteenth, four books and his lies in his own voice. It shares 506 whole lines with the Iliad. The stake is the weakness: the poem is anonymous, the other homecoming poems are lost, and what the turn cost cannot be recovered.
Roman, under Hadrian · Architecture
9.3 · Tier V
The inheritance: the Greek and Roman temple, a cella for the image behind a columned front, with worship at an altar outside; and Roman concrete vaulting, already bold in Nero’s octagonal hall in the Domus Aurea, Domitian’s palace on the Palatine and the bath halls. The departure: the interior made the subject of architecture, the building turned inside out; a concrete span nothing before it had reached; the whole reduced to one undivided room lit from one opening. The stake was physical: failure at that span would have killed people, and the dome stands without ties. What holds the axis is the porch, a conventional temple front kept as a hedge, the tradition left in front of the door.
Augustine of Hippo · Literature
9.2 · Tier V
The inheritance is the Psalms, Paul’s letters, the Platonists, Cicero’s dialogues and the classical rhetoric Augustine taught. Nothing in it was this: a whole life told as a prayer, to God, with readers overhearing; childhood examined as a moral and psychological object; the narrator’s own sins, sexual and intellectual, laid out by a sitting bishop whose enemies, Donatists and former Manichees, could and did use them. The stake was real. Augustine reports that when “da quod iubes et iube quod vis”, give what you command and command what you will (X.29.40), was quoted before Pelagius in Rome, Pelagius objected, and the line passed into the long quarrel over grace. The unannounced turn from narrative to memory to time to creation is a second risk. Held below the top because confession and ascent were known forms; the swerve is in their fusion and scale.
Sailendra · Architecture
9.2 · Tier V
The inheritance: the Indian stupa with its railing and circumambulation path; terraced stupa bases in Gandhara; the Javanese stepped sanctuary, the punden berundak; and the Sailendras’ own mandala plan of shrines about a centre at Candi Sewu. The turn is severe. A Buddhist temple with no interior at all, the whole building an outside to be walked. A stupa that is a mountain and a diagram at once. Narrative carried at a scale and in an order no building had attempted, 1,460 panels as a graded curriculum. A new object, the perforated stupa, with the image put half out of sight. The stake was real and partly lost: the hill fill moved, the foot had to be buttressed and its chapter hidden, and the type was never built again. What holds it below the top is that each element had a source; the swerve is in the fusion.
Diego Velázquez · Visual art
9.2 · Tier V
The inheritance is the Habsburg court portrait: the sitter isolated, upright, at full length, in a neutral or ceremonial setting, as in Titian and in Velázquez’s own portraits of the king. The departure is on the canvas: a royal portrait turned into the scene of its own making; the king and queen reduced to a reflection; the painter among the household at its scale, the largest figure on the left; the viewer given a place in its space. Van Eyck’s convex mirror and the painter in his studio are precedents for parts, not the whole. The stake was social: the Order of Santiago required proof that he had never practised a trade for money, and he painted himself at work. The cost was risked, not paid.
Filippo Brunelleschi · Architecture
9.1 · Tier V
The inheritance: the model of 1367, with its pointed octagonal vault and no flying buttresses; the Gothic of the cathedral; the Baptistery’s octagonal vault; the Roman vaults he studied; and the universal practice of turning a vault on timber centering. The departure: a vault raised without full centering over a span no centering could economically bridge, by brick rings on curved beds locked with herringbone; two shells; machines invented for the work; and, in the lantern, classical members on a Gothic profile. The stake was extreme: a goldsmith whose largest building, the Innocenti, was barely begun, with a rival as co-head, risking collapse over the high altar. Held below the top because the figure was given: the swerve is in the means.
Claudio Monteverdi · Music
9.1 · Tier V
The inheritance is the stile antico of the Mass that shares the print, the Venetian polychoral psalm, Viadana’s few-voice concerto over a continuo, falsobordone, and the echo and ornamented solo of chamber and theatre. The departures: the whole Office of a feast in the new style, at a scale no Vespers in print had reached; a theatre toccata opening a service; the Song of Songs as love-song brought into Vespers; the chant kept under it all, so that the swerve is made on old ground. The stake was real: a composer under printed attack, his place at court uncertain, sent Rome a double proof, the old way and the new, for a work with no occasion that waited three centuries for a hearing. Held below the top because every element was proven somewhere; the turn is the synthesis and its scale.
Francisco Goya · Visual art
9.0 · Tier V
The inheritance is the history painting of the day — David’s oaths and deaths, Gros’s Napoleonic battles, West’s death of a general — where history is made by heroes, around a commander or a sacrifice that means something, with the glorified death of the martyrdom picture behind it. The departure: no hero, no victory; the enemy a mechanism without faces; the scale of history painting given to a nameless labourer; a handling so broad that much of the canvas reads as unfinished. The stake was specific. Goya had served Joseph Bonaparte’s court, and in 1814 his loyalty was in question. The commission asked for heroism; he gave a slaughter. Held below the top because the patriotic subject itself was safe.
Friedrich Hölderlin · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
The means were known. Pindar and Klopstock had written the free hymn, Schiller the philosophical elegy, and the Greek revival was the common project of German letters; on this view the swerve is an intensification. The departure is from Weimar’s own Greece, the serene classicism of Goethe and Schiller, its sentence and its balance. Hölderlin turned the Pindaric hymn into a German form with its own syntax, the hard joining of inversion and parataxis; made the caesura and the alternation of tones structural principles; set Christ among the Greek demigods in “Der Einzige”; and turned at the last from Greece toward the native and the West. The stake was total: the hymns went largely unpublished and unread for a century, and the maker’s mind gave way before the work could be finished or received.
Ludwig van Beethoven · Music
9.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Classical sonata of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven’s own thirty years at it, with tonic and dominant the poles of every movement. The departures are many, and they are one wager: a sonata at the scale of a symphony; a tonal system of descending thirds in place of the fifth’s polarity, carried through all four movements; a development that settles a semitone from home; a long slow movement in the key farthest from the tonic; a Largo that is improvisation written down; a finale fugue whose heading declares its licences. The stake was real: its tempi and its difficulty were written past the players of its day. Held below the top because the road was partly his own: Op. 101 and Op. 102 no. 2 had already put fugues into late sonata finales.
Bob Dylan · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance was the folk revival that had made Dylan its spokesman, the twelve-bar blues and the pop single of about three minutes. The departures were four: a six-minute single built on a long, accusing lyric, which reached No. 2 in the United States; symbolist collage in place of the topical protest song; a Chicago blues guitarist and a loose New York session band behind a folk singer; and an eleven-minute closing track. The stake was paid in public, with the audience that had made his name: the electric set at Newport came five days after the single, and booing followed at Forest Hills. The band became the whole sound, on eight tracks of nine, where the album before had gone electric on one side. Held from the top because Bringing It All Back Home, in March, had already taken part of the turn.
Samuel Beckett · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Joyce above all, with Proust, Kafka, Dante, Descartes and Geulincx, the picaresque and Cervantes, and the detective story in Moran’s mission. The turn is from Joyce’s art of adding to an art of taking away: impoverishment as method, a narrator who knows less with each page, a voice that cancels as it states, a second half that annuls its own first sentence. The change of language was part of the turn. The stake was real: a writer past forty with little reputation, a manuscript turned down by publishers until Éditions de Minuit took it, in a language not his own. Held below the top because the turn was prepared in the French stories of 1946 and in Watt, and because L’Innommable takes it further, so that the swerve is the trilogy’s as much as this book’s. The doubled structure and the denial at the close are this book’s own.
Fernando Pessoa · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Portuguese lyric after Camões and Antero de Quental, the saudosismo of Pascoaes and the Portuguese Renascença around Pessoa, with Whitman, Horace and the European symbolists and futurists behind. The swerve is not a style but the invention of authorship as a medium: three complete poets, each with his own poetics, made by one man, published under their own names and reviewing one another, a drama in people without a stage. No lyric tradition had done that at this scale or with this seriousness; Browning’s masks speak one poem each, and Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms argue in prose. The stake was real: Orpheu was received in Lisbon as a scandal, and Pessoa staked his life’s work on a method that left him almost unpublished in book form. Held a step below the top because each component, free verse, the Horatian ode, the futurist ode, was inherited.
Arthur Rimbaud · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the French prose poem of Aloysius Bertrand and of Baudelaire’s Petits Poèmes en prose, the Romantic confession of Rousseau and Musset, and the Christian literature of conversion and damnation. The turn is large on each count. The prose poem, a sequence of small detached pieces, becomes a single dramatic book with one voice, a plot of descent and return, and an argument. The confession becomes a trial in which the confessant is also prosecutor and judge. And a poet of eighteen, whose verse of the year before had broken the rules of French prosody, quotes that verse in order to condemn it: the swerve turns on its own author. The stake was real and paid: a book printed at his own cost, left unpaid for and almost unread for thirteen years, written out of a scandal that had ended in a shooting, and followed within about two years by his leaving literature. Held off the very top only because the prose poem and the confession were given forms, not invented ones.
Gustave Flaubert · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Balzac: the young provincial who comes to Paris to conquer it, in Illusions perdues and Le Père Goriot, and the novel of education in which the hero is made by what he learns. Flaubert removes the engine. There is no conquest, no fall, no crisis that changes anything; the events of 1848 pass through the book as noise in the street and talk at dinner; the climaxes are refused, as when Mme Arnoux does not come to the rendezvous in the rue Tronchet (II.6); and the ending reaches back before the beginning to a non-event. The ellipsis of fifteen years in a paragraph is a new instrument. The stake was real and was lost at the time: the book was badly received in 1869. Held below the top because Madame Bovary had already made the stylistic break; this is the structural one.
The Beatles · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
The departures from the guitar-group LP of 1966 are many: a single-chord closer built on tape loops, with the voice fed through a rotating speaker; a song on which no Beatle plays; a whole track in a Hindustani idiom; reversed tape; automatic double tracking, invented in these sessions by Ken Townsend; a record that could not be played on stage, finished weeks before the group stopped touring. Several precedents lay outside pop, in Stockhausen and musique concrète, and the first session, for the closer, came in April, before Pet Sounds was released in May. The turn was taken early and across the whole palette at once, on one record, where each precedent had opened a single path. Held from the top on the stake: the group’s position cushioned it, and half the record perfects the house style.
Mark Twain · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is plain: the humour of the old Southwest, its frame tales telling dialect from above through a cultivated narrator; the boys’ book, Twain’s own The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876); and the picaresque. The swerve is to remove the frame. An unschooled boy tells a whole serious novel in his own grammar, with no educated voice between, and the vernacular becomes the medium of moral consciousness, not the butt of a joke. The first page announces the break by letting Huck correct his author: Mark Twain “told the truth, mainly”. The stake was real and was paid: a sequel to a children’s book that took slavery and a boy’s damnation for its matter. Held off the top because the dialect, the picaresque frame and the burlesque episodes were inherited, and the Phelps chapters fall back on the boys’ book the novel had swerved from.
Donatello · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the clothed David of the Florentine tradition, Donatello’s own marble of 1408 to 1409 among it; the statue in the niche, made to be seen from the front and bound to a building; and a long reserve toward the nude, admitted for Adam and Eve, the damned and the body of Christ. The departure: a freestanding figure in the round, nude, in bronze, at about the size of the boy it shows, raised on a column to be walked round; a biblical hero made a naked adolescent in the pose of an antique god; the sensuality of the body not hidden but pointed to. The stake was real, and the unease the figure carries has outlived its maker in five centuries of argument over its eros. Held below the top because antiquity supplied the model to which the swerve returned.
Luigi Pirandello · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the well-made bourgeois drama of adultery and family shame, the Italian teatro grottesco of the 1910s, the old device of the play within the play, from Shakespeare and Calderón to Tieck, and Pirandello’s own stories of characters calling on their author. The turn is a reversal of the stage’s ontology. The drama is not played but refused; the play we watch is the failure to make one; the fourth wall is not broken as a device but abolished as a premise, and in the definitive text the Characters walk in through the audience. Held below the very top only because the play within the play had a long ancestry, and the story of characters seeking their author was already Pirandello’s own.
William Wordsworth · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the epic, and above all Milton. In Book I the poet weighs the subjects an epic might take, an Arthurian tale, the wars of Mithridates, Gustavus of Sweden, and puts them aside, until the question “Was it for this” turns the poem upon his own childhood. The departure is from the epic of a nation or of God to the epic of one unremarkable mind, told at epic length in Milton’s metre, with no plot but growth and no hero but the speaker. The stake was real, and it was paid: Wordsworth never published the poem, and the wager was placed while its winnings were withheld for forty-five years, until after his death. Held below the top only because the confessional and spiritual autobiography, Augustine’s and Rousseau’s, had already opened the subject in prose.
Arnold Schoenberg · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritances are the melodrama, spoken word over music from Benda to Schumann’s ballads, the Lied cycle, and the cabaret recitation Albertine Zehme wanted. The departures: a speaking voice sustained through a whole work, notated in pitch and rhythm and denied song; free atonality carried across twenty-one forms with no through-composed text to hold it up; five players on eight instruments, the ensemble a palette rather than a group; strict canon, passacaglia and palindrome inside the atonal language, a decade before the twelve-tone method. The stake was real: a Berlin public, and a language most of it refused. Held below the top by his own road: Sprechstimme had appeared in the speaker of the Gurre-Lieder and in Die glückliche Hand, the atonal miniature in Opp. 11 and 19.
Federico Fellini · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is plain: the narrative feature, which marked its passages into memory and dream by optical convention; Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (1957); Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour (1959) and Last Year at Marienbad (1961), which had already loosened time; Pirandello’s author and characters; Gide’s novel about the writing of a novel; Fellini’s own episodic La dolce vita (1960). The departure: a large commercial production, with the biggest star in Italy, whose subject is that its director has nothing to make, and whose present, memory and fantasy meet at straight cuts. The stake was real: it followed the greatest success of Fellini’s career, and a failure would have been public. Held below the top because Bergman and Resnais moved first.
Le Corbusier · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
The departure is double, and the stake was high. Against his own tradition: Le Corbusier was the chief author of the rational, prismatic architecture of the 1920s, the free plan and the white box on pilotis, and here, at the height of his authority, he built thick curved walls, a sagging roof and a plan with no governing grid. The cost was paid in public: Stirling read a crisis of rationalism, and the movement’s own critics a betrayal or an indulgence. Against the Church: a pilgrimage chapel without arcades or a window programme, by an architect who was not a practising believer. Held from the very top because the plastic turn was already under way in his postwar work; this is its fullest statement, not its first step.
William Gaddis · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the dialogue novel of Ivy Compton-Burnett and Henry Green, the party chapters of Gaddis’s own The Recognitions, and Joyce behind them. The turn is a long novel with no chapters, no breaks and almost no narration, in which the reader must identify the speaker from the speech, follow simultaneous telephone calls and reconstruct a corporate plot from the fragments its participants let fall. Nothing in the American novel of 1975 was built this way at this scale. The stake was real: twenty years after a first novel of great length and difficulty, Gaddis made a second more demanding still, on a form that could repel every reader. Held below the top because part of the instrument is his own, from the parties of the first novel, and part is Green’s and Compton-Burnett’s.
Dionysus Flambouras · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The departure is the book’s largest wager. Four volumes in four measurably distinct registers, the transitions unmarked: the simile runs at five to the thousand words in the first volume and at a fifth of one in the second, while the vocabulary of registration rises almost tenfold and never falls back to where it began. A whole volume is handed to a night administration headed Hour, Location, Rider and Warmth; a cetology and a forty-three-article blazon sit inside a novel; a kingdom speaks in decrees and catalogues. The precursors are reached rather than saluted: the slab of the invented film is not gone through but closed from a window, and the hero’s accusers turn out to be his own juvenilia. The cost was real, a quarter of a million words staked on an unpublished first position, with no floor beneath any of it. No prior work renders a redeemed order in the vocabulary of the bureaucracy that was the fall.
The Beach Boys · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the band’s own: surf, cars and the beach, harmony pop sold to teenagers, and Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound, which Wilson revered. The turn is large. The leader of a hit band stops touring and builds, with session players, a record of introspection with no surf and no cars, scored for harpsichord, French horn, Electro-Theremin and strings among much else, on harmonies that move by inversions and avoid the root. The stake was the formula itself: the sound and subjects that had made the band were set aside while they still sold, and the band’s voices were laid over tracks cut without them. What holds it below the top is the path: Spector’s production was proven, the Beatles had made the album a whole, and the band’s records of 1965 had begun the turn.
Michelangelo · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the orders as Brunelleschi had set them in this very church and Bramante had made them the grammar of Rome, each element doing what its form declares, columns standing forward and bearing, brackets carrying, windows opening; and the lit basilican hall of Michelozzo’s library at San Marco. In the vestibule the departure is almost total: every element is turned against its customary role, and the stair has no precedent as a form. The stake was real and public: a papal, dynastic commission in the family’s own church, given to a sculptor with no long record as a builder, where license could be read as error. Vasari saw it within a generation and named it as license. The hall departs much less.
Chantal Akerman · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is double: the narrative feature, with a star, Delphine Seyrig of Last Year at Marienbad and of Buñuel; and the American structural film Akerman had seen in New York in the early 1970s, Michael Snow’s duration and fixed frame, and Warhol’s. The turn joins them into what neither had made: duration and the fixed frame put to the service of a story, and a story whose events are housework. Cinema had cut a woman’s hours in her kitchen as dead time; this film makes them the whole matter, and lets three days pass before the one event. The stake was total: a first long feature by a woman of twenty-four, three hours and twenty minutes of a woman peeling potatoes. Held below the top because the means were borrowed, and part of the swerve is their transfer.
Francesco Borromini · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the Renaissance centralised church from Bramante to Michelangelo’s St Peter’s (9.0), a plan built from circle and square, the orders a modular grammar of column and bay, a dome raised on a drum over a distinct body; and Borromini’s own first step at San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane (9.0), where the oval was generated from triangles. The departure: a plan generated from the triangle and the star, which classical theory did not use; an order that binds a moving wall into one band instead of articulating bays; a dome without a drum that continues the plan instead of capping it; a lantern of concave bays; a spiral crown with no precedent in Christian building. The stake was real: Borromini was attacked in his lifetime and after it as the destroyer of the orders, and his career stood on this manner against Bernini’s. Held a step below the top because San Carlo had already made the turn of geometry, and Sant’Ivo extends it.
Edvard Munch · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the Kristiania naturalism in which Munch trained, under Krohg; Impressionism, seen in Paris; and the Synthetism of Gauguin and the late van Gogh, which had already flattened colour and let line carry feeling. The departure: a landscape not of what was seen but of what was heard; colour freed from local hue to carry sound; a human figure deformed into a sign; and the surface left rough, crayon over thin tempera, board bare, as if unfinished. Each step had a precedent; none had gone so far toward making a picture the direct record of a psychic event. The stake is documented: in November 1892 his Berlin exhibition was closed after a week amid public scandal, and he went on in the same direction. The line pencilled on this board, calling it the work of a madman, is in his own hand. A turn, and a cost paid.
Gustave Courbet · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is history painting: a format of six or seven metres kept for the state, the church, the battle and the antique. The departure is to fill it with a provincial burial of no public rank, with life-size portraits of the painter’s neighbours, unidealised, ranked by nothing, under an empty sky, in a sombre, broad, unfinished-looking manner the critics took for ugliness. It is the founding wager of Realism in painting, and the stake was real: a young provincial painter with one Salon medal behind him staked his standing on a canvas called ugly and vulgar and read as a political provocation in the years after 1848; the jury of 1855 refused it, and he answered by building his own pavilion. Held below the top because the turn was prepared, in Dutch group portraiture, the provincial genre scene, Géricault’s scale for a contemporary event, and his own After Dinner at Ornans of 1849.
Auguste Rodin · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the commemorative portrait statue of the nineteenth century: a recognisable likeness, a costume, the attributes of the calling, pen, book and desk, a pedestal with allegory, a figure for the boulevard to read. The departure removes all of it: no likeness in the ordinary sense, no attribute, no story, the body hidden, a man made a mass, an expressive distortion carried into a public commission from a learned society. The cost was paid in full and in public: the society refused the work, the press mocked it, the commission passed to a rival, and Rodin took the plaster back to Meudon and never saw it in bronze or in the street. Held below the top because Rodin had been making the turn for years, in the Walking Man, the partial figures and the low base of the Burghers, and because Medardo Rosso’s dissolving figures went before it on one part of the road.
J. M. W. Turner · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the marine painting of the Dutch masters and of Vernet and Loutherbourg, and Turner’s own earlier sea pieces: a horizon, a viewer on stable ground, the ship as drawn object, the storm as an event in a scene. The departure: no horizon; the composition built as a vortex from the centre outward, so that sea, sky, snow and smoke are one substance; the boat dissolved nearly into the medium; paint laid, scraped and dragged so that the surface itself is weather; and a title that asserts the painter’s body in the storm as the work’s warrant. The stake was public: the canvas hung at the Academy when the late manner was widely ridiculed. Held a step below the top because that manner was already his path, and this canvas pushes it furthest rather than first.
Caspar David Friedrich · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the composed landscape and the marine as Claude and the Dutch fixed them: a repoussoir at the side, coulisses stepping back, a middle ground, ships to measure the sea, a framed horizon. The departure is total. There is no repoussoir, no coulisse, no middle ground, nothing at the sides; the horizon runs unbroken from edge to edge; the foreground is, in effect, the frame itself. No painting in the European tradition before it had dared a field so nearly empty at this size. The stake was public: it was shown at the Berlin Academy, where the absence of the expected structure was the talk around it. Held below the top because the cost was risked rather than paid: the king bought it, and the painter was elected to the Academy.
Henri Matisse · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The departure is from the whole European tradition of the large figure painting: modelling, perspective, local colour, anatomy, finish and subject. In their place stand three flat colours at mural scale, a contour that distorts limbs for momentum, and a subject that is nothing but motion. The Fauve canvases of 1905 had freed colour at easel size; this canvas risks it at the scale of history painting, for a patron who would live with it. The cost was paid in public, in the hostility of the Salon d’Automne of 1910. The full-size canvas of 1909 was made toward this commission, and the saturated vermilion of the bodies is this canvas’s wager alone. Held below the top only because the road from 1905 was already open.
Dziga Vertov · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance in 1929 was the fiction feature with intertitles and, within documentary, the newsreel and the newer city symphony, Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927) among it. The departure was radical and declared in the opening titles: no intertitles, no scenario, no actors, no theatre, and a film whose subject is its own making. Superimposition, split screen, slow and reverse motion, the freeze, stop motion and the jump in scale are all used and all shown being used. The stake was paid: Vertov had argued against the fiction film for a decade, this was the wager in full, and it was attacked on release as formalist trickery. Held from the top by precedent, Ruttmann and Vertov’s own Kino-Eye and Kino-Pravda among it, gathered and driven further rather than invented whole.
Henri Matisse · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the studio interior, from Vermeer’s Art of Painting to Courbet’s Painter’s Studio and the Impressionist room in its light, and Matisse’s own Fauve colour, which had kept colour attached to things. The departure is on the canvas: a whole room, walls, floor and furniture, painted out in one colour; perspective kept only as lines in reserve, the drawing made by what the paint did not cover; objects ranked by whether they keep their colour, art above furniture. It is a picture painted over itself, and the decision is legible at every edge. The stake: painted as a decoration for a buyer who declined it, it was shown in London in 1912 and in the Armory Show in 1913 and stayed unsold for sixteen years. Held below the top because the Fauve years and Harmony in Red of 1908 had prepared the move.
Jacques Tati · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is screen comedy built on a star and his gags, from Chaplin and Keaton to Tati’s own Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday (1953) and Mon Oncle (1958), which had made Hulot a popular figure. The swerve is near total: a comedy that dissolves its star into the crowd, sets several gags at once in a wide frame with no close-up to direct the eye, has almost no plot and almost no dialogue, and asks the viewer to find the comedy for himself. The stake was the highest: years of production, a city built for the film, 70mm, and a failure in its own year that left the film cut and seen for decades in shortened prints. Held a step below the very top because Mon Oncle had already made the modern house the subject and set Hulot against it.
Claude Monet · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the nineteenth-century panorama, Mesdag’s at The Hague (1881) among them, enclosing the viewer in illusion and with a horizon; the decorative cycles of Puvis de Chavannes and the Nabis, which put painting on the wall but keep figure and ground; the Japanese screens and prints Monet collected; and his own series, which made time the subject. The departure: painting as an environment, with no frame, no edge and no outside; no horizon, no ground plane, no fixed point of view; a few square metres of water enlarged to the walls of two rooms. The stake: the most famous living painter in France staked his last twelve years on a gift his admirers took for decline. Held below the top because the decorative ensemble was a living French genre.
Mark Rothko · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is twofold: the painted sacred room, from Giotto’s Arena Chapel to Matisse’s chapel at Vence (1951), always with images; and the painted environment — Monet’s Water Lilies at the Orangerie (installed 1927), which encloses the viewer in light and nature, and Rothko’s own rooms: the Phillips Collection, still of luminous floating rectangles, and the Seagram and Harvard murals, darker, in maroon and open frames, but still pictures hung in rooms made for something else. The departure: a sacred room with no image of any kind and in no single creed; his colour given up for maroon and black; his soft floating edge given up, in the black forms, for a hard one. A painter of sixty staked his last years on a room he would not see opened. Held below the top because darkness was not his alone: Ad Reinhardt’s black paintings were contemporary.
Robert Altman · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Hollywood western with a star, and the departures run at every level. Zsigmond’s negative was flashed before exposure, so that the colour fogged and the shadows filled; the dialogue was recorded on many tracks and mixed so that it overlaps and sinks; the hero is a small man who talks to himself and loses; the gunfight is played against a fire the town cares about more. The stake was real: a Warner Bros. production with Warren Beatty, who contested Altman’s method on the set, and a studio that released a film whose sound was widely taken for a fault. Held just below the top because the anti-western had begun before it, in Penn and Peckinpah, and this swerve was the furthest of a movement rather than the first.
Philip Glass and Robert Wilson · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is opera with plot, characters, an orchestra in the pit, arias and intervals. The departures came at once: no plot and no characters in the operatic sense; an amplified ensemble of organs and winds for an orchestra; a chorus singing numbers and solfège; texts of found speech and word-pattern by a teenager, a retired man and a dancer; four and a half hours without an interval, the audience free to come and go; dance and image weighed with music. The stake was real: the company hired the Metropolitan Opera House to set it before the opera audience. Held below the top because each component had precedent, in Glass’s Music in Twelve Parts, Wilson’s The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin and the Judson dancers. The swerve is the joining.
Jasper Johns · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance in 1954 was New York painting at the height of its authority: the gesture as the trace of a self, the field without a given image, the sublime as the painter’s claim. Johns turned from it as completely as a painter could while keeping its paint: a subject that needed no invention, a design that composed itself, a figure already flat and so unable to sit on a ground, and encaustic, which kept the gesture but made it a skin instead of a revelation. Each part had a precedent, in Duchamp’s readymade, the trompe l’oeil of Peto and Harnett and Stuart Davis’s emblems, but none had set a given flat sign coextensive with its support and called it a painting. The stake was real: Johns was in his mid-twenties and unknown, had destroyed his earlier work, and risked being read as a joke, a provocation or a slight to the flag.
Gerrit Rietveld · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the Dutch brick house, the very row this one is joined to; the expressive brick of the Amsterdam School; Berlage’s rational masonry; and De Stijl’s own drawings and models, the counter-constructions of van Doesburg and van Eesteren of 1923, which proposed the planar house and were not built. The departure: a house built whole, as lived space, from planes and lines, its box broken open at the corners, its upper floor without fixed walls, its colour part of its meaning, set against a brick row. No building before it had realised the De Stijl house, and few after it did. The stake was real and paid: a cabinetmaker with little building behind him, a client who staked her children’s home on it, and a construction improvised to look like what it was not.
Virgil · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
The path was the most proven in literature: Homer, taken in order. I–VI are an Odyssey and VII–XII an Iliad, with an Achilles of its own, “alius Latio iam partus Achilles” (6.89). The turn is legible because the source survives. Epic is bent to history: the hero’s virtue is pietas, not glory, and prophecy runs a thousand years forward (1.257–296, 6.756–886, 8.626–728). The ending reverses its source. Priam cites the Achilles who “nobly listened to a suppliant’s plea” (2.541–542); this poem ends with a suppliant, pleading in his father’s name, refused (12.930–950). The stake was real: a Latin epic set against Homer, under a patron, left unfinished. It is held where it is because the frame, the type-scenes and the episodes are borrowed.
Sophocles · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
The inheritance is known in part. In the Odyssey Epicaste hangs herself and Oedipus goes on ruling in Thebes (11.271–280). The turns this play makes are visible in it. The whole past is compressed into one day of inquiry; the hero is the investigator of his own crime; the queen knows before he does (1056–1072); and he puts out his eyes with her brooches (1268–1270) and insists that the hand was his (1331). The chorus even puts its own dance at risk: “ti dei me choreuein?”
“why should we join in the sacred dance?” (896). What cannot be measured is the stake. The form was proven and the myth known to every spectator, and that holds it lowest of the five gates.
Aeschylus · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
The inheritance is known: the Odyssey’s Orestes, whose revenge is an example; Stesichorus’ lost Oresteia; Pindar’s eleventh Pythian. The departures are large. Clytemnestra becomes the killer and the trilogy’s dominant mind, the matricide becomes a question, and the myth ends in a court, which Athena calls the “first trial for bloodshed” (Eum. 681–682). She names the hill from the Amazons’ sacrifice to Ares (685–690), not from a trial of Ares. The stake was civic: the trilogy came within four years of Ephialtes’ reform of the Areopagus. What holds it lowest of the twelve is Aeschylus’ own precedent. The connected trilogy was his practised form, and his Danaid plays may also have ended in a settlement.
Anonymous (the Yahwist and the other sources) · Literature
9.3 · Tier V
The turn from what it inherited is plain in particulars. Against Enuma Elish, where the world is made from the body of a slain goddess, the world here is made by word, without combat, and sun and moon are not named but called “lights” (1:16), gods demoted to lamps. Against Atrahasis, where humankind is made to bear the gods’ labour, man and woman are made “in his own image” (1:27). The flood is sent for violence (6:11), not for noise, and ends in a covenant with every living creature. The founding story of its region is told as one quarrelling family in prose, and God is argued with: “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” (18:25). Held below the top because the wager was a tradition’s, over centuries, and its cost to any one maker cannot be shown.
Franz Kafka · Literature
9.2 · Tier V
The inheritance is the nineteenth-century novel of law and guilt: Dickens’s Chancery in Bleak House, Dostoevsky’s examining magistrate in Crime and Punishment, and the exactness of Flaubert, whom Kafka admired. The turn is total. The realist contract is kept in every sentence, rooms, clothes, hours and gestures precisely given, and broken in the whole: no cause is given, no world outside the court is allowed, every door opens onto it, and the hero is an initial. A novel is made to proceed by the logic of a dream told as an office memorandum, through ten chapters and a year, and to be funny while it does. The stake was real, and paid: Kafka could not finish the book, never offered it for print, and asked that it be burned. Held a step below the top because the swerve was first made in “Das Urteil” and Die Verwandlung in 1912; this book carries it to the length of a novel rather than making it.
Franz Schubert · Music
9.2 · Tier V
The inheritance is the Lied of Reichardt, Zelter and Zumsteeg, Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte (1816) and Schubert’s own Die schöne Müllerin (1823). The departures: a cycle with no story, no frame and no beloved present; sixteen minor keys out of twenty-four; the major key used throughout as the sign of illusion; a song declaimed on one note over moving harmony, and one built on a drone and a short tune; a piano that is the world and the double; an ending that is a question put to a beggar. The stake was real: by Spaun’s account the friends were dismayed at the first hearing. Held below the top because the road was his own: the Müllerin had already made a Müller cycle the drama of one consciousness.
William Shakespeare · Literature
9.2 · Tier V
The inheritance is the chronicle play, Shakespeare’s own first tetralogy and Richard II and Marlowe’s Edward II, and the clowning of the popular stage. The swerve is to give the chronicle a second world of equal weight, in prose, made of people history does not record, and to let each world judge the other: the comedy does not relieve the history but criticises it, scene for scene, until the history play becomes a play about what history is. The second part swerves again from the first one’s success: a sequel with no battle, a hero long absent, and the comic giant made old, sick and cast off, a real risk to the crowd’s love. Held a step below the top because the double plot itself was not new; what is new is its weight and its function.
Du Fu · Literature
9.2 · Tier V
Du Fu inherited regulated verse as a court form, polished for banquets and occasions, and the old ballad as a form of set titles. He turned both. He gave the ballad titles named for the events themselves, so that “Ballad of the Army Carts” and the six poems of the three officers and three partings (759) report the present. He made the regulated poem carry the personal, the political and the plain, admitted prosaic diction and colloquial turns, and in the late poems bent syntax past ordinary sense, so that in “Autumn Meditations” the grammar follows memory rather than fact. The stake was real: the manner won him little in his lifetime, and his standing rose only decades later. Held a step from the top by the inheritance he worked within.
Euripides · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
The inheritance is Aeschylean tragedy and the epic and lyric story of the Argonauts. The turn: a heroine given the code tragedy gave Ajax or Achilles, not to be laughed at by enemies, to harm enemies and help friends, and applying it as a woman in a household, which makes the code monstrous; a hero reduced to a reasoner about marriage and status; a chorus of Greek women that sympathises with a barbarian’s revenge and does nothing; the killer of her children carried off unpunished in a divine car where the god of the ending should have stood. The stake was paid: the play took third prize. The ancient summary reports a claim that Euripides took it from Neophron; the order of the two plays is contested, and the score rests on the balance of evidence.
Hieronymus Bosch · Visual art
9.0 · Tier V
The inheritance is the Netherlandish winged altarpiece, a devotional machine with a grisaille exterior and a feast-day opening. The work keeps the machine and changes its use. By 1517 it hung in a palace in Brussels. Its centre has no saint, no story and no devotional object, and no textual programme has been found for it. Its hybrids and giant fruit have manuscript drolleries and proverbs behind them, but nothing at this scale or in this place. The turn is near total. The stake keeps it below the top band: nothing suggests Bosch paid for the wager. The work paid later: by 1605 Sigüenza was defending the painter against suspicion of heresy.
Paul the Apostle · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Paul inherits more than he invents, and says so: in 1 Corinthians 15:3 he hands on what he himself received; the Philippians hymn may be older than he; the mission to the gentiles was under way before him, at Antioch. But the turn the letters make is the decisive one: the covenant of Israel opened to gentiles without circumcision or the law, argued from Israel’s own scriptures against the leaders of the movement. Galatians stakes everything on it, with a curse on any other gospel even from an angel, and the account of opposing Peter to his face at Antioch. The cost is written into the text: “forty stripes save one” five times, the rods, the stoning, the shipwrecks (2 Corinthians 11:24 to 25), letters written from prison. The received formulas cost a tenth, and hold it below The Waste Land’s 9.3.
Fyodor Dostoevsky · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the confession, from Rousseau, whom the narrator names as a confessor who lied about himself; Gogol’s “Diary of a Madman” and “The Overcoat”, the clerk’s humiliation and the diary form; and the Natural School of the 1840s, to which Dostoevsky’s own Poor Folk and The Double belonged. The swerve: a novel whose first half is a philosophical monologue without event, spoken by a repellent and self-refuting narrator who forestalls every objection and argues against his own reader; a confession made to wreck the genre of confession; and the redemptive plot of the fallen woman inverted. The stake was real. It took on the reigning creed of the radical young at its height, in a struggling journal, with no plot a reader of 1864 would recognise. Held a step below the top because the clerk, the diary and the double were already Gogol’s ground and Dostoevsky’s own.
Dante Alighieri · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance: Provençal and Sicilian lyric; Guinizzelli’s gentle heart, named in “Amore e ’l cor gentil sono una cosa” (love and the gentle heart are one thing, XX); Cavalcanti’s love as a wound to the spirits; Boethius’s alternation of prose and verse; the razos that explained troubadour songs; the schools’ division of a text. The departure: a vernacular poet divides his own poems as the schools divided an authority, and sets them in a prose history of his soul that turns on the beloved’s death, so that lyric becomes elegy and conversion. The stake was real: the book is addressed to Cavalcanti, “primo de’ miei amici” (first of my friends, III), and wagers against his poetics of love as ruin. Held below the top because each component has a precedent; the swerve is their fusion.
Vincent van Gogh · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance is two laws. Impressionism’s: paint the motif before your eyes, in its light. And his own, held through Arles: the Rhône night was painted on the quay under gaslight, and he had dismissed Gauguin’s and Bernard’s painting from imagination as abstraction. The departure: a landscape made from memory, composite and invention, in a studio by day; a sky given forms no eye sees, the record of force rather than of light; the stroke made the carrier of the meaning; a religious need stated as a landscape, with the church dark. The stake is documented. He broke his own rule and knew it; within five months he called the result stars too big and a failure, and his brother doubted it. Held below the top because no public risk was run: almost no one saw the canvas in his lifetime.
Vladimir Nabokov · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance is real: Pope’s Dunciad Variorum (1729), a poem buried under mock scholarship; Swift’s A Tale of a Tub; Sterne; Borges’s fictions of encyclopedias and invented books; and Nabokov’s own commentary on Eugene Onegin, written in the same years and published in 1964. The turn is that none of these made the apparatus the novel: a full, plausible poem of 999 lines, then a commentary in which a second story, a third and a murder plot are told only through the misreading of the first, with the reader left to establish what happened from the margins. The stake was real: the first novel after the fame of Lolita, it refused every expectation that fame had made and asked a general readership to read a book as an edition. Held off the very top because Pope and Borges had opened the ground, and the scholar’s own labour made the form less of a leap for him than it looks.
Caravaggio · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the conversion as epiphany: Christ in the sky, angels, a troop of soldiers scattering, a rearing horse, as in Michelangelo’s fresco in the Pauline Chapel and in the painter’s own first version, where Christ leans down in an angel’s arms. The departure is total. The heavens are removed, the troop is reduced to one servant, the horse is brought down to earth and given the field, and the event is made interior. The stake was paid as well as risked: the first pair was set aside, the commission was painted again, and the second answer was more radical than the first, not safer. Held below the top because the manner had been announced in the Contarelli Chapel a year before.
William Gaddis · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Joyce’s encyclopedic novel and Eliot’s allusive collage, set against an American novel of the early 1950s that had largely turned from high modernist ambition to realism and the first person. The turn: an American novel of nearly a thousand pages, learned and satirical, about authenticity itself, built of borrowings it does not mark, its party scenes rendered as unattributed talk overlapping like noise. It turned modernist means on the question of the copy, and so anticipated the self-conscious novel of the next two decades. The stake was real: a first novel of this length and difficulty, set against the grain of its decade, and no second novel followed for twenty years. Held below the top because the instrument is largely Joyce’s and Eliot’s, and the swerve lies in the subject and the American setting more than in the means.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the French literary novel of 1932, written in the written language: Gide, Proust’s long periodic sentence, the well-turned narrative of the prize juries. The swerve is to write a serious novel of the whole world in spoken French, its popular syntax and its argot carried from the first line, “Ça a débuté comme ça”, to the last, not as the dialogue of characters seen from above but as the narration itself. Rabelais stands behind it, and the picaresque, and Zola’s popular speech; none had made the oral register the narrating instrument of a whole book of this scope. The stake was paid at once: the Goncourt jury divided and gave its prize elsewhere, and the book was received as an outrage as often as a revelation. Held below the very top because the full break with the sentence, the ellipsis as its unit, comes with Mort à crédit (1936): this book is the turn, and its successor the fullest departure.
Masaccio · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is double. Behind it stands Giotto’s narrative fresco, grave figures on a shallow stage; around it in 1425 stood the International Gothic, Gentile da Fabriano’s Adoration of the Magi, finished in Florence in 1423, all gold, line and brocade, and the elegant manner of Masolino, Masaccio’s senior partner on these walls. The departure is from both: figures with the mass of Donatello’s and Nanni di Banco’s sculpture on real ground, one light from the chapel’s window throwing shadows, a single vanishing point, a landscape receding by diminishing trees and paling hills. The stake was paid in the open, in a manner nobody had yet bought. Held below the top because Brunelleschi had shown the perspective and Donatello the figure; the swerve combines and commits more than it invents.
Antoni Gaudí · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance was Villar’s neo-Gothic church, the revival every Catholic city of the 1880s was building. Gaudí kept the Gothic plan and section and turned its structure inside out: he removed the flying buttress by inclining the column along the thrust, replaced the pointed arch with the catenary and the parabola found by hanging chains, and built the late surfaces from ruled geometry, so that a free-seeming form could be set out by straight lines. The cost was paid in full: a career narrowed to one unfinishable building, a method that lived in models because it could not be drawn in the ordinary way, and in 1936 the loss of the record it depended on. The continuation staked the work again, against the opinion of its time. Held short because the departure corrects Gothic rather than leaving it.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is twofold: the national pavilion as a palace of exhibits with a front, and the classical German line from Schinkel in which Mies was formed; and his own path, the glass towers on paper (1921–1922), the unbuilt Brick Country House (1924), the Weissenhof block and the Velvet and Silk Café with Reich (1927). The departure: a state pavilion with nothing in it, so that the building is the exhibit; walls that do not meet, do not enclose and, in the form’s statement, do not carry; no front, no door and no room, but a route; onyx, marble, chrome and plate glass used flat, without base or cornice. The stake was real: the Reich’s face before a king, entrusted to an empty building designed and built in months, the onyx bought whole and the building taken down unsold. Held below the top because De Stijl had drawn the plan of sliding planes, Wright’s plans had been in Berlin since 1910, and Mies had drawn it himself in 1924.
Sigmund Freud · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance was double: the dreambook of the people, from Artemidorus to the interpreters of omens, which read dreams as messages by a key, and the science of 1899, which read them as the noise of a sleeping brain stirred by the body. Freud turned from both: the dream has a meaning, but the meaning is the dreamer’s own and is reached through his associations, not through a key. The stake was large and was paid. A Jewish neurologist of forty-three without a chair published his own dreams with their ambitions, envies, resentments of colleagues and fantasies of eminence, and exposed himself as evidence; the book was coolly received and sold slowly. Its form, argument conducted through confession, had no precedent in scientific writing. It stops short of the very top because the symbol key of the later editions leans back toward the dreambook it left.
Daniel Libeskind · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the museum as a neutral container of white rooms in sequence, the ideal of the museum building of the 1980s; the memorial as monument, figure or inscription; and, on the other side, the abstract memorial already opened by Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1982), and the deconstructivist drawings shown at the Museum of Modern Art in 1988, Libeskind’s among them. The departure: a museum whose building is its first and largest exhibit, made of absence, with no front door and spaces that cannot be entered; architecture asked to bear a history and an ethics, not to frame them. The stake was extreme: an architect known for drawings and teaching, with no building to his name when he won, and a form that refused the museum’s ordinary use. Held below the top because the abstract memorial and the vocabulary had both been opened.
Frank Lloyd Wright · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the museum as palace or temple, a sequence of rooms on a symmetrical plan, as at the Metropolitan up the avenue; the modern white box of the late 1930s; and the New York street wall. The departure: no rooms, one ramp; no floors, one void; a building wider at the top than at the base, turned from the grid in curved concrete. Wright’s own path had the spiral, in the unbuilt Gordon Strong Automobile Objective of the 1920s and the ramp of the Morris shop in San Francisco, and Le Corbusier had drawn a spiral museum; none had built it as a museum at this scale. The stake was as large as any building of its decade took on: sixteen years, the client’s death, the director’s fall, the city’s resistance, and the architect dead before it opened.
Guarino Guarini · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Roman Baroque centralised church, above all Borromini’s undulating walls, and behind it the closed dome of the Italian tradition, coffered or painted. The departure is very wide. Guarini opened the dome into a skeleton of crossing arches, carrying the Islamic rib vault into the centre of a Catholic royal church; he made the light come from behind the structure; he bowed the walls of the octagon toward the visitor where Rome had hollowed them away. The stake was physical: a dome of interlaced arches at this scale was a wager on calculation and stereotomy, on the capital’s most visible square. Held off the top because Borromini had already loosened the wall: at the floor the departure is a step along a path, and the dome is the swerve.
Le Corbusier · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is twofold: the French country house of masonry walls, pitched roof and windows cut as holes, set into the ground; and the makers’ own path, from the Dom-ino frame through the Citrohan projects, the La Roche house, Cook and Garches. The departure: the house lifted wholly off the ground and the car taken under it; every point of the doctrine at once, as no earlier house had shown them; a ramp as the spine, so that the plan becomes a route; four equal fronts, turned to no street. Garches began the turn, but the makers’ own steps belong to the tradition the house leaves, and none had gone this far. The stake was real and paid: a frame and a flat roof untried at this standard, and the clients’ money and comfort, lost to the leaks.
Édouard Manet · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the core of the Salon: the nude, the pastoral and the format of history painting, with the Venetians of the Louvre and Raphael behind them. The departure: those forms given to contemporary people at the scale reserved for heroes and gods; the modelling flattened, so that the nude is lit from the front almost without half-tone; a group studied in the studio set before a landscape that admits it is a backdrop; the scale of the background bather left wrong in plain view; the speed of the sketch brought into a finished Salon canvas. The stake was real and was paid: rejected by the jury of 1863, shown among the refused and mocked, by a painter who never ceased to want the Salon. Held below the top because the turn kept its sources visible on purpose and leaned on Courbet and on Spanish painting.
Rembrandt van Rijn · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Amsterdam civic guard portrait: officers and men in rows, standing or seated at a banquet, each face given its share of light, down to Pickenoy and van der Helst in Rembrandt’s own decade. Its rule was legibility; every sitter paid to be seen. The departure: a group portrait painted as an event, the company caught as it moves off; sitters ranked by light rather than given equal shares, some half hidden by a gesture or a pike; an allegorical child among them, brighter than any; a shadow under the arch that belonged to history painting. The stake was the commission: men who paid for faces got, in some cases, a fragment of one.
Talk Talk · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the band’s own, a synthesiser pop group with hits across Europe in the mid-1980s. The turn is among the largest any popular group has made: away from verse and chorus, from rock instrumentation and from the studio’s ordinary method, toward pieces made of edited improvisation, silence, acoustic and orchestral timbres and a liturgical stillness. Its sources, modal jazz, Debussy and Satie, church music, were proven elsewhere, but never in this form or from inside a pop career. The stake was total and was paid: the band had left EMI after a dispute, the record sold little, and the group made no other. It went further than Spirit of Eden down the road that record opened; that the road was already chosen holds it from the very top.
Henri Matisse · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The departure is large and the stake real. Matisse took the Fauve method of the summer of 1905, pure colour laid in patches on small landscapes, and made it something else at the scale of the Salon: flat zones, unbroken contour, arbitrary colour, no modelling, no consistent light, and a deliberate refusal of consistent scale and perspective, all laid on the most academic of subjects, the large pastoral composition of nudes. He showed it as his one entry in 1906, after the scandal of the autumn before, with his reputation and his income uncertain, and the turn was paid for in ridicule and in friends. Held below the top because the subject is inherited whole, and because Gauguin and Cézanne had laid much of the road.
Günter Behnisch and Frei Otto · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the Olympic stadium as a raised bowl of masonry or concrete, Berlin 1936 the nearest and most charged example, Rome 1960 and Tokyo 1964 the modern ones; the long-span roof as rigid shell, truss or cantilever; and Otto’s own tents, from the small membranes of the 1950s to the German pavilion at Montreal in 1967, which was temporary and about a third of this size, with no computed form and no rigid cover. The departure: a permanent and very large roof over several venues as one landscape, a cable net under a rigid transparent cover, its form found from models and computed by a method made for it. The stake was very great: the structure was untried at this scale and permanence, its calculation had to be invented, the cost overran heavily, and the opening date of the Games fixed the risk. The wager was won.
Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers with Gianfranco Franchini · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the museum and the library as temple and palace, from the Altes Museum and the British Museum to the modern museum still raised on a podium behind a façade; and in the avant-garde, the paper megastructures of Archigram and Cedric Price’s unbuilt Fun Palace for Joan Littlewood, which had proposed culture as a serviced, changeable frame. The departure: a national institution in the historic heart of Paris built as an exposed frame with no façade in the old sense, services and movement outside, half its site given to a square. The stake: two young architects with little built, chosen by a jury under Jean Prouvé for the state’s flagship, against a hostile press, on cast steel and spans untried at that scale in a public building. Held below the top because the turn was first drawn on paper by others.
Hilma af Klint · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the academic Swedish painting af Klint learned at the Royal Academy (1882 to 1887) and practised in portrait and landscape; botanical illustration; Jugendstil ornament; and the diagrams of theosophy, Besant and Leadbeater’s Thought-Forms among them, with the automatic drawings of the Five in the 1890s. The departure: non-objective painting at monumental scale in 1907; a life cycle without a figure; the ornament and the diagram enlarged to the scale of history painting and made the whole picture. Each element had a precedent; none had been made the art itself at three metres. The stake was real and private: a trained painter of forty-five gave her art to a commission she could not show. Held a little below the top because the swerve was not risked in public, and because whether a doctrinal diagram is a swerve in painting is disputed.
Homer · Literature
9.6 · Tier V
The tradition the poem inherits is mostly lost, so the turn can be read only from inside it. The inheritance is plain in the Greek: more than half the lines close on two words found closing another line, and the poet tells the Muses that “we hear but a rumour and know not anything” (2.486). The turn is plain too. A war saga is cut to a few weeks around one man’s anger. Achilles sings klea andrōn, “the glorious deeds of warriors” (9.189); Phoenix offers the old song’s lesson in the same words, that its heroes were “won ... by gifts” (9.524–526), and Achilles refuses it. What the departure cost cannot be read, because the field it left is lost.
Anonymous · Architecture
9.3 · Tier V
The inheritance is the early Gothic of Saint-Denis, Sens, Noyon, Laon and Paris, four storeys high, sexpartite-vaulted, its walls still thick and layered; and, for the Royal Portal, the crowded portals of Romanesque Burgundy and Languedoc. The departure of 1194: the tribune dropped, the oblong bay under one vault, the clerestory raised to the arcade’s height, the flyer made the primary support, so the wall becomes a frame for glass. The stake was real: no one had done this over a span of about 16 metres on flyers alone, and the work was begun at once after a fire that could have ruined the chapter. What holds the axis is that the swerve was shared: Soissons was moving the same way in the same years, and Saint-Denis had turned first, half a century before.
Raphael · Visual art
9.1 · Tier V
The inheritance is the painted row of famous men, each sage with his name beneath; Perugino’s square and temple in the Delivery of the Keys; Leonardo’s Last Supper. The departure: the row dissolved into a crowd in action; the labels dropped, so that identity rides on posture and attribute alone; a pagan assembly housed in the architecture of the pope’s new basilica; living men painted as ancients; a whole building as the stage. The stake was the painter’s: twenty-six, given a pope’s rooms over the older men who had begun them. The departure was welcomed, not censured; the cost fell on the career, not the wall. A synthesis that became the standard is a swerve that risks nothing visible, and the axis says so.
William Faulkner · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
The inheritance is the Southern historical romance of the plantation and the war, and Faulkner turns it inside out. The same matter is told as an investigation that cannot close, by narrators who conjecture, contradict and invent, until the most important facts, Bon’s blood and what Sutpen said to Henry in the camp in 1865, are reached by two students imagining in a cold room in Cambridge, with no witness. Invention is made the method of history. The stake was real: the book was hard, and it sold poorly. Held below the top on two counts. The layered narrator who reconstructs another man’s story was Conrad’s, in Lord Jim; and the larger break with the instrument of the English sentence had already been made in The Sound and the Fury. This book bends that departure toward history rather than starting it.
Mimar Sinan · Architecture
9.1 · Tier V
The inheritance: Hagia Sophia’s dome braced by semidomes on the axis, and Sinan’s own Süleymaniye on that scheme; the Şehzade’s four semidomes, his own; the Üç Şerefeli’s dome on a hexagon and its four minarets, in Edirne a century before; his own octagons and hexagons at smaller spans. The departure: a single dome at Hagia Sophia’s span with nothing cutting into it, on an octagon pushed to the walls so that the hall is one room; four matched minarets moved to the hall’s corners; and a public measure taken against Hagia Sophia, on the record. The stake: a sultan’s mosque, an architect of nearly eighty, and a boast that could be checked. Held below the top because every element was in the tradition and the span exceeded nothing: a perfection of an inherited form, not its overthrow. Hagia Sophia risked a structure nobody had built; this risked a reputation.
Franz Kafka · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
The inheritance is the realist family story, the fable of transformation and, nearest, Gogol’s “The Nose”, where an impossibility is also told as a civil inconvenience. The turn is in what the impossible is made to do. The fantastic premise is given in the first sentence as fact and never again questioned; it is neither dream nor allegory nor joke, and everything after it is domestic realism worked out with a clerk’s exactness: rent, debts, jobs, furniture, meals, lodgers. The supernatural is made ordinary and the ordinary monstrous, and no one in the book, Gregor included, is surprised for long. The stake was public: Kafka, almost unknown, published a story about a man turned to vermin, without a frame to excuse it. Held below the top because the transformation tale and Gogol’s precedent were in hand, and the turn had been made two months earlier, in “Das Urteil”.
Lucretius · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
The departure is double. Against its own school: Epicurus distrusted poetry, and Lucretius put Epicurean physics into the high style of Ennian epic. Against its city: in a Rome whose public life ran through priesthoods and auspices, the poem names religion the source of crime, and opens on a father killing his daughter for a fair wind. The stake was real on both sides, the scorn of the school and the charge of impiety, and the hexameter risked on matter that resists verse, in a language without the terms: “patrii sermonis egestas”, the poverty of our native speech (1.832). The swerve of the atoms, which breaks “fati foedera”, the bonds of fate (2.254), is the doctrine’s own figure for it. Held at 9.0 by precedent: Empedocles and Parmenides had written philosophy in hexameter.
Gustav Mahler · Music
9.0 · Tier V
The inheritance is the late Romantic symphony and the orchestral song, Mahler’s own above all. The departures: a symphony made wholly of songs, with no movement in sonata form; a last song as long as the other five together; a large orchestra used as chamber groups, with mandolin and celesta; the pentatonic and heterophony, two lines sounding one melody at once, as structural method, not colour; voice and solo flute moving in free time over a pedal; an ending without a cadence. The stake was real: at its date nothing in symphonic practice ended on an unresolved added sixth. Held below the top because the road was his own: the Wunderhorn symphonies had already put song inside the symphony, and the Kindertotenlieder had made orchestral song a chamber texture.
Giovanni Boccaccio · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the preachers’ exempla, the Novellino, the French fabliaux and romances, the Eastern frame tales that reached Europe through the Disciplina clericalis and the Seven Sages, and the Commedia. The turn is large. The exemplum’s moral frame is taken away and a company that judges tales by delight and wit put in its place; the comic and obscene matter of the fabliau is set in a high Latinate prose kept until then for grave subjects; a hundred tales answer a hundred cantos with a human comedy that has no hereafter; and the book is offered to women in love, not to scholars. The stake is in the text, in the author’s defence opening the fourth day and again in the Conclusion. Held from the top because frame tale and novella were both inherited, transformed rather than founded.
Joseph Conrad · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the imperial adventure romance of Haggard and Kipling, the sea yarn, and the narrative of African exploration that Stanley had made popular. Conrad turned all three inside out. The yarn is told by a man who distrusts yarns; the journey to the interior finds no treasure and no truth but a hollow man; the exploration ends in a lie. The method turned with it. Meaning, the frame narrator says, was to Marlow “not inside like a kernel but outside”, “enveloping the tale”, and the narrative withholds the sense of what is seen until after it is seen: the sticks that are arrows, the round knobs on the posts that are heads. The stake was real, for the book was written for Blackwood’s, a Tory magazine of empire, read by men like the Director, the Lawyer and the Accountant. Held below the top because Conrad had already found Marlow and the frame in “Youth”.
Nikolai Gogol · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the picaresque road novel of Lesage and Cervantes, the digressive narrator of Sterne and the mock epic of Fielding. The departure is large. Gogol called a prose satire a poem and meant it: the narrator’s epic similes grow past their occasion and live on their own, the black tailcoats at the governor’s party moving like flies on sugar in summer; the digressions turn from a scoundrel’s progress to the nation; and the grotesque, until then a manner of the tale, becomes the substance of a national epic. He chose a hero without virtue and said so in the last chapter. The stake was real and paid: the censor took the title and forced the Kopeikin tale to be rewritten, the critics divided sharply, and the work’s own demand for a continuation that would redeem it consumed its author.
Juan Rulfo · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the novel of the Mexican Revolution, Azuela’s Los de abajo, Guzmán, the realist regional novel of the countryside, and behind it the Catholic folk imagination of Jalisco. The turn is radical: the countryside of the realist novel becomes a town of the dead; chronology is broken into fragments without numbers or dates; the narrator is a corpse, and the disclosure of his death halfway through re-reads all that came before. Faulkner’s lessons are taken in, but the instrument is new in Spanish: the speech of the Jalisco peasant, made spare and exact, carrying a modernist structure. The stake was real, and the book was received with some puzzlement. Held a tenth off the highest because the fragmentary, polyphonic novel had masters in English before it, and the swerve is of a tradition into modernism as much as beyond it.
Alexander Pushkin · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Byron, Don Juan and Beppo above all, Sterne’s digressive narrator, the French and English novel of sentiment, and the Russian elegy of Zhukovsky and Batyushkov. The departure is large and was costly. Pushkin made a novel in verse, which he told Vyazemsky was “не роман, а роман в стихах: дьявольская разница”
(not a novel but a novel in verse: a devilish difference); invented a stanza for it, his own and not Byron’s ottava rima; turned Byronic posture into an object of irony, so that the Byronic hero is placed in Russian provincial life and found to be, perhaps, a parody; and set the novel’s matter in the ordinary Russian present, a name-day, a country neighbour, a provincial ball, before there was a Russian novel to do so. The stake was real: the book came out across eight years, written in part in exile, to critics who read its early chapters as a light imitation of Byron. What holds it here is that the instrument is in part Byron’s: the chatty narrator in a strict stanza, the hero of satiety and the air of improvisation came from Beppo and Don Juan, with Sterne behind both, so that the swerve from its parent is large but one of degree.
Carl Theodor Dreyer · Film
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance was the historical spectacle of the 1920s, costume, crowd and battle, and the pageant of popular French piety around the Maid, canonised in 1920. Dreyer turned from all of it: a costume picture almost without costume, a film made of faces, with no establishing geography, eye lines that do not match, figures cut off at the frame edge, and low angles that set the judges against bare white. The stake was real: a large French production under a foreign director, a Church that pressed the censor, a commercial failure, and a director who did not command such means again. Held below the top because the means were not all new: the close-up was Griffith’s, the Kammerspiel and the Soviet montage of the middle of the decade had prepared the cutting, and Dreyer’s own chamber films had begun the turn.
Gian Lorenzo Bernini · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the altarpiece, the framed image before which the viewer prays; behind it, Michelangelo’s Medici Chapel, architecture and sculpture by one hand, the ecstatic saint of painting, and Trent’s decree on images (1563), which warned against anything lascivious. The departure: the vision happens in the niche, in real light, before witnesses; painting, sculpture and architecture are fused with no edge between them; marble dissolves into cloud, flame and a body that gives way; ecstasy is shown at its bodily pitch, in a canonised woman, in a church. The stake was real: a sculptor out of favour staked his recovery on a private chapel. Held below the top because the parts were inherited; the fusion is the swerve.
Vladimir Nabokov · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the confession, in the line of Rousseau, Poe and Dostoevsky’s Stavrogin. The swerve gives it to a narrator whose crime is the gravest and whose prose is the most seductive in that line, so that the reader’s delight becomes the subject. It is also a Russian prose writer’s turn into English, his “second-rate brand of English”, staged as an American road novel. Turn and stake are one judgment, and the stake is in the matter itself, a child’s abuser given the most beautiful voice in the book on purpose, and in the record: the novel was first printed in Paris, by the Olympia Press, in 1955, and no American house issued it until 1958. Held below the top because the formal departure is less than that of the most radical modernist novels; the moral and rhetorical wager is the greater.
Fyodor Dostoevsky · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the society novel of scandal and inheritance, and the precedent Dostoevsky named was Don Quixote. The departure is to put at the centre of a realist novel of Petersburg money a man without guile, and to follow the logic to its end. The wager is that goodness could be made the subject without allegory or sentiment, and the cost was steep: Dostoevsky wrote in his letters of his fear that the idea was beyond him, his notebooks show him abandoning plan after plan, and the ending refuses every consolation the form had, with no conversion, no rescue, the hero returned to idiocy and the heroine dead. The scandal scene, in which a whole company gathers in one room and every pride breaks at once, is made a structural principle here more than in any earlier novel.
Jalal al-Din Rumi · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The mystical ghazal had been made by Sana’i and Attar, whom Rumi names as his masters, and the doctrine and much of the imagery are inherited; a reader of Persian may call the Divan an intensification. The turn is real and large. A courtly and contemplative form is made a song of the dance, in driving metres, colloquial phrases, refrains and repeated words, sometimes macaronic, often spoken as if aloud in the middle of a gathering; the poet gives his own signature away to another man; the poem ends by telling itself to be quiet. The stake was paid: a jurist and preacher of standing, heir to his father’s chair, threw over his public self for a dervish his disciples resented and, by an early tradition that cannot be confirmed, may have driven off or killed. The Divan is that wager in verse.
Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the American superhero comic from 1938 on: the costume, the team, the secret identity, the monthly serial, with Moore’s own Marvelman and Swamp Thing and Frank Miller’s Daredevil immediately behind. The turn is total. The genre’s premise is taken literally and its consequences followed into politics, sexuality, ageing, history and physics, and its form is turned from the splash and the fight to a grid of nine panels and a novel’s architecture, with prose documents interleaved and a pirate comic inside the comic. The stake was real: a monthly mainstream title for the largest American publisher, with invented characters and a structure that would fail if any issue failed. Held from the top because the instrument of revision was already in hand, in Marvelman from 1982 and The Dark Knight Returns in the same year: the swerve lies in completeness and form more than in first discovery.
David Lynch · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Hollywood mystery and the television pilot, and the departure is the abandonment of narrative coherence for the logic of dreams at feature length, in a film about Hollywood that Hollywood would have to distribute. The stake was real and was paid: ABC rejected the pilot; the completion came from French money; the film was built from footage shot for a series that would never exist, and an ending had to be invented over open material. The turn is not a stylistic accent, since the whole first part is set up to be loved as a story and then taken away. Held just at the figure by precedent: Lynch had already made the dreamed double life in Lost Highway (1997), and Bergman’s Persona had merged two women on screen in 1966.
Anonymous (Neolithic and Bronze Age) · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the earthwork enclosures and cursus monuments of the fourth millennium, the timber circles of the third and the great stone circles of Britain, Avebury near in time and place and the Stones of Stenness earlier in Orkney: standing stones or posts without lintels, the stone left largely as found. The departure is dressed stone, pounded to shape; a carpenter’s joints made in sarsen; a continuous lintel ring and the trilithon, which no other prehistoric stone circle in Europe has; and stone brought from the extremities of the island. The stake was a society’s labour over generations, set on a structure without precedent in stone, where a failed lift kills. Held off the top because the plan, circle in circle and horseshoe open to the sun, follows the timber circles of its own landscape.
Roberto Bolaño · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the total novel of the Latin American boom, Rayuela, Cien años de soledad, Terra Nostra, and behind it Borges, Kafka and the encyclopedic novels of Europe and the United States. The turn is away from the boom’s magic toward a realism of record: the crimes part sets down well over a hundred murders in the language of the police report, a wager that risks boring the reader into the very indifference it indicts, and takes the risk on purpose. Five books that barely touch, a centre never reached, a hero who appears only in the last part, crimes never solved, a quest that fails: each refuses a promise the novel makes. The stake was absolute, a dying writer’s last years spent on a structure he could not finish. Held below the top because the instruments, Kafka’s withholding, Borges’s invented authors, Perec’s lists, are inherited, and the swerve lies in their combination and their matter.
Piero della Francesca · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the narrative panel of the Passion, in which the sacred event fills the field and every figure acts toward it, and the new Florentine perspective of Brunelleschi, Alberti and Masaccio’s Holy Trinity. The departure is radical on both. The title event is pushed into the middle distance and made small; the foreground is given to three men who are not in the story and do not look at it, so that the subject is the gap. Perspective is no longer a frame for the action but the means by which two orders of time and attention are measured against each other in one space. The stake was a devotional subject made nearly illegible as devotion, risked in meaning more than paid in career; held a little below the summit for that.
Claude Debussy · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the symphony as practised in France after Franck and d’Indy, cyclic and developmental, with Wagner behind it, and the programmatic tone poem. The departures: development replaced by continuous transformation, so that themes are generated and dissolved rather than stated and worked; three panels that are a symphony in proportion, a large first movement, a scherzo and a finale that recalls the first, without one sonata procedure; colour made structural; a cyclic return that arrives as transformation, not recapitulation. The stake was real: his largest orchestral score, given in a season of personal scandal and received coolly by critics who had championed Pelléas. Held below the top because the road was partly his own, through the Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (1894) and the Nocturnes (1899).
Anonymous · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the Norman Romanesque of Jumièges and Caen; the Anglo-Norman churches raised after 1066, Winchester, St Albans, Ely and Norwich, timber-roofed over their main vessels; the high groin vaults of Speyer; small rib vaults in Lombardy and Normandy, their dates disputed. The departure, the makers’ between 1093 and 1133: a great church rib-vaulted over every span; pointed transverse arches across the nave; the thrust taken down by concealed bracing; the cylindrical pier made a field of incised pattern, an Insular love of surface laid on Norman mass. The stake was real and partly lost: the first choir vault failed. Held below the top because rib, pointed arch and alternation each existed before; the turn is in their union and scale.
James Boswell · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance was the eulogy, the short Life prefixed to an author’s works, the funeral sermon, and Johnson’s own critical biography in the Lives of the Poets, with his Rambler essay on biography, which argued for domestic detail but practised it briefly. Boswell turned biography into dramatised record: the subject’s talk in direct speech, scene by scene, with its interruptions and its setting; the biographer present as a character; the man shown in his worst habits beside his best. The stake was real and was paid. He was mocked in print as a toady and an eavesdropper, friends of Johnson thought the disclosures a betrayal, and his own folly is on view throughout. A tenth above Infinite Jest’s 8.9: the turn made a genre.
Bob Dylan · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the topical folk song of the Greenwich Village revival, which Dylan had led, and the acoustic records that had made him its voice. The turn is double. Side one puts the folk singer’s words over an electric band playing Chuck Berry and Chicago blues; side two leaves protest for long visionary songs whose images do not resolve into a cause. The stake was real and was the singer’s own constituency: the folk audience held the electric guitar as the mark of commerce, and the summer that followed showed what the turn cost. Held below Highway 61 Revisited at 9.2 because the Beatles and the Animals had joined folk material to the rock band, Berry supplied Subterranean’s frame, and the record makes its turn in halves.
Mikhail Bulgakov · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Gogol’s comic fantastic and Hoffmann’s, Goethe’s Faust, Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor and the Menippean tradition. The turn: a Soviet satire, a Gospel apocrypha and a love story made into one novel, in which Satan comes to Moscow and is the only just power in it, and the fantastic and the metaphysical, abolished by the official aesthetic, return at full scale. The stake is as high as a novel’s can be. Bulgakov wrote it in Stalin’s Moscow, after his plays were banned, with no hope of publication and the knowledge that the manuscript itself could be a charge against him; he burned the first version and wrote it again, and was still revising it in the last weeks of his life. The book took every risk its form allowed, and its author took the larger one of writing it at all. Held below the top only because its materials are openly inherited; the swerve is in their joining.
Francisco Goya · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the mythological picture as the academies and courts knew it: an episode from Ovid ennobled by the body, with Rubens’s Saturn of the 1630s its nearest instance and Goya’s own court practice behind him. The departure: a myth stripped of decorum, setting and narrative; a body scraped, smeared and dragged rather than modelled; black as the field, with no space and no light source; terror placed in the devourer, not the victim; and all of it made for a private wall, with no patron, buyer or public. Held below the top because the stake was private: nobody saw it in his lifetime, and the turn had been prepared over three decades of the Caprichos, the Disasters of War and the late drawings.
Hans Scharoun · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance was the shoebox hall of Vienna, Amsterdam and Boston, the horseshoe opera house, and the fan-shaped modern auditorium of the 1950s, all with the audience in front of the music. Scharoun turned the hall inside out: the music at the centre, the public round it on all sides, in an asymmetric plan with no front, no axis and no façade in the classical sense, at a time when modernism was turning to the orthogonal and the repeated. The stake was large and was paid. No hall of this kind and scale had been built; the acoustic outcome was uncertain, Cremer’s task being to make a surround room work by means then unproved; and the organic, expressionist lineage behind it was held unfashionable against the International Style. What holds it at 9.0: surround seating had precedents in the arena and the theatre in the round, and the organic line from Häring and Scharoun’s own houses was a path he had walked for decades.
Ingmar Bergman · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
The inherited form is the psychological chamber drama, which Bergman had himself refined in Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light and The Silence (1961–1963). The departures are many: a prologue that shows projector, leader and film as material; the film breaking in the gate at the dramatic turn; one monologue spoken twice, once on each face; two faces composed into one; the crew shown at the close; a lead who barely speaks. The stake was real: Bergman put his standing as art cinema’s most bankable director on an unexplained, near-abstract film. Held below the top by precedent. Resnais, Godard and the avant-garde had already broken the transparent frame, and Bergman’s own Prison (1949) had shown a projector.
Andrei Tarkovsky · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the memory film of the fifteen years before: Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (1957), Fellini’s 8½ (1963), the work of Resnais, and Tarkovsky’s own Ivan’s Childhood (1962), whose dreams opened the door. The turn goes further than any of them: a feature with no plot and no visible protagonist; three time levels joined by association; one actress in two roles and one boy in two; the director’s mother in the film, his father reading his own poems, newsreel taken as the narrator’s own memory. The stake was real and was paid: inside the studio and the state committee the film was criticised as obscure and private, and it counted against its maker in the years before he left. Held from the top because Resnais and Fellini had proved the path’s first stretch, and the film extends it rather than opens it.
Gustave Eiffel · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the masonry monument, the Washington Monument then the tallest structure standing; the iron and glass halls of the exhibitions; the company’s own lattice piers at the Maria Pia bridge in Porto and the Garabit viaduct; and thousand-foot towers proposed and never built since the 1830s. The departure: a structure nearly twice as tall as anything standing, in bare iron, with no wall, no room and no image, set at the centre of Paris as the exhibition’s gate. The stake was paid in full: a protest of artists and writers in Le Temps in February 1887, public doubt that it could stand, and a permit for twenty years only. Held below the top because the lattice pier was the company’s proven method, so the turn lies in scale and in setting an engineer’s structure up as a monument.
John Donne · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Elizabethan love lyric: Petrarch through Wyatt, Sidney and the sonnet sequences of the 1590s, with its idealised mistress, its fluent music and its stock of fire and ice. The turn was nearly total. The voice became a man speaking, often in mid-quarrel: “For God’s sake hold your tongue, and let me love.” The metre was bent to the speaking voice, line lengths mixed and stresses wrenched; the figure was taken from scholastic theology, alchemy, the new astronomy, cartography, law and money in place of roses and stars; the poem became an argument with premises and a conclusion; the stanza was invented poem by poem; and the woman became an equal, a partner in bed, or the object of open contempt. The cost was real but bounded. Jonson’s verdict that Donne “for not keeping of accent, deserved hanging” shows what the wager risked, but circulation in manuscript among a coterie sheltered it, and Sidney had already found the dramatic voice. That holds it at 9.0.
Caspar David Friedrich · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the shipwreck picture as Vernet, Loutherbourg and the young Turner made it: a storm, a sea in motion, sailors in peril, a narrative of struggle with a moral of courage or pity. The departure is total on each term. No storm: the event is over. No figure: no one to pity. No motion: the sea has become solid. The drama is reduced to a geometry of planes and fractures, close to an architecture, the human trace almost withdrawn; landscape carries what history painting carried. The stake is borne in the painter’s standing, which fell through the 1820s and 1830s. Held at 9.0 rather than above, because the turn continues his own earlier departures, the Tetschen altar and the seascapes of the 1800s.
Franz Liszt · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Classical sonata of three and four movements, Beethoven’s above all, and the Romantic sonata of Schumann and Chopin. The departures: one continuous movement of half an hour; the four movements laid over one sonata form, each section with two functions; the whole made from three motifs by transformation of character, not by development in the Classical sense; a fugato as the hinge into the recapitulation; a quiet close. The stake was real: Liszt was known as the virtuoso, his serious ambition doubted, and the work met dismissal and, decades later, Hanslick’s contempt. Held below the top because the road existed: Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy of 1822 had joined four movements on transformed material.
Le Corbusier · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the perimeter block and the corridor block of European housing; the garden city; Le Corbusier’s own unbuilt schemes, the immeubles-villas of the 1920s and the Ville Radieuse; and the Soviet communal house, above all Ginzburg’s Narkomfin building in Moscow (1928 to 1930), which had already stacked split-level units on corridors serving more than one level, with shared services. The departure: a whole quarter in one vertical slab, raised clear of the ground, its streets inside it and its school on its roof; the dwelling a unit set into a rack; raw concrete made the finish of a monumental building. The stake was as large as any building of its decade took on. Held below the top because Narkomfin and his own schemes had prepared the turn.
Charles Baudelaire · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The swerve was not from nothing. Aloysius Bertrand’s Gaspard de la Nuit (1842) came first, and the dedication names it; Guérin’s Le Centaure and the prose poetry of the Romantics stood behind it. The difference is the one the dedication states: to apply to modern life, “ou plutôt à une vie moderne et plus abstraite”, “or rather to a modern and more abstract life”, the procedure Bertrand had applied to the picturesque past. The turn is double: a lyric without verse, and a lyric given over to the newspaper anecdote, the joke, the moral fable and the fait divers, with the poet the target of his own irony. The stake was paid: the master of French verse set his craft aside, editors refused or cut the pieces, and the book did not appear in his life. Bertrand’s named precedent holds the figure where it is.
Gustave Courbet · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance: history painting and allegory at the Salon, where large canvases and personifications were kept for gods, heroes and the state; the artist’s studio as a modest genre; the group portrait. The departure: an allegory made of real, named contemporaries and anonymous types in modern dress, at the scale of a history machine, about the painter’s own seven years; a self-portrait as the centre of the social world; the allegory confessed as real, a contradiction in terms the title makes a programme. The stake was paid: the jury refused the canvas, and Courbet built his own pavilion beside the official exhibition, charged admission and published a manifesto, a painter’s exhibition against the state’s that was close to unprecedented. Held below the top because A Burial at Ornans and The Stonebreakers had already brought the ordinary to the scale of history; this canvas turns the swerve on the painter himself.
Le Corbusier · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is double. In India, the capital as imperial theatre: Lutyens and Baker’s New Delhi, an axis of domes and classical columns, finished less than twenty years before. In the architect’s own art, the white, light, machine-exact modernism of the 1920s, the pilotis and the free plan. The departure from both: a new nation’s government housed in raw concrete left as cast, in forms drawn from the sun and the monsoon, parasol, brise-soleil and open portico, in sculptural masses that were nobody’s style, on a ground where the powers stand apart. The stake was large: a state’s founding buildings given to a foreign architect in his sixties, in an untested language, with hand labour and scarce steel. It failed in part, on the plain, and paid. Held below the top because the late turn was already begun at Marseille.
Paul Cézanne · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Impressionism, his own school since Pontoise with Pissarro: paint the motif before you, in its light, the stroke recording a moment. The departure, at its furthest in the late canvases from Les Lauves: the stroke becomes a plane of colour that builds rather than records; modelling by light and shade gives way to modulation by colour, warm advancing and cool receding; contours are opened, so that sky passes into mountain and plain into foreground; and the picture is made over years on one motif, so that time is in it as accumulation, not as an instant. The stake was real: he worked in isolation at Aix, was mocked in the press for decades, was shown widely in Paris only from 1895, and the late manner looked to many like unfinished work. Held at 9.0 because the swerve belongs to the late manner, taken in many canvases; this is one of its fullest statements, not its singular act.
Knut Hamsun · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
In 1890 the Scandinavian novel was Zola’s, Kielland’s and the Breakthrough’s: social naturalism, a plot, a problem. Hamsun’s essay of the same year, “Fra det ubevidste Sjæleliv”
(From the unconscious life of the mind), called for a fiction of the nerves, and this book is its execution: no plot, no development, no social thesis, a narrator without a name, a past tense that collapses into the present, events chosen only for what they do to a mind. It is not Dostoevsky’s departure repeated: the underground man argues against an interlocutor and a thesis, and Hamsun dropped both. The stake was real, a first novel by an unknown, after years of failure, published on the wager that nothing would happen in it. The departure held and became a road.
Michelangelo Antonioni · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is neorealism, whose Rome Antonioni had shared in the 1940s and 1950s, and the romantic melodrama of the couple, which the film takes up and refuses. L’Avventura had removed the solution of its mystery; L’Eclisse goes further and removes the lovers from their own ending. After two hours on two people, the last minutes show the place they agreed to meet without them, held long enough that the viewer’s expectation becomes the subject. It is one of the boldest decisions in the narrative cinema of its decade, and the stake was real: a commercial production with a French star, risking the audience the earlier film had only lately won. Held below the top only because the trilogy had prepared the turn.
Alain Resnais · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the narrative feature: a story told in an order that, however rearranged in flashback, refers back to one sequence of events, as the witnesses of Citizen Kane still describe one life. Marienbad removes the stable sequence. There is no fact the flashbacks refer to; past, present, wish and invention share one tense, and the cutting moves between them inside a single gesture. It brought the method of the nouveau roman into cinema whole, and pushed beyond Resnais’s own Hiroshima mon amour (1959), where memory still had a referent in the war. The stake was real: a costly widescreen production made with no story to sell, mocked as well as praised. Held below the top because that earlier film had opened the path, and the literary model was already written.
Pierre Chareau and Bernard Bijvoet · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The departure is from everything around it: from the Parisian hôtel it occupies, from the white rendered villa being built by Le Corbusier’s circle in the same years, and from the idea of the architect as the drawer of plans. The house is made as a fitted object, its structure shown, its walls of a mass-produced industrial lens never before used to wall a dwelling on this scale, its partitions moving, its details forged one by one with a craftsman on site. The stake was paid: four years of making, a cost the family bore, a designer without an architect’s licence carrying a building of this complexity, and a site so constrained that the form had to be invented to fit it. Chareau never built anything comparable again.
Talk Talk · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance was a hit pop band’s own: the synthesised singles of the mid-1980s that had made Talk Talk known in Europe, and the warmer, guest-played The Colour of Spring (1986), already moving toward acoustic sound. The turn was far larger than that step: six long pieces on a major label, mostly acoustic, with silence as a structural element, jazz and church music in their grammar, and no song made for radio. The stake was the career, and by the usual account it was paid: no tour, and a dispute with the label that ended the contract. Precedent existed, in the band’s previous record, in Miles Davis’s edited sessions of 1969 and in ambient music, and Laughing Stock went further; that holds it from the very top.
Jackson Pollock · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is easel painting as a whole: the canvas upright, the brush in contact, the line as the edge of a form; behind it Cubism’s shallow grid, Surrealist automatism from Masson and the émigrés, and the mural scale of Orozco and Siqueiros, whose workshop of 1936 used poured and sprayed industrial paint. The departure: the canvas off the wall and on the floor; the brush lifted off the surface, the paint poured, dripped and flung from sticks and hardened brushes; household enamel beside artist’s oil; the line freed from contour; no centre; all of it at the scale of a wall. The stake was public, met with mockery as much as praise. Held below the top because by 1950 the method was three years old: this is its culmination, not its first wager.
Andy Warhol · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance in 1962 was painting as the trace of a hand and a self, still dominant in New York and already questioned by Johns, Rauschenberg and Lichtenstein. The departure: a found photograph transferred to canvas by a commercial process, printed fifty times, with the process’s failures left to stand as the painting. The hand withdraws into the squeegee, the grid replaces composition, a publicity still replaces invention: the turn is from the painter as subject to the painter as process. Each element had a precedent close at hand, in Johns’s given image, Rauschenberg’s photographic transfers and Lichtenstein’s borrowed commercial images of 1961. The stake was real: a successful commercial illustrator whose standing as a painter was not granted risked being read as decoration or as cynicism. The turn is complete; its first steps were shared.
Robert Wiene · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the German studio picture of 1919: the detective serial and the fantastic film of doubles and spells, The Student of Prague (1913) and The Golem (1915), staged in built, naturalistic sets and lit for legibility. The swerve is radical: the whole world of the film painted, light and shadow put on the walls with a brush, perspective broken, the camera asked to record a picture of a mind rather than a place; and a frame that turns the tale into a madman’s account and then refuses to say whether it is false. The stake was real: a modest production in a starved industry, a style untried in cinema, sold abroad as art. Held below the top because the turn imported a movement from the stage and the canvas more than it invented one.
Barnett Newman · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the easel picture and the New York School’s own answer to it in 1950, the gestural field of Pollock and de Kooning, in which the painting records an act. The departure is from both: no gesture, no drawing, no composition by balance of parts, no figure against ground, but one colour divided by lines that bound nothing, at a scale that defeats the stepping back by which pictures had been read. The stake was severe and paid: the Parsons show of 1951 was received as empty, colleagues turned away, and Newman withdrew from exhibiting for most of the decade. Held below the top because the breakthrough is Onement I of 1948, and this canvas carries the swerve to its full scale rather than making its first act. Pollock’s Autumn Rhythm, the departure it answered, swerves further.
Jackson Pollock · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the easel picture, its composition, figure and ground; Picasso and the Mexican muralists; the automatism of the Surrealist émigrés in New York; and the painter’s own mythic and figurative work of 1942 to 1946, which had made his name and secured his contract with Peggy Guggenheim. The departure: the canvas off the easel and on the floor, “My painting does not come from the easel”; paint poured and flung, so that the mark has no contour and the field no centre; the studio’s refuse embedded as matter, not collage. The stake was real: a painter just established, turning from the work that sold to a surface soon mocked as accident. Held below the top for precedents, poured paint in Siqueiros’s workshop in 1936, Max Ernst’s swinging can, Janet Sobel’s all-over drip paintings seen at Art of This Century, and for the brushed ground beneath, which this canvas has not yet left.
Edgar Degas · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance: sculpture as the Salon knew it in 1881, marble and bronze, idealised, mythological or commemorative, finished, with colour shut out since the neoclassical decades; and below the fine art, the waxworks, the anatomical model, the shop mannequin and the dressed devotional image. The departure: a modern working child, not a nymph, in tinted wax, dressed in real fabric and real hair, shown in a glass case among paintings at an exhibition of painters. The stake was real and was paid: a painter’s first public sculpture, met by a press that called it ugly and bestial, and Degas never exhibited sculpture again. Held below the top because the materials had precedents in the dressed images of Spain and in the wax cabinet; the swerve is a transfer as much as an invention.
Herman Melville · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the novel of character as Melville’s readers knew it, his own sea romances, and behind them the satire of Lucian, Rabelais and Swift and the picaresque. The turn is radical: a novel with no protagonist whose mind is entered, no plot that advances, a hero who may be many persons or none, a narrative made almost wholly of conversation, and three chapters in which the narrator stops to argue that consistent characters in fiction are false to life and that fiction should show “another world, and yet one to which we feel the tie”. It reaches forms that did not exist for sixty years. The stake was Melville’s whole career as a novelist: after Pierre had failed, this book failed with reviewers and buyers, and he published no novel again. The departure and its cost were one. Held at 9.0 and not above because the satiric dialogue has a long lineage that the book leans on.
Leo Tolstoy · Literature
9.3 · Tier V
The inheritance is the European novel of adultery, with Madame Bovary the nearest precedent, and the Russian family chronicle. The swerve: two plots that meet in a single evening (VII.9–11), joined by an inner linkage rather than by plot; a heroine dead with one of the eight parts still to run; a last part given to a man’s search for faith; chapters seen through a dog; and in Anna’s last ride a mind given as a run of associations, “Tiutkin, coiffeur” (VII.29), with nothing between it and the reader. The stake was real: Katkov refused the last part for The Russian Messenger, and Tolstoy issued it himself. Held below the top because the greater break had been made in War and Peace, which Tolstoy refused to call a novel; this book returns in part to the form it bends.
Iktinos and Kallikrates · Architecture
9.3 · Tier V
The inheritance is the canonical Doric peripteral temple, lately fixed at Olympia, and the design of the burned temple whose platform this one took. The departures are real, and they run through the whole building: an eight-columned Doric front, rare on the mainland; an Ionic frieze inside a Doric temple; all ninety-two metopes carved, where Olympia carved twelve, inside the porches; a colonnade returning behind the cult statue; and the refinements, carried as a system through every course, so that the type’s straight lines give way to controlled deviation. The stake was public: Plutarch reports Perikles attacked for spending the allies’ money on the city. What holds the axis lowest is that the type is perfected, not abandoned; every turn is made inside the inheritance.
Byzantine · Visual art
9.2 · Tier V
The inheritance is the Roman apse of Christ among saints with a donor and his model, as at Santi Cosma e Damiano; Ravenna’s own century of mosaic; and the court art of Constantinople. The departure: two living rulers set on the sanctuary wall as participants in the rite, frontal against gold, with no event; a whole chancel built as one eucharistic argument. The stake was political: a church begun under the Goths declared for the emperor in its holiest place, and the panel altered to make it stick. What holds the axis lowest: the style was the court’s, the apse type Rome’s, the hieratic turn under way across the empire; this is the turn’s greatest surviving instance more than its author.
Johann Sebastian Bach · Music
9.2 · Tier V
The inheritance is threefold: the Lutheran Missa of Kyrie and Gloria; the Dresden number Mass, a chorus or aria for each clause; and the stile antico. The departures: a Lutheran cantor’s complete Catholic Ordinary, which no liturgy of either confession could hold; a scale near two hours that no service could use; the composer’s own past assembled by parody into a summa; a Mass that ends with the music of its thanksgiving. The stake was a dying man’s last labour on a work for no one, which waited a century for a hearing. Held below the top because every element was proven: the plan is Dresden’s, parody was lifelong practice, and the turn is in the conception, not in any idiom.
Plato · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
The turn: the contest of praise speeches at a drinking party, a game of the Athenian elite, is made the vessel of a philosophy of love, and the courtship of boys that Pausanias defends (182a to 185b) is converted into the pursuit of wisdom. The teaching is given to a woman and a prophetess, at a party of men from which the flute-girl has been sent away. The night stages a contest with poetry itself: the tragic poet at his victory, the comic poet beside him, and at dawn Socrates pressing them to grant that one man should know how to make comedy and tragedy. The stake was real: Socrates was dead, Alcibiades the most notorious of his associates, and the dialogue answers the charge of corruption by having Alcibiades testify that Socrates refused him. Held below 9 because the Socratic dialogue was already a form practised by others.
Ancient Egyptian, under Khufu · Architecture
9.1 · Tier V
The inheritance was about a century old: Djoser’s stepped mound and Sneferu’s three attempts, Meidum, the Bent Pyramid, which changed its angle when the structure moved, and the Red Pyramid, the first true pyramid, at the safe 43°. The turn: Khufu went back to about 52°, the angle that had failed, at 146.6 m. More than degree: every royal burial chamber before had lain at or below the ground, and this one was lifted some 43 m into the masonry, which required the granite roof, the compartments, the plugs, the Gallery and the shafts; the Gallery has no precedent and no successor. The stake was a kingdom’s surplus for a reign and the chamber’s roof, which cracked. Held below the top because the form is the type perfected, not a new type, and the entrance system continues Sneferu’s.
Ludwig van Beethoven · Music
9.1 · Tier V
The inheritance is the Viennese symphony of Haydn and Mozart, and Beethoven’s own Eroica (1803 to 1804), which had already made the symphony a heroic drama of large scale. The departures are several: a whole first movement saturated from one rhythmic cell of four notes, carried into all four movements; a minor-key symphony whose goal is a major-key finale, so that the weight falls at the end; two movements joined by a composed transition, and an earlier movement recalled inside a later one; trombones, piccolo and contrabassoon brought in for the arrival. The stake was real: a benefit concert on which his income depended. Held below the top because the road was his own, and the Eroica took the larger risk first.
William Shakespeare · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Cinthio’s tale is sordid and quick: the Ensign and the Moor beat Disdemona to death with a stocking filled with sand and bring the ceiling down on her. Shakespeare made it heroic tragedy, and two turns carried risk. He made a Moor the noble hero, on a stage whose Moors had been villains: Aaron in his own Titus Andronicus, the Moor of Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar. And he lifted domestic tragedy, a form then at the level of Arden of Faversham and Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness (1603), into the grand style with a handkerchief at its centre. The cost was paid in reception: Thomas Rymer in 1693 called it a “bloody farce” and mocked the handkerchief as unworthy of tragedy. Held below the rest of the gated five because the machinery, the soliloquising villain and the intrigue, was inherited from the Vice and from Shakespeare’s own Richard III: the swerve is in where tragedy was placed, more than in a new form.
Teotihuacano · Architecture
9.1 · Tier V
The inheritance is a Preclassic tradition of pyramids and plazas, the talud-tablero already in use, and the Mesoamerican habit of ruler portraits from the Olmec heads to the Maya stelae. The departures: one orientation imposed on some 20 km² of city, without precedent in the Americas; the decision, around 250, to rehouse a valley’s population in some 2,000 masonry compounds of one type; the Sun, raised in one effort to a mass nothing in Mesoamerica approached; and a state art with no ruler in it, against the whole Mesoamerican habit. The stake was the form itself: a population concentrated in one city, its life tied to the plan. A wager on a proven path is not a swerve, and this path was not proven. Held below the top because the elements were inherited; the swerve is in the scale and the system, not in any one member.
Matthias Grünewald · Visual art
9.1 · Tier V
The inheritance is the Upper Rhine retable of carved shrine and painted wings, Pacher and Schongauer among its masters; the German crucifix of the suffering body; Netherlandish oil. In the same years the field was turning to Dürer’s measured, Italianate body. The departure: hierarchical scale kept and made a weapon in an age of perspective; a body painted in decomposition, at life size and over; colour used as light and as theological state, so the risen body dissolves into a coloured sun; a Concert whose space is a vision, not a room. It ran against the current and left no school. But nothing shows the commission risked anything: the house wanted it, and no censure is on record. A swerve this large at no recorded cost is held below its turn.
Virginia Woolf · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
The inheritance is the Victorian family novel and the Edwardian realism Woolf had attacked in “Modern Fiction” and in Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown (1924), with Proust, Joyce and Dorothy Richardson’s novel of consciousness behind her. The turn is a novel built as two days with a decade between them, the decade compressed into a corridor in which marriage, death and war stand in brackets. The central figure dies offstage between two sections, and the novel goes on without her. The stake was real: the material was her own parents’ marriage, and the middle part risked a break that readers might not cross. Held below the top because the interior method had been made by Richardson, by Joyce and by Woolf herself in Mrs Dalloway two years before, and because, publishing at her own press, she risked no editor’s refusal.
Vyasa (attributed) · Literature
9.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance was the Vedic corpus, hymn, ritual and Upaniṣadic speculation, and a bardic tradition of heroic narrative carried by the sūtas. The swerve turns the heroic war poem against its own ethic from within: the triumph of its heroes is won by fraud at their god’s counsel and told as the destruction of their world, the victory is mourned for a whole book, and the losers’ honour stays in view, Duryodhana in heaven and Karṇa revealed as the eldest brother. A second turn is the Gītā’s: philosophy set on the battlefield between the drawn armies, sacrifice reinterpreted as action, liberation opened to the householder and the warrior through devotion. The stake was real, a claim to be the “fifth Veda” while unsettling the order it inherits. Held below 9.0 because a work made by many hands over centuries placed no single wager, and because the bardic narrative it turned from is largely lost, so that the cost of the turn cannot be measured against what it left.
Jonathan Swift · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
The inheritance is plain: Lucian’s True History, More’s Utopia, Rabelais, Cyrano’s voyages to the moon and sun, the real voyage literature of Dampier, and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), whose plain first-person realism Swift borrowed in order to turn it inside out. The turn is in two moves. The deadpan seaman’s report, with its latitudes and dimensions, is applied to the impossible, so that the form of credible testimony becomes the satire’s instrument; and the narrator himself becomes the satire’s last object, so that the reader cannot stand with him. The stake was real: the book was printed anonymously from a copy delivered in secret, its printer altered passages for fear of prosecution, and the fourth part risked, and drew, the charge of hatred of mankind. Held below 9.0 because the imaginary voyage and its satiric use were long established; the swerve is in the instrument more than in the form.
Geoffrey Chaucer · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
The inheritance is the frame collection (Boccaccio’s Decameron, whether or not Chaucer knew it; Gower’s Confessio Amantis), estates satire, the French dream vision and the Italian poets he had translated. The departure is large: a company of mixed estates whose quarrels drive the sequence; tales fitted to tellers, so that genre becomes character; a narrator who withholds judgement (A 183); English decasyllabic couplets at a length no English poet had sustained. The stake is in the text: churls’ fabliaux set beside saints’ lives with an apology that is also a defiance (A 3171 to 3186), and the Retraction revoking “The tales of Caunterbury, thilke that sounen in-to sinne” (I 1086). Held from the top because the frame and the satire were inherited.
Ralph Ellison · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
The inheritance is plain: Richard Wright’s naturalist protest novel, above all Native Son (1940), and behind it Dostoevsky’s underground man, Melville, Twain, Joyce and Eliot, the slave narrative, the sermon and the blues. The turn was away from protest: a picaresque, comic, surreal novel of identity in which the Black narrator is not a social case but a consciousness, and in which the style moves from naturalism in the South to expressionism and then to the surreal as the narrator’s world comes apart. The stake was real: a first novel after seven years’ work, by a writer who had been Wright’s protégé, satirising the Communist left he had moved among and setting himself against the protest tradition critics expected of him. Held below the top because the instruments, the picaresque, the underground narrator and the modernist allusion, were inherited, and the swerve lies in their use.
James Joyce · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
The inheritance was the plotted magazine story, Maupassant’s turn and Kipling’s finish, and in Ireland the Revival’s tale of the peasant West, with George Moore’s The Untilled Field (1903) the nearest precedent. Joyce’s turn: stories that end before their events resolve, on a perception rather than an act; a narration that takes the idiom of the person it follows, so that “Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet” is Lily’s phrase, not the author’s; no moral offered; the city’s real streets, shops and public houses named. The stake was paid in full: about a decade from the first story, in 1904, to the book, in 1914, and Grant Richards’s withdrawal in 1906 over words and passages Joyce would not cut. Held a step down because Chekhov had already made the plotless story and Flaubert the impersonal one; the swerve completes a European turn in English.
Charles Dickens · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
The inheritance is Dickens’s own: the multiple plot, the comic gallery, the orphan’s progress, the attack on an institution, as on the workhouse in Oliver Twist and the schools in Nicholas Nickleby. The turn is formal, and it was costly. The book divides itself between an impersonal narrator in the present tense, itself a departure in the English novel, and a woman’s retrospect that never knows what the other narrator knows, and stakes a long serial on the seam between them. Its protagonist is an institution and a city; its plot is solved by a police detective. Reviewers disliked Esther’s voice and the gloom, and Dickens defended the combustion in his preface rather than cut it. Held below the top because it bends his own proven form more than it breaks the novel’s.
Cormac McCarthy · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
The inheritance is plain and the book carries it openly: the King James Bible, Melville, Faulkner, Dante, the nineteenth-century travel narrative whose chapter headnotes it borrows, and the Western, the most worn of American genres. The turn is in what it does to the last of these. It takes the genre of the frontier as moral education and removes the hero, the law, the town, the woman and the redemption, and gives the Western the diction of scripture and the structure of a descent into hell. It turned McCarthy’s work from Appalachia to the Southwest, and dropped the interiority his earlier books allowed. The stake was real: a book written against every commercial expectation of a Western, which sold poorly and lay neglected for a decade. Held below the top because the style fuses masters it names, and the swerve is in the matter more than in the instrument.
Ludwig van Beethoven · Music
9.0 · Tier V
The inheritance: Haydn’s six late masses, symphonic in scale, the Missa in tempore belli of 1796 with drums already in its Agnus Dei; Mozart’s C minor Mass; Beethoven’s own Mass in C of 1807; Handel’s oratorio; Palestrina and the church modes, which Beethoven studied for this work. The departures: a mass too large for any liturgy, built as one argument through the whole Ordinary; modal writing inside a symphonic language; recitative and battle music in the Agnus Dei; an orchestral prelude in place of silence; a concerto violin at the elevation; an ending that leaves the prayer open. The stake was real: four years of work, the occasion missed, a score no church could use. Held below the top because the symphonic mass, and even the war in the Agnus, were Haydn’s road first.
Attar · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance is plain: the Arabic prose allegories of the birds’ journey to a king, Avicenna’s and the Risālat al-ṭayr ascribed to a Ghazālī (whether Abū Ḥāmid or his brother Aḥmad is debated), and Sanāʾī’s Ḥadīqat al-ḥaqīqa, the first great Sufi masnavī of anecdote and teaching. The turn is double. It joins the two, setting the anecdotal teaching inside a narrative quest, so that the stories become stations on a road; and it ends not in admission to an Other but in identity, the thirty birds as the king. That ending is a theological wager as well as a formal one. The stake shows in Ṣanʿān, a great shaykh who renounces Islam for love and is not condemned, and in the holy fools’ reproaches to God, material a jurist could call heresy. Held below the top because the form and most of the doctrine were inherited, and the turn perfects more than it breaks.
Franz Kafka · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the realist novel of arrival, the young man come to a place to make his way, with the village novel behind it, and the masters Kafka named in his diaries and letters: Flaubert, Kleist and Dickens. The turn is in what that contract is made to carry. A lucid, factual, almost legal prose, as sober sentence by sentence as realism, renders a world whose law is never stated and whose hero gains nothing in a week; the action is mostly testimony, each speech revising the last; progress is replaced by the deepening of a position. The stake was real: the book was written by a sick man who had published only short prose, on no model and for no market, and he abandoned it. Held below the top because the swerve was made first, in the stories and in Der Process (1914 to 1915); this book extends and deepens it more than it makes it.
Plato · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The inherited forms were the Socratic conversation, the display speech of the orators and sophists, and the poets’ hymn, and the dialogue turns each against itself. It is the one dialogue set outside the city, by a Socrates who says he never leaves it. It reproduces a speech by the leading speechwriter of Athens, whether Lysias’s own or Plato’s pastiche is disputed, and beats it twice, once badly and once well, so that its central doctrine arrives as a retraction, on the model of Stesichorus’s palinode for Helen (243a). It argues against writing in the most written of forms, and that wager is its most consequential departure. Held below 9.0 because the turn is largely from Plato’s own practice: the dialogue form was his and well tried, and the Symposium had already crowned a sequence of speeches on love with a Socratic ascent.
Fyodor Dostoevsky · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the anti-nihilist novel of the 1860s, a tendentious genre (Pisemsky, Leskov’s No Way Out), and the chronicle of provincial life. The swerve is to turn the political novel into metaphysical tragedy: a conspiracy plot whose real subject is what happens to persons when an idea possesses them, told by a gossiping narrator who cannot keep up with his own material, around a hero who is a void at the centre of every other character’s devotion. Kirillov’s suicide as a logical proof, carried through as a scene of horror, has no clear precedent. The stake was real: the book cost Dostoevsky with the progressive press for decades and fixed his name as a reactionary’s, and the confession chapter he thought central was refused and lost to the published book. Held below the top because the form of the anti-nihilist novel still governs much of the satire.
Bertolt Brecht · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the dramatic tradition Brecht called Aristotelian: identification, suspense, catharsis, the history play of great men. The swerve is the epic theatre carried into a full-scale tragedy: a chronicle of a camp-follower, not of Gustavus Adolphus or Tilly, whose funeral happens offstage while Kattrin’s face is scarred; captions that give the ending away; songs that step outside the scene; a heroine meant to be watched rather than wept for. The stake was large. Written in exile for a stage that did not exist, without a German theatre, a public or a performance in view, it wagered that the method of the Lehrstücke and The Threepenny Opera could carry a major play. Held below the top because the theory and much of the technique had been made by Brecht and Piscator in the 1920s; this is the method’s fulfilment more than its first break.
Giacomo Leopardi · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the oldest form in Italian poetry, Petrarch’s canzone, its fixed stanza repeated through the poem for five centuries. The turn was the canzone libera: from A Silvia on, stanzas of unequal length, hendecasyllables and settenari mixed at the poem’s need, rhyme free and returning where it is wanted. It freed the lyric’s central form from within and became the form of modern Italian verse. The second turn was of matter: a materialist, anti-providential philosophy at the centre of lyric, against Manzoni’s Catholic Romanticism and the liberal faith in progress. The stake was paid: the Naples edition of 1835 met the censors, and the Palinodia and La ginestra set the poet against the Florentine liberals who were his friends. Held below 9.0: the diction stays classical and Petrarchan inside the tradition it bends, and the turn of form came over ten years, not at a stroke.
Anonymous, under King Lalibela · Architecture
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance is twofold: the built church of Aksumite Ethiopia, in courses of timber and stone with projecting beam-ends, and the cave church cut into a cliff, as in Tigray. The departure: the church carved free, a whole building released from the rock on every side and finished inside and out, the built church reproduced by subtraction, and then multiplied into a quarter of courts, trenches and passages below the plateau. The stake is total: a cut cannot be undone, a fault in the rock or an error in the setting-out destroys the work, and the whole must be conceived before the first stone is taken. Held because the monolith has precedent elsewhere, at Ellora, with no known link, the cave church was already Ethiopian, and the vocabulary is kept faithfully.
James Joyce · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the novel of development and of the artist’s youth: Goethe, Flaubert’s L’Éducation sentimentale, Butler’s The Way of All Flesh, George Moore, and Joyce’s own Stephen Hero, a conventional autobiographical novel of its decade. The turn: a style that grows with its subject, so that the narration takes the vocabulary of the mind it renders at each age; the removal of the narrator’s connective tissue, leaving only the scenes in which a stage is fixed; and the narrative handed at the end to Stephen’s own diary. It opens in nursery speech, with no adult frame. The stake was real: Joyce threw away years of work, and the finished book was declined by English publishers and printers before Huebsch issued it in New York. Held below the top because Ulysses made the greater break, and because this book keeps the chronological spine it bends.
Jacques-Louis David · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance is two laws. The academy’s history painting: antique heroes, stoic deaths, many figures in a frieze, as in David’s own Death of Socrates and Oath of the Horatii. And the Christian altarpiece. The departure: a contemporary man, killed a few months before, in a bath, painted with the gravity and the formulas of both, the murderer left out, the story stripped to its aftermath and half the canvas left without a subject. West’s Death of General Wolfe had already brought contemporary dress into history painting, so the turn to the present is shared ground; the reduction to one body and the empty field are David’s. The stake was paid in part: the canvas was the Jacobin state’s icon, and after Thermidor its painter was imprisoned and the picture withdrawn.
Jan van Eyck · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the panel portrait of the Netherlands in the 1430s, a single head and shoulders against a dark ground, as in van Eyck’s own portraits of those years; and the furnished interior, which belonged to the Annunciation and the saint in the study, not to living sitters. The departure: two living people, neither rulers nor saints, at full length, in their own room, among their goods, with the care the sacred interior had received; a double portrait made into a scene; the painter written into the picture as witness. The stake is the lesser part. This was a private commission for a merchant, so the risk was the painter’s invention against a genre that did not yet exist, not a public wager. Held below the top for that.
Samuel Richardson · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the letter fiction of the seventeenth century, the Lettres portugaises and Behn’s Love-Letters between a Nobleman and his Sister, the conduct book, the devotional literature of holy dying, and Richardson’s own Pamela (1740), which made the epistolary novel popular and ended in a rewarded marriage. The swerve is in three things: many correspondents, so that one event is written by victim and by agent; a scale no novel had attempted for the private life of one household; and a tragic end. Readers of the first instalments pleaded for Lovelace’s reform and the marriage, and Richardson refused, against his public, his own success and the comic form the English novel was then fixing. Held below 9.0 because the form was already his; the departure was in its use.
Franz Kafka · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the colonial tale and the decadent fantasy of torture, with the travel narrative’s European visitor as the frame. The turn is in the register: the most extreme matter told in the cool, exact prose of an engineering report and a legal brief, with no narrator’s horror and no moral, and with the apparatus explained at length as if its functioning were the point. That was a real departure from both the sensational and the symbolist modes the story drew on. The stake was paid: Kafka held the story back for five years after he wrote it, read it aloud in public in Munich in November 1916, and published it only in 1919. Held below the top because Kafka had already made the swerve, in Das Urteil and in Die Verwandlung (1912), and this story extends it more than it makes it.
Built for Abbot Suger · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
The parts were inherited: the pointed arch from Burgundy, the rib vault from Normandy and England, the ambulatory with radiating chapels from the pilgrimage churches. The turn was to combine them so that the chapels merge, the walls open and the ambulatory becomes a continuous field of light on the slightest supports then possible, and to justify it in writing as theology. The stake was real: a royal abbey’s east end, rebuilt in under four years over the saint’s tomb, on supports untried at that scale. The west front made its own turn, joining sculpted portals with column figures to a façade rose, and the thirteenth-century rebuilding turned again in glazing the triforium. Held below 9.0: the same synthesis was rising elsewhere in the same years, and each element had been proven alone.
Herman Melville · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the magazine sketch of eccentric characters and the genial urban humorist: the manner of Irving and Lamb, and Dickens’s law clerks, from whom Turkey and Nippers plainly descend. Melville begins inside it and turns it into something without precedent in the fiction of the 1850s: a story whose central figure has no motive, no history and no explanation, in which the comedy of humours stays in place and becomes the setting of an absurd and fatal refusal. The stake was real. Melville wrote it after Moby-Dick had failed to sell and Pierre (1852) had been received with hostility, for a magazine that paid him by the page and printed him anonymously; to hand a paying public an unexplained story was to risk the one income left to him. Held below 9.0 because the swerve is placed inside an inherited frame that does much of the work, and the first-person tale of a strange acquaintance was established by Poe and Hawthorne.
Franz Kafka · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Hebel’s calendar tales, Kleist’s anecdotes, the Hasidic tale and the Talmudic parable, and Robert Walser’s short prose. The turn is the parable without a key, told in the flat, exact German of an office report, in which the impossible is admitted without surprise and the meaning is withheld by design. The title story adds a dream logic held in one breath; the report gives the scholarly lecture to an ape; Auf der Galerie builds a story from a counterfactual and its negation. The stake was real: a slim book of pieces that seem fragments, by a writer with almost no public, set against the expectation that a story resolve. Held below 9.0 because the deepest part of the swerve, the Kafkan mode itself, is shared with Die Verwandlung and Der Process; this book’s own departure is the short parable.
Bob Dylan · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the singer’s own: the electric turn of 1965 and Highway 61 Revisited, the Chicago blues behind it, and the folk tradition he had left. The turn here is to Nashville. A New York surrealist took his songs to the session players of country music’s capital, and the result was a sound neither city had: country precision playing city dread. With it came a double album and a single song filling a whole side, the second without precedent in the field. The stake was real: he was being booed nightly on tour, and the sessions were a gamble on players he did not know. Held from the top: the decisive swerve came the year before, and most tracks keep the forms of the blues and the ballad.
Stendhal · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the novel of education and seduction: Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloïse and Confessions, Laclos, Marivaux’s Paysan parvenu, and Scott’s historical novel. The departure is large. A contemporary political chronicle, of the present year, made from a court report; a hero followed from inside, his calculations and self-deceptions exposed sentence by sentence, with the narrator stepping forward to excuse or mock him; a dry, rapid prose set against the Romantic manner of the day; and a love story whose passions are analysed as Stendhal had analysed them in De l’amour (1822). The stake was paid: the book sold little, puzzled its readers and waited decades. Held below the top because Balzac was making a parallel turn to the contemporary social novel in the same years.
Olivier Messiaen · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is French chamber music after Debussy and Ravel and Messiaen’s own organ cycles of the 1930s. The departures are many: duration treated as a quantity, with added values and non-retrogradable rhythms in place of metre; an opening movement whose harmony and rhythm run on independent cycles; birdsong as thematic material; a six-minute movement in unison; two slow movements slower than anything in the chamber repertoire; and a theology printed in a chamber score. The stake: dialogue, development and balance given up for an argument about time that could have been heard as a private system. Held below the top by the composer’s own path: the modes and rhythmic devices are in the organ works of 1935 to 1939, and two movements are transcriptions.
Ambrogio Lorenzetti · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the religious fresco cycle of Giotto and of Duccio’s followers, the virtues and vices in the margins of sacred programmes, and civic painting of a narrower kind: heraldry, the defamatory images of traitors, the Maestà Simone Martini painted in the next room. The departure is large: a monumental cycle whose subject is a secular theory of government; the first sustained painted view of a contemporary city as it lives; the first panoramic landscape in European painting since antiquity, the subject of a wall and not its backdrop; the work of ordinary citizens made worthy of a government’s walls. The stake was public: the regime’s own chamber, its image read every day by those it addressed. Held a step below the top because the allegorical apparatus is inherited, not invented.
David Foster Wallace · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the encyclopedic American novel of Pynchon and Gaddis, DeLillo’s systems and Barth’s metafiction, with Joyce behind them all. Much of the apparatus is inherited: the acronyms, the alternative geopolitics, the paranoid plot around a lethal object, as in Gravity’s Rainbow. The turn is in what the apparatus is used for. Wallace had argued in “E Unibus Pluram” (1993) that postmodern irony had been absorbed by television and could no longer resist anything, and the novel turns the encyclopedic form against irony: its moral centre is a recovery house and a set of slogans, and its sympathy goes to the people the systems novel would have treated as specimens. The endnotes make the reader’s attention part of the form. The stake was real: a thousand-page book from a writer whose first novel had been received as clever and young. Held below the top because the instrument is largely Pynchon’s, and the swerve lies in purpose more than in means.
Louis Kahn · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
The departure is wide and the stake very high. The inheritance was the modern capitol, with Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh nearest: free-standing concrete objects on an open plain. Kahn turned from it to a closed, centralised, archaic mass on water, with walls of great thickness and openings cut like geometry from a ruin, and turned equally from a revival of Islamic forms. The stake was not only aesthetic: a monument at this scale in a poor country, begun under one state and carried through a war of independence into another, completed after its architect’s death. That it was finished at all was the wager won. Held below the top because Kahn’s earlier work had announced its language of mass, ruin and served space.
The Beatles · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the band’s own Revolver (1966), where tape loops, studio processes and an Indian song had already entered, with Pet Sounds (1966) beside it, and the music hall, the brass band and the Indian classical forms the record borrows. The turn is to the album as the work: one show, no single taken from it, the lyrics printed, the songs run together, an aleatory orchestral passage on a pop record, a sermon in Indian form opening a side. The stake was real: the band had stopped touring, and the record could not be played on stage. Held from the top: the wager was placed by the best-resourced band in the world, and many of its means are Revolver’s carried further.
Miles Davis · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
The turn is from the jazz of 1959, hard bop and its dense chord changes, to frames of one or two scales held for long stretches. The soloist is no longer asked to run the changes; he is asked what to do with space. The stake was in the method: a working band of the first rank placed its record on frames it had never played, brought in the day they were recorded, and kept performances whole. The turn changed the harmonic ground of improvisation. Held from the top: Milestones, George Russell, Gil Evans and Bill Evans had prepared it, the band’s standing cushioned it, and Ornette Coleman’s break the same year cost more.
Machado de Assis · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The departure is from Machado’s own first manner, the four earlier novels ending with Iaiá Garcia (1878), and from the Brazilian novel as it stood, romantic in Alencar and turning naturalist after Eça’s O Primo Basílio (1878), which Machado had attacked in print. Against both he chose the free form of a Sterne or a Xavier de Maistre: a dead first person, short chapters, an insulted reader and a typography that jokes. The stake was real: a successful novelist of forty-one abandoning the form that had made him, in a market of serial readers. Held off the top because the turn is announced as an inheritance, the lineage named on the first page, and Sterne had done the formal work. The swerve is in putting that form to work on a slave society.
Béla Bartók · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Baroque concerto grosso, the four-movement symphonic plan and the string orchestra for which Sacher commissioned. The departures: an ensemble without precedent, two antiphonal string bodies with keyboards and tuned and untuned percussion as equal partners rather than colour; stage space as an element of form, the seating printed in the score; a slow chromatic fugue opening the work, built as a fan that touches all twelve keys and closes; one subject governing all four movements; the Adagio’s sound of glissandi, struck wood and string clusters. The stake was real but limited, and much of the turn runs along Bartók’s own road: the arch forms of his Fourth and Fifth Quartets, the night music of Out of Doors (1926), two decades of folk dance. The swerve is from the tradition, not from himself.
Mary Shelley · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Gothic novel of Walpole, Radcliffe and Lewis, the Godwinian novel of ideas and persecution (Caleb Williams), and the epistolary frame. The swerve moved the source of terror from the supernatural to natural philosophy, so that the horror is made in a laboratory from Galvani and Davy rather than summoned from a crypt; and it gave the monster the eloquence, so that the book’s most persuasive voice is the thing it fears. The Gothic villain becomes the narrator’s own creature, and the narrator becomes the villain. The stake was real: an anonymous first novel by a young woman of a notorious household, which reviewers met in part with hostility. Held below the top because the frame and much of the machinery are inherited, and the departure is in premise and voice more than in the form of the novel.
Edgar Allan Poe · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance was the German tale of terror and the sensation tale of Blackwood’s, which Poe knew well enough to parody in “How to Write a Blackwood Article”. The turn was inward: the terror moved from the castle to the narrating mind, and the narrator became the instrument of horror, unreliable by design. Beside it, three further departures: the tale of ratiocination in 1841; the first serious theory of the short story as a form with its own law; and the tale of science and the scientific hoax. The stake was real. Poe lived by the magazines, was poor, was charged with Germanism in his own time, and placed his art on the shortest and least honoured form in the market. Held under 9.0 because part of the turn was made inside popular forms, and much Gothic furniture is kept rather than broken.
Robert Frank · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is double. Behind the book stands Walker Evans’s American Photographs (1938), its model of a sequenced book of plain American places and faces; around it stood the humanist photography of the 1950s, Steichen’s The Family of Man (1955), the captioned and reassuring picture essay of the illustrated weeklies, and Cartier-Bresson’s composed decisive moment. The departure: grain, blur, tilted horizons, figures cut by the frame, pictures taken from the hip or the car, and no text to tell the viewer what to feel. The stake was real and the cost was paid: a foreigner’s portrait of America in the Cold War, attacked in the American photographic press as sloppy and as anti-American, and its maker soon turned from the still photograph to film. Held below the top because Evans had laid the form and William Klein’s New York book of 1956 was taking a parallel turn.
D. H. Lawrence · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the English novel of marriage and society, from Austen to George Eliot, the provincial novel of Hardy, and Lawrence’s own Sons and Lovers. The turn: character given as states of a deeper being, not as “the old stable ego of the character”, which Lawrence told Garnett not to look for; a plot of scenes, each a crisis of the unconscious, joined by recurrence rather than sequence; marriage taken as the story’s problem, not its end; love between men set beside love between man and woman as an equal question. The stake was paid: The Rainbow had been destroyed under a court order in 1915, and this book waited four years for a publisher. Held below the top because The Rainbow made the first break, and this book carries it further rather than making it.
Auguste Rodin · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the nineteenth-century commemorative monument: one hero, or a hero at the apex of a pyramid of lesser figures and allegories, raised on a pedestal above the street and read from the front. The turn is total. No apex, no hero above the rest, no allegory, no frontal view; the figures on one low base as if the pedestal had sunk; bodies with enlarged hands and feet, rough planes, and the strain of fear shown at the scale of civic statuary. The Rodin literature reports a cost paid for it, in objections from the commission, delay and a first setting that raised the group again; that history is reported, not verified here. Against a 9: Rodin was established, the Gates had given him his manner, and the turn is within figuration. Below Fountain and The Large Bathers at 9.4.
George Gordon, Lord Byron · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the high Romantic long poem, Wordsworth’s Excursion, Southey’s epics and Byron’s own Childe Harold; behind them the Italian comic stanza of Pulci and Berni, which Frere had tried in English and Byron had tested in Beppo (1817). The turn: an improvised, digressive, conversational epic whose subject is as much the narrator’s mind in the act of composing as the story it tells, every register, lyric, satire, theology, gossip and battle, admitted under one stanza. That had not been done in English. The stake was paid: Murray printed the first two cantos without his name or the author’s and later declined the poem; Hunt published the rest; the reviews and Blackwood’s called it obscene. What holds it here: the mock-epic, the digressive narrator of Sterne and Fielding and the Italian romance all stand behind it, so the swerve is a fusion of known parts. The fusion is the departure.
Rainer Maria Rilke · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The departure is large and its cost was real. Rilke turned from the effusive, musical, devotional subjectivity of Das Stunden-Buch, which had made his name, to the thing: the poem made as Rodin, and later Cézanne, made things, with the self withheld. German lyric after Goethe and the Romantics had no settled form for this. He paid in years of labour and in a doubt he recorded in his letters. The swerve is formal too: the rhymed sonnet is bent by enjambment until its rhymes become hinges in mid thought. Held below 9.0 because the turn has precedents, Parnassian objectivity, Mörike’s “Auf eine Lampe” and C. F. Meyer’s “Der römische Brunnen”, which the fountain poem answers. It is a radical deepening of a line already present; no predecessor made the thing poem the ground of a whole book.
David Lynch · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
The inherited forms are the teen mystery, the boy-detective story and film noir, all within American studio cinema. The film turns them three ways. It fuses them with surrealism and the avant-garde in a film released wide. It makes the tone undecidable, 1950s kitsch played both straight and as dread, sincerity and irony never separated. And it puts sexual violence and abjection on screen as the studio mystery had never carried them. The stake was real, by report a fee given up for control after Dune (1984), on a film many thought unreleasable. Held below the top by precedent: Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt and Rear Window had found the dark in the small town and the watcher, and Lynch’s own Eraserhead (1977) was the swerve that this film brought to the town.
Alfred Hitchcock · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
The turn and the stake are both large. The film breaks the oldest contract of the commercial feature: it kills its billed star a little under halfway and hands the story to her murderer. It brings into a studio release a lunch-hour bed, a flushing toilet and a killing cut with a violence no mainstream American film had shown. And it turns against its maker’s tradition: the director of North by Northwest makes a cheap black-and-white picture with a television crew. The studio would not fund it; Hitchcock staked his own money and name, and the material courted the censors. Held below the top because the swerve stays within suspense, a form he had mastered: it turns the genre rather than leaving it.
Giovanni Battista Piranesi · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the stage prison of the Bibiena family and the scena per angolo, the architectural capriccio, the Venetian veduta and the Roman antiquarian plate, all of which Piranesi practised. The departure: he took the theatre’s prison set, a backdrop meant to be read from one seat, and made a space that cannot be read from any seat, giving up the single vanishing point that stage and veduta exist to serve. In 1761 he went back to his own admired plates and darkened, overloaded and argued them, at the cost of their first airy beauty, risking a known work for an unproven one. Held below the top because capriccio, stage set and ruin came to him whole; the swerve is in what he did with them.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Gothic of the Île-de-France, above all Notre-Dame de Paris, five-aisled and begun some thirty years earlier. The departure: Bourges takes the five-aisled plan and remakes it as a single volume, giving up the transept, raising the inner aisles to a full elevation of their own, and grading the section so that light and thrust are handled by the same steps. It was conceived as Chartres was rebuilt after 1194 and answers the same problem the opposite way: Chartres concentrates, Bourges spreads. The stake was real, an untried section at great height on economical buttressing. Chartres became the norm, and that measures the wager. Held below the top because the five-aisled plan and the sexpartite vault were inherited.
Gian Lorenzo Bernini · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the free-standing marble group of the Mannerists, Giambologna’s Rape of the Sabine above all, its figures spiralled to be walked round, and the antique group, the Laocoön and the Belvedere. The departure is in three things: a single instant of change in place of a stable pose; several materials imitated in one, skin, bark, leaf and hair cut as different substances from the same marble; and the many views reduced to a sequence read in order as one walks. The stake was physical. Leaves and fingers carved free risk the block at every stroke, and a sculptor in his early twenties wagered his patron’s most visible commission on what marble had been thought unable to do. The risk was taken and not lost, and the turn goes past the path he had proved in the Proserpina.
Pontormo · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Florentine altarpiece of the High Renaissance: Fra Bartolomeo’s monumental calm and, nearest, Andrea del Sarto, Pontormo’s master, whose figures stand on ground in a lit, measurable space. The departure is near total: no space, no ground that bears weight, no architecture, figures stacked up the plane rather than placed in depth, a palette of pastel and shot colour with no natural source, a moment that cannot be named, and the painter’s own face at the edge. The stake was real: a family chapel altarpiece on a three year campaign kept hidden, by a painter whose public reputation rested on the manner he was leaving. Held below the top because Rosso’s Deposition at Volterra, of 1521, had already broken the High Renaissance altarpiece: the turn was made beside a companion.
Terrence Malick · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance was the American combat film as Saving Private Ryan had restated it that same year: a squad, an objective, a mission with a moral, violence as immersive shock. The departures: a chorus of inner voices in place of a hero’s arc; attention to grass, birds and light equal to that given to battle; the enemy shown dying and praying; stars cut to minutes, and a cast’s worth of names removed altogether; nearly three hours with no climactic battle, only a patrol and one death. The stake was real: a studio’s money, a director absent twenty years, a release against the most honoured war film of its decade. Held near the top by precedent: Malick’s own Days of Heaven (1978) had already dissolved narrative into light and a child’s voice.
Lu Xun · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance was the classical language and the old fiction: the chapter novel (章回小说), the anecdote, the biography (传) of the dynastic histories. The turn was total: the first-person diary, the short story built on a single situation, the ironic narrator, drawn from Gogol, whose “Diary of a Madman” gives the first story its title, from Andreyev and Chekhov and the Japanese and Russian fiction Lu Xun had translated, and made in a vernacular still being invented. Ah Q’s first chapter parodies the categories of the classical biography, searching for the kind of 传 this nobody deserves. The stake was the preface’s wager, whether to wake the sleepers in an iron house they cannot leave. It is short of the top because the forms were borrowed whole: the departure, total within Chinese, was a transplant from abroad rather than an invention of form.
T. S. Eliot · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance in English in 1910 was the Georgian lyric and the late-Victorian dramatic monologue, and the departure, in English, is total. Browning’s monologue is turned inward until there is no listener and no event; the city, “a patient etherised upon a table”, is set where the romantic sky was expected; rhyme is kept and made ironic, landing on bathos; the line lengthens and shortens with the mind; allusion becomes a structural device rather than an ornament. The stake was real: the poem was the work of an unknown, and Harriet Monroe held it back at Poetry until Ezra Pound pressed it into print. Held below the top because the turn was learned. Laforgue, read through Arthur Symons, had made the ironic urban monologue in French a generation earlier, and the satires and “Conversation Galante” come close to pastiche of him.
Willem de Kooning · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is twofold: the figure tradition from Rubens to Soutine’s flesh and Picasso’s women of the 1930s; and, in 1950, the New York School’s own turn away from the figure, with Pollock painting on the floor and Newman’s zip already made. The departure broke both. The figure came back into the gestural field at full scale, the brushwork of abstraction tearing it apart rather than describing it, and in the subject most loaded for a painter of that generation, the woman’s body of the nude. The stake was real: a standing among the abstract painters he led, and two years of a canvas he could not finish. Some of abstraction’s defenders received it in 1953 as a betrayal. Held below the top because Picasso’s dismembered women are its parent, and Dubuffet’s Corps de dames were painted at the same moment.
Salvador Dalí · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is two laws. The academic one Dalí revered: the minute illusionism of the small easel picture, the glaze and finish of Meissonier and the Dutch. And Surrealism’s: automatism, the dream, the chance meeting of unrelated things. The departure: the irrational painted with the full apparatus of the academy, so that a dream is given the evidence of a photograph; and a new image, the hard object made soft, a solid thing behaving like cloth or cheese. Each half had precedent, in de Chirico’s still spaces, Tanguy’s shores and Magritte’s exact unrealities; what was new was the softness, and it entered the language at once. The stake was his standing in the Paris group, then new. Held below the top because the turn, decisive in its image, was made on a path others had opened.
Pablo Neruda · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
European surrealism and Rimbaud’s derangement of the senses were there to be inherited, and Vallejo’s Trilce (1922) had already broken Spanish syntax more radically. But the turn is Neruda’s own, and its cost was high. He walked away from his own Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada (1924) and from the rhymed and shaped lyric of modernismo into a hermetic, simile-drowned long line that his Chilean readers found opaque, and he did it in isolation, with no movement behind him. It is not automatic writing: the poems are composed, and their images keep to one physics. In Madrid he made the swerve a programme, setting an impure poetry stained by use against Juan Ramón Jiménez’s pure poetry, at the price of open enmity. The second volume swerves again, into the material songs and the ode to a living Lorca.
J. M. W. Turner · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the landscape as the Academy exhibited it, a scene of place with a subject and a finish; technology as a matter for prints and illustrated papers, not for high painting; and the picturesque, in which the road bridge and the boat would have been the subject. The departure: the railway made the subject of a major exhibited canvas, painted not as an object but as a condition of perception; form dissolved into paint, so that the canvas itself is the blur; the viewer put on the track. The stake was public: Turner showed it at the Academy at sixty-nine, when his late manner was mocked in the press and by cartoonists. Held below the top because the dissolving manner was already his. The Snow Storm of 1842 had taken the same risk in means; the swerve here is in the subject.
David Lynch and Mark Frost · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Three turns, each with a stake. The series put an art-cinema method, dream, dread, slow tempo and a cosmology never explained, into American network prime time inside a soap and a procedural, and the network’s audience left during the second season. The film turned against the series: it dropped the comedy and the town’s charm and centred the victim. The Return turned against the revival itself, withholding its hero for fifteen parts, giving an hour to an abstract genesis and refusing the nostalgia it was commissioned on, a departure television had not attempted. Held below the top because the first swerve was prepared: Lynch’s own Blue Velvet (1986) had found the small town’s underside, Peyton Place supplied the frame, and Potter’s The Singing Detective (1986) and Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) had already brought an auteur’s means to the serial.
Francis Bacon · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the religious triptych and the Crucifixion of Cimabue and Grünewald, which Bacon named among the pictures he returned to; Picasso’s biomorphic bathers and figures of the late 1920s, from which the bodies plainly descend; and the wartime British painting it hung beside, the neo-romantic landscape and the rooted, organic forms of Sutherland and Moore. The departure: a crucifixion without the crucified; an altarpiece made secular and claimed for one painter’s private terror; Picasso’s forms taken off the beach and set on plinths in a field of colour with no space. The stake was his standing: a painter in his mid-thirties with almost no surviving work, who had stopped painting for years, showing a picture its first viewers found monstrous. Held below the top because the debt to Picasso is large and visible.
The Beatles · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the group’s own: the unified studio album of the year before, with its orchestral colour and its frame of a fictional band. The turn is large and was costly. The record strips the studio back to songs played by a band or by one man, abandons the frame for a sprawl, replaces the most famous sleeve of its time with a blank one, and puts on the most anticipated album of its year eight minutes of tape collage with no tune: musique concrète set before a mass audience by the most popular band in the world. Held below the top because the turn to plainer sound was in the air that year, and the double album had precedent in Blonde on Blonde and Freak Out!. The pairing of plainness and noise was the record’s own.
Jonathan Swift · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Menippean satire and the learned wit: Lucian, Rabelais, Erasmus’s Praise of Folly, Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, whose own digression on madness is near, Butler’s Hudibras against the enthusiasts, Marvell’s controversial prose, and the Grub Street hack as a figure of contempt. The turn is to give the whole book to its target. The speaker is the modern author himself, with no frame and no corrector; his prefaces, dedications, digressions and manuscript gaps are the satire, and the book becomes a parody of the printed book as an object. In 1710 Swift took the swerve further, printing his enemy’s glosses as the book’s own notes. The stake was real: anonymity kept for life, and a charge of irreligion that the Apology had to answer. Held below the top because the parody of pedantry had predecessors and the allegory is a conventional instrument.
Khmer, under Jayavarman VII · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Khmer temple mountain: a stepped pyramid with towers in quincunx, ordered by concentric enclosures and axial causeways, raised for Shiva or Vishnu and the king’s cult. The departure is wide. The state temple turns to Mahayana Buddhism; the clear pyramid gives way to a dense, centripetal mass; the central sanctuary is round; the tower becomes a face; the common life enters the outer gallery as a subject. The stake was large on two fronts: a change of state religion made after the Cham sack of the capital in 1177, answered by the reaction that cut out the Buddha images after the reign; and a wager on building at speed and scale with uncertain means, paid in collapse. Held from the top because the temple mountain is kept: the swerve turns the type rather than leaving it.
Robert Smithson · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is sculpture as an object: made in a studio, set on a floor or a plinth, seen in a room, owned and sold; behind it Minimalism’s industrial units, which had put the object on the floor but kept it portable and kept the room. The departure: the work leaves the room, the city and the market; its material is the site’s own and its scale the landscape’s; it is made to be changed by water and salt, so its permanence is surrendered by design; it can be leased and stewarded but not owned in the ordinary sense. The stake was real: a patron’s money, a remote lake with no audience, and the work’s disappearance within about two years. Held below 9.0 because the turn was shared, not first: Heizer’s Double Negative was cut in 1969 to 1970, and Smithson’s own Nonsites and Asphalt Rundown (1969) had already left the gallery.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is threefold: the American country house of timber or masonry, walled, roofed and set on its ground; the European modern villa, Le Corbusier’s Savoye and Mies’s own Tugendhat House, a free plan inside a walled volume; and Mies’s own path, the free planes of the Barcelona Pavilion, the court-house projects and the glass-walled Resor project. The departure: the house dissolved into one room with no walls, the envelope wholly glass, the structure carried outside it and the planes hung on the faces of the columns, the floor lifted off the earth, the services gathered into one freestanding object. Barcelona had made such a space for a pavilion with no use; this made it a dwelling, and that was the stake. It was paid in the client’s money, comfort and privacy, in a lawsuit, and in the architect’s first American house. Held below the top because the turn runs along Mies’s own line, and Philip Johnson’s Glass House, drawn from this design, was built first.
Frank Lloyd Wright · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the office building as a stack of rentable floors or a classical block, and Wright’s own Larkin Building in Buffalo, a top-lit hall of work of 1904. The departure is large, and it was paid for. Columns so slender at the foot were a structure the state’s building authority would not accept; it required a load test, and the building waited on the result. Glass tubing in place of sheet glass was untried at that scale and leaked, a cost borne for decades. A headquarters with no window to its own city, all curves and red brick, turned against the stripped classical and the early International Style alike. The tower, cantilevered from one core with no outer columns, was a second wager. Held below the top: the governing type, the top-lit communal workroom, is Wright’s own of thirty years before.
David Bowie · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Bowie’s own: the plastic soul of Young Americans and the cold funk and motorik pulse of Station to Station, beside the German electronic bands and Eno’s ambient records. The turn is large. A rock star at commercial height gives half an album to instrumentals, cuts his songs off before they complete, puts the voice low and the processed drums high, and abandons the persona-driven album he had perfected. The stake was the singer’s own standing. What holds it below the top is the path: the electronic and ambient languages were proven in Düsseldorf and in Eno’s own work, Eno was in the room, and the turn had begun on the previous record. The swerve is the joining, made from inside the mainstream.
Daniel Defoe · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is spiritual autobiography, the travel narrative, the voyage account and the providence tale. The book swerves into something none of them was: a fiction presented as a true memoir, sustained over a long book by circumstantial detail, in which the ordinary days of an ordinary man are the matter. Romance is set aside; nobody is noble; an event is the making of a table. That is the turn the English novel takes from it. The stake was real: a bankrupt journalist published an invented life as fact, in a form with no assured readership. Held a tenth below 9.0: the swerve was half unwitting, a journalist’s habit of fact turned on an invented life, the form not reflected upon; and Bunyan had already given the ordinary soul a narrative.
Edvard Munch · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The swerve is plain and it cost. Munch came out of the Kristiania naturalism of Krohg and the bohemians, where the sickroom was a social subject painted clearly; here the same subject is painted as memory, in a surface scraped, scored and left visibly unresolved. The departure was from the finished surface itself, the convention that a painting is a window and not a record of its own making. The stake was public: shown in 1886, the canvas was mocked in the press as unfinished, and the painter, twenty-two, was exposed as a failure before his town. He did not retreat, and returned to the motif for forty years. It is held short of the top because the scratched surface had partial precedents, in late Romantic sketchiness and in Whistler’s thin surfaces, and the full turn to colour and line as feeling came in the 1890s.
Giulio Romano · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the classicism of Bramante and Raphael, in whose Roman workshop Giulio was trained and which he took over at Raphael’s death in 1520. The departure is made from inside. The order is used correctly enough to be recognised and wrongly enough to be felt: triglyphs slipping, keystones breaking the line, rustication left half finished on purpose, a building that seems to be going up and falling down at once; and in the room of the giants, a room denied by its own painting. It is the swerve of its century in building, the turn the name Mannerism was later coined to describe. The stake was real but bounded. A prince wanted a house of pleasure and wit, not a church, so the licence was licensed, and what was risked was the patron’s taste. Held off the top for that.
Giorgio de Chirico · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance in Paris in 1914 was Cubism and its offshoots, and before them Impressionism: perspective dissolved, the object fragmented, the surface made primary. The departure is a wager against the whole advance: a return to linear perspective, the piazza, the arcade, legible objects and deep space, and then the turning of those means against themselves, so that perspective, the instrument of rational order since the fifteenth century, becomes the instrument of unease. The stake was real: a young Italian in Paris, painting against the movement the city was proud of, risked being read as provincial or reactionary, and Apollinaire’s support was the measure of his few allies. Held below the top because the swerve belongs to the body of piazzas begun about 1910; this canvas is one of its most concentrated statements, not its first.
J. G. Ballard · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the science fiction of the 1950s and 1960s, Burroughs’s cut-up, the Surrealists, Sade, and Ballard’s own The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), which contains a piece titled “Crash!”. The turn is to write the near-future novel in the present tense of the reader’s own city, with no invention but the narrator’s desire, and to write an erotic novel whose object of desire is technology itself. Science fiction had imagined the machine’s future; this book says the future has arrived and lives in the car park. The stake was real and paid: the book’s notoriety, and a narrator who bears the author’s name, staking his person on it. Held below the top because the more radical formal break had been made three years earlier, in The Atrocity Exhibition, of which this is the narrative realisation.
Miles Davis · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is acoustic modern jazz: the small band, the head and solos, the soloist in front, and Davis’s own second quintet, which had made that form as free as it would go. The turn is very large: electric keyboards and guitar, rock and funk rhythm from two drummers, a large ensemble improvising together over vamps, and the finished work made in the editing room rather than on the stand. The stake was real and was paid: jazz critics charged the record with selling out to rock, and part of Davis’s older audience never came back. Held short of the top by the path. The turn had begun on Miles in the Sky and Filles de Kilimanjaro in 1968 and was half made on In a Silent Way, recorded six months earlier; Hendrix, Sly Stone, James Brown and Tony Williams’s Lifetime had placed parts of the bet. Level with Kind of Blue.
Frank Gehry · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the modern museum: the neutral container, the orthogonal gallery, the white room, with the foundation’s own Wright rotunda in New York as the great exception. Gehry broke the box at the scale of a major public building, with doubly curved surfaces that could not be drawn, priced or built by the ordinary means of the time, and went to aerospace software to make them buildable. The stake was public: a regional government in a declining industrial city placed a large public sum on an unproven form and a riverside site of no prestige. Held short of the top because some of the vocabulary was Gehry’s already, and Utzon at Sydney had broken the box decades before.
Antoni Gaudí · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the Eixample house of flats, a flat masonry front on the street line, balconies in ranks, bearing walls and a light well; and Modernisme as Domènech i Montaner and Puig i Cadafalch practised it a few doors down the same avenue, rich applied ornament on a conventional block. The departure: one continuous carved stone surface, with no ranked opening and no applied ornament in the usual sense; no bearing walls, so that the plan is free a decade before the Dom-ino; courtyards curved and opened as wells; the car underground; the roof a sculptured landscape. The stake was paid in ridicule and in the loss of the crowning image. Held short of the top because Gaudí’s own Casa Batlló and Park Güell began the turn this house completes.
Richard Linklater · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is triple: Michael Apted’s Up series, returning to the same people every seven years in documentary; Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel films, one actor aged across twenty years of fiction; and Linklater’s own Before films, on this desk at 8.6, actors and characters aged together at long intervals. The turn is to make one fiction feature of the whole span, shot a little each year with the same cast and no makeup, and cut so the years pass unannounced. The stake was as large as any in American film of its decade: twelve years committed, and a child actor who might lose interest or grow badly into the part. Held from the top because the grammar within each year is inherited and unchanged.
Jackson Pollock · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the easel picture, brush on upright canvas, figure on ground, the composed rectangle with a centre and a frame, which Cubism and Mondrian had flattened but not abandoned; nearer, Surrealist automatism, the poured experiments of the Siqueiros workshop of 1936, which Pollock attended, Ernst’s swinging can, and the small all-over pourings of Janet Sobel. The departure: the canvas on the floor, the brush lifted off the surface, house enamels and aluminium paint, a field with no centre and no edge, the image as the trace of the whole body. The stake was public: the method drew ridicule in the press, and the painter’s standing rested on it. Held below the top because this canvas does not make the swerve; it perfects one made in 1947. It is the turn at its most assured, not the turn.
James Ensor · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance was double: the Belgian realism and Impressionism that the Brussels avant-garde of Les XX championed, and the official history painting whose scale this canvas borrows. The departure is from both. A modern-life subject is painted at the size of a history machine; the faces are masks; the space is a stage crammed to the plane; the colour is unmixed, harsh and flat in a way nothing in Belgian or French painting of that year matches. It anticipates by about two decades the masks and crowds of Nolde and the German Expressionists. The cost is on record: the canvas could not be shown, the painter’s standing with his own avant-garde collapsed in these years, and the picture waited some forty years for a public. Held below 9.0 because the mask and the grotesque crowd came from carnival and caricature.
Eladio Dieste · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance was twofold. Thin shells in the 1950s belonged to reinforced concrete, the field of Torroja, Candela and Nervi; brick belonged to load-bearing walls, to Catalan tile vaults working in compression and to Guastavino’s domes. Dieste turned brick into a reinforced shell and gave it shapes, the ruled wall and the double-curved vault, that neither tradition had built, and he did it as an engineer without an architect’s licence for form, for a modest parish, on his own calculation. The stake was real and paid: a wall and roof one brick thick, with no backing, built in a seaside town by local labour, would stand or fall by a new theory of a material. It stood, and made a method. The departure was confined to structure and material, not to a whole idea of what a building is.
René Magritte · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the oldest contract of Western painting, that a picture of a thing stands in for the thing, and the forms built on it: trompe l’oeil, the emblem with its motto, the shop sign, the primer card, the advertisement in which word and image agree to sell. Behind it stand the Cubists’ letters, Dada’s titles, Duchamp’s objects and de Chirico’s still spaces. The departure is on this canvas: a picture that contradicts itself in writing, painting made the instrument of thought in the manner of commercial illustration, against the automatism and the dream of the Surrealists around him. The stake was his place in the Paris group, which he left within the year. Held below the top because this is the sharpest statement of a turn made across a group of word paintings, not a turn made by one canvas.
William Shakespeare · Literature
9.3 · Tier V
The inheritance is the chronicle history play, with Shakespeare’s own Richard III the nearest precedent, a usurper as protagonist; the Senecan tragedy of tyranny, ghosts and blood; Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, whose damned man is watched from inside; and the tempters of the morality play. Holinshed supplied the story. The turn is the tyrant made the tragic subject from within. Richard enjoys his villainy and tells the audience so; Macbeth imagines his crime before he commits it and suffers it after, and the soliloquies make the audience share the murderer’s mind while the murder itself stays off stage. The witches are made neither cause nor symbol, and the play will not decide. The stake was real: a sympathetic regicide, written for the company of a king who had survived the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, on the history of his own line. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve, with The Encompassed, is that the instruments, the villain protagonist, the soliloquy and the damned man, were already in the field, his own and Marlowe’s: the swerve lies in depth more than in means.
Sophocles · Literature
9.2 · Tier V
The inheritance is Attic tragedy as Aeschylus left it, built in connected trilogies around the fate of a house. The turn is a single self-contained play in which a young woman’s defiance of the city is the action, staged at the city’s own festival; a heroine who leaves the stage some seventy per cent of the way through and dies offstage, while the play turns to her opponent and makes him its sufferer, so that the tragedy has two centres; and a chorus of elders whose odes misread the moment they are sung in. The stake was real. Held lowest of the five gated axes because the self-contained play and the isolated hero belong to Sophocles’ practice as a whole rather than to this play alone, and Oedipus Tyrannus carried the method further.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart · Music
9.2 · Tier V
The inheritance is opera buffa, and the Don Juan story as popular comedy with a fireworks hell. The departures are real: seria, mezzo carattere and buffa characters share scenes and ensembles; a comic opera opens with a killing and ends with a damnation scored as tragedy; the ball sounds three metres at once; the overture is built from the last scene. The stake was moderate. Prague commissioned the work after cheering Figaro, and Gazzaniga had set the subject in Venice that February. Figaro had made the ensemble finale into drama, Idomeneo and Gluck’s Alceste had given trombones to the voice from beyond, and Gluck’s ballet Don Juan (1761) had ended in a D minor inferno.
Ferdowsi · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
The inheritance is massive, and the poem proclaims it. It versifies the prose Shahnameh compiled at Tus in 957, follows its order and says so, passing over the Parthians because the source kept little of them, and keeps Daqiqi’s verses under his name. The turn is in voice and scale: a national history made one poem in New Persian, where before there were prose and a fragment; a diction held close to Persian in a literature open to Arabic; a tragic voice that stops the chronicle to question it; a Zoroastrian past honoured at a Sunni Turkic court. The stake was three decades of work and a dedication to a sultan whose favour did not follow. Held below the top because the poem’s own claim is fidelity.
Plato · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
The inheritance is the Socratic dialogue, a prose genre of Socrates’ companions, Antisthenes, Aeschines and Xenophon among them, and the Pythagorean and Orphic teaching on the soul. The swerve: a death narrative made into philosophy, and philosophy made the action of a death; the Forms set out at length and made the ground of an argument, after the “deuteron ploun”
“second sailing” (99d); and an author who writes himself out of the scene by name. The stake was real: to tell the death of a man Athens condemned as the death of the best and justest, and to found on it a claim against the body and the city’s values, was a public wager in the decades after 399. Held below 9 because the Apology and the Crito had already made Socrates’ end the matter of literature: the Phaedo deepens a form Plato had already broken.
George Orwell · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
The inheritance is plain and close: Zamyatin’s We, which supplies the frame of a diarist in a total state, a rebel woman, a love affair against the law and a cure; Huxley; Swift; Koestler’s Darkness at Noon for the interrogation. The turn is made in three places, and each is a departure from the masters the book draws on. The future is made shabby and present: the London of 1948, its rationing, bomb sites and razor blades, not a glass city. The regime is stripped of any claim to happiness, against Huxley and Zamyatin both: power is its only end. And language is made the instrument of rule, with an appendix to prove it. The hero is denied even martyrdom. The stake was real: a man of the left, dying, writing a book the right would take up. Held below the top because the instrument is the realist novel with an essay inset, a proven path, and the debt to We is heavy in the plot itself.
Michelangelo · Architecture
9.0 · Tier V
The inheritance was the long, timber-roofed basilica, the form of the church it replaced and of the Western cathedral, and the centralised domed space of the Pantheon and of Brunelleschi. The departures: Bramante’s decision to replace the most venerated church of the West with a centralised domed building, demolishing as he built; and Michelangelo’s core, one sculptural mass bound by a giant order, under a drum of paired columns and a ribbed double dome that joined Florence to Rome at the Pantheon’s scale. The stake was the destruction of the Constantinian basilica, and a cost raised partly by indulgences. Held lower because the completed building retreated from its swerve into a Latin cross, and the dome synthesised inherited elements.
Leo Tolstoy · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
The departure is real, and it cost something. Tolstoy’s novels had placed dying among many lives, Andrei Bolkonsky’s and Nikolay Levin’s. Here the dying is the whole subject, the protagonist a deliberately undistinguished official, the end given in the first chapter, and a whole life compressed into two chapters of summary, refusing the incident on which realist fiction ran. The book wagers that a reader will follow a mediocre man’s body and mind through months of illness with no event but pain. The stake was Tolstoy’s art itself: this was his first major fiction after A Confession, written when he had begun to doubt that art had any claim. Held below the summit because the inherited paths stay visible: Gogol’s clerk, the Christian art of dying, and Tolstoy’s own earlier deathbeds.
Alexander Pushkin · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
The means are inherited. The tetrameter is Pushkin’s own and the eighteenth century’s; the Petersburg panegyric descends from Lomonosov, Derzhavin and Batyushkov’s walk through the city; the narrative poem is the form of his southern poems and of Byron; and the meeting with Peter’s statue answers Mickiewicz’s digression on the same monument in the third part of Dziady, which Pushkin’s notes cite. The turn is in their use: a narrative poem whose hero is neither a Byronic outlaw nor a prince but a poor clerk without a surname, set inside the form of the state ode, so that ode and tale read each other; a verse that admits the plainest prose phrasing, our hero lives in Kolomna and works somewhere; an ending with no apotheosis and no moral. The stake was paid: the Tsar marked the poem, Pushkin refused the changes, and it went unpublished in his life. What holds the axis is that the instruments were his own and his age’s, recombined rather than invented.
Chola, under Rajaraja I · Architecture
9.0 · Tier V
The inheritance is a mature grammar: the Pallava temples of Mamallapuram and Kanchipuram, the early Chola stone shrines, the Dravida tower of tiers, pavilions and dome. Every element at Thanjavur has its precedent. The departure is in scale, and here scale changes kind: the earlier Chola sanctum towers were modest, and this one, at about 66 m, turns the roof of a shrine into the landmark of a state. Add granite carried into a delta without stone and gateways raised to monumental size. The stake was real: a height the tradition had never tried, with a conquest treasury and the king’s name committed to it. What holds it is that the swerve is of magnitude inside a proven language: a proven path, walked at an unproven height.
John Milton · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
The inheritance is the whole pastoral elegy: Theocritus’s first Idyll, the Lament for Bion, Virgil’s fifth and tenth Eclogues, Sannazaro, Spenser’s November eclogue and Astrophel. By 1637 the convention was worn, and the volume for King was full of it. The swerve is threefold: a verse form taken from the canzone and broken further, so that the poem sounds improvised within the strictest of genres; the invective of St Peter, which Spenser had licensed but never pressed so hard, delivered in the year of Prynne’s mutilation by a young man without position; and the coda, which turns the lament into a performance seen from outside. The stake was real. Held below 9.0 because each element has a precedent, and the wager was placed inside the most honoured form.
Virginia Woolf · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
The inheritance is the Edwardian novel of Bennett, Wells and Galsworthy, the novel of houses, incomes and careers that Woolf attacked in “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown” (1924), with James, Conrad and Proust behind it. The turn is a novel of one day without chapters, passing from mind to mind on the occasion of a motor car, an aeroplane writing letters in the sky or a clock, with a past dug out behind each person to meet in the present, and two protagonists joined by nothing in the plot. The stake was real but limited: Woolf owned her press, so no editor could refuse her, and Jacob’s Room (1922) had already broken with the realist form. Above all, Ulysses (1922) had made the single day and the city’s crossing minds a form, and Woolf read it while she wrote. The swerve is her own, the tunnelled past, the double who never meets, the sentence that crosses minds without a seam, but it is not the first break.
Samuel Beckett · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Measured against the drama it inherited, the departure is extreme: no action that changes the situation, no outside world shown, a stage that is also a skull with two eyes, and characters who know they are in a theatre, Hamm commenting on his own story as technique and on his last soliloquy as a turn still to come. The stake was real: a play in French by an Irish novelist, its first performance given in French in London. Held below the top by an inheritance from its own author. En attendant Godot (1953) had already made the decisive turn, and Fin de partie deepens and darkens it rather than making a second of equal size: the more radical of the two in closure and in cruelty, the less radical in being first.
Valmiki · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The poem inherited Vedic hymn and sacrificial prose on one side, and on the other the oral heroic narrative, ākhyāna and itihāsa, sung by bards. It turns that narrative toward feeling, description and figure. It is called the ādikāvya, the first poem, and the claim is made inside the work: its second sarga stages the birth of the śloka out of grief at a killing. The similes, the seasons, the landscapes that answer the hero’s state and the long attention to a woman’s sorrow depart in kind from the battle narrative it otherwise remains. Held below the top because the inheritance is largely lost, and because much of the swerve grew by accretion rather than by one wager.
Aeschylus · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The departure from the inheritance is large and named. Against Hesiod, the play turns the trickster into a philanthropist and the just order of Zeus into a new tyranny, harsh because new: a theological wager at a festival of Dionysus, before a city that sacrificed to Zeus. Against the form of tragedy as it stood, it puts at the centre a protagonist who cannot act, from the first line to the last, casts it wholly with gods but for Io, and makes its plot a secret withheld. The stake was real: a play that indicts the king of the gods could be heard as impiety, and a fixed hero risked a static play. Held below the higher figures because a trilogy, if the play stood in one, likely carried the swerve toward reconciliation, and the visitor structure is a received shape.
Jalal al-Din Rumi · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the didactic Sufi masnavi of Sana’i’s Hadiqat al-Haqiqa and of Attar, whose Mantiq al-Tayr holds its tales inside the birds’ journey to the Simurgh. Rumi kept Attar’s metre and broke the frame: a teaching poem with no frame and no ending, its voice breaking into its own tales to address Husam, God or itself, its tales nested three and four deep and dropped when the meaning has escaped them. Obscene tales are set inside exegesis on purpose, so that the lowest matter carries the highest, and God rebukes a prophet for correcting a herdsman’s crude piety. The stake was paid: some of the learned censured the poem, and a critic inside it scorns it as mere tales of prophets. Held here because the metre, the form and the method of tale and gloss were received, and the swerve perfects the freedom of a genre more than it breaks its terms.
Jorge Luis Borges · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the fantastic tale of Poe, Stevenson, Chesterton and Kafka, the detective story, the gaucho literature of Hernández, and Borges’s own Ficciones (1944). The turn here is real and costs something: the metaphysical fiction is carried out of the library into history and the pampa, into the Argentine civil wars (“La otra muerte”, whose premise is that the past itself can be altered), the Nazi’s confession and a factory girl’s revenge; and the narrator of “El Aleph” is named Borges and made petty, jealous and comic inside a vision of the infinite. The stake was that the device would cheapen these matters or that the matters would weigh the device down, and for the most part it holds. Held below the top because the larger departure was made in Ficciones five years before, and much here extends a method already proved.
Andrea Palladio · Architecture
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance is twofold: the Veneto villa as a working farm, which Palladio had been building for twenty-five years with a temple front on the house; and the decorum that gave the dome to the church and the temple front to the gods. The departure: a house with four fronts and no back; a dome over a private dwelling, and a hall under it that serves no cult; a villa with no farm, built as an instrument for seeing. The stake was real: a patron’s fortune on a house that gave up a sheltered side and put its kitchens underground, and an architect’s standing, near sixty, on breaking the decorum of types on the most visible site around his city. Held below the top because the turn was reached step by step along Palladio’s own path, and the dome, the boldest part of the wager, was built lower than published.
Anton Chekhov · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the well-made play, Ostrovsky’s merchant comedy and Ibsen’s drama of revelation and confrontation. The swerve: the central event offstage; a protagonist who does nothing; a hero of the sale who is also its bereaved; dialogue in which people answer what was not said; farce, Charlotta’s conjuring and Yepikhodov’s broken cue, set inside an elegy; and Chekhov’s insistence on comedy against his own theatre. The stake was real: the Moscow Art Theatre played it as tragedy, and he objected. Held below the top because the greater break, at the greater cost, was The Seagull, whose failure at the Alexandrinsky in 1896 is the stake of the method; this play carries the method to its end rather than inventing it.
J. R. R. Tolkien · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance is twofold, and the book departs from both. From the romance tradition (Malory, the sagas, Beowulf, William Morris, Dunsany, Eddison) it departs by putting a hobbit drawn as a novel draws its people at the eye of the story, so that the cost is felt in a small life; by treating an invented world as history, with chronology, languages and appendices; and by ending the quest in failure redeemed. From the novel of its decade it departs utterly: a long heroic romance without irony, in an archaic high style where it chose, published in the years of late modernism and postwar realism. The stake was real, and paid in a critical contempt that lasted decades. Held below the top because the parts are medieval and the swerve is in their fusion.
Gabriel García Márquez · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance is plain: Faulkner’s county and its doomed families, Kafka’s deadpan acceptance of the impossible, Borges’s books that contain their readers, and in the Spanish of the Americas Carpentier’s “lo real maravilloso”, the prologue of 1949, and Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo (1955), whose dead town speaks in a voice that fuses the marvellous and the plain. The synthesis is itself a turn. The total novel in Spanish had been going toward difficulty, Cortázar’s Rayuela (1963) above all; this book made it narratable, a chronicle of a continent in the single voice of a family storyteller, with wonder and history on one plane and a closing turn in which the novel is revealed as the prophecy it narrates. The stake was real: a writer of four small books and no wide readership, by his own account in debt through the writing, wagering years on a long family chronicle in a manner the avant-garde had left behind. What holds the axis there is that the means were made by others. The departure is in the fusion and the tone, not in the instrument.
Raphael · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the High Renaissance altarpiece, the painter’s own above all: one scene, a calm and centred symmetry, a single unifying light, figures in a measured space. The departure is in three things: two episodes in one field, divided and joined, in an altarpiece; a night of strong chiaroscuro below, a raking light over deep shadow that looks forward to Caravaggio and the Baroque; and agitation, the lower figures thrown into opposing diagonals, gesture made the medium of the drama. The stake was real: a public contest with Sebastiano and Michelangelo for the same patron, answered by abandoning the harmony that was his signature at the height of his fame. Held below 9.0 because the turn is within his own practice and the Roman school, and its parts had precedents.
Katsushika Hokusai · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the ukiyo-e print of actors and courtesans, with the picture of famous places, the perspective print after Western models, Chinese manuals and Rinpa waves behind it. The turn is on four counts. A commercial single-sheet series makes landscape its whole subject, which the market had treated as minor. The famous place becomes a moment: Kanagawa is offshore and invisible. The viewpoint is from inside the sea, with a low Western horizon, in a tradition that looked down on its subjects. And the colour is an import pigment two years in the market. The stake was money: an artist of seventy, and a publisher’s capital on an unproven genre and a new blue. Held below the top because the path was half proven: Hokusai had drawn this wave twice before, the perspective print was decades old, and the cost was commercial, not to standing or safety.
William Faulkner · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the interior monologue as Joyce had made it, the impressionist narrators of Conrad and James, and the Southern novel of the rural poor, which had been local colour or sociology. The turn: fifteen voices and no narrator, a child’s and a dead woman’s among them; a novel in fifty-nine short stations; a carpenter’s section in numbered points; and a method built for the urban and the educated turned on tenant farmers and made to carry farce and tragedy at once. The stake was real: a writer whose last book had sold little wagered that readers would assemble a family from fragments with no guide. Held below the top because the greater break had been made a year before, in The Sound and the Fury, and this book refines the method that book opened rather than opening it.
John Coltrane · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the quartet’s own modal language, built since 1961 (the long vamps, Tyner’s chords in fourths, Jones’s polyrhythm), and behind it the hard-bop record of tunes and solos. The turn is real. A jazz album is made as one suite in four parts bound by a single figure, with an explicit devotional programme: a chanted phrase, a printed poem, and a saxophone that plays the poem’s syllables. The sacred had entered extended jazz before, but not in this form or at this pitch, and the turn to open prayer staked a leading band’s record on an audience wary of piety. What holds it from the top: the language is proven, consolidated rather than left; Pursuance is a fast minor blues; and the fuller swerve came six months later, with Ascension.
Alessandro Manzoni · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Scott’s historical novel, Ivanhoe (1819) the model of the 1820s, and an Italian tradition with no modern novel of standing and no common spoken prose. The swerve is threefold. The heroes: two peasants, illiterate or nearly, at the centre of a long novel in Italian, with the great of the century in supporting parts. The voice: a narrator who quarrels with his found manuscript, corrects its style, inserts the archive and argues with the reader, so that the novel contains its own historiography. The language: Manzoni rewrote a published and successful book to make it speak a living Tuscan, a wager on a national language that did not yet exist. The cost was real: in Del romanzo storico (1850) he argued that the form he had used was impossible. Held off the top because the frame was Scott’s.
Leonardo da Vinci · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the Florentine portrait of women in strict profile; the Netherlandish three-quarter bust before a landscape, Memling’s, which Florence had already taken up; and Leonardo’s own earlier portraits, Ginevra de’ Benci with her three-quarter turn and landscape, and the Lady with an Ermine turning with her hands in view. The departure: the half-length with both hands, set in a stable pyramid; the sitter turned to meet the viewer and held at the instant of an expression; the outline abolished, so that form is made of shadow; and a landscape no longer a backdrop but a world in aerial perspective at the scale of the figure. The stake was paid, not only risked: by every account the portrait was never delivered, and he kept it. Held below the top because each element has a precedent in his own work; the swerve is a synthesis carried to the limit.
Albrecht Dürer · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Two departures, each with a stake. In iconography the print breaks the received picture of melancholy as the lowest temperament, the heavy earthy type of the temperament cycles, and joins it to the noblest of the arts, giving a body in northern art to the melancholy genius of Ficino’s De vita (1489). In the medium it makes an engraving carry an unresolved meditation for private study, without narrative, saint or lesson, sold on the open market. The cost was legibility: a print its buyers could not easily read, cut with the investment of a painting. Held short of the top because every material was in circulation; the turn is in their union.
Honoré de Balzac · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the novel of manners, the roman noir and the melodrama of the boulevards, Scott’s historical novel, which Balzac openly took as his model, and the eighteenth-century novel of education. The turn is in two things. The milieu is made causal: the house, the street, the furniture and the price of every dinner are forces that make character, and description becomes an argument. And the characters return: in writing this novel Balzac decided that his books would share one population and one society, a wager on a single work of a hundred volumes that he could not know he would live to make good. The book also joins the melodrama’s machinery, the convict, the drugged wine, the duel, to a realism of money the melodrama never had. Held below the top because those inherited materials stay visible, and the full break is the Comédie humaine, of which this is the threshold.
Virgil · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Theocritus: the Idylls, a Hellenistic form of herdsmen’s song, already artful, already a city poet’s game. The turn is in three moves. Virgil let Roman history into the form: the confiscations after Philippi, a living young ruler made a god, a consul and a fellow poet named in the bucolic world. He made the landscape symbolic, an ideal place rather than a Sicily, so that pastoral became a mode for speaking of anything. And he built the ten as a book, an architecture the Greek collection did not have. The stake was real: a first book in a minor form, put before the patrons of a civil war. Held at 8.8 because the debt is close, line by line in places, in the second, third, seventh and eighth poems.
Jean Racine · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The instrument was inherited whole: the alexandrine, the five acts and the unities came from Corneille’s stage and the doctrine of the 1630s and 1640s, and the play changes no form. The swerve is in what the form is for. Corneille’s tragedy turns on the will mastering passion, and on admiration; here passion is the fatality and the will its instrument. The stake was public: an author of twenty seven, after the failure of his first tragedy and a modest second, set himself against the reigning master on his own ground, and was attacked for it. The departure cut against the source as well: Racine kept Astyanax alive and Andromache faithful to Hector, against Euripides, and said so. A turn of the whole French stage; held below the top because the instrument was not changed.
Chinua Achebe · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is double, and the turn is against both. The English novel of Africa, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Joyce Cary’s Mister Johnson, which Achebe said he answered, had seen Africans from outside, as darkness or as comedy. Achebe took the European realist novel and the classical tragic form and set them inside an Igbo village before contact, in English bent to carry Igbo speech, proverb and tale, with no explaining narrator to translate. The last turn is structural: one page inside the colonizer’s mind, and the irony needs no comment. The stake was real: a Nigerian writer in his twenties, in the colonial language, before independence. Held below the top because the form is inherited whole, and Tutuola had brought Yoruba narration into English in 1952.
Sappho · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is epic: hexameter narrative, its formulae, its scale of value in armies, ships and glory. Sappho turns its means to the single voice and its ends upside down. The hymn takes the form of a Homeric prayer, with its appeal to help given before, and gives it to a lover gently mocked by the goddess she summons. Fragment 16 names the epic goods and sets them below whatever one loves, with the Iliad’s own cause, Helen, recast as a woman who chose. Fragment 31 describes the body as epic describes a warrior’s fear, and applies it to watching a girl laugh. The stake was real: a woman’s first-person voice, on desire between women, in a public tradition of male song. Held below the top because Archilochus had already set the first person against epic, and Alcaeus, on the same island, worked the same forms.
Rashtrakuta, under Krishna I · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is twofold. One is the Indian rock-cut tradition, a thousand years of chaitya halls and monasteries cut into cliffs, Ellora’s own Buddhist and Brahmanical caves among them, and the small monoliths of Mamallapuram, cut from boulders standing above ground. The other is the structural Dravida temple of Pattadakal and Kanchipuram. The departure: a complete temple complex of two storeys, with bridges, tower and court, cut free in the round from a hillside, downward, at the scale of the largest built temples of its day, the cave turned inside out into a building. The stake was a dynasty’s labour on a method that admits no correction. Held below the top because the temple it makes is a proven design copied from a masonry model.
Akira Kurosawa · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the period film, the jidaigeki, as Japanese studios made it, and narrative cinema at large, where a flashback was trusted to show what happened. The film turns both. It shows four incompatible pasts, each with the camera’s full authority, so that the image itself is made to lie; it plays testimony straight into the lens with the questioner removed; it points the camera into the sun. Citizen Kane (1941) had used several witnesses, but its accounts add up; here they cancel. The wager was a period picture that refuses its audience a fact. Held below the top because the contradictory confessions, and the turn by which each teller claims the killing, are Akutagawa’s. The film’s own departures are the lying image, the frontal court, the fourth account and the frame.
Samuel Beckett · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The turn is the tape recorder made a stage partner: a dialogue between a man and his own younger voice, which he can interrupt, rewind, curse and skip, and which cannot hear him. No play before it had put a man’s recorded past on stage as an agent. The inheritance is the monologue and the one-actor play, Strindberg’s The Stronger, Cocteau’s La Voix humaine with its telephone, and the memory play; the turn is that the absent partner is the self. It was Beckett’s return to English for the stage, and to an autobiographical matter he had kept out of the French plays. The stake was real after Godot had fixed what a Beckett play was. Held below the top because the solo form was inherited and the wager bounded by its scale.
Jean Renoir · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance was the French poetic realism of the later 1930s, Renoir’s own La Bête humaine (1938) and the films of Carné and Prévert among it, with its doomed lovers and fatal atmosphere, and beside it the boulevard comedy of adultery. The film refuses both: a fatal ending with no fatalism, a farce that kills, a large cast with no hero, and a tone that changes inside a single shot. The stake was high and it was paid: the film was banned twice, and for twenty years it existed only in mutilated versions. Held below the top because part of the turn was prepared in Renoir’s own work, in the depth staging and the mobile ensemble of Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (1936) and La Grande Illusion (1937).
Francis Ford Coppola · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the American war film, split by 1979 between the patriotic combat picture and the new grief of The Deer Hunter and Coming Home (both 1978). The film turns from both. It treats a war four years over as hallucination rather than record, sets a Victorian novella of empire in Vietnam, scores an assault to Wagner and the war’s opening to a rock song, and ends in ritual and silence. The stake was as large as any in American film: Coppola’s own money, years of his career, his reputation, and a premiere as unfinished work. Held below the top by precedent: Herzog had made a river descent into madness in Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), and the frame is Conrad’s.
The Clash · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the band’s own: the year-zero punk of its first album, which declared the past dead, and the larger rock sound of Give ’Em Enough Rope. The turn is to embrace exactly what punk had refused: rockabilly, rhythm and blues, ska, reggae, lounge jazz, the pop ballad, horns, and a producer who belonged to the 1960s. The stake was real and public: the band’s standing as the conscience of punk, wagered on a double album that looked like the rock indulgence punk existed to end, and on covers of the old music it had disowned. What limits it is the path. The turn ran back into a proven tradition, and the reggae swerve had been made on the first album with Police and Thieves: large in the band’s field, smaller in the music’s.
Hans Holbein the Younger · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Northern portrait and the learned portrait with attributes: the sitter shown with the tools of his calling, and the vanitas kept apart, as a separate panel or a still life on a reverse. The departure is radical. Holbein put a death’s head into the portrait itself, in a different projection, across the foreground of a state picture, so that the picture cannot be seen whole from any one place. Anamorphosis existed as a curiosity in prints and studies; here it is set inside the most worldly genre there was. The stake was the commission: a large picture for a French nobleman’s house in which the patron’s own body dissolves. The patron likely shared the device, which lowers the risk; the turn was still taken.
Diego Velázquez · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Two inheritances: the mythological history painting of Titian and Rubens, with its gods visible as gods, and the bodegón of the painter’s own youth, with its kitchens and workers. The departure is to fold the first into the second: a fable told as a workroom, the goddess dressed as a spinner, the climax pushed into the background and half woven into a tapestry, so that a history painting presents itself as a genre scene and the viewer must find the myth. With it comes the late handling at its freest, the wheel painted as motion and the air as substance. The risk of misreading was borne by the picture, which was misread. The turn is deep; the stake was the painter’s, more than the canvas’s.
Don DeLillo · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is plain: Dos Passos’s U.S.A., the encyclopedic systems novel of Pynchon and Gaddis, DeLillo’s own Libra, which had already set real figures in a historical fiction, and his compressed novels of the 1980s with their deadpan voice. The turn is in two things. The book reverses its chronology across half a century, so that history is excavated rather than narrated and the reader arrives at causes last; and it took the systems novel, which had held its persons at a distance, and gave it a family, a neighbourhood and an elegiac warmth the earlier DeLillo had withheld. The stake was real: an 827-page book after a career of shorter ones, and a historical novel that refuses the forward drive of its genre. Held below the top because telling a story backward had been done before, the mixing of real and invented figures was established, and the voice is the author’s matured manner.
Titian · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Venetian poesia, Titian’s own above all, the mythologies for Philip II of the 1550s and 1560s, and behind the composition Giulio Romano’s design for the Palazzo Te, which the picture follows in its disposition. The departure is in the paint: forms left open, built from broken touches and scumbles, worked, on Palma Giovane’s report as Boschini gives it, with the fingers; contour dissolved into air. A mannerist decorative design becomes a dark, meditative object with a seated thinker at its edge, which the source had not. The stake was real: contemporaries judged the late manner unfinish or failing sight, and Vasari set down the doubt. Charged because the borrowed design limits the turn to treatment more than invention.
Sergei Eisenstein · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance was the narrative cinema of the individual hero and the theatrical historical film. The turn: a collective hero; parts cast by type rather than by actor; a story told by the collision of shots rather than the continuity of action; time stretched and broken on the steps; a political argument carried by cutting. The stake was real: a state commission with a deadline, a political subject, a director of twenty-seven on his second feature, and a form no audience had been trained to read. Held below the top because much of the turn was made the year before in Strike (1924), which already had the collective hero, typage and the montage of attractions, and because Kuleshov’s experiments and Griffith’s Intolerance had prepared the theory of the cut. This is the turn perfected and made legible more than the turn first taken.
Caravaggio · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the beheading as altarpiece and narrative, given as Salome receiving the head on the charger or as the raised sword at the blow, the figures filling the field; and the painter’s own Roman manner, figures packed against a dark ground at the front of the picture. The departure is the moment after the sword and before the knife; the figures pushed into one corner of a five metre canvas and set back in a deep, empty architecture; the paint thinned, the handling quick. The stake was real: a painter under sentence of death for homicide, justifying his knighthood in his largest format, chose emptiness where splendour was expected. Held below the top because the turn was prepared in his own work.
Titian · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Venetian altarpiece as Giovanni Bellini fixed it, the sacra conversazione: still figures in a painted architecture continuous with the carved frame, an apse within the apse. Bellini’s triptych of 1488 hangs in this church’s sacristy. On that ground the departure is total: no architecture inside the panel, figures in violent motion, a narrative event in place of a timeless assembly, colossal scale, and a structure held by colour and light rather than perspective. The frame keeps the classical arch outside the picture, and the picture breaks upward out of it. The stake was real: a young painter’s first great public altarpiece, on the high altar of one of the city’s two great mendicant churches. Held below the top because Rome had moved this way already, Raphael’s Transfiguration was being painted in the same years, and the subject was not new.
Terrence Malick · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the American family drama and the star vehicle. The departures: a cosmogony set inside a family melodrama; a narration that is prayer, whispered and addressed to God; a story told as memory, out of order and in fragments, its scenes unfinished; an ending with no event, only a gathering. The stake was real: a star picture from a studio’s specialty arm, which by report drew boos as well as applause at Cannes. Held below the top by its precedents. Tarkovsky’s Mirror (1975) had already made a childhood out of fragmentary memory, and its mother also rises into the air. 2001 had already put the cosmos on screen, through the same Douglas Trumbull. Malick’s own Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line had made the whispered voice-over his manner.
Søren Kierkegaard · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The form is the swerve. The tradition of the treatise on faith and ethics is answered by a Dialektisk Lyrik, written by a pseudonym who says he cannot make the movement of faith, who praises what he cannot understand, and whose name is silence. Philosophy in Copenhagen in 1843 was Hegelian, in Heiberg and Martensen; the book attacks the system’s claim to go further than faith from inside a literary mask, mixing eulogy, fairy tale, legend, case and satire. The stake was real: Kierkegaard published at his own expense, into a small city that could read the book as a private apology for a broken engagement, a wager on a form with no public. What holds the axis: the turn to the single individual had antecedents, Hamann above all, whom the epigraph names, and the Pauline and Lutheran tradition the title cites.
Robert Browning · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance was the Romantic lyric of the poet’s own feeling. The swerve is to the poem of another’s voice, in colloquial syntax broken by interruption, digression and the listener’s unheard replies, in a verse that will be rough when the speaker is rough: “I am poor brother Lippo, by your leave!” It cost. The book sold badly, and Browning’s standing lagged Tennyson’s for a decade; his reputation was made over the following years, with Dramatis Personae (1864) and The Ring and the Book (1868 to 1869). What holds it below the top: the dramatic monologue was already Browning’s own in 1842 and 1845, in “My Last Duchess” and “The Bishop Orders His Tomb”, so this book is the full arrival of a turn already taken, not the turn itself. It is the swerve made large, and made to hold a whole book’s range.
Andrea Mantegna · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Lamentation and the Entombment as narrative images: the body laid across the picture, parallel to its plane, legible from the side, the mourners round it in a frieze, as in Giotto’s Lamentation in the Arena Chapel at Padua, which Mantegna knew, and in his own engravings and panels of the Entombment. The departure is a turn of ninety degrees. The body is set along the line of sight, so that the viewer’s position replaces the narrative; the mourners are pushed to a corner; colour is withdrawn almost to grisaille; the scale is made intimate rather than altar-sized. Foreshortening a whole figure was not new as a problem, in Mantegna’s own ceiling oculus at Mantua and in Uccello’s studies, but it had not been made the whole of a devotional image. The stake was decorum: the feet first, and the body as a corpse.
Pierre Choderlos de Laclos · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is plain and was at its height: Richardson’s Clarissa, with Lovelace as the libertine of letters, and Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse, from whose preface the epigraph is taken. The turn is in the use of the form. Richardson and Rousseau gave the letter as the transparent heart; Laclos makes it an instrument of deceit, written for effect, copied, dictated, intercepted and forwarded, so that the reader learns to read every letter twice. No voice has authority: the two prefaces contradict each other and the footnotes are unreliable. The book borrows the sentimental novel’s moral alibi and hollows it. The stake was real: an artillery officer’s only novel, a scandal on publication, held against him at court. Below the top because the form was inherited intact; the swerve is in its use, not its making.
Théodore Géricault · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is history painting in David’s school, at the largest scale the Salon allowed, reserved for antiquity, scripture and, under the Empire, the deeds of Napoleon; Gros at Jaffa and at Eylau had already brought the contemporary and the suffering body to that scale. The departure: a contemporary event of national shame, chosen by a young painter without a commission; no hero, no leader, no sovereign, no victory; anonymous victims given the bodies and the scale of heroes; the moment of false hope rather than the rescue; a Black man at the summit. The stake was real: two years of work, a canvas no private buyer could house, a subject the government could only take as an attack. Held below the top because Gros had prepared the turn, and the academic body is kept intact.
Stanley Kubrick · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Cold War suspense thriller, the source novel itself among it, Peter George’s sober tale of an accidental nuclear attack; beside it the service comedy and the satire of the early 1960s, Sellers from British radio farce, Southern from the American comic novel. The turn: Kubrick began a serious adaptation and made it a nightmare comedy, straight in its procedures and absurd in its men, with the world destroyed at the end and no rescue. The stake was large. The Cuban crisis of October 1962 was recent, and a studio picture mocked the President’s council, the Air Force and the strategists by type. Held below the top by precedent: the black comedy of murder had been made in Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), Kubrick’s own Lolita (1962) had already set Sellers loose in it, and Swift had shown the way centuries before.
Wong Kar-wai · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Hong Kong and Shanghai melodrama, Fei Mu’s Spring in a Small Town (1948) among it; the film of the love not taken, Brief Encounter (1945) above all; and Wong’s own manner of the 1990s, the handheld camera, step-printing and voice-over of Chungking Express (1994) and Fallen Angels (1995). The turn is double. Against the genre, the spouses are kept off screen, so the affair at the centre of the plot is never seen. Against the manner that had made Wong’s name, the film chose stillness, composed frames and period restraint, and told its story by repetition and costume; the stake was that name. Held below the top because the genre turn returns to a path Brief Encounter proved, and Days of Being Wild (1990) had already set Wong in this decade and mood.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the eighteenth-century novel of sensibility, Goethe’s own Werther first among its books, and the novel of education he had written in Wilhelm Meister. The swerve is threefold. A novel of adultery is told by a narrator who observes as a natural philosopher observes, ironic and withholding judgement, and who names his hero in the first sentence as a convenience. The governing figure is taken from contemporary chemistry, Bergman’s theory of elective attraction, and made to bear moral weight. And the moral question is left open. The stake was real for a writer of Goethe’s standing in 1809. Held below 9.0 because the realist means are not new: the swerve is in the frame and the stance.
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the four-movement symphony as Beethoven left it and the nineteenth century practised it, the finale as resolution and arrival. The departures are architectural: a slow finale ending in silence, in the minor; the triumphant movement placed third, so that the form contains a false ending; a waltz in 5/4; a lament no section plays, made from two lines of violins; a first-movement development entered from six p’s. The stake was real: the composer put the form before the public himself, conducting the premiere. Held below the top because the harmonic and orchestral language is his settled idiom, not a new one, and because quiet closes had precedents, Haydn’s Farewell and Brahms’s Third among them.
Percy Bysshe Shelley · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Aeschylus’s Prometheus plays, whose lost sequel ended, as far as is known, in reconciliation, and Milton’s epic of the rebel against heaven. Shelley swerves from both: no reconciliation with the oppressor, a close the Preface calls too feeble, and a rebel without Satan’s ambition and revenge, who wins by unsaying his curse rather than by force. The form swerves too: a lyrical drama, neither a play for the stage nor an epic, in which the drama dissolves into song, and a fourth act with no action at all. The stake was real: the poem was unplayable in the theatre, met contempt in the Tory reviews and sold almost nothing in Shelley’s life. Held below 9.0 by precedent, Byron’s Manfred (1817) and Goethe’s Faust, and because the political hope was a circle’s, Godwin’s above all, rather than Shelley’s alone.
Béla Tarr · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the long take of Hungarian cinema, Miklós Jancsó above all, the duration of Tarkovsky, and Tarr’s own turn from the handheld social realism of his early films to the black and white of Damnation (1988), already made with Krasznahorkai and Víg. The departure is in scale and in structure, and both cost a great deal: a narrative of more than seven hours, with very few cuts and chapters that double back in time, made as the country’s film industry was collapsing and almost impossible to programme. The wager was that duration alone could carry it. Held below the top because the manner, the camera, the weather and the partnership were proved in Damnation: the swerve is in magnitude and architecture more than in grammar.
Friedrich Nietzsche · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The turn: philosophy that questions its own will to truth, written not as a system but as a sequence of provisional attempts in the voice of a “perhaps”, against the German tradition of the treatise from Kant to Hegel, and against Schopenhauer, whose will it reads again as will to power (§36). The cost was real: a book no publisher would take on terms, printed at the author’s expense, and read by almost no one at the time. It is held below the top band because the aphoristic form was inherited, from the French moralists, La Rochefoucauld and Chamfort, and from Lichtenberg, and because Nietzsche had made the move to the book of aphorisms himself, in Menschliches, Allzumenschliches (1878) and Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (1882). What is new is the return of the aphorism to the essay and the plan: a book of aphorisms that is also an argument.
Leonardo da Vinci · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Lombard and Florentine altarpiece of the 1470s and 1480s: the Virgin enthroned in architecture, saints ranged at either side, a gilded carved frame, figures bounded by contour and lit for legibility. The departure: no throne, no architecture, no saints at the sides; a wilderness cave; an apocryphal subject in the place of a devotional image; no haloes; figures bound not by contour but by shadow, emerging from a darkness that is the picture’s ground; a group composed as a pyramid by glance and gesture rather than ranked in a row. The stake was paid, not only risked: the picture led to a dispute with its patrons that ran, with arbitration, into 1508, and to a second version. Held below the top because the turn was prepared in Leonardo’s own unfinished Adoration of the Magi in Florence.
Huang Gongwang · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the monumental landscape of the Northern Song, of Fan Kuan, Guo Xi and Li Cheng, and the lyric fragment of the Southern Song academy, of Ma Yuan and Xia Gui: in either case a world shown, painted by professionals for a court. The departure is a landscape that records the painter’s brush and mind rather than the world’s grandeur: the long dry hemp-fibre stroke, out of Dong Yuan and Juran, made the carrier of the whole; ink laid dry and built up rather than washed; a scroll made over years with its time visible in it; the amateur’s painting as the highest kind. The turn is large and governed the next six centuries. The stake is held down: Zhao Mengfu had already opened the Yuan return to Dong Yuan and Juran, and an elderly Daoist painting for a friend ran no public risk.
Virginia Woolf · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Woolf turns away from the novel she had made her own. The single consciousness and the interior stream give way to a choral book: the audience is the protagonist, heard in overheard fragments; a play in verse and prose is set inside the novel; the narration cuts between the stage, the lawn, the gramophone and the sky. The book borrows the village pageant, a homely English form of the 1930s, and makes it a mode of history and of criticism at once. The stake was real: Woolf had been charged with remoteness from the common life, and this book gives the common life the stage at the risk of the comic and the trivial. The departure from The Waves, which had pushed interiority as far as it would go, is complete. Held below 9.0 because the choral novel had precedents, in the “Wandering Rocks” of Ulysses and in Woolf’s own crowds in Mrs Dalloway.
Rembrandt van Rijn · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is twofold: the Dutch marriage portrait, the couple side by side or hand in hand, composed for display; and history painting, the biblical scene told by action and witness. The departure dissolves both. The portrait becomes a scene of private touch, the history loses its narrative and its witness, and what is left is neither and both. The handling departs further: a sleeve built up like relief, a surface that refuses finish, in the decade when Amsterdam taste had turned to the smooth classicism of younger painters. The stake was paid: Rembrandt had been insolvent since 1656 and painted this way against the market. Held below the top because the late manner, not this canvas alone, carries the swerve.
Michelangelo Antonioni · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is neorealism, which had given Italian film the street and the unresolved ending, and the narrative feature at large, whose contract is that a question posed will be answered. The swerve breaks the contract: a mystery is set up in the first half hour and abandoned, and the film turns to what it was watching all along, the dead time between events, the figure in the landscape, the drift of attention. The stake was paid in full: the first audience at Cannes jeered, and critics and filmmakers signed a statement in its support before the jury gave it a prize. Held below the top because the turn was prepared, by Rossellini’s Journey to Italy (1954) and by Antonioni’s own Il Grido (1957).
Zhang Zeduan · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance: narrative handscrolls, the Admonitions scroll and the Night Revels of Han Xizai among them; ruled-line painting of buildings and boats; the landscape journey on the scroll. The turn: so far as the surviving record shows, nothing before it had given the whole length of a long scroll to the ordinary commercial life of a city, at one scale, with no hero, no moral text and no sacred subject. The stake was real: ruled-line painting stood below landscape and figure painting in critical esteem, and trade and traffic had no dignity in the order of subjects. The turn is among the most consequential in its tradition. It was made inside a court culture that prized exact observation, with proven means rather than new ones, and that holds the axis below the top.
Albrecht Altdorfer · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the history picture of the German Renaissance and the battle print: a narrative of figures, a horizon low or moderate, the deed in front. The commission fixed the format, and the companion pictures of the set show what was expected. The turn: a history painting made into a cosmic landscape, the viewpoint lifted until the earth curves, the deed shrunk to a point within an ocean of figures, the upper half given to the sky and the known world. It draws on the painter’s own invention of pure landscape and on Patinir’s world landscape, but no one had set a historical battle inside a vision of the globe. The stake was real in a ducal commission for a matched set. Held below 9.0 because its elements were already in play and the departure stayed largely a single act.
David Bowie · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Bowie’s own rock and art pop, and immediately The Next Day (2013), a rock record in his established manner. The turn is to a working New York jazz quartet, chosen from a club and given his songs to play with the improviser’s freedom; to drums that borrow the patterns of drum and bass; to a vocabulary of Nadsat and Polari; and to a long two-part title track as both opener and first single. The stake was real: a last record placed on players unknown to the rock audience. What holds it below the top is precedent. Earthling (1997) had already brought drum and bass in, Scott Walker’s late records had cleared the ground for the elder singer’s dark turn, and the meeting of jazz and rock is an old path.
Francisco Goya · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the satirical print and emblem of the Enlightenment, Hogarth’s series and the allegorical frontispiece; the Venetian etched capriccio, Tiepolo’s Capricci and Scherzi; the didactic image whose author stands outside folly and points at it. The swerve: the satirist puts himself, asleep, at the centre of the nightmare, and the monsters come from him; aquatint, a tone process made for reproduction, becomes the medium of the dark; the frontispiece of a moral programme becomes an image of its failure. The stake was real: a court painter publishing at his own cost a set that mocked clergy, nobility and superstition while the Inquisition was active. Held below the top because the whole set carried that stake more than this plate.
Albrecht Dürer · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Netherlandish and German portrait of the fifteenth century, the sitter in three-quarter view at a parapet or a window, and Dürer’s own self-portraits of 1493 and 1498 in that manner, the second already claiming a gentleman’s dress and a landscape window. The departure is total in pose and in claim: the strict frontality and symmetry of the sacred image given to a living layman, the setting abolished, the painter’s hand and his own colours named as the means. The stake was real, for a painter was a craftsman and the image could be read as blasphemy. The cost was risked, not paid, and the risk was private: that holds it below the top.
Auguste Rodin · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance was precise: Ghiberti’s doors for the Baptistery in Florence, the narrative bronze portal of ordered scenes in compartments, with perspective, and behind it the academic relief of the Salon. The departure: the leaves became one undivided field; relief passes into the round and back into the ground; the frame is invaded; narrative order gives way to simultaneity; the fragment, the repeated cast and the unfinished surface become means, not accidents. The stake was paid: a state commission never delivered, thirty-seven years, and a whole seen in Rodin’s lifetime only as an empty frame. Held below the top because the turn was gradual and the extracted figures were shown and sold throughout: the wager was hedged.
Ernest Hemingway · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is visible: Sherwood Anderson’s linked book of a town, Winesburg, Ohio; Joyce’s Dubliners; Gertrude Stein’s repetition; Pound’s imagist economy; and the compressed style of the newspaper cable. The turn was the book’s own: a story built on what is left out, so that the subject of “Big Two-Hearted River” is never named; a sentence of declarative plainness used as a pressure vessel; and a montage of stories and vignettes in which a fishing trip and an execution share a book. Nothing in American fiction of 1925 read like the interchapters. The stake was real: a first book of stories, the weaker form in the market, by an unknown, with its frankest story cut by the publisher and a method that risked being read as thinness. Held below the top because Anderson and Stein had laid much of the path, and “My Old Man” shows the debt nakedly.
Alexander Pushkin · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Russian tragedy in 1825 was French classical: Sumarokov, then Ozerov, in rhymed alexandrines, with the unities and an elevated register throughout. Pushkin threw all of it out at once. He set seven years and more than a dozen places against the unities of time and place; put unrhymed pentameter in place of the alexandrine; set prose, tavern songs, Latin, Polish courtiers and French and German mercenaries beside a chronicle Slavonic; made the people a protagonist; and ended on a stage direction instead of a speech. The stake was real: the play waited five years for print, and the theatres could not or would not stage it for decades. Pushkin knew what he had risked and called it his best. What holds it off the top is that Shakespeare had already made the swerve in another language; the wager was to bring it into Russian, where it was new.
August Strindberg · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the European stage of the 1880s: the well-made play, Ibsen’s prose drama in several acts, and Zola’s call for a theatre of observed life that his own plays had not supplied. The swerve is real and of form: one continuous act in near real time; characters made of many motives rather than a ruling trait; dialogue that drifts and doubles back as talk does; the set turned on a diagonal; the interval abolished and replaced by mime and dance. The stake was paid: Bonnier, Strindberg’s publisher, refused it, Seligmann cut and softened it, and the Danish censor stopped the public premiere. Held below the top because naturalism was a programme already in the air, and some of its means were Zola’s and Antoine’s first.
Spike Lee · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Hollywood social-problem film on race, from The Defiant Ones (1958) to Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and In the Heat of the Night (both 1967), in which a white audience is shown its prejudice and reconciled; beside it, the blaxploitation picture and the American one-day ensemble film. The turns are large. The race picture is made from inside a Black neighbourhood by a Black writer-director, with no reconciliation and no white conscience at its centre; the likeable, idle hero commits the act of destruction; the film closes on two contradictory texts. Old devices from Brecht and Godard, direct address, a painted set, tilted frames, are put to new use, and a hip-hop anthem is its burden. The stake was real: a studio picture by a director with two features behind him, released amid warnings in the press that it would incite riots.
Catullus · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance was Greek, Sappho, Archilochus, Callimachus and the Hellenistic epigram, and at Rome the weight of Ennian epic and public verse. The departure is to make a Roman citizen’s own love, quarrels, brother and friends the subject of a sequence of poems in Latin, in the first person, under a real if veiled woman’s name, and to set the Sapphic stanza of 51 and the obscene iambics of 16 in the same small book. Poem 51 translates Sappho until its last stanza turns on the translator. The stake was real: poems against Caesar and his officer Mamurra (29, 57, 93) while Caesar was the most powerful man in Rome, and an aesthetic of small finished poems against the grand manner. Held short of the top because much of the departure was shared with the neoteric circle, Calvus and Cinna, whose poems are lost.
Apuleius · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance: a Greek comic ass story, which the short Onos among Lucian’s works shares; Milesian tales of adultery and witchcraft; and the Greek ideal romances of lovers parted and reunited. The turn: Apuleius kept the comic ass and broke its ending, putting an epiphany, an initiation and a shaven convert’s joy where the Greek version, as the Onos shows it, ends in a sexual joke; he set at the centre a fairy tale of the soul in mannered Latin; and at the close he let his narrator become a man of Madauros, the author’s own city, turning a Greek’s fiction into something like a confession, unless it is the last joke. The stake was real: a Platonist sophist who had been tried for magic, and answered the charge in his Apology, wrote a novel about a man undone by magic and saved by a cult. Held below the top because the materials were inherited and the frame was the Greek writer’s.
Paul Gauguin · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the large allegorical decoration of the Salon and of Puvis de Chavannes, a pale frieze of figures in a landscape about the meaning of life. The departure: the same ambition carried out in flat, saturated colour on coarse cloth, in a colony at the other end of the world; figures from Polynesian life and from Egyptian and Javanese reliefs in place of classical nudes; the meaning withheld rather than given; the decoration made into a confession. The stake is documented and extreme: the painter described the canvas as a testament made before an attempt at suicide, alone, ill and without money, on the largest canvas he could get. Held below the top because the decisive turn was made a decade earlier, in Brittany in 1888 and in the first Tahitian canvases; this is the summa of a swerve already taken, at its greatest scale and stake.
Walker Evans · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance was threefold: the pictorialist print and its successor, the high modernist print of Stieglitz and his circle, the photograph as the equivalent of its maker’s feeling; the social documentary of Riis and Hine, the photograph as a plea for reform; and the illustrated magazine of the 1930s, the picture subordinated to caption and story. Evans departed from all three: a plain, frontal, impersonal style that keeps the maker out of the picture and records the vernacular without irony or appeal, presented not as fine prints or reportage but as a sequenced book whose meaning lies in juxtaposition. The stake was real: against Stieglitz, then the arbiter of photography as art, in a museum, by a man in his mid thirties. Atget’s record of Paris, which Evans knew and admired, stands behind the plain style and holds the axis below the top.
Donatello · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance has two strands. One is the Tuscan wooden penitent, a devotional type already present in the fourteenth century, the hair-clad Magdalen painted on panels and carved for churches. The other is the Florentine Renaissance body that Donatello had done most to make: the classical nude, the beautiful youth, the dignified prophet. The departure is to turn the new naturalism against the new ideal, anatomy studied as closely as any antique body and used to show the body wasted, aged and ugly, at the scale of life, in the city’s baptismal church. No sculptor in the city had made the penitent so unsparing, and a workshop at the height of its prestige risked the repellent in a culture that prized beauty. The cost was risked rather than paid, and the medium and type were inherited.
Mikhail Lermontov · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The turn is in form and in stance at once. In 1840 Russian prose had Pushkin’s tales and Gogol; it had no psychological novel. Lermontov makes one out of a cycle of tales that look like the travel sketch, the Caucasian adventure, the society tale, the confessional diary and the philosophical anecdote, and arranges them against chronology, so that the hero is approached from outside inward. The stance was the stake: a hero plainly not admirable, offered under a title the public read as either praise or libel, with no moral verdict supplied. The reception bore the risk out, and the preface of 1841 is the author’s answer to readers who took the book as self-portrait or as slander on the age. Held below the top because it is not a break with narrative itself, and its materials are Romantic.
Wallace Stevens · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Romantic meditative lyric, with Keats and Wordsworth behind “Sunday Morning”; the French Symbolists and the dandy tradition, with Laforgue behind “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle”; and the Imagism of the 1910s. The turn is large and of a kind no contemporary made. A comic, gaudy, foreign-flavoured diction, “Chieftain Iffucan of Azcan in caftan / Of tan with henna hackles, halt!”, is put to the service of a philosophical poetry of mind and world, and a meditative blank verse keeps the grandeur of the Romantic ode while removing its God. It is a different modernism from Eliot’s and Pound’s: hedonist rather than penitential, and of the American South and Florida rather than of London. The stake was real: the first book of a forty-four-year-old lawyer, open to the charge of preciosity, which it largely drew.
Richard Linklater · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the screen romance, the brief encounter and the film of the love not taken, and beside it the European film of talk and walking, Rohmer above all, with Linklater’s own Slacker (1990). The first swerve is an American romance with no plot beyond talk, no obstacle beyond the clock and an open ending. The larger swerve is the shape: two sequels made nine years apart, each written with the leads, with none of the sequel’s business in them and the actors’ real ageing made the matter of the work. The stake was real: the second film risked spoiling an ending loved for its openness, the third a romance turned into a marriage quarrel. Held from the top because each film alone walks a path Rohmer proved.
Frank Lloyd Wright · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is twofold: Wright’s own Prairie house, with the long horizontal and the cantilevered eave of the Robie House; and the European modern house of the decade, white trays and glass on a frame, which the Museum of Modern Art set before America in 1932, largely without him. The departure: the house put over the waterfall, not beside it, against the client’s expectation; concrete trays cantilevered from a stone core rooted in the rock, on a site no house had tried; the European tray turned against its own doctrine, made of the site instead of set apart from it. The stake was real and paid. Wright was sixty-eight and widely thought finished, the client’s engineers advised against the structure, and it did deflect. Held below the top because the cantilever and the horizontal were long Wright’s own, and the tray was the Europeans’.
Joy Division · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is punk, which the group had played as Warsaw, beside Bowie’s Low and Iggy Pop’s The Idiot, the Velvet Underground, the Doors and German electronic music. The turn is real and thorough: punk’s speed and noise turned to space, slowness and dread, the song made a room rather than a shout, the bass carrying the melody, the drums machined; the group’s second album, Closer, worked inside the sound this record found. What holds the figure from the top is the path and the stake. Low had made the cold European turn inside rock in 1977, Wire, Magazine, Public Image and Siouxsie and the Banshees had begun post-punk in 1978, and a debut on a new independent label risked little standing. The record is the first full statement of a turn others began, and it stands a tenth under Low, which opened its road.
Luis Buñuel · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
The inherited form is the comedy of manners and the dinner-party film, and the departure from it is wide: a narrative with no plot to complete, dreams entered without signal and nested so that waking cannot be trusted, a refrain shot outside the story, and one running joke extended to the length of a feature. The stake was real. A feature made for wide circulation was built on a payoff it refuses to deliver, and it played as comedy to a wide audience; for a film of its circulation the form was radical. Held below the top by its maker’s own record. The Exterminating Angel had already built a dinner party on an inexplicable prohibition, and the dream-logic was Buñuel’s inheritance from 1929.
Charles Mingus · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
The departure is from the jazz record of 1963 as a set of tunes with solos, to a single ballet of six dances for eleven players, written and improvised in one weave and assembled on tape. Three turns at once: the extended composition carried by a working jazz band rather than an orchestra; collective improvisation orchestrated, so that the band’s cries are scored and its scoring cries; and the studio as an instrument, years before the layered records of the late 1960s made that ordinary. The stake was real: a new label’s prestige release placed on a forty-minute suite with no standard and no single, by a leader whose records sold modestly. Held from the top by precedent: Ellington’s extended works, Mingus’s own Pithecanthropus Erectus (1956) and his workshop method, the Third Stream around him; and the breaks of Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor in the same years cost more.
My Bloody Valentine · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is independent guitar rock as it stood in 1989: the feedback pop of the Jesus and Mary Chain, the voice as texture of the Cocteau Twins, the noise of Sonic Youth, the volume of Dinosaur Jr., and the band’s own Isn’t Anything (1988). The departure is in the physics of the sound, and in places it is invention: the glide, feedback sampled and played as keys, chords that no longer hold a pitch, no element foregrounded. No guitar record of its kind placed a larger stake, and it was paid in full: two years, a label’s finances, and a career that produced no further album for more than twenty years. Turn and stake together carry the figure well above the bar. What holds it below the top band is that the path was the band’s own and half opened.
Augustine of Hippo · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is double: the Christian apology of Tertullian and Lactantius with the Eusebian reading of a Christian empire as providence’s work; and the Roman histories and antiquities of Sallust, Livy, Varro and Cicero, which made Rome’s greatness the measure of its gods. The work turns from both. Rome, pagan or Christian, is desacralised: its glory was paid to it as wages for its virtues (Book V), and its fall proves nothing about God. Against the philosophers’ cycles it sets a line with a beginning and an end (XII.14 and following). An answer to a crisis becomes a theology of history, a cosmology and an eschatology. The stake was high: senatorial pagans to persuade and his own side’s triumphalism to refuse, as the West was failing. Charged: the form is the apologist’s and the encyclopaedist’s, extended.
Thomas Pynchon · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the American novel of the 1950s, realist or Beat, and behind it Joyce, Nabokov, Conrad’s colonial fiction, the spy novels of Buchan and Maugham and Henry Adams’s Education. The swerve: a novel whose historical chapters are not history but one obsessive’s reconstructions, each told through a borrowed narrator, set against a present line that refuses plot; a book that treats the twentieth century as one conspiracy with a feminine name and does not say whether the conspiracy exists. The stake was real: a first novel by an unknown of twenty-five, wagering a long book on an unresolved quest. Held off the top because Gaddis’s The Recognitions (1955) had taken part of the risk eight years before.
Lewis Carroll · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the English children’s book of the first half of the century, built to instruct: the moral tale, the improving verse, the cautionary story. The book turns against it on its own ground, parodying the very verses children were made to learn by heart, and it gives its child no moral to carry home. The Duchess satirises the habit: “Everything’s got a moral, if only you can find it” (chapter IX), and her morals are nonsense. The turn is formal too, a narrative whose logic is the literal application of language. The stake was real: an Oxford lecturer in mathematics, under a pseudonym, publishing a book with no instruction in it. Held below the top because the ground was partly broken: Lear’s Book of Nonsense (1846) had opened nonsense verse, and Kingsley’s The Water-Babies (1863) the fantastic children’s book, though one that still moralised.
Leon Battista Alberti · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance was the Tuscan basilica of Brunelleschi, San Lorenzo and Santo Spirito: columns, arcades, aisles, light vaults, line over the mass of wall; behind it the Gothic hall and the friars’ churches; and Alberti’s own path, the shell of San Francesco at Rimini and the fronts of Santa Maria Novella and San Sebastiano. The departure: the column given up for the pier and the wall, aisles for chapels cut into the mass, a barrel vault of Roman scale over a church after the Basilica of Maxentius rather than any Christian precedent, the whole made of one repeated unit. The stake was real: an untried vault at that span in brick, given by an old man who would not see it built. Held below the top because his own earlier works prepared the turn, and builders after him carried the stake.
Public Enemy · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the hip hop of 1986 and 1987: the sparse drum machines of Run-DMC, the looped samples of Marley Marl and of Eric B. and Rakim, and the group’s own modest debut, Yo! Bum Rush the Show (1987). The turn is large. Tracks are built from many samples at once, layered until they clash; noise becomes the hook; the tempo rises; and all of it is joined to political speech in place of the boast. The stake was real: a group with a weak first record, on a label living by radio and crossover, made a record abrasive by design. What holds it below the top: collage had been made by Afrika Bambaataa’s camp and by Double Dee and Steinski, political verse ran back through Gil Scott-Heron and the Last Poets, and Boogie Down Productions moved toward the same ground the same year. The joining, and its density, were new.
Hart Crane · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Whitman’s America and his long poem of the self and the nation; the Romantic ode and visionary lyric of Blake, Shelley and Keats; the Elizabethan density of Marlowe and Donne in the line; and, as the immediate pressure, The Waste Land (1922), which Crane read as the age’s verdict and set out to answer with an affirmation. The turn is twofold: against Eliot, an epic of assent written in the same modern city with the same machinery; against Whitman, a diction compressed to the point of private logic. The stake was real: years, a patron’s money and a reputation, staked on a form that Allen Tate and Yvor Winters judged a failure. Held below 9.0 because the swerve from Whitman is more of idiom than of form.
Giorgione · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Venetian devotional picture, Giovanni Bellini’s above all, in which landscape is a setting, the figures carry a legible subject, and the story is the reason for the picture. The departure is that the subject is withheld and the landscape and its weather become the subject: the first record names the picture as a small landscape with the storm, and only then the people. It is among the first easel pictures in Europe in which the people do not explain the picture. With it comes a method, the composition found in paint on the canvas rather than fixed in drawing beforehand. What holds the axis below the top is the cost: the wager was placed in a private house, at cabinet size, for a collector to whom an enigma was a pleasure and not a scandal. It was never exposed to a public.
Frank Lloyd Wright · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is twofold: the American Protestant church of the nineteenth century in Gothic or Romanesque dress, spire, nave and pointed windows, the congregation’s own burned church among them; and Wright’s own path, the Prairie houses and above all the Larkin Administration Building in Buffalo (1904 to 1906), whose lit central court, galleries and corner stair towers this building takes over. The departure: no spire, no nave, no pointed arch, no window to the street; the church a cube of bare poured concrete, a material then of factories and footings, left exposed on a sacred public building; the entrance turned away from the street; interior space made the substance of the building. The stake was real and was paid: an untried finish, a tight budget overrun, cracks and leaks. Larkin had made the turn in plan two years before; this building made it sacred.
Terrence Malick · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
The tradition is the lovers-on-the-run film, from You Only Live Once (1937) and They Live by Night (1948) to Gun Crazy (1950) and, six years before, Bonnie and Clyde (1967), which had made the outlaw couple glamorous and their death a ballet. This film turns every term: the killer has no psychology and no grievance; the violence is quick, plain and unglamorous; the love is thin; the music is a schoolroom tune, not period rock and roll; and the narrator is a girl whose voice is in the wrong key for every event she tells. The stake was real: a first feature, in a genre whose box-office logic it refused. Held below the top because the turn is of tone and voice within an inherited plot, and the New Hollywood was already turning genre.
R.E.M. · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the guitar band of the 1960s, the chime of the Byrds above all, beside the Velvet Underground, Television and Patti Smith; around it stood the American rock of 1983, synthesiser new wave, the arena guitar solo and the hard, bright production of the year. The turn is from all of that at once: the guitar played as arpeggio rather than display, a voice mixed into the band with its words left indistinct, a production dense and dark rather than loud and clean, and a South that was neither Southern rock nor country. Four refusals made together are more than a turn of degree. Held below the top because the sources were proven and admired, the chime was twenty years old, the stake of a debut on an independent label was small, and the record refused a moment more than it invented a language.
Van Morrison · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
The turn is from the rock and rhythm-and-blues record of 1968, and from the singer’s own hit, to something without precedent in its field: a rock singer leading a jazz rhythm section through long takes, with no electric guitar and no chorus in most songs, the voice treating words as sound and repeating them until they change. Its models lie nearer modal jazz and the folk ballad than any rock album of its year. The stake was real. Morrison came out of a contract dispute with a hit-single career behind him, placed his first record for a new label on a form no audience had asked for, and the record failed commercially for years. It is held from the top because the means were jazz’s and folk’s, already proven, and others were moving in a near direction at the same time.
Gérard de Nerval · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Two turns, each costly. Nerval took the most regular of French forms and made it hermetic, syncretic and private, a sequence of names and emblems whose sense, the dedication says, would be lost by explanation: the hermetic sonnet before the Symbolists. He published it as a man whom Dumas had just announced to the public as mad, and the stake was his standing as a sane writer. The second turn is in the prose. “Sylvie” breaks the order of time in a short novel, with present, recent past and childhood interleaved without warning, so that the reader often cannot tell in which layer a sentence sits. The inherited models, Rousseau’s reveries, the German Romantic tale, the conte, are plain, and the departure from them is plain too.
Sly and the Family Stone · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
The tradition inherited is the band’s own, which it had made the field’s: bright, horn-driven, many-voiced pop funk at dance tempo, with uplift in the chorus. The departure is near total. Slow tempi, a rhythm machine for a drummer, dense layered murk for open ensemble, a lead voice mumbled or buried, the signature anthem rewritten as its own negation. The cost was real: a long wait after the last hit, a label and an audience expecting Stand! again, and a public reputation for missed shows and drugs that the record could have confirmed. That it went to number one is evidence that the wager paid, not that it was safe. Held below the top because the swerve is in mood, density and means more than in grammar: the songs keep verse and chorus, the groove is still funk, and What’s Going On had already turned soul inward that year.
Parmigianino · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the High Renaissance altarpiece of Raphael and Correggio: balance, coherent space, figures in natural proportion, and Parmigianino’s own early Raphaelite manner. The departure is drastic. Proportion is stretched as a programme; the space is broken by a leap of scale with no mediating ground; the sacred group is crowded to one side and a near empty colonnade stands at the other, an asymmetry that refuses the pyramid. No public altarpiece of its decade went further from the classical norm. The stake was a chapel commission in the painter’s native city, under contract, and the swerve was paid for in a picture he could not finish. Pontormo and Rosso had already broken the norm in the 1520s: the turn was made inside a current.
Akkadian · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Sumerian and early Akkadian victory monument, as in the Stele of the Vultures of Eannatum and the Standard of Ur: the field divided into horizontal registers, figures standing on ground lines, the ruler shown in a sequence of scenes. The departure is total within the field. The registers are abolished; one continuous landscape fills the stone; figures stand on a rising slope, not on lines; the eye is led diagonally from lower left to the apex by the ranks themselves; the stele’s outline is made the mountain’s. The stake was real: the most official object the state made, staking the king’s claim to godhood on a new pictorial order. Held below the top because Akkadian art had begun to loosen the register in seals, so part of the turn was underway.
Workshops of Qin Shi Huang · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Zhou and Warring States practice of tomb figures, yong: small figurines of wood or clay, a few tens of centimetres high, schematic, a substitute for the human sacrifice of earlier royal burials. The departure is total: figures at life size, modelled toward likeness, by the thousands, in the formation of a real army, with real weapons. There is no precedent in China for life-size naturalistic sculpture in any number, and none for this undertaking anywhere. Whether the turn drew on Hellenistic sculpture is argued and cannot be settled; the scale and the system are Qin’s either way. The cost was paid by a state that spent its realm’s labour on the mausoleum and fell four years after the emperor died. Held below the top because the swerve was of scale and likeness within a funerary practice whose purpose it kept.
Kraftwerk · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is double: Anglo-American rock, and the West German experimental bands of the early 1970s, the band’s own first records among them. The turn is real. A pop record of 1977 built almost wholly from electronic instruments, with machine percussion, pulses that sound sequenced, flat voices and no guitar, claimed a European rather than an American identity and made the mechanical the subject rather than a colour. Franz Schubert names a Romantic composer and Metal on Metal makes noise into rhythm, both turns away from rock’s terms. The stake was smaller than the turn. Autobahn (1974) had already made a motorway journey into an electronic hit, and Radio-Activity (1975) had given a whole album to a technological theme. The swerve deepens a road the band had built, and that holds it a tenth below Low, which staked a rock star’s standing on the joining. It stands level with Unknown Pleasures and a tenth above Power, Corruption & Lies, records that name German electronic music and Kraftwerk in their inheritance.
Piet Mondrian · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the painter’s own: Neo-Plasticism as he fixed it from about 1920, black lines on white, a few planes of primary colour, asymmetric balance, held for two decades and made famous, with the Cubism he drew it from behind it. The departure: black is gone; the line is made of colour; the line is broken into units, so that it no longer divides the field but pulses across it; balance becomes rhythm, and a fixed system a field of movement. A painter of seventy whose authority rested on that system overturned its central element, at the risk of seeming to abandon his doctrine. Held below the top because the coloured line without black was begun in New York City (1942) and the tape works, and the tradition left is one he had made himself.
João Gilberto · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
The turn is from the Brazilian popular singing of the 1950s, the samba-canção and the radio voice of Orlando Silva and Dalva de Oliveira, full vibrato over a big orchestra, to a voice without vibrato placed at conversational level; and from the full percussion of samba to a guitar that abstracts it, the thumb holding the surdo’s pulse while the fingers displace the tamborim’s syncopation against it, so that voice and guitar run slightly apart and meet. The stake was real: Gilberto was a little-known singer from Bahia, staking a record on a voice that the trained ear could hear as wrong. Held from the top: Jobim’s writing, Johnny Alf, Dick Farney and cool jazz had prepared part of the ground, and Gilberto’s guitar had already been heard on Elizeth Cardoso’s Canção do Amor Demais (1958).
Leos Carax · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the European art film of the episodic and the oneiric: Buñuel’s The Phantom of Liberty (1974) and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), Cocteau’s poet passing through mirrors, Franju, Lynch, Ruiz; and Carax’s own romantic cinema, built on Lavant. The turn abandons plot and character for one actor’s tour through the genres on a single frame, and makes the absent camera its subject, which the episodic tradition did not have. The stake was real: thirteen years without a finished feature since Pola X, a career nearly ended by Les Amants du Pont-Neuf, a small budget and a lead no longer bankable. Held below the top because the episodic dream film is a proven path, and the turn is more of manner and frame than of the medium.
Vladimir Nabokov · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the nineteenth-century family chronicle, the Russian above all, and the first sentence turns Tolstoy inside out: “All happy families are more or less dissimilar; all unhappy ones are more or less alike.” From there the departure is very wide: a counter-earth with its own history, electricity banned, an Amerussian continent and Tartary beyond; a memoir with the lovers’ quarrels in its margins; a philosophical treatise set inside a car journey; a prose that moves among three languages. The stake was real and paid: Nabokov at seventy, famous after Lolita, wrote his longest book in his least accessible manner, and many who had admired the earlier novels found it self-indulgent. Held below the top because its instruments, the unreliable memoirist and the annotated text, were his own from Pale Fire; the swerve is in scale and world more than in kind.
Danny Boyle · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The departures are three, and two carried real cost. The infected are not dead: they are living people in a fit of rage, and they run. The change had precedents, but here it was made decisive, and it remade the creature of the genre. The image is consumer video, smeared and grainy in daylight, chosen for a theatrical feature from a major distributor when that was a wager on what an audience would tolerate; it was widely called ugly at release, and it gives the film its look of footage from the end of the world. Third, the genre moves to England, with an unknown lead and English institutions, and the last act turns from the monsters to the soldiers. The limit: the survival plot is Romero’s, almost beat for beat.
Luis Buñuel · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The inherited forms are the realist narrative of the Mexican industry, in which Buñuel had worked for fifteen years, and the European art film, which explained its mysteries psychologically. The departure from both is wide. A commercial feature of 1962 builds its whole narrative on an impossibility it never explains and never resolves, and plays straight a repetition of shots that an audience could take for error. The stake was real: Buñuel came to it straight from the scandal of Viridiana, with the same producer, and a film this hostile to Church and class put his standing at risk. The premise the later Buñuel would invert begins here. What holds it below the top is the surrealist attack on the bourgeoisie itself, laid in L’Âge d’or (1930); the turn is the narrative form given to that wager.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance is double: the international art cinema of the long take, in which Apichatpong was already a leading name after Blissfully Yours (2002), Tropical Malady (2004) and Syndromes and a Century (2006), and the despised popular Thai cinema of ghosts, costume dramas and television serials. The turn is to marry them without irony. The monkey ghost is a man in a fur suit with red lights for eyes, made as a matinee monster, and the film asks the art audience to take it as a son. The stake was real: ridicule, dismissal as whimsy, and a political history under the eye of the Thai censor. Held below the top because the director’s earlier films had already set him on this path.
Norman Foster (Foster and Partners) · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the postwar office tower, a central core wrapped in floors, its structure hidden and its ground a lobby. The departure turns every term: structure outside and shown, cores pushed to the flanks, floors hung from above, ground surrendered to the street, a hollow centre lit from the sky, the whole assembled from factory parts made abroad. Nothing like it had been built at this height. The wager was financial and technical at once: an untried structural system, prefabrication without precedent, a client committing its headquarters on the eve of the negotiations over 1997, and a cost that exposed architect and bank to ridicule had it failed. It carried the swerve of the Centre Pompidou into a working tower. Lloyd’s, finished the same year, shares the turn.
Jonathan Glazer · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance is double: science fiction of the visitor, with The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) its nearest elder, and the body horror of the alien among us; and British social realism of the city street. The departure joins them as neither had: a film star in a wig driving a van through Glasgow, filmed by concealed cameras, picking up men who did not know a film was being made, cut into abstract sets of black and white void that explain nothing. Exposition, backstory and the alien world are refused. The stake was real: about a decade in development, a star of the largest commercial films of the time in an unexplained part, and a method that risked yielding nothing usable. Held a step from the top because the turn sits inside art cinema, where precedents existed.
Joseph Paxton · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the public building of masonry and style, the Building Committee’s own domed brick scheme its local form; and beside it the glasshouse and the railway shed, engineers’ structures not counted as architecture: Paxton’s Great Stove at Chatsworth, with Decimus Burton, his lily house of 1849 to 1850, and Burton and Turner’s Palm House at Kew. The departure: the conservatory system taken to the scale of the largest public building in the world, prefabricated and assembled to a deadline, and made the official monument of a nation. The lily house supplied the roof and the principle, a proven path that holds the figure off the top. But the stake was paid in full view: a gardener’s design over the profession’s, public fears of wind, hail and crowds, galleries tested by marching troops, and the Exhibition’s whole credit on a building that did not exist eleven months before.
Charles Rennie Mackintosh · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the public building of late Victorian Britain, historicist and symmetrical, and round Mackintosh the Arts and Crafts and the Scottish Baronial. The departure: a public institution composed from use and light, asymmetrical, its fronts different on every side, its ornament gathered in iron, stone and glass at a few points; and in the west wing of 1907 to 1909 a geometry of sheer verticals and bare stone that leaves Art Nouveau behind and anticipates a modernism not yet named. The stake was real: a young draughtsman’s design under a governing board, the second phase redesigned boldly rather than repeated, a career that faltered in Glasgow within five years of completion. Held short because the swerve grows from ground already prepared by Voysey, Lethaby and the Baronial revival, a turn within it before a break.
Mughal court painters · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the manuscript painting of the Safavid court, in which both directors were trained: small images within the page of a book, text above and below, flat planes, jewel-like colour, figures elegant and still. The departure is wide and on several fronts at once. The picture is enlarged to a sheet of cloth and made to be shown, not held, so that the image dominates and the text retreats. Figures gain weight and movement; space recedes; bodies collide; colour is used for force. Indian painting and Indian life enter a Persian frame, carried by a mixed workshop. The stake was a new emperor’s first great project and fifteen years of labour. Held below 9.0 because the departure was assembled gradually and collectively.
Li Chun · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance was the timber beam bridge and the pontoon, and the stone or brick arch known from Han tomb vaults, built in the semicircular or near-semicircular profile that every arch tradition of the period used, with spandrels filled solid with earth and rubble. The departure: a segmental arch of very low rise at a span near 37 metres, its spandrels opened by smaller arches, a combination Europe reached independently and many centuries later. The stake was physical: a flat arch thrusts hard sideways, the abutments sat on shallow foundations in soft ground, and failure would have dropped a stone road into a flood river. The wager succeeded. Held from the top because the record before it is thin, and the turn may have been prepared by bridges that do not survive.
Konstantin Melnikov · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the Moscow house, the European villa, and the rectilinear Modernism of the house’s own decade, Constructivism among it, whose language was the frame, the glazed plane and the expressed machine. The departure leaves all three together. No house before it was built of two intersecting cylinders with a lattice wall of hexagonal cells, and against the frame Melnikov set a load-bearing brick mass, archaic and singular. The stake was real: a private house for an individual architect in the Soviet capital of 1927, as private building was ending, on a form no builder had tested, with walls whose economy and stability were his own wager. The later cost, his exclusion from practice, had many causes, and the figure is not raised for it.
Jasper Johns · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is New York painting of the early 1950s: the gesture as the trace of a self, the canvas as an arena, the image refused. The departure is double. The painterly touch, worked in wax so that every stroke stays visible, is laid over a pre-given flat sign, so that the gesture survives as handling while its claim to express is emptied out. And the body returns, not as a figure painted but as a cast, a thing taken from life and boxed, in a field that had banished both the figure and the object. The stake was real: an unknown painter of about twenty-five against the reigning school, in a work that could be read as a joke; in the event the show of 1958 succeeded. Held below the top because Flag made the first move, and the target is its second instance.
Moisei Ginzburg and Ignaty Milinis · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the Moscow apartment house of masonry, courtyards and corridors of rooms; the communal flat that the housing crisis had made of it; and the radical commune projects of the late 1920s, which would abolish the family flat outright. The departure is double. Against the old block, a frame lifted on columns, ribbon windows, a roof garden and a section of interlocking cells no housing had used; against the radicals, a transitional house that kept the family and offered the commune as a choice. The F cell is an invention in the section of housing, not a borrowed style. The stake was paid: the materials failed early, and within a few years the line the building stood for was condemned. Held below the top because frame and ribbon were received from Le Corbusier and the West.
Victor Horta · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The departure is from two traditions at once: the eclectic historicism of Belgian building in the 1880s, in which Horta was trained classically under Balat, and the fixed plan of the Brussels row house. Horta gave up historical style entirely for a vocabulary of his own, put exposed iron into a private house and onto its street front, broke the enfilade, and designed every element, structure to door fittings, as one system. The stake was real: a young architect’s reputation and a friend’s house, on an untried idiom in a conservative city, with a material reserved for utilitarian work. It had precedent, in Viollet-le-Duc’s writings on iron and in the decorative arts, which keeps it below the highest marks; as the built turn of a whole building it was among the first and the most complete.
Marcel Duchamp · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is double. The nude as painting’s central genre, the reclining body from Giorgione and Titian to Manet and the Salon; and nearer, Cubism as Picasso and Braque made it and as the circle at Puteaux around the painter’s brothers codified it, an analytic art of the still life and the seated figure. The departure answers both. The nude does not recline but descends, and it is not seen. The Cubist facet is set moving, time admitted into a style that had fixed its object, with a mechanical image as the source. The stake was paid: by the painter’s account the hanging group of his own family circle asked him to change the canvas or its title, he withdrew it, and within months he turned from painting as a profession. Held below the top because Futurism made motion its programme the same year, and the faceting was inherited.
Euripides · Literature
9.2 · Tier V
The departure is real, and part of it is a return. Euripides took a subject Aeschylus had treated in plays now lost, and in his last years turned back to a full chorus at the centre of the action, to the archaic trochaic tetrameter, and to a god’s epiphany as the whole plot. Against his own human, domestic tragedy that is a swerve; against the tradition it looks like a revival, and that holds it lowest of the five gates. The turn is in what he made of it: a god as protagonist in human disguise for nearly the whole play, who costumes his victim on stage and leads him out as an actor in his own death. The stake: a cult play whose god behaves monstrously, offered at that god’s festival by a poet who had won few first prizes.
Virgil · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
The inheritance is named: Hesiod’s Works and Days, “Ascraeumque cano Romana per oppida carmen”
“I sing the song of Ascra through the towns of Rome” (2.176); Aratus and Nicander; Lucretius, saluted and set aside in “felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas” (2.490); Varro’s prose Res rusticae of 37 BC. The swerve: a didactic poem whose subject is not the instruction, precepts no farmer could farm from, addressed to Maecenas; a small subject claimed for the highest glory, “in tenui labor; at tenuis non gloria” (4.6); a manual that ends in an epyllion of Alexandrian kind. The stake was real: a young poet after the civil wars spending some seven years on a mode Latin had no great instance of but Lucretius. Held at 8.7 because the didactic frame itself is inherited, and the move transforms a proven path more than it opens one.
George Eliot · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
The inheritance is the English multi-plot novel of Dickens and Thackeray, and Eliot’s own provincial realism in Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss. The swerve is a novel with no single centre, which stops in its twenty-ninth chapter to ask “but why always Dorothea?” and turns to Casaubon’s inner life; a narrator who reasons as a scientist does, with the microscope and the pier-glass and its “concentric circles” (ch. 27) for instruments; a heroine whose great nature ends in a second marriage and an unnamed life; a man of science who ends a fashionable physician and dies at fifty. The stake was real: a heroine given no vocation and a Finale that refuses the reward the form promised, issued in a scheme of parts that Blackwood and G. H. Lewes devised for this book. Held below the top because the form bent is still the form, and the break with it was not made.
Anonymous · Architecture
9.0 · Tier V
The inheritance is twofold: the native raised storehouse, known from haniwa house models, and the continental architecture newly arrived with Buddhism, tile-roofed, painted and set on stone footings, at Asuka-dera and Hōryū-ji. The departure: in the generation when the court began to build its temples, and soon its palace, in the imported manner, it fixed for its supreme sanctuary a form that refuses every continental technique, and bound it to rebuilding for ever. The stake was a perpetual charge on timber, labour and wealth, and the lapse of the fifteenth century shows what it cost when it could not be paid. Held below the top: the intention and the date are tradition, not record; rebuilding had native antecedents; and some features may themselves be continental.
Alfred Hitchcock · Film
9.0 · Tier V
The inheritance is the Hollywood suspense thriller, which Hitchcock had largely defined, and the star vehicle. The departures: the solution revealed in the last third, so that mystery is given up for dread and sympathy moves to the deceiver; James Stewart, the decent American of the decade’s screen, made a man whose love becomes coercion; long passages of wordless following carried by the score; an ending with neither consolation nor justice. The stake was real — Paramount’s money, a top star, the director’s own formula — and the film was received coolly and did modestly. Held near the gate by precedent: Preminger’s Laura (1944) had already made a man love a dead woman’s image and found her alive, and Rebecca had made the haunting dead woman a studio subject.
Richard Wagner · Music
9.0 · Tier V
The inheritance is Wagner’s own music drama, Tristan and the Ring: continuous texture, leitmotif, the orchestra as narrator. The departures: a drama whose decisive action is a refusal, so that the climax of Act II is a man not yielding; time slowed on purpose, with ceremony staged in real time; a harmony split in two, diatonic and modal for the Grail and saturated chromaticism for Klingsor’s realm, so that harmony becomes moral geography; an orchestra written for the covered pit, its sound blended and veiled; a sacred rite on a theatre stage. The stake was real: the charge of blasphemy, Nietzsche’s break, and a work withheld from every theatre but Bayreuth. Held near the gate because the swerve continues Wagner’s own road: the harmony extends Tristan rather than overturning it, and the method is the Ring’s refined.
Plato · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Attic forensic oratory, Antiphon, Andocides and Lysias, with its exordium, narration, proofs and appeal for pity; the model defence already existed in Gorgias’ Defence of Palamedes, and Palamedes is named in the work (41b). The Socratic literature grew up after 399 too: Xenophon wrote his own Apology, and Polycrates’ prosecution pamphlet answered such works. The swerve is the defence that refuses to defend, turning every convention against itself: an exordium that disowns eloquence and means it, proofs that become cross-examination, a refusal of the appeal for pity (34c to 35b), a counter-penalty that proposes reward, and a defeat made the proof of the case. The defence speech becomes the self-portrait of a philosophical life. The stake was real: Plato wrote within a few years of the execution, in the city that ordered it, and named himself present (34a). Held at 8.7 because the instrument is the courts’ own and the Palamedes precedent is close; the swerve is in the use, not the mould, and Plato’s larger departure was the dialogue, which this work largely sets aside.
Anonymous · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Sumerian court poetry of Bilgames: separate songs in praise of a king, in which Enkidu is a servant. The largest step was taken before this version, in the Old Babylonian poem, which joined the episodes into one life with a turn: praise of a hero becomes the story of his failure, Enkidu is raised to friend and double, and the king fails at immortality, at sleep, at keeping a plant. This version inherits that turn and departs again within it. The older poem opened in praise of a king who surpassed all kings; this one opens on the man who saw the Deep, praised for what he learned rather than what he did, and makes the epic a wisdom text and a record, set down on a tablet for the reader to take out, with the ring closed at the walls. The Flood is told inside it as the survivor’s own story, so that the oldest catastrophe answers one man. And the whole, a king’s epic whose king is refused what he seeks, turns against the royal praise that was the form’s tradition. What holds the figure there: the decisive turn was an earlier poem’s, made over centuries by several hands; this version was made in a scribal culture that prized fidelity; and the field is too broken to show what the departure cost its maker.
Louis Le Vau, Jules Hardouin-Mansart and André Le Nôtre · Architecture
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance is near and named: Vaux-le-Vicomte, built from 1656 to 1661 by the same three men, had already joined château, axis, parterre and canal in one composition. Versailles turned it in scale and purpose more than in form. A country house became the seat of a state; the government left its capital for it; the garden was carried past any enclosure to the horizon; a gallery became the room of state, lined with mirrors at a size French glassmaking had only just reached. The stake was enormous and was paid, in money, in water the site lacked, in an abandoned aqueduct, and in a court removed from Paris, a wager that 1789 lost. Held at 8.7: the formal departure from Vaux is small.
Rainer Maria Rilke · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the German elegy: Klopstock, Goethe’s Roman Elegies and above all Hölderlin, with his long line and his withdrawn gods. Nearer still stood Rilke’s own Neue Gedichte (1907 to 1908), whose object poems had made his name. The swerve is away from that manner: in place of the thing seen exactly, an invented cosmology, spoken in a voice that addresses angels, lovers, the earth and the reader; and the elegy itself turned, its lament become praise and the mourning poem an argument for being here. The stake was real: ten years, a crisis in which the cycle could not be finished, and a reputation for exactness staked on a high rhetoric. Held below the top because the long line and the vanished gods are Hölderlin’s, a proven path, and because in 1922, the year of The Waste Land, the turn ran toward eloquence while the age ran toward the fragment.
Thomas Mann · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the German Bildungsroman, Wilhelm Meister and Der grüne Heinrich, the realist family chronicle Mann had already mastered in Buddenbrooks, and the ironic narrator of the German tradition. The turn is real: the education novel inverted, so that the young man is educated by sickness and death and ends not in a vocation but on a battlefield where he vanishes; the novel opened to the essay, so that the narrator’s discourse on time and the characters’ disputations become the action; and tempo made the subject, a novel of its time and about time. The stake was personal and public: a comic novella swelled across twelve years and a war, absorbed Mann’s turn from the nationalism of the Betrachtungen, and answers its conservative reader of 1918 in the snow. What holds it here: in the years of Ulysses and Proust the book keeps the omniscient narrator, the linear chronology and the full realist sentence, and the essay and debate have precedents in Dostoevsky and the German novel of ideas. It swerves inside the house of the European realist novel, not out of it.
Toni Morrison · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the nineteenth-century slave narrative, which told the facts and drew a veil over the interior and the worst, and the historical novel of slavery. Morrison turns both: the veil is lifted onto what the narratives could not say, the interior of the enslaved, and the historical record, the clipping and the case behind it, is subordinated to a ghost the book never explains away. A realist historical novel with a literal revenant at its centre was a real wager on the book’s seriousness. Held below the top because the paths were partly laid: Gayl Jones’s Corregidora (1975) and Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979) had already brought the past of slavery into the present body, Faulkner had taught the withheld revelation, and García Márquez had made the marvellous plain. The departure is great in degree and in purpose, less in means, and it came from a writer already established, so the stake lay in the subject more than in the career.
Leo Tolstoy · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance is double. The Russian Caucasus tale, from Pushkin’s The Prisoner of the Caucasus (1822) through Marlinsky’s Ammalat-Bek to Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time, had made the mountaineer a figure of romance; this book turns the theme into an anatomy of empire, in which the exotic is plain and the Russians are the raiders. And Tolstoy’s own panorama, the manner of War and Peace, is compressed into a short book that climbs by single chapters to the tsar and comes down again to a peasant hut. The stake was real: a work of the art its author had renounced in What Is Art?, kept back through eight years of writing, which drew the reigning emperor’s great-grandfather as a vain seducer who sentences a man to the gauntlet. Held below the top because the realist means are Tolstoy’s own and proven; the turn is in use and compression, not in form.
Thomas Mann · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Mann swerves less here than in Buddenbrooks or The Magic Mountain: the novel of ideas, the essayistic narrator and the leitmotif were already his, and the fictional life of an artist has a long German line. What is new is real, and it cost something. The life is told by a deliberately limited friend, writing in a second time that runs to the fall of Berlin, so that the reader must judge the narrator’s judgments. The method is montage, Mann’s own word for it: a fictional life built out of real ones, Nietzsche’s, Hugo Wolf’s, that of Tchaikovsky’s unseen patroness, with Schoenberg’s method, and with Adorno lending a living collaborator’s thought. And the book spends its greatest length on music that does not exist, described so that it must be believed. The stake was the author’s own: an exile near seventy wrote his nation’s damnation in its oldest language while the war ran, and staked his authority on a medium he did not command, which drew Schoenberg’s charge of theft.
Giuseppe Verdi · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the melodramma of Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti and its set form of scena, slow aria, transition and cabaletta, which Verdi had used and bent through Rigoletto (1851) and Il trovatore (January 1853). The departures: a courtesan of the 1840s as heroine of a serious opera, in a story the audience could take for its own city; a domestic scale of three principals, two parties and two rooms, with no court, battle or conspiracy; a prelude that opens on the deathbed; a heroine whose vocal type changes with her life, from coloratura to lyric line to near speech; and the central duet loosened into argument. The stake was paid: the first night failed. Held below the top because the forms are bent, not broken, and Rigoletto two years before had made the larger structural turn.
Johannes Brahms · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
The inherited form is the requiem, the Latin Mass for the dead as Mozart, Cherubini and Berlioz had set it. The departure is plain: a vernacular text compiled by the composer from the whole Bible, Apocrypha included; no Introit, no Dies irae, no Sanctus, no prayer for the dead; the mourner as its subject; the name of Christ absent; a concert work built as an arch. The stake was real for a composer of thirty-four, and Vienna hissed. Held below the top by its roots: the Lutheran tradition had already set compiled scripture on death in German, in Schütz’s Musikalische Exequien (1636) and Bach’s cantata BWV 106. The swerve turns a tradition rather than leaving it.
Igor Stravinsky · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the choral symphony and the sacred concert work: Beethoven’s Ninth, Mahler, the oratorio. The departures are several: a symphony in which the chorus is the subject, not an addition; an orchestra stripped of violins, violas and clarinets and weighted on winds, brass, two pianos and harp; a fugue at the centre of a symphony; ritual Latin, set against its quantities; and a sacred work of 1930 that refuses expression, by the composer of The Rite of Spring, when modernists took his neoclassicism for retreat. The stake was real in standing, not in livelihood: the commission was secure. Held below the top because the road was his own. Les Noces had joined chorus with pianos and percussion, and Oedipus Rex had made Latin a ritual language and stillness a dramatic mode. The swerve is the synthesis, made sacred.
Johann Sebastian Bach · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the keyboard variation set and the ground: Sweelinck and Byrd, Frescobaldi, Bach’s own Passacaglia and Chaconne. The departures are several: a set built as an architecture of halves and threes; a canon at every interval in order, which no keyboard set had attempted; the genres of the age, overture, fughetta, gigue, the old motet style and bravura, on one bass; and a learned ladder that ends in two street songs. The stake was real but bounded: a wager on counterpoint against the galant, in a print for amateurs that few amateurs could play, risking no post and no commission. The ground was a proven path; the swerve is the synthesis.
Nikolai Gogol · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is plain: the sentimental tale of the poor and humble that runs from Karamzin, Pushkin’s “The Stationmaster” (1831) with its wronged little official, Sterne’s digressive narrator and Hoffmann’s fantastic. Gogol’s own “Diary of a Madman” (1835) and “The Nose” (1836) had already set a clerk in a grotesque Petersburg. The swerve is the fusion: a story whose narration is a comic oral performance in which pathos and mockery sit in the same sentence; a realist tale of poverty that turns fantastic at the end without changing its tone; and a hero of no interest made the whole subject. The stake was real: the story offers its sympathy in a manner that invites the reader to laugh at the one who receives it, and it risked being taken for a joke or for a sermon. Held at this figure because much of the ground was Gogol’s own, broken already in the Petersburg tales.
Victor Hugo · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is plain: Scott’s historical novel, Balzac’s social panorama, Hugo’s own Romantic drama and Notre-Dame de Paris, and above all the popular serial of the 1840s, Eugène Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris, with its convicts, its underworld and its redeemed criminal. The turn is in what Hugo made of the serial: a total book, novel and epic and essay and sermon at once, in which a convict, a prostitute and a street child are given the scale of epic heroes, and the historian’s chapter on Waterloo stands beside the melodrama as an equal. The stake was real: the book was written by a proscribed man against the Second Empire, sold for a sum then unheard of, and received by much of literary Paris with contempt. Held below the top because its materials, the redeemed convict, the policeman, the underworld and the coincidence plot, were Sue’s, and the form it chose looked backward from Flaubert’s.
Euripides · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Attic tragedy, whose form assumes an action: a choice, a reversal, a recognition. The swerve is a tragedy whose action is over before it begins. The protagonist cannot act; she can only endure, lament and argue. The play replaces plot with succession and puts the victims, women and slaves, where a hero stood; it sets a law-court debate on Helen’s guilt inside the lament, and lets Hecuba’s rationalist prayer startle Menelaus. The stake was real: produced months after Athens took Melos and before the Sicilian expedition sailed, before the people who had voted for both, it took second prize to Xenocles. Held below the top because Euripides’ own Hecuba and Andromache, and Aeschylus’ Persians in showing the defeated, had prepared the turn.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the epistolary novel of feeling: Richardson, and above all Rousseau’s Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (1761), with Gellert and the German sentimental novel behind. The turn is in form and in stake. Goethe cut the correspondence to one voice: no answering letters, no counsel given room, no moral authority inside the book, and an editor who reports and does not judge. In Rousseau passion is disciplined into virtue; here nothing disciplines it, and the hero dies unabsolved. The stake was real: a book that took the suicide’s side was banned in Leipzig, attacked from the pulpit and parodied by Nicolai in Freuden des jungen Werthers (1775). Held a step below the top because the novel of passion in letters and the cult of feeling were proven ground; the swerve is in degree and in the single voice more than in kind.
Geoffrey Chaucer · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato, a lyric narrative of a young man’s love and grief, with the French Troy matter and the conventions of fin’ amor behind it. The turn is large. Chaucer made Boccaccio’s cousin into an uncle, older and more compromised; made the heroine slower, more frightened and more reasoning; installed a narrator who claims to translate faithfully and visibly does not; put Boethius into a love story; and closed a pagan tragedy with an ascent and an address to “yonge, fresshe folkes” (V.1835). The stake: a long poem of the highest ambition in English, when the court still wrote in French, sent after “Virgile, Ovide, Omer, Lucan, and Stace” (V.1792). Held below the top because the story and much of its sequence are Boccaccio’s.
Albert Camus · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the French novel of psychological analysis, from Madame de La Fayette and Constant through Stendhal to Proust, whose method is to explain the self to itself; and beside it the classical récit in the passé simple. Camus wrote a first-person narrative that refuses analysis: the narrator reports what he did, saw and felt in the body, and almost never why, in the passé composé of speech and in short sentences without connectives. The plain sentence has an American source in Hemingway, and the turn is partly a transfer. But to set that manner inside a French philosophical novel, and to make the absence of inner explanation the subject of the trial, was a new road. The stake was real: the first published novel of an unknown journalist from Algeria, issued in occupied France and built on a hero with nothing to explain.
Anna Akhmatova · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Turn and stake together. The turn: the poet of the intimate Acmeist lyric, of the glove on the wrong hand and the lovers’ quarrel, turns to the choral requiem, the lament of a people spoken in the first person, and gives up neither her compression nor her concreteness. IV makes the turn its subject, setting the “Царскосельской веселой грешнице”
(gay sinner of Tsarskoye Selo) beside the three hundredth woman in the line. The stake was as high as a poem can carry: to write it down was to risk her son’s life and her own, and the form of its survival, memory and burned paper, was part of the wager. Held below 9.0 because the formal means are inherited: the liturgical requiem, the folk lament, the Pushkinian monument, rhymed strophic verse. The departure is in what the inherited forms are made to hold, not in a new form.
Giovanni Bellini · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
The inherited image of Francis receiving the stigmata had, for two centuries, a seraph or a crucified figure in the sky, rays to the wounds, and usually Brother Leo as witness. In the panel as it stands there is no seraph and no witness. The source of the event is outside the picture, as light alone, and the landscape is given a share of the field and of the meaning equal to the saint’s. The subject becomes uncertain, and that uncertainty is the swerve. It is joined to a technical turn, an early Venetian command of oil glazing for light and air. The stake was a large devotional panel that risked not being its subject at all. Netherlandish landscape prepared the way.
Tintoretto · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is double. There is the devotional Crucifixion of few figures, Christ, the Virgin and John, as the Venetian altarpiece had it; and there is the crowded Calvary, in the narrative paintings of the fifteenth century, in the crowded, foreshortened histories of the Venetian mainland, and in Tintoretto’s own earlier, smaller Crucifixion of the 1550s, which already set the thieves’ crosses at angles. The departure is the event turned into a panorama of an execution in progress, wall wide, its stages laid across one field as one action, the centre lifted out by height and light, the whole made an environment for a room. The stake was real: the Scuola’s commissions were contested among the city’s painters, and this wall was the test of a reputation for speed. Part of the turn was prepared by the earlier canvas.
Umayyad, under Abd al-Rahman I · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the hypostyle halls of Medina, Kufa and Jerusalem; the Umayyad mosque of Damascus, whose aisles run parallel to the qibla; the Roman and Visigothic columns of the site; the Visigothic horseshoe arch. The departure: the two-tier arcade, which turned short spolia into a tall hall; the alternating voussoir, structure made colour and rhythm; in al-Hakam II’s hall the lobed and interlaced arch, multiplied until it becomes a screen; the ribbed dome, its ribs crossing to leave an open centre; the mihrab as a chamber. The stake was real: a refugee dynasty building a rival to Damascus at the far edge of the Islamic world, and in the domes a structural wager. Held below the top because two of the four campaigns repeat the module rather than turn it.
Joseph Conrad · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the English novel of empire, which had told the far place through a traveller or a single consciousness, as Conrad’s own Marlow books did. Nostromo has no centre. It invents a whole republic, with its history, factions, port, mine, railway and press, and tells it with the chronology broken, so that history is seen as a field of forces rather than a story with a hero. The book named for its title figure keeps him offstage for long stretches. The stake was in the form itself: a novel of this size with no guide and no hero risks the reader’s hold on it, and the book takes that risk throughout. Held below the top on two counts: the method of the time-shift and of irony toward official history extends what Lord Jim had begun, and the late adventure plot returns to the paths of the sea story.
Herman Melville · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the sea tale and the true narrative of voyages, the Gothic mystery of Poe, and the American fiction of slavery in the years of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), sentimental and moral. The turn is large. Melville took a documentary source and kept its documents, splicing a court record into a novella; he bound the telling to the perception of a decent, obtuse American so completely that the reader cannot see past him, decades before restricted point of view was a method; and he refused the abolitionist frame and its sympathetic slave, giving instead an enslaved man of genius whose intelligence is shown only as the revolt he directs. The stake was real: the tale appeared unsigned after the failure of Moby-Dick and Pierre, went almost unread for seventy years, and has carried ever since the risk of being read as the racism it exposes. Held under 9.0 because the frame and materials of the sea mystery are inherited.
Isaac Babel · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The book departs from the Russian war novel as Tolstoy left it, with its breadth, its general in the private soul and its historical argument, and from the civil-war novel being written around it. In their place come thirty-four flashes, each compressed to the point of shock, in an ornamental prose whose metaphors are more violent than the events, set beside the flat skaz of the men who did them. The inheritance is real (Gogol and Leskov for skaz, Maupassant for the cut, Bely and Pilnyak for ornament), so the swerve is a fusion and a compression rather than an invention, and is held below 9.0. The stake was very high: the book refused the heroic account of the Red Cavalry while its commander was alive and powerful, and Budyonny attacked it in print in 1924.
Andrei Tarkovsky · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance was science fiction, in the cinema and in the Strugatskys’ novel: alien visitation, salvaged artefacts and the men who smuggle them out. The film turns from all of it: no alien, no effects, no artefact on screen, a Zone of overgrown industrial waste, and faith in place of discovery. It turns from narrative toward duration as well. The stake was real: the first footage was lost and the film was made again. Held below the top because Tarkovsky had prepared the turn himself. Solaris (1972) had already turned science fiction inward, and Mirror (1975) had broken his narrative grammar; this is the furthest point of a road he had opened.
Martin Scorsese · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
The inherited form is the boxing picture and its plot of rise, temptation and redemption, from Body and Soul (1947) to Rocky (1976), four years before. The departures compound: a sports biography with no redemptive bout and a hero it will not excuse; black and white in 1980; fights rendered as interior states, unreadable as sport; domestic scenes played long and close. The stake was real: Scorsese came to it from the commercial failure of New York, New York (1977), with a prestige picture built on a repellent hero. Held below the top by precedent: The Set-Up (1949) and Fat City (1972) had taken the glamour out of the ring, Taxi Driver (1976) had centred an unexcused man, and the producers came to it from Rocky.
Sophocles · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is exact and known: Aeschylus and Euripides had both staged the fetching of Philoctetes, Euripides in 431 BC, and both plays are lost but for fragments. Dio Chrysostom’s fifty-second oration compares the three, and shows Sophocles’ departures. He adds Neoptolemus, so that the play becomes the making of a young man’s character under pressure; he empties Lemnos, so that ten years of abandonment are total; and he makes the plot fail, then makes a god undo the failure, using the device of Euripides’ late plays with a doubleness that leaves the human verdict standing. The stake: a tragedy in which no one dies and nothing happens but a change of mind. It won the prize. Held below 9.0 because the swerve stays within tragedy’s late repertoire.
El Greco · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is threefold: the Byzantine icon of the painter’s Cretan training, with its intercession, its gold and its frontal Christ; the Venetian altarpiece in two zones, earth and glory, as in Titian’s Assunta, with Tintoretto’s figure in motion; and the Spanish funerary chapel. The departure: two laws of painting set against each other on purpose in one canvas, a sober portrait gallery below and an elongated, flame-like, weightless heaven above; a medieval miracle staged among living men painted from life; the soul shown as a translucent body passed through a channel of cloud. The stake: after the Martyrdom of Saint Maurice failed to please Philip II, the painter’s future lay with Toledo’s clergy and gentry, and this was his largest commission for them. Held below the top because the swerve was made inside the brief: the parish wanted a miracle and a glory.
Nathaniel Hawthorne · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Scott’s historical romance, the Gothic novel and its American line in Charles Brockden Brown, the Puritan histories, and Hawthorne’s own tales. The turn: a novel that begins after the transgression, which is never shown; that makes its fallen woman the moral and intellectual centre and gives her the freedom of thought her community denies; that turns the Gothic inward, from the haunted house to the haunted heart; and that refuses to settle its own marvels, offering the meteor and the mark on the minister’s breast each with another reading beside it. The stake was real: the book was attacked in its first years as immoral, and “The Custom-House” cost its author the good will of his town. Held below the top because the machinery of Gothic and allegory is inherited, not broken: the turn is made with tools the tradition supplied.
Henry Fielding · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the romance and the epic, Cervantes and the picaresque of Lesage and Scarron, the comic stage on which Fielding had worked until the Licensing Act of 1737, and against them Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1747 to 1748), the novel of letters and inward virtue. The turn: a comic epic in prose at full scale; a narrator who steps forward in eighteen essays and claims the authority of a historian and the laws of a legislator; a plot built as an architecture rather than a string of episodes; and a hero whose sexual faults are neither hidden nor punished but weighed against his goodness. The stake was real: the book was attacked as immoral in its year. Held below the top because the first break was made in Joseph Andrews (1742), whose preface named the comic epic in prose; Tom Jones is the break completed.
Seljuk and later builders · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Two turns, both with stakes. First, the Seljuk insertion of a great domed chamber into an Arab hypostyle: the inherited field of supports cut to raise a monumental brick dome over the mihrab, an act that changed what a congregational mosque was. Second, the conversion of the court into a court of four iwans, setting the Iranian palace and house plan within the mosque and displacing the hypostyle as the governing form. The stake was real: domes of that span in brick on squinches stood at the edge of what the region had built. Held below the top because both elements came from the region’s own vocabulary, and the four-iwan plan may have been tried elsewhere at the same time.
Sylvia Plath · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The departure from her own inheritance is sharp. The Colossus (1960) is a careful, mannered, formal book in the manner of its period; Ariel throws that manner off for short driven lines, nursery-rhyme chant, black comedy and a voice that performs to an audience. Beyond Lowell the turn is in tone: rage, glee and incantation where his voice is ruefully discursive, and a woman’s voice of violence and triumph that the lyric in English had not carried. The stake was total: the subject was her own marriage, children and death, written at the edge of breakdown. Held below 9.0 because the path was already broken: Lowell’s Life Studies (1959), which she admired, and Anne Sexton, her classmate in Lowell’s seminar, had carried the private life into verse.
Samuel Beckett · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the novel as Joyce and Proust left it, the first-person confession, the self-conscious narrators of Sterne and Diderot, Descartes and Geulincx behind the immobile thinker, Dante’s Belacqua, and Beckett’s own English novels, Murphy and Watt. The turn, which this book makes more visible than its neighbours, is to put the making of fiction inside the fiction as a dying man’s last act: stories begun, judged, abandoned, renamed in mid-course, the narrator breaking off to report on his pencil. The stake was real: Beckett had left English for French and was writing with no publisher and little prospect, and the trilogy was refused before Minuit took it. Held below the top because the decisive break, the voice without a world, was made in Molloy and pressed further in L’Innommable; the narrator-as-author has older precedents.
Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is plain. The frame is Stephen Knight’s royal and Masonic theory of the murders, from Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution (1976); the psychogeography of Hawksmoor’s churches comes from Iain Sinclair’s Lud Heat (1975), which Moore acknowledges; Campbell’s line remembers the engravings of the Victorian penny press; and the apparatus is the historical novel’s. The turn is in the medium and in the stake. After Watchmen, Moore spent some ten years on a black-and-white, unsensational, heavily annotated work of history, serialised in a small-press anthology and by fragile publishers, two of which failed while it ran. The book refused the costume, the colour and the thriller’s pace, and gave the comic an annotated, documentary and speculative mode it had not had at this length. Held below the top because each element is inherited; the swerve is to join them in this medium, and to pay for it.
Andrei Tarkovsky · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance was the Soviet biographical and historical epic, the life of a national genius told as triumph, with Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky (1938) and Ivan the Terrible (1944 to 1958) as its grand manner. The departure is deep: a film about a painter never shows him painting; the life is broken into unequal episodes; the past is mud, rain and torture, not pageant; a religious subject is treated as religious, in the Soviet Union of 1966. The stake was paid in five years withheld. Held below the top because parts of the grammar were prepared, by Kalatozov and Urusevsky’s moving camera, Bergman, Bresson and Tarkovsky’s own Ivan’s Childhood (1962).
U2 · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
The turn was large and paid for. The most earnest stadium band of the 1980s, coming off a record of American roots music that drew a hostile press, took up industrial noise, Manchester dance rhythm, a distorted voice and irony as a mode of address. The stake was the band at its height: the audience The Joshua Tree had won, and, on the account of the sessions, the group itself, near to breaking up in Berlin. What holds it from the top is the tradition. Every language the record used existed, in Bowie and Eno’s “Heroes”, made in the same studio, in Manchester and in the industrial scene, and the songs stayed songs.
Claudio Monteverdi · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Florentine favola of the decade before: Peri’s and Caccini’s settings of Rinuccini’s Euridice (1600), recitative over a sparse continuo, with the spectacle of the intermedio and the madrigal behind them. The departures are three: a full musical drama that brings every language then available, recitative, strophic aria, madrigal chorus, dance-song, sinfonia and ritornello, into one action; an instrumental ensemble specified at the head of the print and assigned by world; and virtuoso ornament written out as dramatic means. The stake was real: a first opera, in a form seven years old, while Artusi’s attacks on Monteverdi’s new manner were current. Held near the gate because the subject, the pastoral frame and the sung speech are the Florentines’, and the turn carries their road further more than it breaks from it.
John A. Roebling and Washington Roebling · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the wire suspension bridge as John Roebling had built it, at Niagara in 1855 and between Cincinnati and Covington in 1866, with stays and stiffening against wind; masonry towers; and the pneumatic caisson, used just before at St. Louis. The departure: a span half again as long as any built, steel wire where iron had served, foundations sunk deeper under compressed air than men had worked, and a raised promenade that makes the crossing a walk. The stake was as high as any of its decade: the first engineer dead before work began, the second disabled, men struck down by an illness no one understood, fraudulent wire in the cables. Held below the top because the system is the maker’s own proven path carried to a new scale, an extension more than a turn.
Anton Chekhov · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the well-made play, the Russian stage of Ostrovsky, and Chekhov’s own The Wood Demon, which ended in a suicide and a set of happy pairings. The swerve is the revision itself: the suicide taken out, Vanya made to fire twice and miss, the guests sent away and the last act set at the accounts, so that the crisis changes nothing and the play’s event is that life resumes. The stage’s oldest device, the gun, is fired and becomes farce and grief at once. The stake was real: The Wood Demon had failed, and The Seagull failed at the Alexandrinsky in 1896. Held below the top because the greater single break is shared with The Seagull, which reached the stage first, and the revision’s materials were inherited.
Sandro Botticelli · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance in Florence about 1480: sacred narrative and the altarpiece at monumental scale; myth confined to cassoni, birth trays, small panels and illumination; and the sculptural, perspectival painting of the generation after Masaccio, the Pollaiuolo and Verrocchio, which Botticelli knew from inside. The departure is twofold. Pagan myth at near life size on a panel three metres wide, with the gravity of a sacred image, for which no Florentine precedent survives. And a turn from measured space: a frieze in one shallow plane, figures that bear no weight, line rather than modelling as the carrier of the picture. The stake is discounted: the commission was private, for a learned household, and the cost was risked in a narrow room.
Édouard Manet · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is two. One is the mirror picture of the old masters, Van Eyck and Velázquez, where the glass shows truly what stands before it. The other is the café and café-concert scene of Manet’s own circle, Degas, Renoir and his own earlier café pictures, a genre of small size and anecdote. The departure: a café-concert subject at near life size, sent to the Salon; a mirror that tells a different story from the room, so that optics are given up for a second truth; the main figure facing out with no anecdote, the scene happening only in reflection. The stake was a Salon public and a painter who was ill, newly decorated, with standing to lose and little time. Held below the top because Manet had made the frontal, withholding figure his wager twenty years before, and the risk here was smaller than the risk then.
Richard Strauss · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Wagner’s music drama: the leitmotif web, the continuous act, the orchestra as commentator, with Strauss’s own tone poems and his two earlier operas, Guntram (1894), a failure, and Feuersnot (1901), behind it. The departures: a spoken play set nearly as written, in prose, after Debussy’s Pelléas of 1902; a single act at continuous high pressure; harmony that sets keys against one another and leaves dissonance unresolved at the climax; a Wagner orchestra used for nerves and detail; and a subject, a girl’s desire for a saint’s dead mouth, that no court opera had staged. The stake was real: censorship in Vienna, London and New York, and Strauss’s standing after two failed operas. Held below the top because the method was a proven path and Debussy had taken the literary turn first.
Pallava · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance: Indian narrative relief on cave walls and in panels, among them the great Varaha relief at Udayagiri of the fifth century; the contemporary rock-cut work of the Chalukyas; the Pallavas’ own first rock-cut shrines. The departure: a whole open-air cliff face as one field, under the sky and not within a cave or a frame; a natural flaw in the rock made the subject’s spine; and a composition with no central icon enthroned, but an event toward which an entire world turns. The stake was real: an early campaign of a dynasty newly working in stone, at a scale with no settled precedent, on a face that could not be corrected. Held below the top because the iconography, the figure types and the carving idiom were the tradition’s.
Martin Scorsese · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the American gangster film as The Godfather had remade it: operatic, dynastic, slow, scored for orchestra, its violence ceremonial. The departures: a pop soundtrack running through thirty years and dating each one; freeze-frames with narration over them; two narrators, one of them the wife; a pace that compresses years into minutes and a last act cut to the rhythm of cocaine; violence that is sudden and petty, a kid shot for an insult, a made man kicked to death over a remark about a shoeshine box. The stake was real: a studio film with no sympathetic centre, released into an expectation of another Godfather. Held near the gate by precedent: Scorsese’s own Mean Streets (1973) had the neighbourhood, the songs and the volatility, and this film enlarges that method.
Radiohead · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
The turn and the stake were both real. The inherited tradition is the stadium-scale guitar record. This one leads with a synthesiser and a processed voice, gives guitars under a third of its time, hands one track to free-jazz brass, and drops the ordinary promotional apparatus of singles and videos. That it went to number one in Britain and America regardless does not reduce the stake; it was taken before the result was known. What keeps it from the top band is precedent: Bowie’s Berlin records, Talk Talk’s last two albums and Scott Walker’s late turn had already placed this bet. The swerve transfers capital; it does not invent a currency.
Virginia Woolf · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the English essay and the lecture, from Lamb and Hazlitt to Pater, and the polemic on women from Wollstonecraft and Mill. The departure is to argue by fiction: an invented speaker, invented colleges, a day’s action with meals and weather, an invented novel by an invented novelist read as if it existed, and a thesis reached by a walk rather than a proof. The stake was real. A lecture to women’s colleges was published as a book in the year of the trial of The Well of Loneliness, with the sentence “Chloe liked Olivia” (ch. 5) set down after a joking check that Sir Chartres Biron, the magistrate in that case, is not behind the curtain: a risk to the author’s standing and to the book’s reception. Held below the top because the essay form bends rather than breaks, and the lecture frame stays visible.
Gian Lorenzo Bernini · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance: squares bounded by porticoes on buildings, as at the Annunziata in Florence and the Procuratie of San Marco; the arcaded atrium of Old St Peter’s; the Renaissance ideal of the regular piazza; Michelangelo’s oval on the Campidoglio. The departure: a colonnade standing free with no building behind it, a screen rather than a wall; trabeated, not arcaded; four deep and radial; an oval of this size made the figure of a city space; an edge that encloses and stays open. The stake was high: the most prominent site in Catholic Europe, a strained treasury, critics of the cost, and an architect whose bell tower on the same façade had come down a decade before. Held below the top because oval and colonnade were each known; the swerve is in their combination and scale.
Federico Fellini · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance was Italian neorealism, which Fellini knew from inside as a writer for Rossellini’s Roma città aperta (1945) and Paisà (1946), and his own films of the fifties, which still told a story. The film turns from both: three hours with no plot of cause, held by a man, a city and the repetition of nights; a street built in the studio in place of the location; the rich and the famous in place of the poor. Its length and shape went against every commercial rule of its day. Held below the top because the turn was shared: L’avventura came to the same festival and À bout de souffle in the same season, Rossellini’s Viaggio in Italia (1954) had already made drift a structure, and I vitelloni had made episodes a life.
Thomas Jefferson · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the American college as one large building or a few, as at Nassau Hall and the yards of Harvard and Yale, or the quadrangle of Oxford and Cambridge, centred on a chapel and governed by clergy. The departure: a university planned as a village of separate houses on an open green, with no chapel in the plan and a library at its head, and a state university without a professor of divinity, its form stating the secular foundation. The stake was real: a former President’s political capital and the legislature’s money, spent amid open criticism of the cost and of the irreligion, on an architect with no practice and a plan no American institution had built. Held below the top because the turn has precedents: Ramée’s plan for Union College of 1813 and the pavilions of Marly.
Hans Holbein the Younger · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Northern devotional image of the dead Christ: the Lamentation and the Entombment with their mourners, the Man of Sorrows, the effigy on the tomb; behind them Mantegna’s foreshortened dead Christ; and within the decade before, Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece, whose crucified body is already a ruin of flesh, though set inside a scheme of resurrection on the same altarpiece. The departure goes further in one direction: the dead god laid flat, alone, at eye level, in a closed box, with no one to mourn and nothing to promise. The stake was a painter in his early twenties, in Basel on the eve of the Reformation, withholding consolation as images were about to be attacked. Held below the top because Grünewald had already broken the decorum; this is a radical compression of an existing subject.
George Eliot · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The swerve is double and the cost was paid. An English domestic novel of manners in 1876 turns, at its height, to Jewish nationalism, with sympathy and with learning, and makes its hero a Jew who leaves England. Eliot’s readers resisted it, and the resistance, Leavis’s surgery included, has followed the book for a century and a half. The novel also refuses the marriage plot it seems to set up: Gwendolen, the heroine of the first half, is not married to the hero, and is left alone and changed, while the book ends with a man’s departure for the East and a prophet’s death. And the telling begins in the middle and turns back, a departure from Eliot’s own practice in Middlemarch. Held below the top because the stake is a turn of subject and of ending more than a reinvention of the novel’s means.
Marvin Gaye · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Motown’s: the three-minute single, written and produced by the company’s teams, sung by an artist who did not choose his material, with social comment kept off the label. The turn is large. A star singer produced his own record, wrote or co-wrote its songs, set them as a continuous suite with segues and a reprise, gave the arrangements a looseness of bongos, conga, flute and free saxophone, made his own voice a layered choir, and made the subject the war, the street and the earth. Held from the top because the path was partly proven: Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions had made the conscious soul song, Isaac Hayes the long-form soul album in 1969, and rock the concept album. The swerve joined them inside the hit factory.
Stanley Kubrick · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the haunted-house film, The Innocents (1961) and The Haunting (1963), the art-horror of Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and Don’t Look Now (1973), the horror boom of the 1970s, and a bestseller with its own rules. The departures are large: horror in even, bright light, with wide lenses and symmetrical frames and ghosts standing in full view; dread by duration rather than shock; a score of modernist concert music; the novel’s explained supernatural stripped to an ambiguity never resolved; the cook who comes to the rescue killed. The stake was paid in divided first reviews, a nomination for its director at the first Razzie awards, and the lasting public objection of the novel’s author. Held below the top because the cold manner was Kubrick’s proven path since 2001, and a King bestseller was a commercial wager, not a blind one.
Kurt Vonnegut · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the American war novel, the black comedy of Catch-22 (1961), and the paperback science fiction by which Vonnegut had made his living. The swerve is the joining of them in one book: the author’s own failure set at the front as the first chapter, a protagonist whose life is told as a mosaic of moments in no order, an alien cosmology used to carry the testimony of the century’s most suppressed Allied atrocity, and a refrain that turns every death into a shrug and so makes the reader count them. The stake was real: Vonnegut was known as a genre writer, the material was his own captivity, and the risk was that the science fiction would trivialise Dresden or that the frame would read as self-indulgence. Held below the top because Heller had established the black-comic war novel and the play with time has antecedents, so that the turn lies in the combination more than in a wholly new instrument.
John Milton · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the classical and Renaissance epic, Milton’s own grand style, and the line of biblical poems on Christ: Vida’s Christiad and Giles Fletcher’s Christ’s Victory and Triumph (1610), which treats the same temptation. The turn is a brief epic on the model Milton had named, the Book of Job, where the hero does nothing, the action is a debate and the victory a refusal: an epic that rejects arms, empire, glory and, in Athens, the learning epic was made of, in a style plainer than its poet’s own. The stake was paid: after Paradise Lost Milton wrote against what it had taught readers to want, and they have found this poem bare ever since. Held below the top by precedent in biblical verse, and by the reuse of its predecessor’s metre and machinery.
Gillo Pontecorvo · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Italian neorealism, Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (1945) and Paisà (1946) above all, with the newsreel and the reportage of the early 1960s; Pontecorvo’s own Kapò (1960) had already set fiction in history. The turn is far: a war ended three years before, reconstructed to look like the newsreel no one could have filmed, with crowds of non-professionals in the streets where it happened, a commander of the insurgency co-producing and playing a part drawn on himself, and a protagonist who is a city and a people. The stake was large: a subject France would not show, and a film that could have been propaganda made to give the enemy the best argument. Held short of the top because neorealism had proved the path.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
The tradition it inherits, the dry garden of the Muromachi period, still pictured a landscape: the narrow garden of Daisen-in at Daitoku-ji, of the early sixteenth century, is a scene in miniature with a waterfall, a river and a boat stone, read like an ink painting. Ryōan-ji removes nearly everything that makes a landscape legible: no shrub, no bridge, no recognisable feature, no single reading. Its subject is the relation of stones across a field. The stake was real: gravel and fifteen rocks before the abbot’s hall of a major temple risk reading as empty. Held because the dry garden principle was already in place, and because, on a later date, the turn would be made with less risk.
John Soane · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance was the Georgian terrace house and English neoclassicism after Adam, and Soane turned both. He hollowed the terrace into a vertical sequence of top-lit, layered spaces without precedent in English domestic building; he reduced the classical order to incised lines and grooves, shallow segmental arches and floating canopies; he made light, mirror and borrowed view the matter of architecture. The stake was real: he built it with his own money, went to law over the projecting front, and was mocked in print in his lifetime, most painfully by his son. The swerve is wide, and it cost him; but it was made inside one man’s house, not on a public commission where it would have risked more.
Louis Kahn · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance was the museum of the decade: the flexible universal hall, as in Mies’s Neue Nationalgalerie of 1968; the white box lit by lamps; Wright’s spiral; and behind them the top-lit picture gallery of skylights and lanterns. The departure is a museum of vaulted rooms, of mass, concrete and stone, lit by daylight drawn down a shell from a slot, its services withdrawn into channels of their own: the room against the open plan, the day against the lamp. The stake was real. Daylight risks old paintings, and conservators had to be satisfied; the shell had no precedent at this form and span. Held below the top because the turn is Kahn’s own, made at Yale, the Richards laboratories, Salk and Exeter, and here perfected more than begun.
Peter Zumthor · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the spa of the nineteenth century, the Kurhaus with its halls of treatment; the modern swimming hall and the hotel spa of the 1960s on this very site; the Roman and Ottoman bath as type; and the image-making of the architecture of its decade. The architect’s earlier work, the shelters over the Roman ruins at Chur and the chapel of Saint Benedict at Sumvitg, was in timber and small. The departure: a bath as a geological mass; stone laid as load-bearing structure in a new composite system; darkness and the senses made the programme; the plan a field to wander rather than a pool to swim. The stake was real: a small commune’s investment in its economy, an architect then little known beyond Graubünden, and an untried wall. Held below the top because the turn drew on a lineage of material and light, Kahn, Scarpa and Lewerentz, already in hand.
Christopher Marlowe · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the morality play, with its Good and Evil Angels, its pageant of the Seven Deadly Sins and its Old Man as a figure of Mercy; the tragedy of the fall of princes; and the English Faust Book, which supplied the episodes. The turn is to set a tragic hero, whose aspiration the verse loves, inside a morality whose mercy is offered and refused to the end. The morality form exists to save; this one damns, and plays the damnation as tragedy, not warning. The stake was real: conjuring, a blood pact and an anti-papal farce on the London stage. Held below the top because the mighty line was already Tamburlaine’s, the morality furniture is taken over whole, and the middle follows the Faust Book closely.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance was the picaresque, the English comic novel of the road, which the troupe chapters recall in Fielding, the sentimental novel of feeling, and Goethe’s own Werther, which had made the suffering, self-consuming young man the type of the age. The book turns against all of them. The hero is passive, a man to whom things happen; the narrator stands at an ironic distance from his enthusiasms; the founding of a national theatre, which the Theatralische Sendung had taken as a mission, is revalued as a detour; and the end is integration into a working society, not death or marriage as reward. The cost was real: ten years of work set aside, and a public refused the Werther it wanted.
Alberto Giacometti · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the walking figure from Egypt to Rodin’s headless Walking Man, which made the stride itself the subject; the volumetric modern sculpture of Brancusi, Lipchitz and Moore, mass and closed form; and Giacometti’s own Surrealist objects of the early 1930s, from which he broke in 1935 to return to the model, to the derision of the Surrealists. The departure, made from 1947: the figure as seen, not as built; mass refused for a line that stands in space; a surface left as the record of the search. The stake was his whole position, years of failed heads and of figures that shrank to the size of a matchstick before they grew again. Held below the top because this figure perfects a swerve made thirteen years earlier, and the commission it was made for was abandoned rather than risked in public.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The departure is large. After Weimar classicism and the first part of Faust, the leading poet of Europe, at sixty-five, put on the mask of a fourteenth-century Persian and published a book of Persian-titled books, with an apparatus explaining the culture to readers who did not know it. Nothing in German or in European poetry had made a whole lyric book out of an answer to an Islamic poet as an equal, and the stake was the standing of the poet who made it. Held at 8.7 because the Persian form is taken as costume and frame more than as prosody: the ghazal is imitated in a handful of poems, the measures stay German, and the swerve is of stance and architecture more than of the line.
The Doors · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Los Angeles rock band of 1966, the Byrds and Love, with the Chicago blues the band covered and the garage organ combo. The turn is real: a quartet with no bass player, the bass line played on a keyboard; a drummer whose dynamics came from jazz; a guitarist drawing on flamenco, Indian modes and bottleneck; a cabaret song by Brecht and Weill dropped into a rock record; and a debut that ends in eleven minutes of improvised theatre of parricide and ritual. The stake was a first record by an unknown band, with a seven-minute track and a closing piece no radio could play. There was precedent: the Yardbirds and the Butterfield Blues Band had opened the long raga and blues form, and organ, blues and drone were common property. But the precedent opened a form; this record turned its meaning, away from virtuosity toward darkness, death and theatre, and staked a debut on the turn. The swerve is made from inherited means, and it was a wager.
Virginia Woolf · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the English biography, which Lytton Strachey had begun to undo in Eminent Victorians (1918) and which Woolf had examined in “The New Biography” (1927); behind it, Sterne’s play with the conventions of a life, and the fantastic voyage. The turn is large: a biography, with preface, plates and index, of a person who lives three and a half centuries and changes sex midway, told by a biographer who complains of missing documents and of a subject who does nothing but think. The stake was real: comic fantasy from the leading modernist novelist a year after To the Lighthouse, at risk of being taken for a trifle, and a public love letter to a woman in the year a lesbian novel was tried and destroyed. Held below the top because comedy cushioned the swerve, made from a proven position.
Terry Gilliam · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the dystopian tradition, Zamyatin, Huxley, Orwell and Kafka, its films from Metropolis (8.3) to Michael Radford’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984), and Gilliam’s own Monty Python. The turn is large: dystopia played as farce, the total state given as clutter, malfunction and bad plumbing rather than efficiency, and a future dressed in 1940s fashions, pneumatic tubes and tiny screens under magnifiers. The stake is the measure. An ending without consolation, at this length, for American studio money, defended in public against the chairman of Universal at real cost to its maker’s career; the studio’s own 94-minute happy ending shows what the swerve refused. Held below the top by precedent: the comic dystopia had Dr. Strangelove (8.7), and Kafka was read as comedy.
Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the Roman Baroque church with a temple front or a pair of towers, Sant’Agnese in Agone, St Peter’s, the projects of Bernini and Borromini, which Fischer knew from his years in Rome, and the Austrian church with paired towers. The departure: to take the towers away and set in their place two free-standing triumphal columns, so that a church front becomes a collage of separable monuments from different ages, a temple front, Roman columns, gate pavilions and a dome, placed side by side without blending. No church had been composed this way. The stake was real: an imperial vow, a public competition, the city’s most visible new site. Held below the top because each part is quoted, and the swerve lies in their assembly, not in a new idea of space or structure.
Built for Qabus ibn Wushmgir · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The inherited tomb of the eastern Islamic lands was the domed cube, as at the Samanid tomb in Bukhara, and religious opinion was cool toward any monumental grave at all. Here a ruler set up a tomb with no visible dome, its height several times its width, its whole ornament two bands of letters. The stake was real on two counts: the structural risk of a tall brick shell in a region of earthquakes, and the public claim of a grave meant to dominate a landscape. Held below 9.0 because the lineage is uncertain: tomb towers of a related kind appear in the Caspian lands within a generation, at Lajim in 1022, and lost earlier towers may stand behind this one.
Robert Altman · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the studio ensemble film of Grand Hotel, Renoir’s The Rules of the Game, the musical, and Altman’s own films of overlapping voices from M*A*S*H (1970) to California Split (1974). The turn is large: a studio release of about 160 minutes with no protagonist and twenty-four principals; no plot line until the last scene; sound mixed as a field of simultaneous voices in which the listener must choose; songs written by the actors who sing them, some deliberately mediocre, performed at length; a candidate never seen; a star killed by a stranger whose reason the film declines to give. The stake was real: the country music establishment took offence, and the form had no commercial precedent at this length. Held short of the top because Altman’s previous five years had prepared the method, and the wager was placed by a director at the height of his licence.
Luis Buñuel · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
The turn and the stake are one fact. The turn: Buñuel took the anticlerical and erotic violence of Un chien andalou and L’Âge d’or and set it inside a plain, almost classical realist melodrama, with no dream to excuse it, so that blasphemy arrives as daylight fact. The stake: he made it in Franco’s Spain, on his first return from exile, on a script the censor had passed, and it cost an official his post and the film its Spanish nationality for sixteen years. Few films have risked as much that was not artistic. Held below the top: the targets and the violence were his already, and the realist manner was refined in Mexico, in Los olvidados and Nazarín.
Henri Labrouste · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The departure is large and the stake was real. Labrouste had broken with the Academy’s reading of the antique in his Paestum envoi of about 1828 to 1829, and was kept from public commissions for years after. This was his first major building, and in it he put exposed cast iron at the heart of a monumental public interior in Paris: the frame shown as frame, its ornament drawn from its own working, the pierced arches, and not applied from the orders. The stake was his standing and the dignity of a state building. Two things temper the turn: iron was already at work in markets, conservatories and bridges, and outside the frame is hidden behind a masonry shell of classical bearing.
William Kentridge · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is threefold: the satirical drawing of Goya, Daumier, Beckmann and Grosz, with its caricature of the fat capitalist; the animated film, whose norm was the cel, the clean line and one drawing replacing another; and the South African political art of the 1980s, mostly the resistance poster and the protest image. The departure: an animation made by altering one drawing rather than replacing it, so that the film carries its own past on its surface, and a political art spoken from inside the guilty class in grey and doubt rather than in the slogan’s red and black. The trace of the eraser becomes a grammar, and charcoal a medium of time. The stake was real. The debts show, in Soho above all, and the method grew from the maker’s theatre and printmaking.
Hilary Mantel · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The departure is real and the stake was high. The English historical novel stood between costume romance and academic pastiche. Mantel took the most familiar story in English history, whose moral roles were fixed, More the man for all seasons and Cromwell the thug, and reversed the lighting while refusing the simple reversal. The instrument is formal: the present tense, so that nothing is known in advance; a perspective locked inside the villain; the bare “he” that makes the reader live as Cromwell’s attention. The cost was plain: a long historical novel, the first of a promised trilogy, by a writer whose novel of the French Revolution, A Place of Greater Safety (1992), had sold modestly; and the device was attacked for confusion. The Booker does not make the wager safe in hindsight.
Ovid · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Latin love elegy of Gallus, Tibullus, Propertius and Ovid’s own Amores: the couplet, the first person, the lover shut out at the door, the servitude to a hard mistress. The turn takes that apparatus whole and points it at exile and the state. The lover at the door becomes the exile at Rome’s shut door, the mistress becomes Caesar, the servitude of love becomes the subject’s petition, and elegy, which took its name from lament, is returned to lament for a living man’s lost world. Book 2 is a second swerve: a defence of literature’s licence in 578 lines, addressed to the emperor who punished it, turning the charge against the canon (2.371). The stake was mortal: the poems went to a ruler who could worsen the sentence.
Bertolt Brecht · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The plot is inherited, and so is the form of the ballad opera; the swerve is in what the songs do. Brecht and Weill made the number step out of the action: the lights change, a board names the song, the singer addresses the house, and the song comments on the scene rather than expressing a feeling inside it. It is the first popular working of what Brecht would call epic theatre, set in the idiom of dance band and cabaret against the operatic and the naturalist inheritance at once, and placed in a commercial house that needed a success. The stake was real: rehearsals by every account were near collapse, and a work that sang its contempt at the audience paying for it had no reason to succeed. It succeeded, and the success was a cost Brecht spent years trying to reverse in his revisions and his Notes. The inherited plot keeps the departure below the top.
The Beatles · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the group’s own beat records, Help! the latest; Bob Dylan’s personal and oblique lyric and the folk rock of the Byrds; and American soul, which the title half mocks. The turn is real: an album of original songs conceived and heard as one record, the lyric turned from courtship toward introspection and memory, the sound gone acoustic and soft, a sitar in a Western pop song, fuzz on the bass, a baroque keyboard in a ballad. The stake was real: a group at the height of its fame could have kept to the formula that made it, and bet that its audience would follow it inward. It is held from the top because the turn was gradual, prepared on Help!, its lyric learned from Dylan, and the larger break came on the next record.
Olmec · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The departure is from what came before in Mesoamerica as far as it is known: small figurines in clay and stone, and perhaps work in wood that has not survived. No monumental stone sculpture is known in the region before the heads, and a colossal head with no body is a rare solution anywhere: the colossi of Egypt and the great heads of other traditions are mostly heads of bodies, or fragments. The stake was literal: quarrying, moving and carving stones of many tonnes without metal or draught animals wagers a polity’s labour on a form. Discounted on two counts: the tradition left behind is so little known that the size of the turn is partly inferred, and within the body the form became a convention, so that the later heads keep a proven path rather than swerving from it.
Anonymous; Octagon by William Hurley and Alan of Walsingham · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The Norman church is a strong member of its family, not a departure. The swerve is the Octagon. Where any builder would have raised a new square tower on the four old piers, the Ely builders cut back the corners of the crossing, spanned the whole width of nave and aisles, and roofed the space not in stone but with a timber vault and lantern at a scale no medieval carpenter had attempted. A long church was turned toward a centralised space at its heart by a priory that had just seen what a failed crossing costs. The Lady Chapel’s nodding ogee arcade is a second swerve within its style. Held below the top because the departure is local to one part of the work.
Pérotin · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Parisian two-voice organum, the organum duplum ascribed to Leoninus and the Magnus liber, in which one free voice moves over the held chant. The departures: four voices, the first four-voice compositions in Western notated music that survive with a named composer; three upper voices in one range, coordinated in modal rhythm, which requires a governing consonance among four parts at every strong beat; a large scale, with the first syllable held for minutes; and long spans organised by voice exchange and sequence, as architecture, not improvisation. The stake was real: a new sound for the cathedral’s highest feasts, with no proven model for coordinating so many free voices. Held below the top because three-voice organum and the modal system prepared the path.
Oscar Niemeyer · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the cathedral as basilica or Latin cross, a long nave toward an apse, solid walls, a tower and a great west door at grade; and, in Brazil, the colonial church. The departure is nearly total: a centralised crown of curves, wholly glazed, its floor sunk below ground, entered from beneath, with no façade. Precedents limit it: centralised modern churches, the glass walls of Perret at Le Raincy, the concrete shells of Candela, Le Corbusier’s Ronchamp of 1955, and Niemeyer’s own São Francisco at Pampulha of 1943, which had already swerved. The stake was high: a cathedral for a new capital staked on one figure in concrete, built without the industrial finish such a figure seems to need, by an atheist architect for the Church, its skeleton standing unfinished for a decade.
Gustave Flaubert · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the saint’s life as Athanasius wrote it, the mystery play, Goethe’s Faust and its Walpurgis night, Byron’s Cain and its flight through space, and the French philosophical prose poem of the 1830s, of which Quinet’s Ahasvérus is the nearest. The turn is large. The master of the realist novel spent a quarter century on a prose drama for no stage, without plot, whose matter is the erudition of the history of religions, documented to the footnote and presented as vision. The stake was paid: his two closest readers told him in 1849 to put it aside, the book of 1874 was received coolly, and his whole method, documentation and impersonality, was spent on a form no one asked for. Held off the top because the dramatic poem of ideas was an inherited genre.
Constantin Brâncuși · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the modelled figure of Rodin, in whose workshop Brâncuși spent a short time in 1907 before leaving, and behind it naturalistic sculpture of birds and beasts. The departure is to the reduced, finished form: one profile for a whole motion, no detail, no modelling, the surface polished until it vanishes into its reflections. The stake was real, and part of it was paid in public: Customs taxed a bronze of the series as manufactured metal, and the sculptor had to argue in court that it was a work of art at all. Held below the top for two reasons. By 1923 the reduction was his own path of fifteen years, from The Kiss and the Sleeping Muse through the Măiastra and the Golden Bird, and this is its culmination. And the bronze of 1928 is a late member of its own series.
Hasegawa Tōhaku · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is threefold: the ink painting of the Southern Song, above all Muqi, whose mists Tōhaku knew from works held in Kyoto temples, Daitokuji among them; the Japanese ink tradition of Sesshū and the Kanō, built on line, outline and solid ground; and the Momoyama screen as Kanō Eitoku and Tōhaku himself practised it, in gold, colour and monumental trees. The departure: Muqi’s atmosphere, made for scrolls and small fields, carried to the scale of a pair of screens, with the ground, the outline and the gold given up and a large share of the surface left to the paper. In the decade of gold-leaf screens it is a turn to nothing. The stake is the unsettled part: if the paintings began as a draft, as is debated, the wager was private, and risked less than a commissioned pair would have.
Television · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Velvet Underground and the garage rock of the 1960s, the New York club scene of 1974 to 1976 at CBGB, and behind them the long improvisations of the West Coast bands and the modal jazz Tom Verlaine admired. The turn is large. In a scene that had made the short song and the refusal of the solo its creed, the band built long songs around composed and improvised guitar lines, and did it without the blues vocabulary every rock guitar solo had used: clean, angular, interlocking lines that sound like neither punk nor the jam bands. The stake was real, the band’s place in its own scene and its commercial life, and the record sold modestly. Held from the top by precedent: the Velvet Underground’s guitar interplay and the San Francisco bands had opened the path, and the jazz model was proven.
Walter Gropius · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the German and Beaux-Arts school building, a symmetrical block on an axis with a ceremonial front, entrance hall and stair; and Gropius’s own path, the Fagus works at Alfeld, begun with Adolf Meyer in 1911, its glazed corners free of piers, and the model factory at the Werkbund exhibition in Cologne in 1914. The departure: a public institution dissolved into volumes shaped by use, with no front and no axis, read only by walking round it; a curtain wall over three storeys on a building of public consequence; flat roofs and white render for a civic commission. The glass corner is Gropius’s own step from Fagus, so the swerve is in the composition more than the wall. The stake was real: a school expelled from Weimar, building on public money under attack, and closed by that politics six years later.
David Markson · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance: Beckett’s monologists, above all the voice of The Unnamable and Winnie in Happy Days; the philosophical aphorism; the last-man narrative of popular fiction; and, by the title, the numbered propositions of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. The turn is to make a novel of the declarative sentence alone: no scene, no dialogue, no plot beyond the slow emergence of what happened to the narrator, a philosophical form converted into the voice of a grieving woman. Beckett made the voice in the void; he did not make a novel of discrete propositions assembled by recurrence. The stake was paid: by Markson’s own account the book was refused by publisher after publisher, and it came out from a small press. Held off the top by the Beckett debt: the swerve is in the kind of sentence more than in a new conception of fiction.
Jackson Pollock · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance by 1952 is double: easel painting, which the pour had already left in 1947, and the painter’s own all-over manner of 1947 to 1950, the most famous new manner in American painting, which had made him. The canvas carries the first swerve, the pour and the canvas on the floor, among the century’s largest; it is credited but discounted, because it belongs to the method and was made by the earlier canvases, Autumn Rhythm at 9.3 among them. Its own turn is the second: after the black pourings of 1951, colour returns at full heat, and the poles impose a rhythmic structure on a field whose principle was that no part should dominate. That put the all-over doctrine at risk when the painter’s standing and health were both failing. Held below the top because part of the departure is a return, to structure and to figure, and the risk was taken against his own system more than against a tradition.
Arvo Pärt · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
The inherited language of the 1970s in the Soviet Union was serial and collage modernism, the language of Pärt’s own earlier works. The departure is total: a double concerto on two triads and two scales, built by rule, with silence as material and the canon of early polyphony as its model. The stake was real. A composer working inside the Soviet system turned away from its sanctioned modernism toward the sound of the church, and in 1980 Pärt emigrated. Three facts hold the axis below the top. The swerve was first made in Für Alina, in 1976, and is shared by the tintinnabuli works around it; American minimalism had already made process, repetition and consonance a path; and Schnittke’s polystylism had already put consonance back into Soviet concert music.
Hildegard of Bingen · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance is twelfth-century sung drama, which dramatised scripture and the liturgy: the visit to the tomb in the Easter Quem quaeritis dialogues, the shepherds and the Magi, the wise and foolish virgins of the Sponsus, the Fleury plays. The departures are several. A drama whose story is not in scripture, an allegory of the soul set to music, two and a half centuries and more before the vernacular morality plays. Text and music by one named author, and that author a woman writing for a community of women. One speaking role in a sung drama, so that the opposition of speech and song becomes the moral law. Melodies of a formulaic design that is her own, not the inherited plainchant of the office. The stake was real but bounded: the work was made for her own house, not for a public that could refuse it.
Thomas Carlyle · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
The departure is large and was paid for. In 1831 there was no English form for this: a fictional review of a treatise that does not exist, a biography assembled from paper bags, a spiritual autobiography told at two removes by an editor who half mocks it, in an English bent into German syntax, capitals and compounds. It had ancestors, and they limit the axis: Swift’s A Tale of a Tub had already made a philosophy of clothes and a mock editorial apparatus, Sterne had made digression a form, and Jean Paul had given Carlyle the manner. But no one had used the frame to carry a creed in earnest. The cost was real: the manuscript went round the London publishers in 1831 and came back, and it appeared as a book first in Boston, by the efforts of Emerson’s circle, five years after it was written.
Pre-Pottery Neolithic builders · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance, as far as it is known: the round houses and small shared structures of the Natufian and early Pre-Pottery Neolithic Levant and Upper Mesopotamia, carved small objects, stone bowls, decorated stone pieces. The departure is very wide: monolithic carved pillars of several tonnes, quarried and raised by communities without metal or draught animals, and at the start without a securely shown agricultural surplus, built into rings of a scale nothing known before them reaches. The stake was the labour and food of a region’s people, gathered for the work, and the pillar itself: a five-metre slab that might topple in the raising. What holds it: the tradition behind the enclosures is little dug and may prove a long slope rather than a turn; and this is one of several T-pillar sites, the largest known and among the earliest, not certainly the first.
David Cronenberg · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the horror film, Cronenberg’s own body horror in Shivers, Rabid and Scanners, the paranoid thriller of the 1970s, Burroughs’s soft machine and addictive image, and Philip K. Dick’s unstable realities. The turns are large: body horror made the vehicle of a theory of media; a studio release whose frame of reality dissolves at the midpoint and never returns; a hero whose degradation is, on the film’s last terms, his ascent; the male body made the site of penetration and pregnancy. The stake was real: the director’s largest budget to that date, a Universal release, James Woods as star and a rock singer as lead, and a film that failed commercially and was cut for its rating. What keeps it from the top is grammar: the stalking, the conspiracy and the shoot-outs are still the genre’s.
New Order · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Joy Division, the band’s own first life, and Movement (1981), the record of mourning that still stood in that shadow; beside it, Kraftwerk, Giorgio Moroder’s sequenced disco and the electro of New York. The turn is large. A post-punk guitar band whose identity was made in gloom joins programmed sequencers and the dance floor to its own playing, and a guitarist who had not wanted to sing becomes the voice, plain and unprotected. The stake was the band’s standing, its audience and an inheritance that many in that audience held sacred. The path had been opened by Kraftwerk and Moroder and by the band’s own singles; this is the first album to stand wholly on the new ground.
Can · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is twofold: the rock of the late 1960s, the drone of the Velvet Underground, the funk of James Brown and the psychedelic jam, and the European avant-garde and tape music in which Schmidt and Czukay were trained. The turn is large. The song is subordinated to the groove, the drummer’s repeated figure becomes the composition, the singer becomes one more instrument, and long improvisations are edited on tape into tracks that are neither jams nor compositions. A young band made its second album a double record with a whole side of chant and noise, and staked its standing with a label and a public on it. What holds it below the top is the path: Bitches Brew had already made a double album of edited group improvisation, the Velvet Underground had joined drone to rock, and Monster Movie had begun the method.
Godspeed You! Black Emperor · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Measured from rock, the departure is near total: no song, no singer, no verse or chorus, movements of up to twenty-nine minutes, strings inside a guitar band, and found voices in place of lyrics. The stake was small in capital, as it is for any unknown group, and a turn this complete is not discounted for coming before there was a career to risk. What holds it below the top is the partly proven path: Talk Talk had dissolved the rock song, Slint had made the slow build a form, Bryars had set a found voice at the centre of an elegy. What is new is the synthesis, and the apocalyptic and political frame given to a wordless rock ensemble.
Toyo Ito · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the defining frame of modern building, Le Corbusier’s Dom-ino: slab and column, a free plan on a grid. The building answers it point by point. The slab becomes a stiffened steel plate; the column becomes a hollow lattice that leans, twists and carries what the core carried; the grid dissolves. The stake was real: plates that needed shipyard welding, a structure untested at the scale, a city committing public money to a programme not yet defined, and an architect until then known for small, light works. The departure goes to the structure, not the surface. It is held below the top because the type had been questioned before, in Kahn’s served and servant spaces and in the Metabolist cores, and the turn is of a system more than of the whole idea of a building.
Leon Battista Alberti · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance was the brick Gothic friars’ church of the Italian towns, and the Florentine renewal of the antique in Brunelleschi’s interiors, which had given the church Roman columns but not a Roman face. The departure: the first church front built on the triumphal arch, an antique monumental exterior applied to a Christian church, the old building encased rather than rebuilt, and the church turned toward a dynastic and humanist cult of fame. The stake was real and was paid: a lord’s whole credit, a pope’s charge that the church was a temple of pagans rather than of Christians, and a ruin that left the building a stump. Held short of the top because the swerve was partly the patron’s and the court’s, and its most daring element, the dome, was never risked in stone.
Spike Jonze · Film
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the American comedy of the 1990s, its independent wing included, and the line of surreal comedy from Buñuel onward. The turn is large: a metaphysical conceit about the occupation of a self, told without explanation or irony about its premise, in drab offices and apartments; a living star playing himself as an empty vessel, his name the title and his head the location; a mainstream star made dowdy; a love between two women conducted through a man’s body. The structure passes from workplace comedy to farce, satire and horror, and holds. The stake was real: a first feature for both director and writer, resting on one actor’s consent to be mocked by name. The comic register is inherited and the absurd premise has antecedents.
Buster Keaton · Film
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the slapstick feature and the dream frame, a proven device, and the confusion of a spectator by the screen had been played before. The departure is of a different order: a commercial comedy whose subject is the apparatus itself, the projection booth, the screen and the cut, and which makes the cut a force acting on a body inside the fiction. The screen entry, done in the camera by matching the actor’s position across separate setups, and the billiard and window gags break the realism on which Keaton’s own comedy of real stunts and real space depended, and break it knowingly. The stake: Keaton’s independent unit answered to Schenck and Metro for profit, and a short, strange, reflexive picture was a risk. Held below the top because the frame was proven and the risk a five-reel one.
Sei Shōnagon · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the waka culture and its catalogues of poetic places, the Chinese learning of the court, Bai Juyi above all, and the women’s kana prose of the tenth century, the tale and the diary, the Kagerō diary among them. The turn is a form none of them offered: a book with no story and no single occasion, made of lists, judgments and scenes, governed only by a first-person sensibility that ranks the world. The list section, a category and its members chosen by taste, is its instrument. The stake was real and was paid: the voice displays Chinese learning and competitive wit at a court that thought such display unbecoming in a woman. Held below the top because the waka culture supplied the categories, and the daily practice of wit at court placed part of the wager on proven ground.
Oscar Niemeyer · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is twofold: the Catholic church, basilican or centralised, of masonry walls, piers and roof; and the orthodox modernism Niemeyer had learned with Lúcio Costa and from Le Corbusier at the Ministry of Education in Rio, the frame, the free plan and the right angle. The building turns from both at once: the structure itself made curve, wall and roof one parabolic shell, the frame given up for the membrane, the church broken into vaults and a detached tower. The stake was real and was paid, in sixteen years without consecration. Shell vaults were not new as engineering, in hangars and in Freyssinet’s work at Orly; the swerve lies in carrying the shell into a church and into a sensuous, regional modernism.
Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren (OMA) · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The inheritance is the tall office building as a vertical extrusion, the type that ran from Chicago and New York to the towers of Shanghai and Dubai in the same years; behind the departure stands a line of horizontal skyscrapers on paper, from El Lissitzky’s Wolkenbügel of the 1920s to OMA’s own earlier projects and Koolhaas’s Delirious New York (1978). The departure: a building of this size bent into a closed three-dimensional loop, leaning, with a cantilever of about 75 metres more than 150 metres up, in a seismic zone. The stake was as large as any building of its decade took: structure beyond the codes of the day, under special expert review, a construction with little precedent, and a reputation staked in public argument. Held below 9.0 because the turn had been drawn on paper for eighty years.
Andy Warhol · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
The inheritance is New York painting of the 1950s: the large gestural field, the hand as the trace of a self, the refusal of the commercial image. The departure is nearly total. A product label, painted at its own scale, frontal, without gesture, repeated thirty-two times with only the name changed, by a former commercial illustrator, and shown as merchandise. The stake was real: the painter was known as a painter to almost no one, and the show was in Los Angeles, far from the centre. What holds the figure below the top is that the path was opening as he walked it: Johns’s flags and beer cans, Rauschenberg’s combines, Lichtenstein’s cartoon paintings of 1961, and behind them Duchamp’s readymades and Stuart Davis’s packages. The turn to the series and the full product line is his own.
Johann Sebastian Bach · Music
9.3 · Tier V
The inheritance is the Lutheran oratorio Passion: the Gospel sung word for word, with madrigal verse and chorales between. Leipzig had heard it at Good Friday Vespers since 1721, and Bach had written one, the St John (1724). The departures are of scale and design: double choir and double orchestra used for dialogue, not only for weight; a frame in which one choir calls and the other questions; the string halo around Jesus, withdrawn at “Eli, Eli”; the arioso and aria as a steady second layer; a closing farewell, not a victory. What holds the axis here is the path: genre, liturgy, libretto type and the St John were all in place, and most of the turn is intensification.
Jean Racine · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
The inheritance is Euripides’ Hippolytus and Seneca’s Phaedra, and the doctrine of the rules. The turns are real. The centre moves from the chaste son to the woman, whose interior becomes the action; the gods leave the stage and survive only in her speech; the slander is shifted to Œnone, so that Phèdre’s guilt is consent and silence rather than the deed; Hippolyte is given a love, so that he too carries a fault. The preface calls her “ni tout à fait coupable, ni tout à fait innocente”
“neither wholly guilty nor wholly innocent”. The stake was real: an incestuous passion at the centre of a tragedy, before a devout public and a hostile cabal. Held lowest of the gates, a tenth above the bar, because the swerve is made inside the inherited form, which it perfects rather than breaks; Racine’s own larger turn was Andromaque ten years before.
Khmer, under Suryavarman II · Architecture
9.0 · Tier V
The inheritance is a mature tradition: the stepped temple-mountain of the Bakong, Pre Rup and Ta Keo, the galleried pyramid of the Baphuon, the cruciform cloisters and galleried plans of Phimai and Beng Mealea. The temple turned it. It fused galleried enclosure and stepped pyramid into one continuous rising composition, the cloister binding the third gallery to the second; it raised a state temple to Vishnu where the tradition was Shaiva; it turned the face west; and it lifted narrative relief from lintel and pediment into a continuous frieze at eye level in a covered walk. Perfected at that scale and coherence, the type was changed, and a state’s labour and treasure were staked on it. What holds the axis here is that each element had its precedent, and Borobudur had already set narrative relief along a processional ascent in the region.
Francis Ford Coppola · Film
9.0 · Tier V
The inheritance is the Hollywood gangster film, a genre of rise and fall built on a single violent man, and the studio picture of the early 1970s. The departures: the gangster made a family tragedy, told from inside the family with no policeman’s point of view; a palette so dark that the studio objected to Willis’s underlit faces; a running time near three hours and a pace that sits in rooms; a star in Brando the studio resisted and a lead in Pacino it doubted. Coppola was at risk of dismissal through the shoot, and the stake was his career and Paramount’s money. Held near the gate by what it kept: the plot is Puzo’s bestseller, the genre’s pleasures are delivered in full, and the departure was received at once rather than resisted.
Fan Kuan · Visual art
9.0 · Tier V
The inheritance is the monumental landscape of the Five Dynasties and early Song: Jing Hao, Guan Tong, and Li Cheng, Fan Kuan’s first model, whose manner the sources describe as spacious, wintry and receding. The turn is real. Fan Kuan turns the mountain to face the viewer, fills the upper picture with it and builds it from a dense, granular stroke that gives it weight rather than air, and the Song sources record the turn as a decision, to leave the master for the mountains. The stake holds the axis at 8.6: the monumental mode was already in motion, so this is a culmination as much as a departure, and no cost is documented.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart · Music
9.0 · Tier V
The inheritance is the opera buffa of Vienna and Naples in the 1780s: Paisiello’s Il barbiere di Siviglia (1782) on the first Beaumarchais play, the chain finale of Goldoni and Piccinni, the stock buffo types. The departures: a comedy whose ensembles carry the drama rather than pausing it; seria idiom given to a comic countess and to the Count’s fury, so that the genres meet inside one household; an Act II finale in which each section changes the situation; characters who keep their own music inside a crowd. The stake was real: the play was banned from the Viennese stage, Da Ponte had to win the emperor’s leave, and rival factions at court made the premiere a risk. Held at the gate because the finale, the types and the sequel were proven paths; the swerve is in degree and depth, taken inside buffa.
William Shakespeare · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The departure is real but partly made before. The turn from tragedy to plays of loss, wandering and recovery had been taken in Pericles, Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale, and the tragicomedy of Beaumont and Fletcher was the fashion. Within that mode the play swerves hard. Romance is a form of time, and sixteen years pass in the middle of The Winter’s Tale; here the unities Shakespeare had flouted all his career are kept, and the wandering is told as past in 1.2. The protagonist controls all that happens, which stakes the drama on whether he will forgive: a real risk, a play whose hero cannot lose. The court masque is fused into the drama and broken off. Held lowest of the gated five because the mode itself was not its discovery.
Euripides · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The swerve is real and its cost is on record. Euripides had written the story before, in the lost Hippolytus Kalyptomenos, whose Phaedra, by ancient report, declared her love herself and offended the audience. The second play wagers on the same story before the same public, and moves the offence into the act of speech: Phaedra fights the desire, will not name it, is betrayed into it by the Nurse, and kills for her name. The intermediary, the scene heard through a door, the silencing oath, the letter that speaks for the dead, and two goddesses at the frame who are neither reconciled nor just make a new tragedy of speech and silence; by the ancient hypothesis it took the first prize. What holds the axis a little above the bar is where the turn is made: inside the inherited form, with the divine prologue, the epiphany and the messenger’s speech used straight, and in part as a correction of the poet’s own earlier risk toward decorum rather than a departure from the tradition.
William Faulkner · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Southern novel and the European novel of the outcast, with Dostoevsky behind it. The turn: three stories that barely touch, held in one book by counterpoint rather than plot; seven chapters of a man’s past dropped into the middle of a manhunt; a whole life told from inside its conditioning, on the principle the sixth chapter opens with, “Memory believes before knowing remembers”; the historical present carried for chapters at a time; the close given to a stranger’s comic anecdote. The stake was real: the charge that the book is three novels and not one is as old as the book. Held below the top because Faulkner’s larger breaks had been made already, in The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying; this book turns back toward a public, legible form and bends it rather than breaking it.
Anonymous · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance is wide: the court tale and its lyric pathos, the waka, the Buddhist sermon and the collections of tales, Chinese history, and the earlier war tales, the Hōgen and Heiji monogatari, shorter and nearer to chronicle. The turn joins them: the warrior made the subject of court pathos, the battle told in the grammar of elegy, a mixed language of Japanese and Sino-Japanese that became a ground of later literary prose, and a national war made into a cycle for blind reciters whose sympathy runs to the defeated. That is a real departure. What holds it lower is the stake. The swerve was made by accretion, over a century and a half and by many hands, and the Kakuichi text perfects a tradition already proven in performance. A turn this large with no single wager on it is discounted for the risk it did not visibly run.
William Faulkner · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The departure is twofold. In form: a novel made of parts that also stand alone, set in no single time, with a genealogy the reader assembles across parts out of order, and a section that breaks the novel’s surface with documents in their own hand. In matter: the plantation inheritance read from its ledger by a white Southern writer in 1942, the heir’s guilt shown and his renunciation shown to fail. The stake was paid: the book was sold as “and Other Stories”, sold modestly, and was read for decades mainly through “The Bear” as a hunting story. Held near the gate because Faulkner had made his largest swerves already, and the book of linked stories had its precedents in Winesburg, Ohio and Dubliners: this is a turn within a developed method more than a new one.
Michelangelo · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance was the Vesperbild, the northern devotional type of the Virgin holding the dead Christ, usually small, stiff, awkward in proportion and harrowing in its wounds; and, in Italy, the painted Lamentation with its many mourners. Michelangelo made the northern type a single monumental marble in the antique ideal of the body, took out the horror, made the Virgin young and gave the impossible geometry of a grown man across a lap a solution the eye accepts. The stake was real: a first great Roman commission, a cardinal’s funerary monument, staked on a young Virgin questioned in his lifetime. Held at the gate’s edge because the turn joins two proven paths, northern type and classical body, rather than breaking one.
Rogier van der Weyden · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Netherlandish panel of the 1420s and 1430s: the deep, light-filled rooms and landscapes of van Eyck and Campin, figures placed in a credible world, and beside them the carved and gilded wooden altarpiece of Brabant. The departure is to paint the carved altarpiece: to take the world away, set life-size figures in a shallow gilt box with tracery, and spend the whole of the new oil naturalism on bodies and faces instead of space. The result claims sculpture’s presence and outdoes it in flesh and tears, and its pitch of feeling departs from van Eyck’s equanimity. The stake was real but not great: a guild commission in a recognised genre, by a painter of standing, for a city that wanted a showpiece.
W. B. Yeats · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance is double: Yeats’s own Celtic Twilight, and the English stanza tradition. Within it the swerve is real. The stanza of Byron’s comedy is turned into the vehicle of the gravest public meditation, with a speaking syntax run against the rhyme. The stake was real too: an old public man staked a late book on the body’s rage and lust in age, on the sexual and the violent, while the wounds of a civil war were fresh. What holds the axis is that the larger turn was made before this book. The break with the Twilight came in Responsibilities (1914), and the public occasional poem in The Wild Swans at Coole and the books after it; this book deepens a manner it did not invent. And against the modernism of its decade it kept the inherited stanza and rhyme.
Herman Melville · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the nautical romance of Marryat and Cooper, Melville’s own White-Jacket, the ballad and the historical tale. The turn is a story that refuses the romance’s settlement and says so: “Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges” (ch. XXIV). Its narrator will not decide whether the captain is sane (ch. XVII), gives the last scene between captain and condemned man only as conjecture (ch. XIX), and ends three times. White-Jacket argued against the lash; this book seats the reader on the court and gives no verdict. The stake was real but private: a retired customs inspector writing for no public, thirty years after his last published novel. Held near the bar because the instruments are inherited, the essaying narrator, the digression and the ballad, and because the greater break in Melville’s own field was Moby-Dick.
Akira Kurosawa · Film
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the jidaigeki and its swordplay film, the chanbara: stylised, star-led, its fights descended from the stage. The departures are real: samurai who are poor, hired for rice and fallible, not heroes of loyalty; the farmers at the centre of the social question, their cunning the warriors’ doing; mud, rain, horses and confusion in place of choreographed swordplay; three and a half hours, with the battle spread across most of the second part. The stake was real, and it was the studio’s money, laid on poor samurai and a battle that fills most of the second part. Against the chanbara the departure is large, and it carries the axis a step past the bar. What holds it there is that the turn was prepared. Kurosawa had already made Rashomon (1950), the larger formal wager, and Ikiru (1952), and he drew openly on the American western, above all on Ford, so part of the swerve imports a proven path.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance: Babel in manuscript and print as a square or stepped tower, small beside its builders, with the divine intervention, the dispersal or the confusion of speech as the event; and the world landscape of Patinir and his followers, a high view over a panorama. The turn: the tower made round and Roman, and the size of a geography, so the landscape is no longer a setting but the building’s site; the divine event removed, so the story is told by construction alone; the knowledge of building, its cranes, scaffolds and supply of stone, made the content of a sacred subject. The stake is modest: a panel for a private collection, by a painter already established, which risked nothing of his standing. The axis clears the gate by a tenth for that reason.
Andrei Rublev · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Byzantine Philoxenia of Abraham, a narrative image of hospitality with the three guests at the centre and the hosts serving. The departure is a turn from narrative to contemplation: the hosts removed, the scene stilled, the three set on one circle, the composition opened toward the viewer, the colour lifted from Byzantine gravity into a clear and light key. The turn is certain; how far each part of it was the painter’s own is not, since reduced versions of the subject existed and the Byzantine painters in Rus’, Theophanes the Greek above all, were his immediate teachers. The stake was small: work inside a sanctioned practice for a monastery that wanted it, at risk only of not being accepted as right, which it finally was, as a norm. This is the lowest of the gated axes.
Giuseppe Verdi · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Italian opera of the 1880s, built of numbers with cadences for applause, and Verdi’s own practice through Aida. The departures: no prelude to Act I; a continuous texture in which recitative, arioso and set piece pass into one another; scenes that end without applause; a libretto by a poet of the Scapigliatura. The stake was real: Verdi was seventy-three, fifteen years from his last new opera, and the charge of Wagnerism was waiting. Held near the gate on two counts. The turn continues his own road through Don Carlos, Aida and the Simon Boccanegra of 1881, and the set pieces still stand inside the flow. Wagner had broken the number opera twenty years before; this swerve is taken within the Italian tradition.
Sophocles · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance is plain: the suppliant play of Aeschylus’ Suppliants and Euripides’ Children of Heracles and Suppliants, with its pattern of arrival, threat and Athenian defence, and the Theban saga. The turn is to take that shape and end it in neither rescue nor catastrophe but in a passing that is a summons: a tragedy whose hero’s death is his apotheosis and the city’s gain, told by a messenger who did not see the end. It returns, from an author near ninety, to the man of his most famous play, and reverses its verdict. The stake was real: the longest and most static tragedy of the corpus, a blind man held in one place for some 1,779 lines. Held below the top because the Eumenides had already ended a tragedy in Athenian cult, and the frame is inherited whole.
Guo Xi · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the monumental landscape of Li Cheng and Fan Kuan: the mountain as a fixed, frontal, immovable mass, built stroke on stroke, as in Fan Kuan’s Travelers among Mountains and Streams. The departure is in kind. The mountain is made mobile, dissolved and reformed by mist; its solidity comes from graded wash and the rolling cloud texture stroke rather than from layered strokes; several viewpoints are fused in one field, so the eye travels rather than stands; and a particular season and hour become the subject of a monumental landscape. The stake was real but bounded. Guo Xi worked in the Li Cheng lineage and as the emperor’s favoured court painter, and the swerve was taken on a path the court endorsed.
Insular · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance is plain: the carpet pages and symbols of the Book of Durrow, Lindisfarne’s union of Insular ornament and Mediterranean figure, the Lichfield and Echternach Gospels, Pictish animal art, and the late antique models, the canon arcades and the enthroned Virgin, that reached the Columban houses. The departure: decoration leaves the major pages and runs through the whole text; the Chi-Rho becomes a page entire; narrative pictures appear at the Passion and the Temptation, rare in Insular books; figure and ornament are fused, not set side by side. The stake was the community’s wealth and, in the years of the Viking raids, its survival, and the book was never finished. But the turn is one of degree and synthesis, a culmination more than a break, and it stands a tenth above the gate.
Li Bai · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance was the verse of the Six Dynasties and the early Tang, with the new regulated forms ascendant. His stated programme was a return: the first of the Old Airs begins “大雅久不作”
(the Great Odes have long gone unwritten) and looks back past the ornate centuries. The swerve came through the return. He took the impersonal, anonymous yuefu and filled it with a first person; he broke the line, as in Shu dao nan; he made hyperbole a mode of knowing rather than a figure; and he made his own person, drunk, banished and immortal, the poem’s subject. The stake was real: a career staked on genius and patronage, the court lost within two years, and the refusal written into the Tianmu poem. Held a tenth above the bar because the forms he used were old, and the formal reorganisation of Chinese verse in his century was Du Fu’s, in regulated verse, more than his.
Rembrandt van Rijn · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the prodigal as a narrative subject: in Northern prints and paintings the son among harlots in the tavern, the son with the swine, the return as an event with servants bringing the robe, the ring and the calf; Rembrandt’s own etching of 1636, a lively scene of arrival, belongs to it. The departure is the story stripped to one embrace in near darkness, without robe, ring, calf or feast; narrative turned to stillness; the two sons set in one picture as the parable’s two halves; and broken, loaded paint turning a history piece into something like an inward state. The stake was real: Amsterdam had preferred a smooth, classicising finish for a decade. Held below the top because the departure is the extreme of the painter’s own late road, not a new road.
Anonymous · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The inherited form is the Germanic heroic lay, which survives in Old English only in pieces: the Finnsburg Fragment, Waldere, the catalogues of Widsith, and the lays sung inside this poem. Against them the turns are large. The short lay becomes a long reflective poem. A Christian narrator stands over pagan ancestors, neither condemning nor converting them, and gives them a monotheist’s piety under pagan law. The poem ends not in victory but in the hero’s death and the foretold destruction of his nation. Those two departures are certain. What holds the axis down is evidence: almost all of the tradition the poem leaves is lost, and what may be inheritance is not credited as invention.
Henry David Thoreau · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is plain: Emerson’s Nature and his essays, Montaigne, Gilbert White’s natural history, the travel narrative, the Puritan spiritual autobiography, and the Bhagavad Gita and the Laws of Manu, read at the pond. The swerve is the fusion: one book that is at once account ledger, field notebook, scripture and brag, in a first person that refuses the essay’s modesty, grounding the transcendental in measured fact: the house costed to the half cent, $28.12½, and the pond’s depth to the foot. The stake was real: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers had failed, the publisher’s terms were hard, and the book went out against the grain of its age. Held below the top because Emerson had set the terms, and the swerve is in their execution rather than a new kind.
John Keats · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance was the eighteenth-century ode of personification, Collins and Gray, the Pindaric and Horatian models behind it, and the greater lyric of Wordsworth and Coleridge, the mind meditating in a landscape. Keats turned the ode into a drama of one consciousness, its argument enacted by the speaker’s movement into an object and back, and built for it a new stanza out of the two sonnet forms. The address no longer praises its object; it tests it, and the poem ends by returning to the self it tried to leave. The stake was real: the odes came months after Blackwood’s and the Quarterly had attacked Endymion, from a poet without standing, wagering on the luxury of sound the critics had mocked as Cockney. Held at 8.6 because the turn refines the greater Romantic lyric rather than breaking from it.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
The idioms are inherited: Norman Romanesque in the church, Gothic in the Merveille, Flamboyant in the choir. The departure is in the organisation. A Benedictine monastery is a horizontal plan, church and cloister side by side round a garth; here the plan is turned on end. The church sits not at the foot of the rock, where it would have been easy, but on a summit platform the builders had to make; the claustral buildings are stacked, and the cloister is lifted onto a roof above two storeys of halls. The stake was real and was paid: the north side of the nave fell and later the choir, and both were rebuilt. Held from the top because the swerve was largely compelled by the site, and the turn is in disposition, not in language.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Viennese suburban magic opera, the machine play with a comic servant and songs: Wranitzky’s Oberon (1789) and Schikaneder’s own Der Stein der Weisen (1790). The departure is that Mozart made the popular genre carry everything he had: seria coloratura for the Queen, folk song for Papageno, Masonic hymn for Sarastro, a chorale prelude in Bach’s manner for the Armed Men, buffa ensemble, and the long through-composed finales of his Italian operas. A suburban fairy play became an opera of initiation. The stake was real but bounded: a proven commercial genre, in a theatre built for it, and the turn taken along the road of his Italian finales and his Masonic music. A popular form turned upward, not an art’s grammar broken; the axis clears its gate by a tenth.
Sophocles · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is epic: the judgement of the arms, the madness and the suicide were known from the epic cycle, and Aeschylus had made a trilogy of the story, which is lost. The departures are large and cost something. The hero dies in view, alone, after the chorus has been sent off; the scene shifts; the death comes at about three fifths, and the play goes on for some five hundred lines over the corpse; and the speech on time gives the audience a hero who may be lying, and never says. The cost is on record: for two centuries the play has been charged with a broken back, which is what a real wager earns. Held off the higher figures because the frame is the one Aeschylus used, prologue, episodes, odes and a divine cause.
Jonathan Swift · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is plain: the economic projector’s pamphlet of the age, the political arithmetic of William Petty and his followers, and the ironic impersonation already used by Defoe in The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters (1702) and by Swift himself in the Argument against Abolishing Christianity (1708) and the Bickerstaff papers. The turn is in carrying the impersonation to the limit of the unsayable without once letting the mask slip, and in aiming the irony at the reader’s own reason rather than at a party. The stake was real: a reward had been offered for the author of the Drapier’s Letters and their printer prosecuted a few years before, Defoe had been pilloried for his impersonation, and a proposal to eat children could be read straight, and has been. Held below the higher figures because the instrument was inherited and already Swift’s own.
Nirvana · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is plain: the quiet-loud form from the Pixies, hardcore speed joined to pop melody from Hüsker Dü and the Replacements, weight and detuning from the Melvins and Black Sabbath, melodic instinct from the Beatles. The departure was to put all of it through a major-label studio, with tight drums, doubled vocals and a radio mix, and make the underground’s sound a mainstream record without softening its subjects: an abduction told from the abductor’s side, the hardcore of “Territorial Pissings”, an infant baited with money on the sleeve. The stake was real, the band’s underground standing spent on the signing. Held near the line: the turn was of placement more than of language.
Benjamin Britten · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the concert requiem of Mozart, Berlioz, Verdi and Brahms’s vernacular German Requiem; the Passion’s practice, in Bach, of interleaving a sacred narrative with commentary; Tippett’s A Child of Our Time (1941); and Britten’s own Sinfonia da Requiem and Canticle II: Abraham and Isaac. The departure: the liturgy itself is interrupted and contradicted by secular poems of war, at a national consecration, inside a cathedral, the forces split into three planes that do not meet until the end. The stake was real: a pacifist who had registered as a conscientious objector writing for a rite of remembrance a text that accuses the old men who send the young. Held near the gate because the swerve is in the conception, not the means: in 1962 the idiom is Britten’s own, tonal at its centre, with the tritone its one structural gamble.
Johann Sebastian Bach · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the keyboard collection of preludes and fugues, and the key-set had been approached: J. C. F. Fischer’s Ariadne musica had already gone through many keys. The departures are four: every key, the remote written as fully as the near; the pairing made strict, one prelude to one fugue, each pair a unit; the prelude raised from a warm-up to the fugue’s equal, in forms from figured arpeggio to invention, toccata and aria; and the fugue stretched from two voices to five in one book. The stake was real for a working musician, since the remote keys were unplayable in common tunings. But the book stayed in manuscript among pupils, on a road Fischer had marked: a swerve of completion.
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the band’s own: murder ballads, gospel-blues and noise, carried on the rock song’s pulse and its verse and chorus. Here the drums are almost gone, the guitar figures of the old manner with them, and most songs are through-composed over drones and loops, at double-album length. The turn reaches the song itself, not only its sound. The stake was real: a band in its fourth decade set aside the sound its audience came for, on a record about one grief. Held near the bar by what had prepared it: Push the Sky Away and Skeleton Tree had opened the path, and the field already held the form, in Eno, Talk Talk, Scott Walker and Mount Eerie’s A Crow Looked at Me.
Johannes Brahms · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the four-movement symphony after Beethoven, whose finales had become the place of victory, in a field contested in 1885 by Wagner’s party and by Bruckner. The departures are several: a finale cast as a passacaglia, a Baroque form no symphony had carried; a symphony ending in the minor at full force, with no major apotheosis; a slow movement opening in a church mode; a first movement without its exposition repeat, whose theme is an interval chain and not a melody. The stake was real but bounded. Brahms was the most secure symphonist in German music, risking no post and no livelihood, and the swerve runs backward into the past, a departure by recovery.
Sultan Muhammad · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is double: the visionary, crowded Turkman style of Tabriz under the Aq Qoyunlu, with its animate rocks and dense vegetation, and the disciplined Timurid classicism of Herat associated with Bihzad, with its clear spaces and legible figures. The departure is their fusion at a density and a scale of conception neither had reached: the Herat figure set in the Tabriz world, a whole society on one page. The stake was real and partly paid. The painting belongs to the first campaign of the young shah’s book, and by most accounts the later paintings of the manuscript, Sultan Muhammad’s among them, turn cooler and more Herati, as if the court’s taste moved away from what this page had dared. Held near the gate because a synthesis, however complete, turns inside a tradition rather than out of it.
Johannes Vermeer · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Dutch town profile, the long low panorama of a city across water or fields, as in Hendrick Vroom’s views of Delft, Esaias van de Velde’s Zierikzee (1618) and van Goyen’s river towns, with a lit foreground and busy staffage. The turn: a townscape brought close, so that one stretch of waterfront fills the width and is held in a single look; the light reversed, near ground and gates in shadow, distance in sun; the sky given more than half the canvas and made the actor; the town painted as light on matter in separate touches; no commerce, no procession, no event. The stake keeps the axis low: a Delft painter working for a local buyer, no cost recorded, a departure never repeated. A turn this large, risked this quietly, sits a tenth above the gate.
Charlotte Brontë · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance: Richardson’s Pamela, where the servant marries the master; Radcliffe’s Gothic, with its castle and its secret; the evangelical memoir and the conversion narrative; the governess novel; the Byronic hero. The turn: all of these bent through one passionate first person that claims the right to judge the master, the clergyman and the reader, and a heroine who is plain and says so. The book refuses virtue’s reward as Richardson gave it: Jane leaves the man she loves on principle, refuses the good man on principle, and returns only when she can come as an equal. The stake was real: a pseudonym was needed, and the book was attacked as coarse and as anti-Christian. Held at this figure because the Gothic and the marriage plot are kept, not broken: the swerve is of voice and moral claim more than of form.
Georges Bizet · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the opéra comique of the Second Empire and the early Third Republic: a family theatre, spoken dialogue, light comedy and, by expectation, an ending short of horror. Carmen keeps the frame, with dialogue, couplets, chorus pictures and a comic quintet, and fills it with a working woman who smokes, fights and chooses where she sleeps, a soldier who deserts, and a murder on the stage. The stake was real: the management resisted, the press found the subject indecent, the first run was respectable rather than triumphant, and Bizet died three months after the premiere. Held at the bar because the form is not broken: number opera with dialogue, in the language of Gounod’s generation used with genius.
Thomas Hardy · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Victorian realist novel and its fallen woman, in whom the form had always read a moral (Hetty Sorrel, Little Em’ly), and Hardy’s own pastoral Wessex. The swerve is to give the fallen woman tragedy in the Greek sense, with the dignity and the cosmos that implies, and to call her pure on the title page; to put an unbaptised child and a mother’s lay baptism at the centre; to make the murderess the heroine and the hanging the end. The stake was real and paid: two magazines declined the novel on grounds of propriety, and The Graphic took it only with the seduction and the baptism cut. Held below the top because the departure in form is smaller: the narration, the phases and the omniscient voice are inherited tools, sharpened rather than broken.
Ingmar Bergman · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is near and can be named: Sjöström’s Körkarlen (1921), where Death’s driver gathers souls; Dreyer’s Vredens dag (1943), which had already burned a witch in a world of fear and faith; Lang’s Der müde Tod (1921) and Cocteau’s Orphée (1950), which gave Death a face and a voice on screen. Each supplied a piece; none had made the morality play an argued feature. The departure is that transfer: a film that argues the existence of God aloud, a sceptic of the 1950s in a squire’s mouth, broad comedy beside the Apocalypse, Death as a dry, courteous player. Held close to the bar by the stake: Svensk Filmindustri backed a director fresh from a prize at Cannes, and the risk was cushioned.
Hugo van der Goes · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Eyckian altarpiece and Rogier van der Weyden’s drama of figures: the sacred scene in a small, enclosed, perfectly lit world, with donors inside it near the scale of the saints. The departure is plain on the panel. The format is enlarged to a scale Netherlandish panel painting had rarely attempted, so that the figures approach life size. Hieratic scale, which Eyckian naturalism had largely given up, is brought back on purpose inside a fully naturalistic space, so that giant saints and small donors share one ground and one light. The shepherds are given a plebeian intensity the tradition had not given its humble figures, and the centre is built round a void. The stake was real: a large foreign export to a city with a strong painting of its own, and a composition that risks reading as incoherent. Each part of the departure had precedent, and that holds the axis where it is.
Anton Chekhov · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The swerve is from the well-made play and the drama of the strong event. The events are offstage: the fire, Protopopov, the duel, Moscow itself. The protagonist is distributed across a group, dialogue talks past itself, and the time between acts is where lives happen. The cost was real: the first audiences and some of the cast at the Art Theatre took the play for a gloom Chekhov did not intend, and he insisted it was close to comedy. Held in the middle eights because the decisive turn belongs to the series rather than to this play alone: The Seagull (1896) and Uncle Vanya made the departure first, and Three Sisters widens it, carrying the group protagonist and the offstage catastrophe further.
Rainer Maria Rilke · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the sonnet from Petrarch to Baudelaire, and Rilke’s own Neue Gedichte, the thing-poem fixed on a seen object. The swerve is double. The form is kept and strained: fourteen lines every time, but metres from three stresses to six, rhyme loosened, and the volta turned into the figure of transformation itself, so that the sonnet becomes a vessel for change instead of a frame for a conceit. And the stance turns from the seen thing to the heard and the invisible: from the object observed to the tree in the ear. The stake was real: a sonnet sequence in 1922, the year of The Waste Land, was a wager on a form the age was leaving. Held below the top because the larger break of the same weeks was the Duino Elegies, and this book is their lighter twin.
Flannery O'Connor · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is plain: the Southern grotesque of Faulkner and Erskine Caldwell, the tall tale and Southwestern humour, the well-made magazine story of the 1940s, and Joyce’s story of epiphany. The turn is the joining of these to a strict Catholic theology, told in the Protestant South through characters who would despise it, so that the comic grotesque becomes the vehicle of grace rather than of social satire or of decadence. Violence is not the region’s curse, as in Faulkner, but God’s instrument. The stake was real: a Catholic writer making slapstick and murder carry the sacramental, at a moment when the serious short story was psychological and secular, and before readers who took her, and still take her, for a cruel satirist; she answered that reception herself in her lectures. Held here because much of the form is inherited intact: the closed story of a single turn is the magazine story perfected, not broken.
Simone Martini · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Byzantine and Duccesque Annunciation, calm and frontal, the Virgin accepting; and nearer, Giotto’s figures of mass and gravity in a built space, in the Arena Chapel at Padua of the early 1300s. The departure: the Virgin’s recoil carried further than the tradition had carried it, the trouble Luke gives her made the subject; the greeting set in raised gold across the field; line made the instrument of feeling, bodies drawn as calligraphy rather than modelled as volume; the olive for the lily; Gabriel still airborne as he speaks. The stake was real: Giotto’s naturalism of weight and space was the force of the age in Tuscany, and this panel wagers against it on line, gold and feeling. Held here because the wager was made within a Sienese tradition that welcomed it.
Louis Kahn · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
The departure is real. Against the glazed, light-framed laboratory of postwar modernism Kahn set heavy concrete meant to age like masonry, and a centre that is not an object but a void. In section he inverted the laboratory, giving the services whole storeys of their own, after the Richards laboratories in Philadelphia, where the idea had been tried in towers and had worked badly. The stake was real: an expensive and unproven section on a client’s money and trust, and a late decision to leave the court empty against the garden first intended. But the turn had been made before: the gallery at Yale, the bath house at Trenton and Richards had announced Kahn’s break. This is the fullest statement of a swerve already begun.
Anonymous · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The field it entered is partly lost, and that widens the doubt. Behind it lie Latin hagiography and liturgy, Latin epic in the schools, and almost certainly a vernacular tradition of Roland, oral and perhaps written; before it in French stand only short religious poems, the Eulalie and the Vie de saint Alexis. Against that field the turn is large: a vernacular heroic poem of four thousand lines, in a laisse used as a dramatic instrument, whose hero brings about the catastrophe by his own excellence and whose second hero is right against him. The stake is the double vision, a crusading poem that lets its hero be wrong and makes a martyr of him anyway. What cannot be measured is how much of form and story lost predecessors had already given.
Titian · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is precise: Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus, which Titian is recorded as having finished, so that he knew it from inside. The pose of the body is kept almost whole. The departure is in three moves: the eyes open and meet the viewer; the figure is brought indoors, into a contemporary room with servants; and the canvas is split into a near field and a far one. Together they change what the figure is: the Dresden Venus is seen, and this one sees. Every reclining nude that looks back descends from the turn, by the eyes and the room, not the pose. What holds the axis near the gate is the stake: a private picture for a prince’s chamber, in an established Venetian genre.
Henry James · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the English and European novel of the marriage plot, with Dorothea and Casaubon in George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871 to 1872) the nearest precedent, and James’s own international theme from Daisy Miller and The American. The swerve is in where the action is placed. The marriage plot ends with the choice; this book begins its true action after the choice, and it elides the courtship’s end and the first years of the marriage, so that Isabel’s discovery comes to the reader as it comes to her. In chapter 42 the climax is a woman thinking in a chair, which James claimed as his best thing and which later fiction of consciousness made a method. The ending refuses both conventions: no death for the heroine, no release. The stake was real: reviewers in 1881 complained of the open close, and James revised to sharpen it, not soften it. Held under 9.0 because Eliot had taken the unhappy marriage to the centre first.
Christopher Wren · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance: in England the Gothic cathedral and, in Wren’s century, the classicism of Inigo Jones, whose portico stood on the old St Paul’s; on the Continent the domed church of Rome and Paris, from Bramante’s Tempietto and St Peter’s to the domes of the Val-de-Grâce and the Invalides. The departure: the first cathedral built for the reformed English church, domed and classical in a Gothic land, and a dome of three shells, which separates inner form from outer and carries the lantern on a hidden cone, an answer no precedent gave. The stake was real: the Great Model refused, the chapter demanding a traditional plan, the design changed under warrant as it rose. The language is synthesis, not revolt.
Henrik Ibsen · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the well-made play of Scribe and Sardou, whose machinery Ibsen keeps, the incriminating object, the timed exits, the secret from the past, and his own prose dramas of the 1870s and 1880s. The swerve is in what it refuses: no thesis, no raisonneur, no cause to argue as in A Doll’s House or Ghosts, and a central figure given no explanation of herself. A heroine without an articulated motive, unsympathetic and destructive, at the centre of a tragedy, was the real risk. Held below the top because the larger break, the prose tragedy of contemporary bourgeois life with its secrets surfacing, Ibsen had made a decade before, and this play perfects and darkens that form rather than founding it.
Baldassare Longhena · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance was Palladio’s Venice: the Redentore, the city’s votive church after the plague of 1575 to 1577, long, grey and white, reached by its own procession across the water; and San Giorgio Maggiore across the basin. Against that, the departure: a centralised octagon with an ambulatory, a type reaching back to Byzantine and early Christian building, to San Vitale and, in Venice, to the domes of San Marco, made into a Counter-Reformation votive church; a drum carried on giant scrolls, an invention without close precedent at that scale; and the whole composed for the eye in motion, inside and out. The stake was real: a young architect against established names, a state’s vow, and a heavy dome on piles at the softest and most exposed point of the city. Held below the top because the palette and the sanctuary keep close to Palladio, so that half the building is a wager on a proven path.
Neolithic builders · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the passage tomb of Atlantic Europe, built for more than a millennium before Newgrange in Brittany, Iberia and Ireland, at Carrowmore, Loughcrew and Gavrinis: already cruciform, already carved, often turned to a sunrise or a sunset. The departure is the roof-box, a second opening for light alone, separate from the door, a device nothing earlier is known to have made, so that the alignment is engineered to the sun’s exact arrival along a rising passage; with it, a scale of cairn, kerb and carving that makes the tomb a monument of the landscape, and art set on the axis. The stake was a generation’s labour on an alignment, set by observation over years, that might have missed. What holds it: the type is inherited whole, and Knowth beside it is a near-contemporary on the same path.
Vasily Grossman · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is plain and chosen: War and Peace, with its families, its battle and its essays on history, and behind it the Soviet war novel, which Grossman had himself written in For a Just Cause. The formal turn is modest: the rotation between front, camp and prison is Tolstoy’s rotation between drawing room and field. The turn in what the form is made to say is very great. Inside a Stalingrad epic the Soviet and Nazi states are set side by side; the Holocaust is given its own chapters at a time when Soviet writing folded the Jewish dead into “peaceful Soviet citizens”; the Ukrainian famine is named. The stake was total: the manuscript was seized, the author went unpublished until his death, and the novel could reach readers only through microfilm abroad. The stake is as high as any in its century; the modest formal turn holds the figure below the top.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is plain. From the calendar pages of the Books of Hours, from the Limbourg brothers’ snowy February of the 1410s to Simon Bening in Bruegel’s own century, came the month with its labour, pig-killing among the winter ones; from Patinir came the world landscape, a high view over a composite earth with a small sacred subject lost in it. The turn: the season itself becomes the subject, at panel scale; the high view is given to ordinary men walking into it from behind; the sacred subject shrinks to an inn sign; one weather and one light govern the whole. The stake keeps the axis a tenth above the gate: a commission from a collector of the painter, for a private house, in a series.
Lorenzo Ghiberti · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Gothic bronze door: Andrea Pisano’s south doors and Ghiberti’s own north doors, twenty-eight quatrefoil fields, figures on a plain ground, the gilding on the figures only. The departure: ten large squares; a whole field of gilded ground; landscape and architecture built in one-point perspective inside bronze; relief graded from nearly free-standing figures in the front plane to lines barely raised in the distance, so that the metal holds depth like a painting. That turned the bronze door into a pictorial field, in the most prestigious commission in the city, and the stake was real: twenty-seven years, the guild’s money, the first master’s name. Held at the gate because the means were not his alone. Donatello’s low relief, Brunelleschi’s perspective and Masaccio’s space were in the air of the 1420s, and the grace of the figures keeps much of the International Gothic.
John Bunyan · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance was old: Deguileville’s pilgrimage allegory, known in English through Lydgate, the morality play, Spenser’s allegorical romance, and the Puritan guides on the plain man’s pathway to heaven. Bunyan’s turn was to move allegory out of verse romance and out of the sermon into a vernacular prose narrative of a man walking, in which abstractions talk like people of a market town and an argument is a quarrel on the road. The stake was real twice over. Fiction itself was suspect among his own people, and the verse Apology records that some urged him to print and others forbade it; and the author was a tinker and unlicensed preacher, writing in gaol without learning or patron. Held near the gate because the form, the soul’s pilgrimage, was proven and the doctrine wholly inherited: the swerve is in the telling.
Fyodor Dostoevsky · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the physiological sketch of the Russian natural school, Gogol, the prison memoir of Pellico’s Le mie prigioni, Hugo’s Le Dernier Jour d’un condamné, and the Decembrists’ Siberia as legend. The turn: a novelistic frame wrapped round testimony, so that a former political convict could write of penal labour at all; the convicts given as individuals, with their own humour, honour and economy, not as a moral lesson or a mass; and a form between memoir, ethnography, essay and fiction that has no settled name. The stake was real. Dostoevsky was newly returned from exile and still under surveillance, the subject was closed, and the frame was a shield the book had to wear without being bound by it. Held below the top because the sketch form it extended was already established, and the swerve is in matter and stance more than in a new form fully made.
Molière · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Roman comedy and its Italian heirs, with intrigue, disguise and a marriage at the end, and Molière’s own five-act verse comedy of character, already made in L’École des femmes (1662) and Tartuffe (1664). The turn: a comedy with nearly no intrigue, whose action is talk; a comic hero whose flaw is a virtue, so that the audience laughs at the honest man and cannot settle whether it should; an ending without the hero’s marriage, in which the lovers part and the hero leaves for exile while the secondary couple is joined. The stake was real. Tartuffe had been banned and Dom Juan withdrawn; the company needed a success, and Molière offered it a comedy that does not make the pit roar. Held below the top because the break with the comedy of character had been made in the two earlier plays.
Anonymous · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Around 1200 the prestige forms of German narrative were the Arthurian romance and the courtly epic, from French models, signed by their poets, Hartmann and Wolfram, in rhymed couplets, and built so that crisis ends in the court restored. This poet took the old heroic matter of the migration age, sung in short lays, and made of it a book epic of the same scale and courtly dress, in a lyric strophe turned to narrative, with no name attached, and let the courtly world it describes so lovingly end in ruin with nothing restored. That refusal is the stake. What holds the axis down is inheritance: the plot existed before the poem, and whether its decisive change from the Norse pattern is this poet’s is contested.
Joseph Heller · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The American war novel Heller inherited was naturalist and serious: The Naked and the Dead (1948), From Here to Eternity (1951), the honourable tradition of the platoon and the price of courage. Heller turned it into vaudeville logic, a circular comic syntax and a broken chronology, and made the comedy the instrument of the horror rather than relief from it. The turn has ancestors, and they are named: Hašek’s Švejk, Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit, Nathanael West, the logic-chopping of the Marx Brothers. Heller did not invent the absurd war. The stake was real: a first novel of this size and this tone about the good war, sixteen years after it, by an unknown copywriter. What holds the axis there is that the departure, large in its field and costly, is not a new form of the novel.
Ernest Hemingway · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the novel of manners and consciousness as James and his successors left it, with narratorial commentary and rendered thought; and, closer to hand, Stein’s repetitions, Anderson’s plain voice and the newspaper. The turn is a novel built on omission: a narrator who never names his wound or his feeling, dialogue that carries what is not said, and a plot in which, on the surface, little happens beyond drinking, fishing and bullfights. The stake was real: a first novel by a writer known for a slim book of stories, about a set of drunks in cafés, which some readers at once took for a mere record of them. Held below the top because the style had already been made in In Our Time (1925), so that the novel extends a swerve already taken, and because its plot and structure are conventional where its surface is not.
Salman Rushdie · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance was the novel of India in English: Forster’s India seen from outside, Narayan’s and Anand’s realist provinces seen from within. The swerve is to take English and Bombay it: Hindi and Urdu syntax, film song, street speech and the oral teller’s rhythm made the medium of a national epic. The stake was real, a young author’s second novel wagered on a manner its first critics could have called pastiche. Charged against it, the book stands on proven paths: The Tin Drum, a narrator of abnormal body bound to his nation’s history and telling from confinement; Tristram Shandy, the birth deferred and the digressive teller; One Hundred Years of Solitude, the marvellous as the record of a nation. The turn is in the combination and in the transfer of the method to the subcontinent, not in the method, and the gate is cleared by a tenth.
Nikolai Gogol · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the comedy of exposure, from Molière to Fonvizin’s The Minor (1782), with the mistaken identity of every stage since Plautus, and Griboedov’s Woe from Wit as the nearest Russian precedent. The swerve: a comedy without a positive hero, without a reasoner to state the moral, without a true love plot (Khlestakov’s proposals to the daughter and the mother in one scene parody it), and without a resolution, ending in a silent tableau that shuts the laughter off. The stake was real: a satire on the whole provincial administration under Nicholas I, first played in his presence, received with fury by part of its audience, and followed by its author’s departure abroad in June 1836. Held below the top because the turn radicalises satiric comedy more than it makes a new form, and Woe from Wit had already cut much of the road.
Fritz Lang · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance was the German silent cinema of the 1920s, Lang’s own Dr. Mabuse films and Spione (1928) among it, and the early sound film, which was largely static, theatrical and filled with music. The turn: sound used as structure and silence as content; no score; an offscreen voice over empty spaces; a sound carried across a cut to join two places; a whistled theme that identifies a man, which the plot then uses to catch him. And a subject set at the centre of a commercial film, a child murderer near the Kürten case, shown as a sufferer as well as a monster. The stake was real. Held below the top because the thriller of the organised city was Lang’s proven path, and the visual grammar was the silent cinema’s.
Bruce Springsteen · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is double: the rock record Springsteen had made with the E Street Band, culminating in The River (1980), his biggest success, and the older line of Woody Guthrie, Hank Williams, early Dylan and the murder ballad. The turn was from the first to the second, and its stake was high: a star at his commercial peak released a home recording on cassette as his next album, without the band, after recording the songs with the band and setting those versions aside. The departure was real and costly, and the medium itself, a demo issued as the work, was new for an artist of that standing. The tradition turned to was old, and the move partly a return.
Le Corbusier · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the monastic plan of church, cloister, garth, refectory and dormitory, kept by the orders for a thousand years, and in France the neo-Gothic priory; behind it Le Thoronet, which Couturier urged the architect to visit, and Ema; and the makers’ own path from the Unité at Marseille (1952) to Ronchamp (1955). The departure: the house lifted off its slope and hung from a level top; the cloister walk replaced by passages across an untouched court; the church a bare box without tower, nave windows or ornament; the dormitory made identical cells with loggias; light handled by devices, not windows. The stake was real: a slender budget, a demanding community, an architect raised outside the Church. Held lower because the turn reorders a type rather than breaking it, in an idiom already the makers’ own.
Luo Guanzhong (attributed) · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is double: the dynastic history of Chen Shou with Pei Songzhi’s commentary, and the storyteller’s pinghua, with its marketplace exaggeration, beside the stage. The turn joins them in a form neither held, a long, continuous written narrative of history, close enough to the record to be read as history, by the old judgment seven parts fact and three invention, and free enough to invent the borrowed arrows, the prayed wind and the empty city. The stake was real: a written fiction of this scale was without precedent in Chinese, and it set itself against both the historians’ claim and the storytellers’ licence. What holds it below the top is that the matter and many episodes were already on the stage and in the pinghua; the departure lies in scale, unity and historical discipline more than in invention.
Erwin von Steinbach and others; spire by Johannes Hültz · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Two departures, both costly. The west front turned the French harmonic façade into something new: tracery taken off the wall and set before it as a free screen, so that the front is two layers of structure, one carrying and one veiling. That was a wager in sandstone on a vast scale, rods many metres long standing free. The spire swerves a second time: an openwork octagonal pyramid with stair turrets climbing its flanks, raised to a height no one had built in stone. An openwork spire already stood at Freiburg, so the second turn is of degree as much as of kind. The nave follows Saint-Denis (8.8) closely and the east end is conservative. The swerve lives at the west, and the stake was paid twice.
Alfred Tennyson · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The inherited form is the pastoral elegy of Theocritus, Bion and Moschus, Lycidas and Adonais: one poem, a shepherd’s mask, a procession of mourners, a resolution. Tennyson turns from all of it. There is no mask and no pastoral machinery; the pastoral is raised in XXI and set aside as passers-by mock the singer. In its place stands a sequence of 131 lyrics written over seventeen years and ordered as the record of a mind changing, with doubt left standing, science admitted and the consolation reached slowly and partly. The model is nearer the sonnet sequences of Petrarch and Shakespeare than the elegy: a real crossing of kinds. The stake was real: a long, private, unresolved grief for a young man, its language of love open to question, its faith uncertain, issued anonymously. Held at 8.6 because the stanza, the diction and the final reconciliation stay inside the decorum of their moment.
Jan van Eyck · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the devotional donor image: the donor kneels, small, at the edge, presented by a patron saint, usually on a wing or in a separate field, while the holy figures keep a heavenly or symbolic space. The departure is decisive. The donor is alone, without intercessor, at the Virgin’s scale, in the same room and the same light, facing her across a few feet of floor; and that room is a secular loggia open onto a landscape of real depth, with aerial perspective carried to the horizon. The stake was devotional and social: to put a living official face to face with the Mother of God, unsponsored, risked presumption, and the picture bears the risk in plain sight. Held a step below the highest because van Eyck’s own earlier work had prepared most of the turn.
Limbourg brothers · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the French book of hours and its calendar, where the labours of the months were small vignettes or roundels at the foot of the page, as in the Pucelle tradition of the fourteenth century, and the brothers’ own Belles Heures for the same patron. The departure is large: the labour of the month enlarged to a full page and set in a continuous landscape with deep space; real architecture, identifiable on the ground; weather, in February’s snow; cast shadows; peasants observed at their work; Sienese and Florentine models absorbed into Northern observation. The stake is the soft part. The commission was private and the patron wanted exactly this extravagance, so the brothers risked invention and little else: a great turn, staked on a proven patron.
Joseph Conrad · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the sensational novel of anarchist plots and foreign agents, the popular fiction of the 1880s and 1890s, with Stevenson’s The Dynamiter and James’s The Princess Casamassima beside it; Dickens’s London; and Dostoevsky’s novel of conspiracy, which Conrad disliked. The turn is to take the matter of the shilling thriller and tell it with an irony that never breaks: bombs, spies and murder given by a narrator who regards police, ministers and anarchists with one cold detachment, who withholds the central event entirely, and who scrambles the order so that the reader learns of the death before the mother and the sister do. The stake was real: the book failed with readers and reviewers when Conrad badly needed a success, and was charged with sordidness and with disrespect to its subject. A decisive turn in the novel’s tone and matter, not a break with its form.
Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The turn was large, and partly the movement’s. The transfer of ground, body and sand designs to boards and then canvas began at Papunya in 1971, and the stake was real: disputes over showing sacred designs to outsiders, and the risk of turning law into commodity. Clifford Possum’s own swerve inside that is the large topographical canvas: instead of one story on one board, many Dreamings of a wide country laid in true relation on one field, the travelling lines carried across the whole. That is a new kind of picture. It extends a swerve others made five years before, with inherited means, and is credited without the founding.
Jean Renoir · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the war film of the 1920s and early 1930s, heroic or pacifist, and the escape adventure. The pacifist films of the time, All Quiet on the Western Front and Westfront 1918 among them, showed the horror of the trenches; this one shows the society behind them and finds the war incidental to its real divisions: no battle, an enemy shown with more courtesy than many allies, escapes interrupted or mild. The stake was paid. Made in 1937, with a sympathetic German officer, a Jewish hero and a Franco-German love, it was refused in Germany, and its negative was seized in 1940. Held below the top because its means, a clear story with stars, were the mainstream’s: the swerve is in vision and sympathy more than form.
Ridley Scott · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the hardboiled detective film of the 1940s, Hawks’s The Big Sleep and its world of rain, smoke and blinds; science fiction in its two dominant modes, the gleaming future of 2001: A Space Odyssey (9.1) and the space adventure of Star Wars (7.9); and Scott’s own Alien (8.3), which had already made a future dirty. The turn is real and wagered at scale: a future old and worn, built by retrofitting and street density rather than clean design; a detective plot whose quarry is the tragic hero; the hero’s humanity left in doubt; a climax that is the antagonist’s death. The stake was a large budget and a commercial failure. Precedent holds the figure: Godard’s Alphaville (1965) had married noir and science fiction, and the French comic The Long Tomorrow, by Dan O’Bannon and Moebius, had drawn the noir future city.
J. M. W. Turner · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Dutch and English marine picture, ships and weather; history painting, which treats past moral events in legible figures; and the modern disaster picture, Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa (1819) above all, which had already made an atrocity at sea into history painting. The departure is a history painting in which the history is nearly dissolved into weather and colour, the figures reduced to fragments in a lower corner and the moral subject carried by light rather than by drawn bodies and gesture. The stake was real: a painter of sixty-five offering the gravest public subject at the Academy, in a manner the press had mocked for a decade. Held at 8.6 because the vortex of storm and sun was already his own, from Snow Storm: Hannibal in 1812 to the sea pieces of the 1830s.
Titian · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is twofold: Giovanni Bellini’s calm Feast of the Gods, made for the same room and finished by Titian, and the Central Italian narrative of Raphael and his school, Raphael having first been given the commission in part. The swerve from both is a figure in unsupported flight at the centre of a grand history, at the size of life, and a design governed by colour rather than contour. The stake was real: the painting answers Rome in its own terms, the antique quoted in the snake-girt satyr, and outdoes it by Venetian means. Held at 8.6 because the turn is made inside a genre the series itself was inventing, not against the genre’s terms.
Don DeLillo · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is plain: the American campus comedy, the family novel, the disaster story, the encyclopedic satire of Pynchon and Gaddis, and DeLillo’s own seven earlier novels, in which the deadpan voice and the theme of systems were already formed. The turn is in what the book keeps. It holds to the domestic, readable, first-person family novel and makes consumer speech its liturgy, brand names and television voices set as free-standing lines, “MasterCard, Visa, American Express”, so that the ambience of the media becomes a metaphysical subject without the paranoid architecture of conspiracy the systems novel had needed. The stake was real: a comic surface made to carry a book about dying, and a hero whose field is Hitler. Held below the top because the chaptered form is conventional, the voice is the author’s matured manner rather than a new one, and others had begun clearing the path to the subject.
David Fincher · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance was the serial-killer thriller at its commercial height, from The Silence of the Lambs (1991) to Fincher’s own Se7en (1995), which promises the viewer a mind to understand and a confrontation to end on. The turn denies both: no killer’s interiority, no climax, a newspaper and police procedural on the model of All the President’s Men (1976), and a last scene that is a line-up of photographs and an uncertain witness. The stake was real: a studio film of more than two and a half hours, with a cast of stars, that refused its genre’s reward, and a director who turned against his own Se7en. What holds it from the top is preparation: Pakula’s newsroom and Gordon Willis’s restraint, and above all Bong Joon-ho’s Memories of Murder (2003), which had already made the unsolved serial case a film about its investigators’ ruin.
John Fowler and Benjamin Baker · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance: wrought iron; the lattice girder and the tubular girder of Stephenson’s Britannia Bridge; the suspension bridge, which Bouch had proposed for this crossing; and the cantilever principle, known in timber and in smaller iron spans, Gerber’s in Germany among them, but never at this scale. The departure: steel on a span of 1,710 feet, more than half again any span then standing; the balanced cantilever made a primary long-span system; compression taken in great tubes; the whole designed against a quantified wind. The stake was as large as any British engineer had carried, a new material at a new scale in the shadow of the Tay. Held short: the swerve was toward safety, its daring in magnitude more than in idea.
Joy Division · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
The departures from the guitar band of 1979 and 1980 are several. The lead instruments are the drums and a high melodic bass, with the guitar as texture or noise. Synthesizers lead “Isolation” and “Decades” inside a group formed in punk. “The Eternal” and “Decades” slow to a funeral pace against punk’s speed. Hannett’s production invents the record’s space, removing the room so that four players sound alone. The stake was real: a small independent label, no commercial cushion, and a sound colder than the group’s own live one. The paths were open — Bowie’s Low, Kraftwerk, the Velvet Underground — and Hannett’s sound was already present on Unknown Pleasures, which keeps the turn near the bar.
Frédéric Chopin · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the prelude as introduction, to a fugue, a suite or an improvisation, and the cycle through all the keys: Bach’s two books, and Hummel’s 24 Preludes, Op. 67, already in this circle-of-fifths order. The swerve is the prelude cut loose, introducing nothing and made a complete statement: the fragment as finished art, pieces that stop rather than close, pieces of a dozen bars offered as works, a set whose unity is a key plan and a manner rather than a form. The stake was real but bounded: Schumann found them sketches and beginnings, and the set risked being read as a notebook. Held by the path: Hummel had made the cycle, and the short improvised prelude was a living practice that Chopin turned.
Achaemenid, under Darius I and Xerxes · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is plain: the Assyrian palace, its guardian bulls, reliefs and hero king; the Egyptian cavetto cornice; the Median columned hall in timber; Ionian and Lydian stone working; and, nearest, Cyrus’s Pasargadae, which had already made the columned audience hall with porticoes. The departure: the columned hall raised to a scale and slenderness no earlier hall had, wide-spaced stone shafts under a flat timber roof, against the massed columns of the Egyptian hypostyle; the whole court lifted onto a terrace and reached by a processional stair; relief turned from the record of war to the image of order; several conquered traditions fused into one imperial style. The stake was real: a new empire wagering its claim on an image of concord. Held where it is because Pasargadae took the first step.
Stanisław Lem · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the novel of first contact as the genre had made it: Wells’s Martians, Stapledon’s minds of the cosmos, and the science fiction of the 1950s, Soviet and American, in which contact is conquest, alliance or instruction and the alien is finally readable. Lem turns the form on its premise. Contact fails, and is shown to have been impossible, because the other is truly other; the expedition’s science, a century of it, is given as a history of failure written in the manner of a scholarly survey, with invented authors and schools; and the drama of first contact becomes a chamber drama of grief. The cost was real: a popular genre denied its payoff, a love story made from a premise of terror, and in socialist Poland a book whose science cannot progress. Held below the top because Lem worked within a genre he had already entered, and the encyclopedic apparatus has precedents in Borges and the scholarly hoax.
Alejo Carpentier · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the European historical novel, the Latin American novel of the land, and surrealism, in which Carpentier had worked in Paris through the 1930s. The prologue breaks with the last openly, setting the marvellous manufactured by the European avant-garde against a marvellous lived as faith in America and found in its history. The novel enacts the break: it narrates documented history and the miraculous with the same flat assurance, so that the reader stands inside the belief of the enslaved. The stake was real: a short, episodic book with no central consciousness, written from a Caribbean slave’s vantage, against both the realist and the avant-garde manners of its moment. Held where it is because contemporaries, Asturias among them in the same year, were working the same ground.
Venetian · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the Veneto-Byzantine palace front of portico and loggia along the water; the Italian communal palace with its tower and battlement, at Florence and Siena; the Gothic of the mendicant churches and of the mainland. The departure: the communal palace turned upside down, closed above and open below, with no tower and no fortification, and Gothic tracery, a diaper of Islamic look, cresting and Byzantine colour fused into an elevation that belongs to none of them. The stake was structural and civic: a great wall and a hall of very wide span set on two open storeys over lagoon mud, and a seat of power left open at its foot. In 1577 the turn was renewed. Held below the top because the portico and loggia were already a Venetian habit, and the turn, though bold, refines a local type.
Ursula K. Le Guin · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is American magazine and paperback science fiction of the 1950s and 1960s: the competent male hero, the technological problem, the galactic plot. The book turns from almost all of it. It is an ethnography, assembled from reports, tales and scripture; its hero is an envoy who fails for most of the book; its technology is a sledge and a stove; its climax is a love never consummated between two people, one of whom has no fixed sex. The stake was real: it was published as a genre paperback, to the readership least prepared for it, and the wager on an ambisexual people narrated by a man was exposed to ridicule from both sides of the genre line. It was not alone: Delany and Dick were turning in the same years, and the New Wave was under way.
Zora Neale Hurston · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The Black American novel of the 1920s and 1930s asked for protest or uplift, a fiction measured by its argument with white America. Hurston turned from both. White America is kept almost wholly off the page until the hurricane and the court; at the centre stand a woman’s love life and the speech of an all-Black town, in a dialect the uplift tradition feared as a minstrel risk. The turn is formal too: a narrator whose literary English admits the folk idiom until the two are hard to part. The stake was paid, in Richard Wright’s hostile review, the charge of pandering and some thirty years out of print. Held below the top because the underlying shape, a woman’s three marriages and her search for love, is familiar: the swerve is in voice, subject and allegiance, not in structure, and it is no break of the order of Ulysses or The Sound and the Fury.
Werner Herzog · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the historical adventure epic, Hollywood and European, in which conquest is spectacle and the jungle a backdrop, and, nearer, the young German art film of the late 1960s. The turn is real and was paid for: an epic made with a handful of actors, a skeleton crew and a budget a studio would spend on one set, on real rafts on real rapids, the camera carried into the water with the cast, so that the hardship shows on the faces. A costume picture is played as delirium rather than history, and the stake was the film itself. Held a step below the top: the river voyage into madness had literary forebears, Conrad above all, and the turn is in the means more than in the narration, a conventional diary voice-over.
Umayyad, under al-Walid I · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the Roman temenos; the Syrian Christian basilica, its nave running long toward an apse; the late antique palace hall; and the plain courtyard house of the Prophet at Medina. The departure is to turn the basilica through ninety degrees: aisles running across the axis, a hall broad rather than deep, and a single transept cutting through it to the mihrab, so that a Christian building type is reused and reoriented to a new liturgy. It also made the mosque monumental and imperial, a building to rival the great churches of Syria, which earlier mosques had not attempted. The stake was large and public: the city’s chief church demolished, the caliphate’s treasury spent on one building, a wager on the new faith’s permanence. What holds the axis is the vocabulary, arcades, columns, mosaics and gable, the inherited language of late antiquity reorganised rather than replaced.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Canterbury’s choir, from 1174, brought French Gothic into England by a French master. Less than twenty years later St Hugh’s Choir swerves: it copies neither Canterbury nor France and makes a Gothic of its own. Its vault breaks the rule that a bay is symmetric about its centre, the ribs running to two points off the centre along a ridge rib, so that the vault reads as a rhythm along the church rather than a sequence of canopies. Its aisle walls carry two arcades in two planes, out of phase. The nave’s tiercerons multiply the rib for effect. The stake was real: untried forms over the choir of a great diocese. Held short because the crazy vault was not repeated in its own form, and the safer half of it was what bore fruit.
Luis Cernuda · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the generation of 1927, the pure poetry of Guillén and Salinas, the Garcilaso and Góngora they revived, and Bécquer behind them. Cernuda turned twice, and paid for both. First into surrealism, which he used, unlike most of his Spanish contemporaries, for the open speech of a forbidden desire; the cost was immediate, in the reception of the 1930s and a reputation for scandal. Second, and more lasting, in exile: he turned Spanish verse from the image and the music the poets of 1927 prized toward the meditative, argued poem of the English tradition, Wordsworth, Browning’s dramatic monologue, Eliot, with Hölderlin beside them. The manner was out of step with Spanish taste for twenty years. Held below the highest marks because the English model was a proven path in its own language; the swerve is within Spanish, and wide there.
Anonymous · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance, as far as it survives: Aurignacian portable carving, the ivory animals of the Swabian Jura and the lion-man of Hohlenstein-Stadel, and signs engraved or painted on rock and blocks in southwest France, vulvas and simple outlines of animals. The departure: drawing and painting on the walls of a deep cave at large scale, modelling by smudged charcoal, recession by staggered contours, motion by repeated outlines, the wall scraped pale as a ground, the relief of the rock used as the body of the animal. That is a turn of the first order in what an image on a surface could do. The stake cannot be read with certainty: the cost was labour and danger in a cave the bears used, by carried light, but what was risked socially is unknown, and the immediate predecessors may simply be lost.
Ife · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The swerve is from the inherited conventions of the head in the sculpture of the region into an idealised naturalism with no close parallel there in its time, carried from clay into metal. The turn is not from nothing: the Ife terracottas share the style, and Nok, far earlier, made heads in clay. Its distinctive step is the metal. To cast a hollow life-size head with thin even walls, and to cast near-pure copper at all, is a wager against a material that flows badly and fails in the mould; the stake was technical, costly in a precious metal, and public, since a failed casting of a royal head is a failed image of the king. Turn and stake together reach the gate. Held below the highest marks because the naturalism is shared with the terracotta school at Ife itself.
Salian builders, under Conrad II and Henry IV · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance: Ottonian building, flat-walled and timber-roofed, as at St Michael’s in Hildesheim, and the Early Christian basilica behind it. The first campaign departs twice: in scale, a nave longer and higher than anything north of the Alps, and in the wall, articulated to its full height by half-columns and giant arches, so that the wall becomes a sequence of bays rather than a plane. The second departs again, with a real stake: a groin vault over a nave of great span, put onto a building already standing by thickening alternate piers. A collapse would have killed, and shamed an embattled emperor. Held short of the top because the vault built on what the first church prepared, and did not open the next path.
Frank Lloyd Wright · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is twofold: the American house of its day, Queen Anne or revival, vertical and compartmented, a box of rooms with a porch and a front door on the street; and Wright’s own path, the Prairie houses from Willits and Martin to Coonley, which already had low roofs, a central hearth and spaces flowing round it. The departure: the box dissolved further than in any earlier house of the line; living and dining made one space with only the chimney between; the roof carried out on steel in cantilevers no masonry house could hold; the front door taken off the street; a Prairie house set on a narrow city lot. The stake was real but bounded, an untried structure and a client’s money against a path Wright had proven: a summation more than a first stroke.
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the backstage drama and the British studio picture of the 1940s, decorous and verbal, and the Archers’ own turn toward colour and design in A Matter of Life and Death (1946) and Black Narcissus (1947). The departure is real and was costly: a commercial feature that stops for a long ballet without a word spoken, in which the space of the theatre gives way to the space of the camera and of a mind; a score composed as the drama itself; a heroine who is a dancer, not an actress playing one; and a death at the end of a picture made to sell. Held at its figure by precedent: ballet on film and backstage tragedy were known, and the frame story keeps to its conventions.
Andrea Palladio · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance: a Renaissance church front that had failed for a century to fit the basilican section, Alberti’s scrolled front in Florence and his triumphal arch at Sant’Andrea in Mantua among the attempts; and Venetian church building, Codussi’s and Sansovino’s, in which the front was a screen of storeys. The departure: two temple fronts interlocked at two scales, one for the nave and one for the aisles, so that the ancient temple tells the Christian section. Palladio had tried the device a few years before on a front for another Venetian church; here he carries it on a church of his own design, seen whole across the water. Inside, the thermal window and giant order of the Roman baths come into a church, with a screen of columns opening the choir. The stake was real: a new syntax on the city’s most conspicuous site, among Byzantine and Gothic churches, the front built by others after its inventor’s death.
Charles Laughton · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Griffith’s silent pastoral melodrama, recalled by casting Lillian Gish herself; German expressionism in light, set and shadow; the iris and the silent close-up; the American Gothic of the novel. The turns were real and large in 1955, when the American film was moving toward location realism and the social problem picture: a studio river and painted skies avowed as artifice, a thriller told as a children’s storybook, a killer who is a preacher, a hymn as both his weapon and her defence, a horror film whose heroine is an old woman. The stake was real: an actor’s first film as director, independently produced, which failed on release and ended his directing. Held below the top because the swerve is largely a recovery of the silent idiom rather than a new language.
Stanley Kubrick · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Schnitzler’s novella, the erotic thriller of the 1990s and Kubrick’s own idiom of Steadicam corridor and symmetrical frame. The departures are real. A studio film sold on the most famous married couple in the world is slow, anti-erotic and finally domestic; its New York is built on English stages; a dream logic runs unmarked across a realist plot; it ends in a toy store on one blunt word. The turn was paid for in a long and costly shoot, years of its stars’ working lives and a puzzled release. Held close to the gate by precedent: Buñuel had made the bourgeois erotic dream in Belle de Jour (1967) and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972).
Andrea Palladio; scene by Vincenzo Scamozzi · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance was the temporary court theatre, stage and seating of timber built for a festival in a hall or courtyard and taken down after it, with a painted perspective scene, of the kind Serlio drew, set behind a bare platform. The Olimpico makes a permanent enclosed theatre on the Roman plan, the first of the modern age to survive, and fuses the Vitruvian frons with perspective built in three dimensions. No one had built the Roman theatre roofed and permanent as a working house, and the solid perspective through the doors was new. The stake was real: an academy’s money and standing on one opening, its architect dead in the first year. Held where it is because its direction is recovery.
Gerhard Richter · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is twofold: the painting of history, which the century had largely given up after Guernica; and, in West Germany in the 1980s, a history painting of the Nazi past in a mythic and expressive register, in Kiefer, Baselitz and Immendorff. The departure is to paint the most contested event of the Federal Republic’s own history, eleven years after it, from press and police photographs, in grey and blurred, with no hero, no allegory and no judgment, as a cycle. Parts had precedents: Richter’s own photo-paintings from 1962, his Eight Student Nurses (1966), from victims’ photographs, Warhol’s death and disaster pictures, Manet’s Execution of Maximilian, made from press reports. The stake was real: it came when Richter was known for abstraction, it invited the charges of glorifying terror and of aestheticizing it, and the sale abroad was attacked. But the method was his own and proven.
Kendrick Lamar · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the West Coast rap of its maker’s first major record, good kid, m.A.A.d city (2012), a cinematic narrative on a commercial sound, and the hip hop of 2015, dominated by trap. The turn: a major-label record built on live funk, jazz and spoken word, with Los Angeles jazz players as its band, free passages, a poem in place of hooks for its structure, and a closing dialogue with a dead man made from an old interview. The stake was real: a successful rapper followed his breakthrough with a long, dense record unsuited to radio, and risked his audience. What holds it near the bar is the lineage it returns to: P-Funk, the Last Poets, Gil Scott-Heron, the jazz rap of A Tribe Called Quest and the Roots, D’Angelo’s Black Messiah three months before, and Flying Lotus’s own work.
Tawaraya Sōtatsu · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance was twofold: Buddhist icons of attendant deities, fixed in a hieratic programme, and the gold screen as the format of Momoyama and early Edo grandeur, mostly in the hands of the Kano school, who filled the gold with trees, birds and architecture. Sōtatsu turned both. He set the gods alone, with no Kannon, no temple and no ground; he emptied the gold, making the bare field the subject; he cut his figures at the edges, against the convention of the whole, centred figure. He did it as a town painter from a shop of fans and papers, outside the academies. The turn cost: the empty field risks reading as unfinished. Held short of the top because the tradition already prized asymmetry and void, and the commission is unknown.
Terrence Malick · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the American rural melodrama and its silent forebears, above all Murnau’s City Girl (1930), with its wheat farm, and Dovzhenko’s Earth (1930); the painters of the plains, Wyeth’s Christina’s World and Hopper’s House by the Railroad, echoed in the house; and Malick’s own Badlands, whose uncomprehending girl narrator this film takes up. The turns: a studio love triangle with stars, told by ellipsis, its dramatic scenes cut away from; the sense carried by a child’s oblique narration; exteriors by natural and twilight light against studio habit; the plot set below the season. The stake was large: a Paramount picture by a director with one film behind him, over schedule and long in editing, after which he left the cinema for twenty years. Held below the top because the narrator was Malick’s own proven path, and the silent cinema had already made the plains a subject.
Rembrandt van Rijn · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the seventeenth-century self-portrait, Rembrandt’s own included: the painter as gentleman, in costume, at half length, against a dark or architectural ground, the tools concealed or kept as attribute, the hand finished. The departure is threefold and on the canvas. The tools are shown and left unresolved, so the making shows exactly where convention demanded finish. The ground is a bare wall carrying two geometric figures without precedent in a portrait. The figure stands frontal, square to the plane, with the standing of a state portrait. The stake was real, but it was paid in standing and in the market, not in a refused commission: no patron for the canvas is known.
Kenzo Tange · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance: Tange’s own work of the 1950s, the trabeated concrete of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park and Museum (8.3) and of a prefectural office, modernism read through timber framing; and the shells and cable roofs of the postwar West, the saddle and hyperbolic roofs already built in America in the 1950s. The departure: Tange turned from post and lintel to tension, at a scale and with a plastic sweep none of those had, and made a suspension structure carry a national monument rather than a utility hall. The stake was large: a novel roof on a fixed Olympic date, engineering found as the building went up, the architect’s standing tied to an untried system before the world. What holds the axis: the suspended saddle roof had been built before; the swerve is in scale, plasticity and synthesis more than principle.
Carlo Scarpa · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is twofold: the Italian monumental cemetery, the chapel tomb with its stone box and its pieties; and the modernism Scarpa inherited, white volumes and a suspicion of ornament. From the first the precinct turns to an open garden the village may enter, with the burial sunk under a bridge. From the second it turns to a densely worked, fragmentary, ornamental architecture made of concrete itself, drawing on Wright, Japan, Byzantine Venice and Viennese craft without a word of historicist quotation. In the 1970s that belonged neither to late modernism nor to postmodern quotation, and it was long treated as a marginal craftsman’s art. The stake was a widow’s grief. Held lower because it reorganised a manner more than a building type.
Sergio Leone · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Leone left the Western, the form he had remade and where his name was certain, for the gangster film, a genre whose recent summit, The Godfather and its sequel, stood in the way. He swerved from that inheritance on two fronts: against the dynastic saga he set one man’s consciousness, and against linear chronicle a structure of memory, possibly dream, ordered by association, a peephole, a station, a song. The stake was real and was paid. The American distributor judged the film unreleasable at its length, cut it and reordered it, and it failed; Leone directed no other film before his death in 1989. Running nearly four hours, its ending may undo the reality of its last third.
George Bähr · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance was the Lutheran gallery church: plain rooms, often long, with galleries inserted, and in Saxony smaller centralised churches. The swerve is to raise that preaching room to the scale and form of a monumental domed central church, the type Rome and the Catholic courts kept for themselves, and to roof it in stone with a dome springing from the body without a drum. The stake was real: a carpenter turned architect, a council’s money, a stone dome of great weight on eight slender piers, a structure that cracked within the century. There were models, central churches and the domes of Rome and Paris; no Protestant city had wagered this. The axis meets the gate, at its edge.
Paul Thomas Anderson · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the American prestige period drama and the study of a strong man, the line of Citizen Kane that Anderson had carried himself in There Will Be Blood. The film turns from it hard. A large picture about a charismatic founder declines the rise and fall the form promises: no exposure, no reckoning, no conversion, no climax. It is a love story between two men told without romance and without resolution, and its 65mm, a format kept for vistas, is spent mostly on faces at close range. The stake was real: Annapurna’s money on a film no studio would call marketable, its founder plainly drawn from a living movement. What holds it short of the top: the turn was prepared, by Anderson’s previous film, which had already bent the American epic toward one man’s will, and by the ellipsis and drift of the New Hollywood.
Johann Sebastian Bach · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Italian concerto, Corelli, Torelli and above all Vivaldi’s ritornello form, which Bach had learnt by transcribing it at Weimar, and the German ensemble sonata. The departures: six concertos with six groups of soloists, none repeated, where a set of the day kept one scoring; the continuo harpsichord made a soloist, with a cadenza that takes over a movement; a concerto without violins and one for nine equal strings with no soloist; a trumpet set as an equal with a recorder, and hunting horns in a concerto. What holds the axis at the gate is the stake: a presentation copy for a prince, made largely of music Bach had already written, risked little. The turn is large; the cost was small.
Godspeed You! Black Emperor · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Measured from rock, the departure is total: no singer, no single, four pieces of about twenty minutes, an ensemble with strings, recorded voices as movements, no faces and no press. The record turns its inheritance into a symphonic plan, four sides as four movements under one arc, with the street recording set into the form as structure. What keeps it near the bar is that the tradition already held much of the turn: Spiderland, Talk Talk, Tortoise and Mogwai had made the long instrumental form, minimalism had supplied the slow build, and the band’s own F♯ A♯ ∞ had made the template. The stake was small in capital: there was no mass audience to lose.
Richard Wright · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The departure is large and the stake was real. The African American novel Wright inherited, his own story collection Uncle Tom’s Children (1938) among it, asked for pity. Native Son refuses pity: its protagonist is a murderer, unattractive, frightened and proud of his crime, and the reader is held inside him for the whole book. Wright wagered that a white reading public, the Book-of-the-Month Club’s readers, would accept this, against the expectations of his publisher, the uplift tradition and the respectability politics of the Black press, and the wager carried. The swerve is from the tradition’s matter and stance more than from the novel’s form: the means are Dreiser’s naturalism, with An American Tragedy the plain model of its murder and its trial, the crime novel and the proletarian novel of the 1930s.
Ralph Waldo Emerson · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the essay of Montaigne and Bacon, the Unitarian sermon in which Emerson was trained and which he left with his pulpit in 1832, and the German-romantic prose of Coleridge and Carlyle. The turn is double. In form, the essay becomes a sequence of oracular sentences, each standing on its own: Montaigne’s essay is a mind trying itself, Emerson’s a mind pronouncing. In doctrine, the sermon’s authority moves from scripture and church to the individual soul, with the divine immanent in it. The stake was real: the Divinity School Address of 1838 had already spoken this heresy, and this book carried it into general print, with a defence of contradiction and whim against respectable prudence. What holds the axis: the doctrine was largely Coleridge’s, Swedenborg’s and the Neoplatonists’, and the departure is greater in voice than in idea.
Barma and Postnik Yakovlev (attributed) · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The turn is real and the stake was high. The building takes the tent church, newly raised in masonry at Kolomenskoye in 1532, and the clustered plan of the church at Dyakovo, and makes of them something without precedent at this scale: nine churches fused on one basement into a single body, closer in massing to the timber churches of the north than to the Byzantine and Italianate stone building that the Kremlin cathedrals had just brought into Moscow. The wager was a tsar’s monument to his greatest victory, on the principal square of the capital, in an untried composition. It is a swerve within a tradition already moving, its sources visible, and so below the Sydney Opera House (9.3) and Villa Savoye (9.1), which overturned the structure of their art.
August Sander · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the studio portrait of the late nineteenth century, retouched and posed before painted backdrops; pictorialism, which Sander himself practised; physiognomy from Lavater onward; and the anthropological and police type photograph, which treated sitters as specimens. The departure is to take the type photograph’s frontal, uniform, serial method and turn it on a whole modern nation, every class, by consent and in the sitter’s own role, without retouching or backdrop, so that the archive becomes a portrait of a society rather than a catalogue of the other. The stake was real: a commercial photographer spent forty years on a project with no patron and no market, and the regime of 1933 suppressed the book. New Objectivity painting and the documentary impulse of the decade were common ground.
Buscheto and Rainaldo · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The departure is wide and the stake was large. The builders took the early Christian basilica of Rome, colonnaded, timber-roofed and five-aisled, already conservative in an age of vaulting north of the Alps, and joined to it what no Western church had joined: the banded polychromy and inlaid lozenges of the Islamic and Byzantine Mediterranean, an eastern sense of the exterior as a sculpted surface, Lombard blind arcading, a dome over a crossing, transepts treated as whole basilicas, and a façade of open galleries with no clear precedent. The result is a new style, not an accent. A commune with no long building tradition staked its prestige on the largest church of its region, on soft ground. Held below the top because the base was itself a revival.
Agnès Varda · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The departures are of structure and of subject. Structure: a feature in near real time, cut into clocked chapters that hand the view to other people for minutes at a time, with a colour prologue and a silent burlesque inside it. Nothing in the commercial cinema of 1962 looked like it, and the New Wave films beside it ran on genre, the gangster picture in Breathless, where this runs on a clock and an illness. Subject: a woman’s interior given the whole film, made by a woman director inside the industry on a producer’s money. The cost was real: a small budget, street crowds that look back at the lens, a heroine vain and unsympathetic for half the film. Varda’s own La Pointe Courte (1955) had made the earlier turn, and that discounts this one by a little.
Katsuhiro Otomo · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance: Japanese television and feature animation, Space Battleship Yamato, Gundam and Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984); the kaiju film, Godzilla above all, in which Tokyo is broken by the bomb’s offspring; Blade Runner (1982) and the cyberpunk city; and Otomo’s own manga, Domu and Akira, whose realism of line and architecture had changed Japanese comics. The turns are several and taken together: a feature-length animated film for adults, violent, political and apocalyptic, made at a scale of production animation had not been given; character motion as full as the best Western studio work; a city drawn in full detail as one environment and lit by night. The stake was large: a committee of investors, a first feature directed by a manga artist, from a story not yet finished. Held below the top because the genre materials, the bike gang, the dystopian city and the psychic child, were inherited.
Lars von Trier · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is double: the European cinema of transcendence, Dreyer above all and Bresson’s suffering women, Mouchette (1967) among them; and von Trier’s own cold, composed, image-led manner in The Element of Crime (1984) and Europa (1991). The turn is against both. Against his own name, he gave up the composed image for a handheld camera that follows the actors and breaks continuity, and gave the film to a performance. Against the tradition, he played its austerity as melodrama, with sexual degradation at its centre and a literal miracle at its end. The stake was high: an English-language film of over two and a half hours, an unknown in the lead, ridicule risked at both extremes. Held below the top because the handheld manner was already in television and in his own The Kingdom (1994).
Paul Cézanne · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the genre card scene, from Caravaggio’s cardsharps through the Dutch taverns to the card players attributed to the Le Nain brothers in the museum at Aix: anecdote, moral, a story told in faces. The departure: anecdote removed entirely; the faces closed; the figures built from planes of modulated colour, as the mountain and the still lifes are; a low genre treated with the solemnity of history painting; and, across the series, repetition used as a method of reduction, the company cut to two. The stake: the figure, his hardest and least accepted ground, worked over years by a painter the Salon had refused and who had barely exhibited. Held below 9.0 because the stake was largely paid earlier, by the method as a whole; by the 1890s he was secure, and the series was private work, not a public wager.
Katsushika Hokusai · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is double. In ukiyo-e, landscape was secondary to actors and courtesans, carried by pictures of famous places as background to travel and figures. In painting, Fuji was an emblem of the Kanō and literati traditions, painted at a distance as a white cone over mist. The departure: a commercial series built on landscape as its principal subject, in a new imported blue; and in this sheet the extreme of it, the mountain brought close, cropped by the frame, coloured red, with every figure taken out. Of a series whose argument is Fuji seen from human life, this is the sheet that drops human life. The stake was a publisher’s venture on an unproven genre by an artist of seventy. Held below the top because the risk was paid in the series, and the series sold.
Thomas Eakins · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the anatomy lesson of Rembrandt and the Dutch group portrait; the Spanish realism Eakins sought in Ribera and Velázquez on his visit to Spain in 1869 and 1870; the academic finish of Gérôme and the portraiture of Bonnat, under whom he studied in Paris; and the American portrait of the eminent man. The departure: a contemporary surgery, with blood and an opened body, painted at the scale and gravity of history painting as the portrait of a living man at his work, his dignity resting on the wound before him, and made for his country’s Centennial. The stake was paid, not only risked: the canvas was kept from the art galleries, called brutal by critics, and sold for a small sum to a medical school. Held below the top because the realist turn was under way in Paris and the Dutch precedent is close.
Utagawa Hiroshige · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the illustrated guides to famous places, and the horizontal landscape print as Hokusai and Hiroshige himself had made it, his Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō of the early 1830s among them, the view set back and composed across. The departure: landscape turned upright, in a format then used mainly for figure prints, and the extreme near and far, a huge foreground motif cut by the frame set against a deep, small distance with almost no middle ground. Western perspective, known through Dutch prints, is absorbed and pressed past itself. The stake: an old master at the head of the trade staked his name and his publisher’s money on a format and a manner unlike his proven one. The cost was risked commercially, and the series succeeded.
Talking Heads · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the band’s own art punk, the nervy, angular New York song, and the turn toward African rhythm begun in I Zimbra on Fear of Music; beside it Eno’s ambient work and his collage with Byrne, and the funk of James Brown and Fela Kuti. The turn is large. The written song is given up for grooves, mostly on one chord, with no verse and chorus to drive them, and the words come as chant and patter from a singer whose persona had been the tense individual; the band’s identity and its audience were risked. What holds it near the bar: Fela, Brown and Eno had placed the bet, I Zimbra had opened the path, and the swerve imports a language more than inventing one. A tenth under Kid A at 8.7.
Jean-Luc Godard · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the fallen-woman melodrama, from Pabst’s Lulu to the French realist tradition of the street, and the turn against it is large. A girl’s fall is told in twelve titled tableaux that announce their content, after Brecht; the first scene is played with the actors’ backs to the camera; a catechism of the trade is spoken over images like a documentary; a philosopher plays himself in a dialogue that seems unscripted; and the death is given without pathos or score. The stake was real: a narrative cinema built on distance, against an audience the melodrama would have held. Held below the top because much of the swerve comes from Brecht and from Godard’s own first films, Breathless (8.8) among them: the turn refines a project already under way in 1960 rather than opening it.
Diego Velázquez · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Titian’s: the reclining Venus of Urbino, the Venus with a mirror held by Cupid, and Rubens’s versions after them. The departure is in three turns. The body is turned away, the back given where the tradition gave the front, so that the erotic becomes a matter of line and withholding rather than display. The face is moved into the mirror and blurred, making the beloved a reflection and the viewer a subject of the picture. And the handling is reduced to a few fields and a dry, economical brush. The stake was real: Spanish painting under the Counter-Reformation had almost no place for the female nude, and the Inquisition watched images. A real turn with a real but sheltered stake.
Otto Wagner · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The turn is wide, and it was taken on a state commission at the centre of imperial Vienna, opposite the neo-baroque War Ministry and on the Ring the historicists had built. Wagner, sixty when he won the competition, had been one of those historicists, and here he left the palazzo, the rusticated base and the giant order for a skin of thin slabs and bolts, a glass hall without historical dress, aluminium where bronze would have been expected. It turns also from the ornament of the Secession, which he had joined: decoration is reduced to the fixing and the fitting. The stake was a public institution’s dignity and the architect’s standing. Against it, the block stays symmetrical and classical in its massing, and the figures at the cornice keep a foot in allegory.
Alberto Burri · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is double: the memorial tradition, which raises a figure, a column or a name over loss; and the land art of the late 1960s and 1970s in America, which worked earth in empty places. The swerve is from both: no figure and no name, no rebuilding, the ruin itself sealed where it lay; and land art carried into a place with a history and a grief, a place empty because of a catastrophe. Burri took a studio form, the crackle, to the scale of a town and to a use it had never had. The cost was real: the work was halted unfinished, stood incomplete for a generation and was finished only after his death. Held below the top because the form was his own and proven in the studio, and the scale belongs partly to the commission.
Paul Thomas Anderson · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is triple: Anderson’s own period dramas, from There Will Be Blood to Phantom Thread; the radical and paranoid cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, with The Battle of Algiers (1966) placed inside the film as the thing Bob watches; and the studio chase picture. The turn is large. Anderson left the period chamber for the present and made an action comedy of left fugitives against a white supremacist state, at a scale no film of his had carried, in a major studio’s season. The stake was money, reputation and the exposure of a film that names immigration raids and armed nationalists in its own year. Much of the hill road’s invention belongs here. Held at the figure because the elements are inherited, Pynchon’s comic paranoia (already filmed in Inherent Vice), the Coens’ manhunt comedy, the chase film: a synthesis made at great risk, not a new grammar.
Elvis Presley · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance is twofold: the long-playing record as a major label used it in 1956, for adult popular singers, cast albums, jazz and the classics; and the rhythm and blues and country records the songs came from. The turn on the first is large, and so was the stake: RCA put the new music on its long-playing format, with a raw live photograph for a cover, when the music was widely expected to pass. The turn on the second is smaller than it sounds. The fusion of country and rhythm and blues in one voice was made at Sun in 1954, and five of these tracks are that earlier work; the RCA tracks cover hits, several of them current. But the swerve that counts is the unit’s own, the step from the single to the album, taken before anyone knew the music would last. Borrowed in the style, large in the format, and the format carries the figure.
Ovid · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Ovid claimed to have invented the form, and the claim is substantially just. Letters inside earlier poems were to hand, Propertius 4.3, Arethusa to Lycotas, the nearest of them, and so were the tragic monologue and the rhetorical schools’ suasoria and ethopoeia; but no one before him had made a book of verse letters from mythical women, or turned epic and tragedy round so that the incident speaks. The swerve is double, from narrative to monologue and from the hero to the one he leaves, and the double letters swerve again, into exchange. The stake was real: fifteen variations on one situation risked the monotony charged against them for centuries. Held at the gate rather than above it because the materials were inherited, elegy had already made the lover’s complaint its subject, and the wager was a young poet’s, smaller than the one he placed later in the Metamorphoses.
Roberto Rossellini · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Italian studio cinema of the Fascist years, its melodrama and its comedy, and Rossellini’s own war films made under the regime. The turn is large and was costly: a feature made within months of the events it shows, in the streets where they happened, with scarce and mixed stock, little money, and a cast that joined two stars of popular theatre and comedy to non-professionals, so that the record of a city and its fiction share one frame. Melodrama and comedy are not dropped but forced against a documentary surface, and the result was a new manner, not an accent. Held below the top because Visconti’s Ossessione (1943) had already taken the camera outside and toward the poor, because circumstance imposed much of the method, and because the melodramatic engine is the old one.
Edward FitzGerald, after Omar Khayyam · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance was double: the Persian quatrain, a single epigram collected by the letter of its rhyme under a doubtful name, and the Victorian English verse of faith and doubt. The turn against both was large. FitzGerald made a scattered anthology into one poem with an arc; he fused quatrains, reordered them and added his own; and he brought the ruba’i stanza, AABA with the blank third line, into English. Against In Memoriam he set a frank, gay and blasphemous unbelief, which ends on the plea that God take “Man’s forgiveness” (81). The cost was real and was paid: the poem appeared without his name in 1859, did not sell, and was remaindered before Rossetti and Swinburne found it. The gate is met, at 8.6.
Bernardo Rossellino, for Pius II · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Italian town of the Middle Ages, its square closed on itself, and a theory of the ordered city that stood on paper. The departure is real, and it cost. No earlier patron of the Renaissance had remade a town centre as one designed ensemble, and here a village was made a city in three years. Three turns were made at once: a trapezoidal square that uses perspective to set a building and open a view; a Tuscan cathedral built as a northern hall church, because the pope had admired the type in Austria and Germany, against the whole habit of his region; and a palace turned to the landscape rather than the street. The stake was paid. By Pius’s own account, in paraphrase, the cost outran the estimates many times, the architect misled him about it, and he forgave it; and the cathedral was set on ground that began to fail at once.
Antoine Watteau · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance: Rubens’s Garden of Love, the Venetian pastoral of the Concert champêtre, Flemish outdoor gatherings, and the theatre of Gillot, Watteau’s master, with the island of Cythera taken from the stage. The departure: a reception piece for an academy whose summit was history painting, delivered as a picture with no text, no hero and no moral, of contemporaries in theatre and pilgrim’s dress in a landscape, so unlike any category that the Académie had to name one. The stake: membership, after five years’ delay, before the body that ranked the genres. The cost was risked and not paid; the Académie had let him choose his subject and received him. Held below the top because each part was inherited and the swerve lies in their joining and where they were placed.
Philip Roth · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the morally serious Jewish American novel of Bellow and Malamud, and Roth’s own first books: Goodbye, Columbus and two Jamesian novels, Letting Go and When She Was Good. Behind it stand Dostoevsky’s underground man, Kafka, Céline and Henry Miller; in the near field, Lenny Bruce’s stage monologue and Bellow’s Herzog (1964), another self-indicting mind in a torrent. The turn was in tone and frankness together: the novel as obscene stand-up confession, sex and masturbation made the comic engine of a serious book, a family and a community exposed in their own idiom. The stake was large, and it was paid. Roth, already attacked for his story “Defender of the Faith”, was charged with self-hatred and with endangering Jews, and the book was banned in places, Australia among them. He gambled a serious reputation on a dirty joke. Held a step from the top because the monologue and the comic confessor were inherited.
Attributed to Domenico da Cortona, under Francis I · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the French castle, keep and curtain with round towers, and the late-Gothic château of the Loire, as at Blois and Amboise: irregular, accreted, its stair in a projecting tower. The departure: a keep with a strictly centralised, symmetrical plan of Italian derivation; the staircase taken out of its tower and set at the centre of the house; a double helix where there had been single newel stairs; four equal lodgings in place of a hierarchy of rooms. The stake was a king’s: a building of this size on an empty site in marshy forest, carried for decades. Held below the top because the turn is a graft: the shell and the roof stay French and medieval in kind, and the Italian elements were in hand elsewhere.
Chris Marker · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the science-fiction story of time travel, the illustrated photo-novel of the magazine stands, the essay film Marker had made through the 1950s, and the cinema of memory around him, above all Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour (1959) and Last Year at Marienbad (1961). The turn is radical: a narrative fiction made of stills, which denies cinema movement and then grants it once, and a pulp premise told as elegy. What holds it lower than the turn alone would: the matter of memory and time was already Resnais’s, the photo-roman already existed, and a short at Argos Films risked little in money. The wager was of form only, placed nearly alone, and it clears the bar of the Epochal Gate by a tenth.
Fritz Lang · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance is German expressionist design (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1920), Lang’s own monumental Die Nibelungen (1924), Griffith’s Babylon in Intolerance (1916), the Italian spectacle, and the literary city of the future that runs from Wells’s When the Sleeper Wakes. The departure is real: a feature-length film of the future city, built and filmed at a scale no science fiction had attempted, with effects that had to be invented for it, the Schüfftan process and the machine-woman’s creation among them, and a design whose subject is the city as a whole. The stake was ruinous: the film failed to recover its cost, and how far it brought down Ufa’s finances is argued. Held below the top because the narrative is a swerve of scale on an inherited melodrama, not a new way of telling.
Martin Scorsese · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the biblical film as Hollywood made it, the reverent epic of the 1950s and 1960s with a Christ seen from a distance in robes of light, and Pasolini’s austere Gospel of 1964, which humanised the setting and kept the text and the certainty. This Christ doubts, desires and is afraid, confesses to collaborating in Roman executions, lives a full life in a dream before choosing death, and speaks plain American English. Jesus Christ Superstar and Life of Brian had touched the material; neither put a serious, doubting Christ at the centre of a studio drama. The stake was the largest of its decade for an American film: a production cancelled in 1983, years of waiting, protests at the studio, bans abroad. Held below the top because the theological turn was Kazantzakis’s; the film’s own is carrying it into a popular medium and paying for it.
Correggio · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the mythological nude of Venice and Rome, Giorgione’s and Titian’s reclining figures and the Loves of the gods painted by Raphael’s school at the Farnesina, and the narrative mythology of cassone and fresco. The departure is large. The god is not shown in a body, an animal or a shower of gold with his attributes, but as a cloud with a barely legible face, and the subject becomes the touch itself rather than the encounter as story. The nude is seen from behind, near life size, her face in ecstasy, the narrative company and setting almost all removed. Leonardo’s sfumato, a device for modelling and atmosphere, becomes the god’s substance. The stake is bounded: a ducal cabinet asked for licence, and the risk of frankness was the patron’s.
Claude Monet · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the view of a monument: the topographical and picturesque cathedral, seen whole in its square, with sky and figures, and the Impressionist motif painted at one sitting. The departure is threefold. The motif is cropped until it ceases to be a view: no ground, almost no sky, the façade a wall of paint. The subject moves from the object to the envelope of light, and each canvas is worked for months, at the motif and in the studio, against the single sitting. And the series, not the canvas, becomes the work. The stake was real: two winters in rented rooms, canvases Monet wrote of destroying, a high price asked for each. Held below the top because the Haystacks had already made the series a method, and had sold.
Itō Jakuchū · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance: Chinese bird and flower painting of the Song and Ming, studied in the Kyoto temple collections; the newer Chinese realist manner that came through Nagasaki with Shen Quan; the decorative screens of the Kanō and Rinpa painters. The departure: a naturalism of the creature pushed past natural sight into pattern, every feather and scale stated and the ground made a field of design, so that minute observation and flat ornament become one surface; and a strangeness no school taught, snow that drips like syrup, rocks like coral, crowds of identical birds. The stake was high and particular: a man of about forty gave up the family trade and gave a decade’s work as a votive offering, outside any studio or patron. Held below the top because the swerve made a personal manner more than a new grammar of painting.
Mark Z. Danielewski · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance is wide and plain: Nabokov’s Pale Fire, a text eaten by its commentary; Borges’s invented scholarship and labyrinths; Sterne’s typographic play; the concrete poets; Pynchon and the encyclopedic American novel; the haunted-house tale; the found-footage frame then current. The turn joins them into something none of them was: a horror novel that frightens through its own apparatus, in which the page becomes architecture, so that the reader turns the book, hunts across facing pages and reads backward in a mirror as the explorers move through the house. Typography is made narrative space at the scale of a whole novel. The stake was real: a first novel by an unknown writer, some seven hundred pages, colour printing, a layout no commercial house would choose, under constant risk of the charge of gimmick, which it has drawn. It clears the bar, and is held near it because much of the instrument, commentary, footnote and fake scholarship, was built by Nabokov and Borges, and the swerve lies in the joining and the scale.
Thelonious Monk · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
The inherited form is the jazz album of 1956: a blowing session, hard bop on standard changes or on heads made to be gone through quickly. The turn is to composition as the matter of the record. The title track is a piece the band must play rather than a frame it plays over: an irregular head, alternating tempos, intervals and accents that make every chorus a reading of the score. The stake was real and is documented. Monk, barred from New York’s clubs since 1951 and recording for a small label, set down a tune his band could not complete, and the record was saved by the splice. Celeste and timpani are smaller swerves of colour. Held near the gate: the language was Monk’s own, laid down on his Blue Note sides of 1947 to 1952, and the record extends it rather than breaks from it.
Mark Rothko · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance: Rothko’s own classic manner of about 1949 to 1957, soft rectangles stacked horizontally and floating in luminous colour, already famous; the New York field painting around him, Newman and Still; and the mural, from the public murals of the 1930s to Monet’s painted rooms in Paris. The departure: the stacked bands turned into open frames and upright portals; the palette taken down into maroon, black and dark red; and the painting made a cycle, a set of walls for one room, so that the work is the enclosure and not the canvas. The stake was a commission in the most prominent modern building in New York, and the canvases the turn produced did not go to its room: he withdrew and kept them. The cost was paid. Held below the top because the darkening had begun in his painting before 1958, and the painted room had Monet’s precedent.
Filippo Brunelleschi · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the Florentine loggia; the hospital with an arcaded front, a type Florence already had; and the Tuscan Romanesque, which had kept a classicising column and round arch alive. The departure: a whole public front in the language of antiquity read afresh, Corinthian columns, a correct entablature, round arches and pediments, governed by one module, so that the building is a proportion made visible, the grey members drawing the measure on the white. The type was not new; the language and the rule were. The stake was real: an untried manner on a guild’s charitable foundation in the city’s eye, built by masons trained in Gothic. Held below the top because the type was inherited and the Romanesque eased the turn.
Nan Goldin · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the documentary photograph of the margins, in Arbus, Weegee and Lisette Model; the diary of a circle from within, in Larry Clark’s Tulsa, Warhol’s Factory and Ed van der Elsken; and the snapshot of amateur colour. The departure is threefold: the photographer as member, not visitor, and herself among the subjects at her worst; colour, saturated and flash-lit, when serious photography still meant black and white; and the slideshow to music, shown in clubs to the subjects themselves, as the work’s form. The stake was real: the art world took the colour slide for an amateur’s medium and the club for no gallery, and the battered portrait cost Goldin her own privacy. Held below the top because Clark had made the insider’s diary and Warhol the circle as subject.
Umberto Boccioni · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the closed figure of Western sculpture, from the antique through Rodin: a body bounded by its skin, set in space, finished at its contour. The departure opens the contour, so that space enters the form and the form is pulled out into space, a figure modelled as its own trajectory. In 1913 this was a real wager: a painter, self-taught in modelling, staking the movement’s claim on sculpture in Paris, the city of Rodin and of the Cubist sculptors. The cost was paid: ridicule, the scattering and destruction of almost all his plasters after his death, and no cast for eighteen years. Held below the top because the step was prepared by Medardo Rosso’s dissolving surfaces, Rodin’s fragments, Cubist faceting and Boccioni’s own paintings; and because this is the conservative path of his own manifesto, which had called for mixed materials: one figure in one material.
James Stirling, Michael Wilford and Associates · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance was threefold: the modern museum as a neutral box or a free plan, as in Mies van der Rohe’s Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin (1968) and the Centre Pompidou in Paris (1977); Stirling’s own path, the engineering brick and patent glazing of his buildings at Leicester, Cambridge and Oxford, by which he had been a hero of late modernism; and in Germany the political charge of monumental stone classicism after 1945. The departure: a museum built as a collage of the classical and the modern, podium, rotunda, enfilade and stone against steel, glass and exposed colour, arranged in plan and section and not only on the front. The stake was real and paid: a reputation made in modernism, a charge in the German press of reviving a classicism tainted by the 1930s, and an irony that risked being read as frivolity.
Antoni Gaudí · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance: landscape design in 1900 meant the formal garden or the picturesque park of planted views. The departure: a third thing, in which roads, retaining walls and shelters are grown out of the hill in its own stone, and structure follows its loads into leaning, irregular forms. Trencadís at the scale of a stair, a hall ceiling and a long bench, made of waste tile and glass, was a further turn, and the free colour of the bench, Jujol’s above all, anticipates collage. The stake was real: Güell’s money, and a speculation that failed, possibly in part because its forms deterred buyers. What holds it short of the top: Modernisme already prized craft, colour and nature, and Gaudí’s own earlier works had opened the road.
Gustave Flaubert · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the historical novel of Scott and its French heirs, Vigny, Hugo and Dumas, where a modern sensibility is placed in costume and the past is made familiar through its ordinary people; and the classical antiquity of Chateaubriand’s Les Martyrs. Flaubert turned from all of it: an antiquity with no Christian or Greek centre, chosen because it was almost unknown; no point of view the reader can share; documentation pushed until the world is opaque; the impersonal method of Madame Bovary applied to a subject where it could borrow no plausibility from the reader’s experience. The stake was real and was paid: he followed a celebrated and prosecuted novel with a book its first critics found cold, cruel and unreadable, and had to defend it in print against Sainte-Beuve and Froehner. Held off the top because the exotic and the archaeological were already in the air of the 1850s, above all in Gautier’s Le Roman de la momie (1858).
Eero Saarinen · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance was the American national memorial: the obelisk, the classical temple, the statue, the inscribed wall, as on the Mall in Washington. In 1948 a memorial to Jefferson was still expected to be a classical temple. Saarinen offered a stainless steel curve, with no column, no figure and no word. The stake was real on two sides. As an image it drew an immediate public charge that it resembled the arch Adalberto Libera had designed for the Fascist exposition in Rome, E42, and the design survived the charge. As a structure it was untried: a self-bearing stainless steel shell, double-skinned, 630 ft high, with no frame, raised from its own legs and closed in the air, fifteen years after the prize. A wide turn at a high price, though the arch is the oldest gate in building.
David Lynch · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is plain: the surrealist film, Un Chien Andalou (1929) above all; the American avant-garde of Maya Deren and Kenneth Anger; the built nightmare cities of German expressionism; Kafka; and Lynch’s own shorts, The Alphabet (1968) and The Grandmother (1970). The turn is to tell a feature-length story, with a courtship, in-laws, a marriage and a child, wholly in the register of nightmare, and to build the nightmare chiefly out of a continuous industrial sound. The stake was a first feature shot over about five years on almost no money, a student production with no distributor in sight. What holds the axis near the bar is that the departure returned to a path the avant-garde had already proved: the turn within it is of scale and sound more than of kind.
Paolo Uccello · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the International Gothic battle and tournament picture, the painted chest, the tapestry of chivalric scenes, the decorative world of Gentile da Fabriano; and, from the other side, the new perspective of Brunelleschi and the treatise Alberti had just written. The turn is to throw the second at the first: to take a secular, contemporary skirmish, enlarge it to monumental scale on panel for a private house, and build it as a perspectival construction in which the debris of battle becomes the measuring grid. The stake was real. The result is visibly strange, toylike and stiff by the standards of either tradition, and the charge of eccentricity followed the painter. Against it, the commission was decorative and private, and ornament protected the departure. A large turn at a moderate cost.
Cindy Sherman · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is threefold: photography as document and fine print, the self-portrait, and the conceptual and performance work of the early 1970s, in which the artist’s body was the material and the photograph its record. The self in costume had precedents: Duchamp as Rrose Sélavy, Claude Cahun, and in the same decade Eleanor Antin and Lynn Hershman’s invented persona. The departure joins three turns at once: self-portraits that are portraits of no one; photographs that copy an original that never existed, a still from no film; and prints made to look ordinary and commercial when art photography was claiming the fine print. The stake was real for an unknown artist of twenty-three. Held below the top because the precedents were close and the field around her was moving the same way.
John Barth · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the English comic novel of the eighteenth century, Fielding, Smollett and Sterne, with Cervantes and Rabelais behind it, and Cooke’s own Hudibrastic satire of 1708 as the seed. The turn is in what the book does with it in 1960: an American novel written at great length in the diction of about 1700, about a real and obscure colonial poet, that rewrites the founding of a province as bawdy farce and makes the falsity of the historical record its subject. Against the realist, Jewish-American and Beat fiction of its moment that was a departure, not an accent, and it made the historical novel a parody of historiography before that practice had a name. The stake was real: a writer known for two short novels of ideas set out on a long, archaic book unsaleable on its face. Held off the top because pastiche borrows by design: the means are the masters’, and the swerve lies in their use.
Woody Allen · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the romantic comedy, from the screwball to the sex comedies of the 1960s, and Allen’s own gag films, Bananas, Sleeper and Love and Death. The turn is double. Inside the genre: a romance told after its end, out of order, with no reunion and the couple apart at the close, and the devices of comic revue, direct address and the sight gag, made the grammar of memory rather than a means to laughs alone. Inside the career: the move from parody to a personal film about a recognisable man and woman, at the cost of the broad audience the slapstick had won. The devices were borrowed, from Godard’s address, Bergman’s memory scenes in Wild Strawberries (8.2) and Fellini’s self-portrait; their fusion in a mainstream romantic comedy, with the unhappy ending as its point, was new. The limit: a working director’s budget and studio cushioned the stake.
Jean-Luc Godard · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the American crime film and the lovers-on-the-run picture, the pulp of White’s novel, and Godard’s own work to date. The departure is large. A star picture with the two leading names of the new French cinema is made as a collage of genres; colour is used as a primary sign, in the red, white and blue of the flag and the filtered light of the party; the lead talks to the camera; two narrators share the voice-over and correct each other; intertitles cut the film, and quotation becomes narrative matter. The stake was real: a costly production in colour and widescreen, with a commercial cast, in a form that refused the plot it borrowed. Held below the top because much of the vocabulary was Godard’s already, as in Breathless (9.3), and the turn from his own practice is one of degree.
Jackson Pollock · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the American mural of the 1930s, the rhythmic murals of Benton, under whom Pollock trained; the Mexican muralists, and Siqueiros’s experimental workshop of 1936, where he poured and flung paint; Picasso and Miró; Surrealist automatism as Masson and the émigrés carried it to New York. The departure: mural scale without a wall, a programme or a story; the figure dissolved into rhythm; a continuous field with no centre and no edge that matters. The stake: Pollock was thirty-one, with one solo show, on a stipend from a patron, and failure would have been public in the house of the most visible collector of the avant-garde in New York. Held a tenth above the gate because the full swerve, the all-over poured field, came four years later (Autumn Rhythm, 9.3).
Piet Mondrian · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the whole of Western painting as an image of something, and nearer, Cubism, which the painter had taken to the edge of abstraction in his trees and facades of 1911 to 1914. The departure of the method is among the largest any painter made: no object, no depth, no modelling, no curve, no diagonal, three primaries and three non-colours, the brush made anonymous. The stake was paid in full: years of poverty in Paris, flowers painted for sale to live, the break with van Doesburg over the diagonal, a rule kept against every market. What holds the axis below the top is the unit. By 1930 the method was nine years old, and this canvas is the swerve confirmed rather than made.
Algernon Charles Swinburne · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The swerve was real and it was paid for. Against the Tennysonian settlement of moral seriousness, domestic feeling and the idyll, the book put sexual candour, sadism, sapphic desire, blasphemy and a frank paganism into a public book from the house that published Tennyson. It cost: the book was withdrawn within weeks, the notices made the author’s name a byword, and his reputation never wholly cleared. The prosodic swerve is as large: triple rhythms sustained at length, the long line of the “Hymn”, classical metres made to sing in English, a music denser in alliteration and feminine rhyme than any before it in the language. Held at 8.6 because the model was partly French, Baudelaire, whom Swinburne had reviewed in 1862, and Gautier, and partly Greek: the departure is from the English tradition more than from all traditions.
Rudolf Steiner · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the monumental public building of masonry, frame and order, and in the 1920s the white cube of the new building, the frame and the module. The departure: a man not trained as an architect built a monumental public building in reinforced concrete as if it were clay, refusing the frame, the module and the right angle, when concrete was still a material of engineers and warehouses. It departs from its own predecessor too, the timber, the domes and the carved interior of the first building giving way to one poured body. Expressionism had drawn such buildings, and Mendelsohn’s Einstein Tower was built in brick and render behind its look of poured form; here the thing was poured at full scale. The stake was paid: formwork made by carpenters as sculpture in reverse, by a small society that had just lost its first building to fire.
Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
The swerve can be named exactly. Behrens’s Turbine Hall in Berlin (1909), from whose office both makers came, set glass between steel supports but closed its corners with heavy battered pylons, so that the building still declared its weight. At Alfeld the corner is opened: the mass is taken out precisely where every tradition of building had placed it. Glazed factory walls existed before, so the turn is not the invention of glass walling; it is the inversion of the corner, and the making of the glass skin into the architecture’s whole statement. The stake was real but not the largest: a young architect’s reputation risked on a client’s front, for a client who wanted to be seen, on a plan already settled, not on a building that would fail if the idea failed. A swerve of exact and lasting direction, at moderate cost, that clears the gate by a tenth.
Umayyad, under Abd al-Malik · Architecture
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance is twofold. From Byzantium and the Late Antique east came the centrally planned martyrium over a holy place, the domed rotunda of the Anastasis, octagons such as the Kathisma near Jerusalem, and gold-ground mosaic; from the Arabs’ own building, almost nothing monumental. The departure: a new faith’s first monumental architecture, at a single stroke; the image banished and replaced by ornament and writing, so that the words of the Quran become the building’s voice; the holy place a bare rock, not a tomb, a relic or an altar. The stake was large, a claim on the Christians’ holy city in their own idiom, raised during a civil war that contested the caliph’s rule. What holds it at the gate is the architecture, a proven type adopted with little change.
Hafez · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Persian ghazal at its height: Sa’di’s love lyric, the mystical ghazal of Attar and Rumi, the ornamented ghazal of Khwaju Kermani and Salman Savaji, several of whose poems Hafez answers in the same metre and rhyme. The swerve is real, a turn within the form rather than a break of it. He made the ghazal undecidable, so that the beloved, God and the prince occupy one addressee and the profane and sacred readings cannot be separated in a single couplet; and he turned the ghazal outward, against the ascetic and the muhtasib, as a voice of public dissent that mocks the enforcers of piety by type. Held at 8.5 because the form, the metres, the image-code and many rhymes are inherited; the departure is of fusion and tone, not of structure.
Yasujirō Ozu · Film
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance is double: the Shochiku home drama, the shomin-geki, and Ozu’s own form, settled over twenty years from I Was Born, But… (1932) to Early Summer (1951). Against narrative cinema at large it is a deep departure: a camera that neither moves nor rises, cuts across the line of action, speakers facing almost into the lens, transitions by still shots, every climax off screen. Against Leo McCarey’s Make Way for Tomorrow (1937), said to be the story’s model, the melodrama is drained out and the parents’ own faults are kept in. Held at the gate because the turn was made before this film. By 1953 the grammar was Ozu’s proven path, and the swerve here is of subject more than of form: an old couple as leads, a death at the centre, a widow as the measure.
T. S. Eliot · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance is large and the poem names it: Dante, the English devotional poets of the seventeenth century, Wordsworth’s meditative blank verse, the mystics. The turn is in two places. First, a musical form borrowed for verse, five movements recurring with variation across four poems, so that statement, recapitulation and development carry the thought where narrative or argument carries it in a long poem. Second, failure let in on purpose: discursive passages that criticise the lyric just sung, and the open admission that “The poetry does not matter” (East Coker II). The stake was real: after The Waste Land had made fragmentation the modern long poem, Eliot staked his standing on a continuous, abstract, devotional one, and some contemporaries charged him with retreat. Held at the bar because the turn runs from his own earlier manner back toward the meditative tradition, and lies in the structure more than in a language the tradition already had.
Pedro Calderón de la Barca · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The form is inherited whole from Lope’s comedia nueva: three jornadas, polymetric verse, a gracioso, a wronged woman in breeches, an honour plot, marriages at the close. The swerve is in what Calderón made the form carry: a dramatized argument in which the plot is the proof and the scenes are premises, an experiment on the prince, its failure, its repetition under doubt, and the conclusion acted. The ending refuses the comedia’s festive release: the gracioso is shot dead for hiding, the rescuing soldier is punished, the marriages are dispositions of state, and the hero ends master of himself and colder for it. Held at the bar because the philosophical comedia had predecessors in the same repertory, and the departure is one of rigour within the form, not a break with it.
Plato · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Socratic conversation, in Plato’s shorter dialogues and other followers’ writings, and against it the rhetorical culture of Gorgias’ own display pieces. The turn: the interlocutors are set in escalating order, so that the form becomes a struggle between the long speech and the short question, makrologia and brachylogia, raised at the outset (449b to c) and again with Polus; and when the question fails, the dialogue ends in a speech and a myth. Socrates conducting both sides alone (505d to 506c) takes the method to its limit. The stake was high: Pericles, Cimon, Miltiades and Themistocles are named as flatterers who left the city worse (515c to 519a), within a generation of Socrates’ execution by that city. Much of the method is inherited from the earlier dialogues, and the figure sits at the gate.
W. B. Yeats · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The departure is real, but the larger turn was taken earlier. The great swerve of late Yeats, from the Celtic Twilight to a hard, syntactic, public speech in traditional stanzas, belongs to Responsibilities, Michael Robartes and the Dancer and The Tower. What is new here is the doubling of that mastered grand style with its opposite: songs in the ballad measure, given to a mad old woman and a lunatic, coarse in matter and lucid in form; and a turn from the tower’s bitterness toward affirmation in the “Dialogue”. The stake was real: past sixty, with the Nobel behind him, Yeats risked the dignity of the high style on songs of sex and excrement, and on a poem whose central claim is that one would gladly live the shame again. What holds the axis at the gate exactly is the rest of the wager, rhyme and stanza against the modernism that had moved off them, which was placed before this book.
Thomas Mann · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the German Novelle of the nineteenth century, with its turning point and its single incident, and Mann’s own Tonio Kröger (1903), which had set the artist against life. The turn is to fuse the realist novella with a mythic substructure and to tell it in a high classical voice that is the hero’s own manner, so that the style is put on trial with the man. The stake was considerable: a famous and respectable author in 1912 publishing a novella of an old man’s passion for a boy, with the self-portrait plain. The case against is formal conservatism. Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, written the same autumn, broke the Novelle open; Mann kept its shape and its periods intact and put the risk in the subject and the irony. The turn is real and its cost was paid, but it is not the largest swerve of its decade.
Gustave Flaubert · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the conte and the nouvelle, Mérimée’s and Balzac’s, the realist tale of provincial life, and the saint’s legend. The turn: the impersonal method, perfected in the novels, carried into the short form, so that a servant’s life, a legend and a chronicle of antiquity are written under one discipline in which irony and pathos are not chosen between; and the form of the triptych, three ages run backward, with the second tale closing on a legend told as the reading of a church window. The stake was real: a ruined man after two failures, turning to the minor form. What holds the axis at the bar is that the method was his own and proven in Madame Bovary; the departure is in application and arrangement more than a new road.
Byzantine, under Bishop Ecclesius and Justinian · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance: Roman centralised halls such as the so-called Temple of Minerva Medica; San Lorenzo in Milan, with its double shell and exedrae; the martyrium as a central type; and Sts Sergius and Bacchus in Constantinople, begun at almost the same time, an octagon in a square with exedrae on alternate sides, its priority unsettled. The departure: exedrae carried round seven of eight sides, so the core’s wall becomes a rhythm of curved screens and its boundary almost dissolves; a section drawn far higher than its sibling’s; a tube dome light enough to allow it. The stake was real: a church of the capital’s kind begun in an Arian king’s capital with a banker’s money, its outcome tied to a war not yet fought. Held at the gate because the turn is shared with a sibling and a line, a step beyond a proven path.
Kenji Mizoguchi · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is threefold: the period film, the ghost story (kaidan) of the Japanese stage and screen, and Mizoguchi’s own long take and moving camera, worked out over twenty years from Osaka Elegy and Sisters of the Gion (1936) to The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums (1939) and The Life of Oharu (1952). The departure is real: the supernatural and the historical held in one visual law, the ghost and the living in the same take and the same light, without the effects the ghost film used to mark the other world; and a war film told as a fable of art and greed. Held at the bar because the grammar was the director’s proven path by 1953, and the stake was smaller than the result suggests. The swerve is of subject and fusion more than of form.
Krzysztof Kieślowski · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the post-war European art cinema, the Polish cinema of moral anxiety, and Kieślowski’s own recent turns: Dekalog, a cycle on a sacred programme, and The Double Life of Véronique, which had found the French co-production, the filters, Preisner and the metaphysics of chance. The departures are real: a trilogy announced as such and shown within nine months; a republic’s motto taken as programme and turned against itself; three genres under one law; colour laid in as structure across three photographers; and in Blue a score that is the plot’s object. The stake was three features in three countries and languages. What holds it at the bar is that the cycle form and the manner had already been proven twice.
Romanesque builders; Obradoiro facade by Fernando de Casas Novoa · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Three swerves, unequal. The Romanesque church belongs to a type it shares with Saint-Sernin at Toulouse and with lost churches at Tours and Limoges; which came first is disputed, and its departure is the type carried out most fully, not invented. Mateo’s Pórtico is a real turn: the portal moved inside a narthex as a triple screen, the figures loosened toward speech and expression, the programme made one continuous scene of the Apocalypse, at the turn from Romanesque toward Gothic sculpture in Iberia. The Obradoiro is a stake in granite: a Baroque frontispiece carried to great height in a hard stone, its centre given to glass. Each risked something; none overturned its art.
Émile Zola · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the French realist novel, Balzac and Flaubert, and Zola’s own naturalism, whose larger swerve was L’Assommoir (1877): the working class in its own language. Germinal’s turn is to make the collective the protagonist, the crowd a character with its own motion and mind, the strike the plot and capital an agent without a face, and to give labour underground the full apparatus of the novel. The stake was political as well as literary: a novel of a miners’ strike, with the shooting of strikers at its centre, published the year after the strike at Anzin, which Zola had visited. Held at the gate because the method was already Zola’s and proven; the swerve is in the subject and the collective hero more than in the form.
Franz Kafka · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the German story of the artist, the Künstlernovelle, Mann’s Tonio Kröger and Death in Venice the nearest: the artist’s estrangement from life told with sympathy or tragic grandeur. Kafka turns it into the chronicle of a fairground act whose art is not a gift but a lack, told in the deadpan of a report, with the artist’s claim to suffering made indistinguishable from fraud in the eyes of every witness. The artist’s parable becomes a parable of its own impossibility, and that turn is the story’s whole knowledge. The stake was smaller than in The Metamorphosis or “In the Penal Colony”: by 1922 the manner was Kafka’s own and proven, and the story extends it rather than wagering it. It meets the gate on the line, and the risk that would lift it lay in the earlier work.
Vittorio De Sica · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is double: the Italian studio cinema of the Fascist years, against which the movement turned, and neorealism itself, already proven by Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (1945) and Paisà (1946) and by De Sica’s own Shoeshine (1946). Against narrative cinema at large the departure is deep: leads who are not actors, no event beyond a theft, no villain, no remedy. The stake was real: De Sica raised the money himself, and an ending without remedy was still a wager in a commercial industry in 1948. Held at the bar because the turn was made before this film. The swerve is of purity, not of direction: the most stripped statement of a method others had opened.
Elia Kazan · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the American social problem picture and the location crime film of the late 1940s, Kazan’s own path among them: Boomerang! (1947) and Panic in the Streets (1950) had taken his camera out of the studio, and A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) had put Brando’s acting on the screen. The departures are real: a prestige picture made of a real waterfront in winter, with dock workers in the background; a hero inarticulate, guilty, half-bought and not very bright, played from inside; a love story conducted in fragments and silences. The stake was an independent production put on location in a hard season. It meets the bar and no more: the turn joins paths already opened, and the moral shape is an old conversion story.
Robert Bresson · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Bresson’s own, the grammar settled from Diary of a Country Priest (1951) through A Man Escaped (1956) and Pickpocket (1959) to The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962): models in place of actors, the fragmented shot, sound given the weight of image, ellipsis. Against that inheritance the film turns in two things. It gives up the single protagonist with an inner voice, which every earlier Bresson feature had, for a centre with no speech and no interiority; and it gives up the single line for two crossing lives and a crowd of keepers. Against the sentimental animal film it is a reversal. But the turn is made on a proven path: the method is carried over whole, and what turns is centre and structure. That holds the axis at the bar.
Built for Fujiwara no Yorimichi · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Amida hall of the Heian court, above all Michinaga’s Muryōju-in at Hōjō-ji (1020), now lost, which set nine Amidas in a long hall; with it the villa pond garden and the palaces of the paradise paintings. The departure: a single image in a compact hall, set in a pond that is the Pure Land’s own lake, wings that are pure image and no accommodation, and an orientation fixed by doctrine. The villa is not given a chapel; it is turned entirely into the other world. The stake was real, a regent’s fortune and hope of rebirth, but it ran on a path the court was already taking, and the main precedent cannot be seen.
Duccio di Buoninsegna · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the maniera greca: the Byzantine Virgin in majesty, the gold field, drapery hatched in gold, the Passion as a sequence of icons. The work keeps that language and turns it: faces modelled with tenderness, drapery that falls over bodies, figures placed in architectural boxes that make rooms, gestures and glances carrying the story between persons, colour of a new sweetness. The stake was large and public: the commune’s chief commission, a contract binding the painter to work only on it, the city’s procession at the end. But the swerve is a turn within the received language rather than a break from it. Giotto broke harder in the same years, in The Arena Chapel (9.3), and that is why the axis stands at the gate and not above it.
John Milton · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The turn is the attempt itself: a tragedy in English on the Greek model, the Chorus restored as a speaking person and the action held to one day and one place, written when the English stage ran on rhymed heroic drama and comedy, with a preface defending tragedy against the low esteem its age gave it. The choral verse, freed of stanza and regular rhyme, is the boldest metrical departure in English before the nineteenth century. The stake was political as well: a regicide’s tragedy, published after the Restoration, of a blinded captive who brings down the festival of his conquerors. It stands at the gate and not above it because the departure is toward an older, proven path; the swerve from Greek tragedy itself is real but smaller.
Anton Bruckner · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Beethoven’s Ninth, Schubert’s Great C major symphony, and Wagner’s orchestra and harmony. The departures: a symphony of some eighty minutes; the Scherzo placed second, the first time Bruckner did so; a first movement ending in the minor, pianissimo, without precedent in a C minor symphony on this scale; Wagner tubas and three harps in a symphony; a coda that sounds the themes of the movements together. The stake was real: Hermann Levi, his most loyal conductor, rejected the 1887 score, and Bruckner spent two years rewriting it. Held at the line because the road was his own: block construction, general pauses, the chorale and the cyclic return were all in the Fifth and the Seventh.
Prince Hachijō Toshihito and Prince Toshitada · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is threefold: the formal shoin, the hall of rank with painted gold walls, as at Nijō Castle’s Ninomaru Palace; the tea house of Sen no Rikyū’s generation, unpainted wood and earth walls, poverty as a discipline; and the pond garden of the Heian and Muromachi villas. Measured within Japanese building, the turn is large. The tea house’s materials and freedoms enter a princely residence — thin posts, bark-edged chamfers, white paper and plain plaster in place of gold — and shoin, tea house and stroll garden are joined into one sequence to be walked. Nikkō’s Tōshōgū (1634–1636), carved and coloured on every surface, shows what the shogunate chose instead. Held below the top by precedent: the tea masters had already made poverty a style, and Go-Mizunoo’s Shūgakuin moved the same way in the same years.
Stanley Kubrick · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
The inherited form is the costume picture and the historical epic, which dressed modern stars in period clothes, lit them as stars and drove them through incident. The film turned against all three habits at once. It lit the eighteenth century by its own light, daylight and candles, with lenses adapted for the purpose; it composed scenes as the painting of the period composed them, and held them; and it gave the story to a narrator who tells the outcome in advance, removing suspense from three hours of narrative. The stake was real: a large studio budget, a slow film in two parts, a star cast against type, after the success of A Clockwork Orange. Held at the gate because the departure is from a genre’s manners, not from the grammar of cinema.
Ivan Goncharov · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the superfluous man of Pushkin and Lermontov and the inert landowners of Gogol, Manilov and, in the surviving chapters of the second part of Dead Souls, Tentetnikov. Goncharov’s turn is to make the superfluous man’s defining quality not ennui, pride or wit but inertia itself, and to build a long novel round a hero who does not get up for its first quarter. The stake was real: a novel whose principal action is not acting risks boring its reader to death, and the slowness is still its standing charge. The second turn is the sympathy: the idle man is the moral centre and the active man the doubtful one. Held at the gate because the narration itself is conventional.
George Eliot · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the English novel of courtship and the domestic novel of manners, with the child-narrative of Dickens beside it. The turn is threefold. A child’s mind, and a girl’s, is taken with full adult seriousness for three books, rendered from within and not as charm or pathos. The provincial commercial world of millers, lawyers, carriers and a trading firm is treated as tragic matter, Eliot’s wager in Adam Bede pressed further. And the marriage plot is refused: the heroine is offered Philip, Stephen and, in its way, her brother’s approval, takes none of them, and the book ends in death. The stake was real, and the refusal of the expected end cost the book its name for proportion. Held exactly at the gate because the swerve is moral and structural more than formal.
Toni Morrison · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the African American novel of Wright and Ellison, in which a young Black man’s coming of age is a protest against American society or an escape from it, and behind them Faulkner’s Southern genealogy. Morrison’s turn is to make the male quest run backward, south and into the past, with possession of history as its goal and not freedom from it; to make Black folk legend, the ring song and the flying Africans, the structure of a novel and not its colour; and to put an ageless woman without a navel at the moral centre of a realist book. The stake was real: after two short novels about girls and women, a long novel with a male hero, built on folklore and the supernatural, which could have read as quaint. Held at the bar because the family chronicle and the quest romance are proven paths, the marvellous was already in the field with García Márquez and Ishmael Reed, and the larger formal swerve in Morrison’s work came later, in Beloved.
Ivan Turgenev · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The form is inherited, and conservative: the short novel of Turgenev’s own Rudin (1856), A Nest of Gentlefolk (1859) and On the Eve (1860), each built round a superfluous man or a hero of the moment, in scenes and portraits. The turn is in the hero and the stance. Bazarov is the first figure of the radical young generation in Russian fiction drawn from inside, neither satirised nor exalted, stronger than everyone around him and wrong about his own heart; and the narrator refuses to judge him. That stance was the stake, and it was paid in full. The young read the book as libel and the old as surrender: Dmitry Pisarev’s essay “Bazarov” (1862) embraced the hero, Maxim Antonovich’s “Asmodeus of Our Time” in Sovremennik (1862) called him a slander on the young, Turgenev was attacked from right and left alike, and his standing in Russia never fully recovered. The swerve is in the treatment, not the form, and that holds the figure where it is.
Gunnar Asplund and Sigurd Lewerentz · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the nineteenth-century urban cemetery, gridded or laid out as a park of monuments; the crematorium as a chapel with a chimney; and, nearer, the forest cemetery already made at Munich’s Waldfriedhof in 1907. Burial among trees was not new. The departure is in what the forest was made to do: landscape abstracted to a few elemental forms, slope, path, mound, cross and edge, and the cemetery made one composition through which a mourner moves. Within the work there is a second turn, from the Nordic classicism of the Woodland Chapel to the modernism of the crematorium, made where convention presses hardest. The stake was real but cultural: two young architects in a civic competition, the commission later divided. No span or structure was risked. Held on the line because the precedent existed and the stake was not structural.
Bong Joon-ho · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance: Kim Ki-young’s The Housemaid (1960), the intruder in a house of stairs; the servant films of Losey (The Servant, 1963) and Chabrol (La Cérémonie, 1995); the con-artist caper; the genre-mixing Korean cinema of the 2000s. The turn is in two places. The caper changes genre at the doorbell, into horror and then tragedy, without leaving its house or its logic, and the change is the argument: the film pulls its own floor away and is stronger for it. And the servant film’s struggle of servant against master becomes poor against poor, with the rich as bystanders. The stake is held down by precedent: tonal fusion was Bong’s proven path (Memories of Murder, The Host, Mother), and Snowpiercer (2013) had laid the class allegory out horizontally.
Sandro Botticelli · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The departure is real. A nude goddess of pagan myth at life size is the whole subject of a large painting, in Florence in the mid-1480s, without a biblical or allegorical pretext and without the small format of a cassone panel. And it turns from the inheritance of Masaccio and the perspective painters: space is shallow, the body weightless and drawn, anatomy bent to line, linear rhythm chosen over volume in light. The stake is a choice against the naturalism the city’s painters had spent sixty years building, a decade before Savonarola’s attack on vanities. Held at the bar rather than above it: the Primavera, a few years earlier and in the same circle, had already made the mythological turn at large scale, and the linear manner was Botticelli’s settled style, so here the swerve is extended more than first placed.
The Beatles · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the group’s own: the studio records of 1966 and 1967 and the plain playing of 1968, beside the pop suite and the rock opera of the late 1960s. The turn is real and lies chiefly on side two: a rock album gives most of a side to a medley of unfinished songs, stitched into one passage with returning themes, a form the group had not tried and few rock records had attempted at that length. “I Want You” is a second risk, a blues held for nearly eight minutes and then cut. The synthesiser is brought into the writing of songs rather than displayed. What holds it at the bar: the group stood above commercial risk, side one returns to polished song, and the suite and the long form had proven paths.
F. W. Murnau · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is double: the German chamber film, with Murnau’s own unchained camera proven in The Last Laugh (1924), and the American studio melodrama of rural virtue and urban vice. The departure is the transplanting: a European art film made inside Hollywood at full studio expense, with few intertitles, a camera that travels where American practice cut, superimposition as the language of thought, and a city built as a state of mind rather than a place. The stake was real: Fox put a great budget behind a prestige picture in a form its audience had not asked for. Held at the bar rather than above it because the grammar was already Murnau’s and Mayer’s, made in Berlin; the swerve is of place and scale more than of method.
Robert Schumann · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Lied of Schubert, his two Müller cycles above all, and Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte. The departures: a cycle that begins without beginning, on an unresolved seventh, and so begins as a fragment; a piano that knows more than the voice and contradicts it, in nos. 7, 9 and 13; a postlude that recalls an earlier song and carries the cycle’s conclusion without words; a cycle with no story told, made of Heine’s ironic lyric where Schubert set Müller’s plainer verse. The stake was moderate. Schumann had made his name with the piano, and what he carried into the Lied, the fragment and the postlude, was in large part the method of his piano cycles. Schubert had already made the song cycle a drama of one consciousness without a plot. The swerve is real and partly along roads already built.
José Clemente Orozco · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is double. There is the baroque dome, the illusionistic heaven of Correggio at Parma and of the colonial churches of New Spain, opening upward into glory; and there is the Mexican mural renaissance of the 1920s, didactic and historical, and in Rivera’s hands confident in progress and the people. The departure is from both at once. Against the baroque heaven, the glory is a man on fire and the opening is a furnace. Against the movement’s programme, the summit of a state commission is neither the revolution nor the people but a tragic figure above history, with the masses of the cycle painted faceless. The stake was real. Held at the bar of 8.5 rather than above it because the expressionist handling and the Promethean figure were already his, at Pomona and at Dartmouth: the swerve is the placing more than the making.
Robert Bresson · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the French crime film and the literary adaptation, and against both the departure is radical: a foreword disowns the genre, suspense is drained from the thefts, the players are models without expression, the voice-over says what we see, and guilt is carried by hands in close-up. The stake was real: a film about a thief with no thriller in it, with untrained leads, in the year the New Wave arrived with its own claims on the crime film. But the turn was largely made before it. Diary of a Country Priest (1951) had the diary and the voice-over, A Man Escaped (1956) the hands at work and the untrained lead. What swerves here is that grammar carried into the crime film and a city crowd, real and narrower, and it holds the axis at the bar.
Krzysztof Kieślowski · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Polish cinema of moral anxiety of the late 1970s, which Kieślowski had helped to make, and state television drama. The departure is a turn away from the political, in 1988, the year of the last strikes, toward metaphysics and private ethics, on a commandment scheme, inside a state broadcaster. The whole was conceived as one structure, and two of its films were made again as features. The stake was real: the cycle could be read as evasion at home, or as piety under a communist broadcaster. Held at the threshold by precedent: Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales (1962–72) had already built a cycle of films under a moral rubric, and Bergman and Fassbinder had already made auteur work for television.
PJ Harvey · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance: Harvey’s own records, from the raw blues rock of Dry and Rid of Me to the piano and high voice of White Chalk (2007); the English folk ballad and the war song; the rock protest record. The turn is real and whole. A singer whose work had been the private body and its desires gives an entire record to England and the First World War, in a light, near-folk idiom built on autoharp, with samples placed as ironic citation and a voice held high and plain where her name was made on force. The stake was the audience that came for intimacy. The high voice had been found on White Chalk and the war ballad is old; the swerve is of subject and stance, and it was taken in full.
W. G. Sebald · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the novel of the Holocaust and its survivors, and the long German prose of Stifter and Thomas Bernhard, whose nested reported speech Sebald adopts. The departure: a novel of the Holocaust that never enters a camp in its present action and never depicts a killing, told at two and three removes, with uncaptioned photographs whose standing as evidence the reader cannot settle, and a protagonist whose story is the failure to remember it. The stake was real: a book of near-plotless digression, presenting images that may or may not be what they seem, risked being received as a mannered essay, or as the appropriation of a history not the author’s. Held lower because the instrument, the photo-text and the walking narrator, had been made in Sebald’s earlier books, Vertigo, The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn; this book turns it toward the novel.
Paul Thomas Anderson · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
There are two traditions to depart from. Against its maker’s own manner the departure is large: the ensemble, the Altman-inflected crosscutting, the pop songs and the talk of Anderson’s Los Angeles films give way to one man, wide spaces and long silences. Against the American epic of Giant (1956), it removes the romance, the women and any redemption, and puts a modernist score and long silences where the studio epic sets romance and talk. The stake was real: a period film with no love story, a wordless opening and a grotesque ending, made inside the studio system. That carries it to the bar and no further: the precedents are close, in Greed, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Kubrick’s period austerity and Malick’s Days of Heaven, the stake was cushioned by a leading actor of the first rank and two studio divisions, and the swerve is from its maker’s manner more than from the medium’s.
Anselm Kiefer · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is twofold: postwar German abstraction, which kept away from the image and from the Reich; and, by 1983, Kiefer’s own path of painting German myth and Nazi architecture in charred matter, already proven in the attic pictures and in Innenraum (1981), and already punished, for the German pavilion at Venice in 1980 drew the charge of reviving fascist forms. The turn proper to this canvas is from the perpetrators’ myth to the victims: a German painter born in 1945 taking up Celan’s Sulamith and setting her in the Reich’s own memorial hall. The stake was real: the charge of appropriation, of aestheticizing the Holocaust, of monumentalizing what it mourned. But the means were his, and a wager placed on a proven path is not a swerve.
Eugenio Montale · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The swerve is from D’Annunzio, whose Alcyone (1903) had made the Tuscan summer noon a panic fusion of the self with nature. Montale takes the same noon, coast and heat and drains them: the noon becomes aridity, the fusion a wall. “I limoni” names the opponent at once, “i poeti laureati” who move only among plants “dai nomi poco usati: bossi ligustri o acanti” (the laurelled poets; with little-used names, box, privet or acanthus), and offers lemon trees and ditches instead. The rhymes are rough where D’Annunzio’s were sweet, and the old line is kept and bent, a riskier wager inside the tradition than outside it. Held at 8.5 because the crepuscolari, Gozzano among them, and Sbarbaro had already lowered the lyric voice, and Ungaretti’s L’allegria broke the line more radically.
Ernest Hemingway · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the magazine story of O. Henry and the Saturday Evening Post with its plotted turn, Kipling, Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio and Gertrude Stein’s repetitions, with Turgenev and Chekhov behind them. The departure is the theory of omission, by which the story’s subject is left out and carried by what remains: “Hills” never names the operation, “The Killers” never says why Ole Andreson is to die, and “In Another Country” lets the war stay outside the hospital. “Hills” pushes it farthest, a story almost wholly in dialogue with the narrator reduced to stage directions, and in 1927 that was a wager, staked in the paying magazines. Held at the line rather than above it because In Our Time, two years before, had already made the turn; this book perfects and widens it.
Samuel Johnson · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Johnson was not the first to write the lives of English poets: Langbaine, Jacob and Cibber’s Lives of 1753 came before him, and Dryden’s prefaces and Addison on Milton before his criticism. The commission was hackwork, a set of prefaces for a publishers’ edition. The turn is in what he made of it. He fused biography and criticism at full scale for a national poetry, and he refused the puff the occasion invited: the Milton calls its subject “an acrimonious and surly republican” and finds in Lycidas that “the diction is harsh, the rhymes uncertain, and the numbers unpleasing”; the Gray dismisses the Pindaric odes; the Swift is cold. He offended the admirers of Gray and Milton, drew pamphlets, and stood on judgments he knew to be unpopular. A large turn on an inherited occasion, at a cost he paid.
Akira Kurosawa · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Japanese home drama, the studio melodrama of illness, and Kurosawa’s own humanist films of the late 1940s, Drunken Angel (1948) among them. The departure is in the structure: the hero is removed with much of the film still to run, and his great work is shown only in recollections at his wake, under argument, among men who misread it. The film opens on an X-ray, with a narrator who announces the cancer and speaks of the hero with dry irony. The stake was real: a plain, ageing clerk as the lead of a film of 143 minutes at Toho, and a long, near-static wake where an audience expected a climax. What holds it at the bar is how much was gathered. The witnesses come from Citizen Kane (1941) and from Kurosawa’s own Rashomon (1950), and how much the story owes to Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich is contested. The use of the device is new; the device is not.
Karl Friedrich Schinkel · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the Neoclassical public building with a pedimented temple front at its centre; the domed museum of the ideal plans, Durand’s and the prize projects of the French Academy; the princely gallery in a palace wing. The departure: a front with no pediment and no centre, eighteen equal columns across the whole face, the stoa set in place of the temple; the dome withdrawn from the skyline and hidden in a plain block; an open stair hall that makes the threshold a public outdoor room with a view; Durand’s ideal plan halved and made to fit a real site. The stake was real: a state building on the most prominent square of the capital, set as the palace’s equal, refusing the expected monumental accent before king and court. Held at the gate, not above it: every element is drawn from the classical vocabulary, and the turn is a reordering of known parts rather than a new language.
Prince · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
The departure is real, and partly made before. The stake is plain. After the largest commercial success of his career and the dissolution of his band, Prince led with a sparse protest song on drum machine and bass, released a double album when his label had refused a triple, made it nearly alone, and sang part of it in a sped-up voice under another name. The turn from the polished arena pop of the mid-1980s toward a dry, home-made funk, and the habit of pitching the voice to cross sex, departed from the R&B and pop of the year. The charge stands: the eclecticism, the psychedelic colour and the drum-machine minimalism had been opened on his own earlier records, and the double album that sets every genre its maker commands on one record has precedents in rock and soul. But the axis scores the turn and the stake together, and the stake here was no proven path: one man, his band gone, wagering the standing his largest success had bought on four sides he played himself. The swerve is a synthesis carried further, and the cost of carrying it brings it to the bar.
Tadao Ando · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the Western church with its image, altar and raised chancel; the Japanese Protestant church, usually a modest hall with a cross on the wall; and the modern sacred building of Le Corbusier at Ronchamp and La Tourette and of Louis Kahn, where concrete and controlled light had already been made the matter of worship. The departure: the cross as void rather than object, the wall itself cut into four; darkness everywhere but at the cut; the whole made from almost nothing. The stake was real but modest: slender means, a congregation’s trust, and the open cross, lost to glass. Held at the bar because the turn was reached through a modern lineage of light and concrete already in hand, and the wager was placed on a path already proven.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the American school building of corridors and studios, and behind it the Beaux Arts plan of named rooms. Against it the departure is total: one room, no corridors, no assigned spaces, the structure lifted outside and above the roof so that the room is wholly free. The stake was real: an institution's only home for its school of architecture entrusted to a single glass hall, against every convention of acoustics and climate, on a campus that was itself an experiment. But much of the turn had been taken already, and by Mies: the Farnsworth House, completed in 1951, had built the raised glass room on exterior steel, and the unbuilt Cantor drive-in of 1945 to 1946 had proposed a roof hung from trusses above it. The hall carries the wager to an institution's scale rather than placing it first.
Johann Sebastian Bach · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
The departure is in the instrument, not the form. The suite is inherited whole: allemande, courante, sarabande, galanterie and gigue, with a prelude before, in the German order of the time. The cello of the 1710s and 1720s was above all a continuo instrument, and nothing written for it had asked one cello to carry a suite and its harmony through six works of this scale. The writing asks for chords, string crossings and implied voices beyond its usual role, a retuning in the fifth suite and an instrument barely standard in the sixth. The stake was real. Its cost is held down by Bach’s own path: the solo violin works, in an autograph dated 1720, had made the wager already for a higher instrument.
Nirvana · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the band’s own: the underground noise rock of Bleach, the Pixies’ quiet and loud, the Melvins and Big Black, and the polished hard rock of Nevermind, which had made the band the largest in its field. The turn is against that last record. A band at commercial height hired the engineer of Surfer Rosa, recorded in a cold room, left the drums and the voice raw, and put songs called Rape Me and Radio Friendly Unit Shifter on a major-label follow-up. The stake was the band’s own standing, spent against its own success. The turn is one of nerve more than invention, and that marks its limit: it went back to a language proven in the underground, the quiet and loud song stayed, and two singles were remixed for radio.
Thomas Pynchon · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is wide and openly carried: Sterne and Fielding, the eighteenth-century travel narrative, the historical novel from Scott on, and Pynchon’s own encyclopedic systems novel. The turn is in the instrument: a very long novel written in a sustained pastiche of eighteenth-century prose, the historical novel’s documents and the picaresque’s tales folded into a frame of oral telling, and the paranoid architecture of Gravity’s Rainbow moved back two centuries to the founding of the nation. The stake was real: a book of deliberately archaic diction and great length, after the cool reception of Vineland, that could have been read as a parlour game. Held at the gate, not above it, because the path had been cleared: John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) had written a mock-eighteenth-century novel of colonial Maryland, and the historiographic metafiction of the 1980s had made the revision of history by fable a familiar mode.
Buster Keaton and Clyde Bruckman · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance was American slapstick, in which story is a clothesline for gags and the world bends to the comedian. The departure: a feature-length comedy built as a historical reconstruction, its look drawn from Civil War photographs, in which every gag arises from the physics of real machines, the story is a single action with no slack, and the comedian is subject to the world rather than master of it. The stake was the largest of Keaton’s career: an epic’s budget, a locomotive sent down through a bridge into a river, a hero on the losing side, a comedy that kills men on screen. Held at the bar because the turn was prepared by his own Our Hospitality (1923), a period comedy on a train, and The Navigator (1924), a comedy of a man and a machine.
Wu Cheng'en (attributed) · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The departure is large, and the stake was real. The book inherits a pious cycle: the pilgrimage of the Tang monk told for edification, a monkey servant already beside him in an earlier telling, and plays and prose versions behind it. It turns that inheritance into a comic, satirical and allegorical novel on a scale no prior version approached. Monkey is moved to the centre and given seven chapters of his own before the monk appears; Heaven becomes a farce of office, where he is made “弼馬溫”
(keeper of the horses) and finds the post the lowest; the three teachings are mocked and reconciled, Daoist imposters exposed at the Cart Slow Kingdom and Buddhist officials at Vulture Peak asking a gift before they hand over the scriptures. Irreverence toward Heaven, the Buddha’s court and the throne was a stake, and the book went out without a name. It is held at the bar, not above, because the chapter form, the storyteller’s frame and the verse are inherited intact.
Frida Kahlo · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is threefold: Mexican muralism, public and epic, the art of Rivera and of the state; the European portrait, a single sitter in a ground; and the popular and colonial image of Mexico, the retablo and ex-voto, the portraits of crowned nuns, the anatomical heart of devotional prints. The departure: the private female body, its wound and its anatomy, made the subject of a canvas at the scale of an easel monument, in a country whose official painting was public history; the double self-portrait used to state a cultural division; devotional idiom turned to a secular self. The stake was real: known chiefly as Rivera’s wife, newly divorced and needing to live by her painting, she staked a life-size canvas on the most private subject available. Held at the gate because the turn was made earlier, in pictures of 1932 and 1936.
Egyptian (Early Dynastic) · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the decorated palette of the late Predynastic, with hunters, animals and the dead spread across the surface in loose, scattered fields. The departure is decisive: ground lines and registers; a hierarchic scale that makes the king the measure of all; the composite figure, head and legs in profile and shoulders frontal, at a scale and clarity that would become the rule; a single royal figure set apart in an open field; signs placed beside figures to name them. A thing for grinding pigment is turned into a monument of rule. The stake is real but not personal: a votive object for a temple, the wager a polity’s. Held at the gate, not above it, because the turn is shared with the maceheads of Narmer and of the Scorpion king, and the palette is its fullest instance more than its sole author.
H. G. Wells · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the utopian dream of the future, Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) and Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890); the underground race of Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race (1871); the evolutionary pessimism of T. H. Huxley, under whom Wells had studied; and the traveller’s tale with its frame. The turn is double. The journey is made mechanical and rational, a machine one rides, where the future had been reached by sleep or dream, and so time becomes a direction of travel. And the utopia is turned inside out: a future produced by evolution and entropy rather than by reform, where progress has run to decadence. The stake was real for a first book set against the reforming optimism its readers knew, though the scientific romance had an eager market in Verne and the frame is a familiar shape.
Adam Lock and others · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The building turns from its inheritance twice, and the stake is real both times. About 1180 it was among the first churches in England built pointed throughout, and it is Gothic without being French: no apse, no ambulatory, no flying buttresses on view, no tall clerestory, a level elevation with the triforium a continuous band, stiff-leaf for French foliage. It took the new structure and refused the French vertical and the French east end. In the fourteenth century the eastern arm became an experiment in spatial ambiguity, an irregular octagon married to a rectangle, piers set so that the eye cannot find the bay. The scissor arches were an answer no tradition supplied. Held at the bar because the first turn was shared with Canterbury and Lincoln.
Octavia E. Butler · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is double: the slave narrative and the historical novel of slavery on one side, the time-travel story of science fiction on the other. Butler fused them and refused the comforts of both. There is no machine and no explanation; the past is not visited but suffered; the traveller from the future has no advantage that matters, and what she knows of history saves no one. The stake was real: a Black woman writing in a genre that had almost no place for her, publishing a book that its genre readers would call fantasy and its literary readers genre, eight years before Beloved. The swerve put a contemporary consciousness inside slavery and made the reader’s distance the thing on trial. It sits at the gate and not above it because the prose and the narrative grammar are conventional: the departure is in conception, not in the making.
Hou Hsiao-hsien · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Taiwanese New Cinema that Hou helped to make, in The Time to Live and the Time to Die (1985) and Dust in the Wind (1986), with its long fixed takes and personal memory; behind it Ozu’s domestic frame; and the state-sponsored cinema that told the island’s recent history only as the regime told it. The turn is from personal memory to national history, and from the regime’s account to the one it had suppressed. The stake was real: a taboo two years out of martial law, a production in five languages recorded on location, and a form that refused the payoffs a historical subject invites. It meets the bar of the Epochal Gate and no more, because the means were Hou’s already: the swerve is in subject and scale, not grammar.
Claire Denis · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the military film, the literary adaptation, and the European art cinema of ellipsis, Bresson above all. The departure is large: a Melville adaptation that sheds almost all of Melville’s talk; a Foreign Legion film with no combat; a narrative turned into choreography, the drills staged with Bernardo Montet so that training becomes dance and plot shrinks to a few gestures between dances. A woman’s camera looks at the male body as an object of beauty and of discipline at once, without irony or camp. The cost of the turn is lowered by precedent. The elliptical grammar was already Denis’s own; Fassbinder’s Querelle (1982) had joined a world of sailors to desire, in studio artifice; and Godard’s Le Petit Soldat stands behind the commandant.
Anthony Burgess · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the English dystopia of Wells, Huxley and Orwell, the novel of the state that remakes the person, and Orwell had already made language an instrument of control. The turn is that Burgess gave the language to the victim and narrator instead of the regime, and told the whole book in it: the reader must learn Nadsat by immersion to read the book at all, so the dystopia is not described from outside but spoken from inside by its most dangerous citizen, witty, musical and monstrous. Newspeak is described in an appendix and never narrated in; here the argot is the narration. The stake was real: a first-person narration in invented argot risked being unreadable, the first edition carried no glossary, and a narrator who enjoys rape and murder risked the book’s being taken for what it shows. Held at the bar because the dystopian frame and the conditioning plot are inherited, and the departure lives in the voice.
Henryk Górecki · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance in 1976 was the Polish avant-garde of Penderecki, Lutosławski and Górecki’s own sonorist and serial works, and behind it the Darmstadt line, for which a slow modal symphony in consonance was regression. The turn: three slow movements, a canon on one modal theme, consonant harmony held for minutes, a soprano singing Polish devotional and folk texts. The stake was real: a cold reception, as reported, before a modernist festival audience at Royan, and fifteen years of modest life. Held at the gate by the road behind it. Górecki had already turned, in Ad Matrem and the Second Symphony; old Polish music and folk song were sources, not an empty field; and the same decade brought Pärt’s tintinnabuli and American minimalism, so the swerve was one of several.
U2 · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
The turn is the band’s, and it was paid for. War (1983), produced like its two predecessors by Steve Lillywhite, had made U2 a band of martial drums, bright guitar and declared conviction. At the edge of the largest scale they hired Brian Eno, a producer known for ambient music, and Daniel Lanois, set up in a castle ballroom, and made a record of washes, room sound and half-written words, its main invention The Edge’s delay, set as structure rather than ornament. The cost was momentum, and a record many heard as unfinished. The sound the band’s next record consolidated was found here. Held from the top by precedent: Eno had taken Talking Heads into his studio method, Joy Division and The Cure had worked texture over riff, and the lead single kept the old style.
Leonardo da Vinci · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Italian portrait of a woman in the 1470s and 1480s, above all in Milan and Florence: the strict profile, the sitter as a display of lineage, dress and jewels, still and closed, seen and not seeing, as in the Pollaiuolo profiles and the profiles of the Milanese court. The three-quarter portrait already existed in Flanders and in Antonello, and Leonardo’s own Ginevra de’ Benci had turned the sitter toward the viewer. The departure goes further: the head turned against the body, the gaze sent out of the frame to an event we do not see, the portrait made an instant of thought, and a living animal made a second subject rather than an attribute. The stake: a likeness for the ruler of Milan of a young woman of his court, which had to please and to honour, delivered as a moment of distraction. The cost was risked, not paid.
Vincent van Gogh · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the landscape of the Barbizon painters and of Impressionism, which recedes: a horizon, a road into depth, a sky of light. Here the central path opens toward the viewer and is cut off, so that perspective gives no entry; the horizon is a hard band; the sky is not light but matter, built stroke by stroke as thick as the field; the birds are calligraphy, a few marks each, at the edge of becoming signs. The double square was itself an unusual format for a landscape. The stake was real: in July 1890 the painter had sold almost nothing and was painting at a pace that left no margin. Held at the gate rather than above it because the turn is largely his own, continuing the idiom of Arles and Saint-Rémy, the wheatfields and cypresses of 1889, rather than departing from it as those had departed from what came before.
John Crowley · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Two inheritances. One is fantasy after Tolkien, which in 1981 meant the secondary world, the quest and the war; Crowley turned from all three, set faerie inside an American house and a family chronicle, and never shows the other world plainly. The other is the literary family saga, with One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) the nearest precedent for the marvellous admitted into a lineage, and Victorian fantasy, Carroll and MacDonald, and the Hermetic tradition behind both. The swerve is the joining: a fantasy written to the standard of the literary novel in sentence and design, and a family novel whose law is a fairy tale. The stake was real: a long, slow, unclassifiable book sent into a genre market that had no shelf for it, by an author whose earlier books were science fiction. Held at the bar because García Márquez had made the marvellous family chronicle, and the swerve lies as much in the field the book entered as in its instrument.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the bourgeois villa of masonry rooms, as Mies had built it in Berlin as late as the Riehl, Perls and Urbig houses and in brick at Krefeld, and as Brno itself built it in those years; and his own projects, the brick and concrete country houses of 1923 and 1924 and the Barcelona Pavilion of 1929. The departure: the free plan of the Pavilion carried into a working house for a family with children and servants, the open room at a scale and luxury no modern house had attempted, the glass wall made to vanish into the floor, the structure reduced to shining points. The stake was real and paid: a young couple’s family money, a client who asked for a modern house and was given a demonstration, and a room no one yet knew how to live in, made public by Bier’s article. Held at the bar because the decisive turn was the Pavilion’s.
The Flaming Lips · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the band’s own: fifteen years of noise-psychedelic guitar rock, ending in Clouds Taste Metallic (1995) and the four-disc experiment Zaireeka (1997), inside a 1990s indie rock that prized irony and the guitar. The turn is large, and made from far off. A guitar band, its lead guitarist gone, gives up the guitar as its centre for orchestral textures, enormous treated drums and keyboards, and gives up irony for open sincerity about death and love. The stake was real: a band of long standing on a major label, with a record of novelty and one hit, following an unplayable multi-disc set. What holds it at the bar and not above it: the path was proven, with Pet Sounds and Brian Wilson’s orchestral pop behind it.
Jonathan Glazer · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Holocaust film in two modes: the dramatised camp, from the television Holocaust (1978) to Schindler’s List (1993), and the refusal of the image, Night and Fog (1956) and Shoah. The film takes a third course: it never enters the camp, dramatises the perpetrators’ home, gives the sound what the image refuses, and films a house as surveillance, without coverage or the close-up for feeling. The stake was real: a decade’s work, a German-language perpetrator film by a British director, and the charge, made widely, of turning atrocity into an exercise. Held at the bar by preparation: Son of Saul (2015) had already given the camp to sound.
Massive Attack · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the group’s own: the soul, dub and hip-hop of Blue Lines (1991), which had made a Bristol sound, and the smoother Protection (1994). Beside it stood Tricky’s Maxinquaye and Portishead, who had already darkened the form. The turn is real. Warm soul and jazz sources are exchanged for post-punk and rock ones, samples replayed and thickened by live guitar and drums, the tempo slowed, the bass made a weight, and the mood turned from cool to menacing. The stake was the group itself, and a member left after this record. What marks the limit is the path: dub bass under post-punk guitar was an old joining, made by Public Image and others twenty years before, and the turn deepens a language the group had made rather than leaving it.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance: peasants in Netherlandish art as small figures in a landscape, as marginalia in calendars and books of hours, or as the butts of moralizing prints, the painter’s own print designs among them; and nearer, the large market and kitchen figures of Aertsen and Beuckelaer in Antwerp, which had already brought common people up to large scale. The departure: the peasant feast painted at near-monumental figure scale on a large panel, with no inscription, no biblical scene in the background and no stated moral; the figures heavy and rounded, given the weight history painting gave its actors; the viewer placed almost at the table. The stake was modest and real, a reputation wagered on peasant life without a sacred pretext. Aertsen’s precedent keeps the figure from the top.
Roman, under Hadrian · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the Roman villa of the late Republic and early Empire, already large and landscaped, terraced on the Bay of Naples and in the Alban hills; Nero’s Domus Aurea, with its landscape and its octagonal hall; Domitian’s palace on the Palatine and his Alban villa; the concrete vault. The departure: one governing axis abandoned for many, each group centred on itself and turned against the next, hinged where they meet; curves set against curves, convex against concave, in the island’s court and the Piazza d’Oro pavilion; segmented domes; rooms as sequences of spaces carved from solid. The stake was real but chiefly of standing, and the physical risk modest. Nero and Domitian had begun the landscape palace; the turn extends their path.
Jack Kerouac · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the American picaresque from Huckleberry Finn, Thomas Wolfe’s rhapsodic autobiographical novel, Whitman’s open road, Hemingway’s plainness in dialogue, and Proust behind the plan of a life written as one legend, what Kerouac called “the Duluoz Legend”. The departure is in the voice and in the subject: a voice modelled on the jazz solo, the long breathless sentence of recollection, and drugs, jazz, petty theft, sex and the purposeless crossing of a continent told from inside and without judgment. The stake was real: six years from the draft to print, and a manner mocked when it appeared. Held at the bar and not above it because the text scored is the edited book, in five parts and ordinary paragraphs; the fullest swerve of the method lies in the scroll and in later books such as Visions of Cody, not in the text before the desk.
William Blake · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance: British history painting of the Royal Academy, with Michelangelo as its ideal of the body; the portrait of the man of science, clothed and honoured at his desk among instruments; and the reproductive print. The departures are two and both risky. In subject, the honoured scientist of the nation is stripped and set at the floor of a dark sea as a mythic figure under indictment, the reverse of the apotheosis Newton was given in the eighteenth century. In medium, a print that is neither reproduction nor edition, pulled from paint and finished by hand into a unique work, outside every category the market or the Academy recognised. The stake was real: Blake had few buyers, and this course led him further from them. Held at the gate because the medium had precedents in printmaking and the Michelangelesque nude was the Academy’s own type.
Alvar Aalto · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance is twofold: the international white house of frame and free plan, which Aalto had himself built at Paimio and in his own house; and the Finnish villa of the National Romantic generation, timber and stone, the vernacular dressed as nation. The departure: the modern frame kept and its purity given up; white render, dark boarding, rubble, turf, rattan and black steel set in one composition; free curves in canopy, pool and studio; the plan made a landscape of levels and screens rather than a grid. The stake was real but cushioned: the clients asked for an experiment and could pay for it, and the risk was to Aalto’s standing among the modernists, taken and won. It meets the bar and no more, because the turn to natural material and place was in the air in the same years.
Hermann Hesse · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
The book departs hard from what it inherits: the German novel of education and the confessional novel of the artist, Hesse’s own earlier mode among them. It breaks its narrative into three voices, binds a mock-scholarly treatise into a novel, and ends neither in maturity nor in death but in a fantastic theatre of the psyche, with a saxophone set beside Mozart, in 1927. The turn had a cost, against a tradition and against its author’s own idiom; a later note by Hesse to readers complains of its misreading. It was not without precedent: Novalis, Hoffmann’s fantasies and the frame tales of German Romanticism stand behind it, and part of the swerve is a return to them. It does not break the sentence or the novel’s grammar as Joyce or Döblin did in the same decade. It meets the bar exactly.
Patti Smith · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the garage song and the long rock incantation, the Doors’ The End and the Velvet Underground’s long pieces, beside the Beat practice of poetry with music and the French symbolists. The turn is real: a poet who had read in St Mark’s Church makes a debut for a new major label on which spoken and improvised verse is the centre, not an interlude, set over three-chord rock, and a woman takes the place of rock’s possessed male singer without softening it. The plain, androgynous cover is part of the turn. The stake was the whole career: a first album, a band of modest technique, a form with no proven market. What holds the figure at the bar is the path: the Beats, the Doors, Dylan and the Velvet Underground had cleared much of the ground, and the Velvet Underground’s John Cale produced it.
Quentin Tarantino · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance is plain: the pulp crime magazine the title names; the hardboiled film; Godard’s play with genre and the dance in Bande à part (1964); Leone’s duration before violence; Kubrick’s broken chronology in The Killing (1956); Tarantino’s own Reservoir Dogs (1992). The departure is real and was wagered. It made a broken chronology the governing law of a mainstream crime film, not a device, so that the hero of one section dies in the middle and returns; it made conversation the main action and violence the interruption; it cast a faded star as a heroin-using killer who talks about hamburgers in Amsterdam, the “Royale with Cheese”. The stake was an independent film at a modest budget, an unproven structure and scenes of a kind studios cut. It reaches the bar and no further, held there because the turn is a synthesis of moves already made, by a director whose first film had proved the manner.
Abbas Kiarostami · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Kiarostami’s own: the car journeys of And Life Goes On (1992) and Through the Olive Trees (1994), the non-professional face, the long shot of a vehicle on a hill, and the reflexive play of Close-Up (1990). The swerve is double. Suicide, a subject the cinema of the Islamic Republic did not treat, is set at the centre with no motive, psychology or past, so that a feature runs on a request alone. And where every convention requires an answer, the fiction breaks for video of its own making. The stake was real: at Cannes the coda was mocked as well as honoured. The bar is met and no more, because the grammar was by then a proven path.
Gandharan · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance is double. From the Indian side, the sacred body as full, smooth and radiant, the auspicious body of the great man. From the Hellenistic and Roman side, carried into Gandhara by trade and workshop practice, a naturalism capable of old age, sickness and want: the old market woman, the drunken old woman, the emaciated figures of Hellenistic genre. The swerve is to bring that unflattering realism to the founder of the religion, at the moment the religion calls holy, in a cult image meant for veneration. To show the object of devotion as nearly a corpse ran against the norm of the auspicious body, and the rarity of the type, a handful in a school that made thousands of Buddhas, measures how far it went. Held at the gate and not above it, because each of its means was available in the school: the departure is in the conjunction, not a new language.
Édouard Manet · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance is history painting, the grand machine of the Salon, and, in this subject, its modern exemplar, Goya’s Third of May 1808. The departure: a contemporary political event, reported in the press weeks before, painted at the scale of history in the deadpan manner of Olympia, with the pathos withdrawn, the victims hidden and the killers made ordinary. The turn from Goya is precise: the same squad, but no lantern, no heroic victim and no moral lighting. The stake is plain in the record: the subject attacked the regime, the painter worked through four versions over about two years and changed the uniforms to French, and the canvas was not shown in France while he lived. Held at the gate rather than above it because the manner was already Manet’s, staked in full in Olympia and the Déjeuner, and here carried into new territory rather than invented.
Giuseppe Terragni · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance was double: the classicising Novecento and the official monumentality of the regime on one side, the white purism of Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus on the other. Terragni turned from both. Against the first he set an undisguised frame, a flat roof and glass; against the second, a building solid, marble-clad, proportioned like a palazzo and composed front by front as four different arguments about wall and frame, where the square house at Poissy had four fronts alike. The stake was real: the regime’s architecture was contested, Rationalism was attacked as foreign and Bolshevik, and a party headquarters was the commission on which the style was most exposed. What tempers the figure: the turn ran within the Gruppo 7, of which Terragni was a founder in 1926, and after his own Novocomum of 1929.
Tadao Ando · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The departure is double. From the Japanese mainstream of the early 1970s, the Metabolist megastructure and the technological optimism of Expo 70, Ando turned to a sealed concrete box of utter smallness. From the wooden nagaya around it he kept the type, narrow, deep, party-walled, with an inner light court, and remade it in concrete, the inner garden left as bare sky. The stake was real: a young self-taught architect, a first serious commission, a minute budget, and a client family asked to accept a house in which one goes outdoors to reach the bathroom. The wager was criticised at the time and could have been read as perverse. Held at the bar because the move recovers an inherited type rather than inventing one, and its language owes much to Kahn and Le Corbusier.
Lina Bo Bardi · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the São Paulo school of exposed concrete, of Vilanova Artigas and Paulo Mendes da Rocha, with its great roofs and tectonic rigour; the clean slate, which would have cleared an old factory from a valuable plot; preservation as restoration of the monument; and Bo Bardi’s own earlier work. The departure is double: a factory of no listed value kept as found and made the centre of a new institution, a decade before reuse became common; and a new block that refuses the school’s order for irregular holes, odd-angled bridges and a rough surface. The stake was real: an Italian-born woman with few buildings, outside the establishment, committed a public client to a poor aesthetic. What holds it: reuse had precedents abroad, and the concrete still belongs to the brutalist family it bends.
Built for King Kashyapa I · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance was Anuradhapura: a royal city on the plain, built round great stupas, monasteries and reservoirs, where kingship stood beside and beneath the Buddhist order. Sigiriya turned from it. The capital went to a rock in the forest, the palace was set above everything, and the greatest effort was spent on a pleasure garden and a fortress, not on a stupa. The cost was total. A king whose legitimacy was in question staked the seat of the realm on a site that did not save him; the capital went back to the plain after him and the rock was given to the monks. Held at the bar, not above it: rock refuges and garden palaces had precedents in South Asia, and the turn is of combination and placement more than of new form.
Adolf Loos · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance is threefold: the Central European villa, with its historicist front and floors stacked at one height; Loos’s own path through the Steiner house (1910), the Rufer house (1922) and the Moller house (1927 to 1928); and the plan libre of the new architecture, which the same years were building at Poissy and Brno. The departure is against all of it at once: a freestanding villa planned wholly in section, as volumes interlocked at many heights, mute outside and rich within, refusing both ornament on the front and the open, uniform floor of the frame. The stake was real: a position against the old orthodoxy and the new, built at full cost in noble materials, late in its maker’s life. Held at the bar because the turn was begun in Vienna, and the Moller house had already taken most of it.
Lluís Domènech i Montaner · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
A concert hall of the nineteenth century was a closed box of masonry, lit by gas and electric light and decorated in the classical orders. Domènech turned it inside out: a hall walled largely in glass on a metal frame, lit by day, decorated not in the orders but in a Catalan vocabulary of brick, tile and native flora. Using the frame to free the wall continues a line he had opened in a café and restaurant of 1888; to use it for a concert hall, where sound and noise were at stake, was a wager. The stake showed: the street’s noise and the ornament’s cost were charged against it for decades. The tradition left was one he had argued, in an essay of 1878, for leaving. It meets the gate at the line.
Steve Reich · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Two departures are made together. From the concert tradition: no development, no conductor, a steady pulse for nearly an hour, harmony that changes by spans of minutes, and an ensemble of mallets, pianos, voices and winds that belongs to no orchestral or chamber type. From the composer’s own path: the phase pieces and Drumming (1971) had held harmony still; this work makes harmony the plan and the pulse its instrument, and turns the method toward a richness his earlier music refused. The stake was real and bounded: a self-organised ensemble, a long unpublished work, open hostility to the idiom. But the larger swerve, to pulse and repetition, had been made by Riley’s In C (1964) and by Reich himself from 1965, and the axis meets its gate exactly, with no room.
Miguel de Cervantes · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Italian novella of Boccaccio and Bandello, read in Spain in translation; the Byzantine romance of Heliodorus; the pastoral; the picaresque of Lazarillo and Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache (1599, 1604); and the Lucianic dialogue. The turn is stated in the prologue’s claim to be the first, and it goes three ways. The Italian novella’s erotic trick gives way to exemplarity, a wager that the short tale can be honest entertainment and tell the truth. Rinconete drops plot almost entirely for a tableau observed. The Coloquio gives the picaresque autobiography to a dog, with a second dog as critic of every moralising digression. The stake was public, under the shadow of the long novel’s success. Held at the gate, not above it: four of the twelve pieces keep to the path they inherit.
Ancestral Puebloan builders · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance was the small hamlet: pithouses, then unit pueblos of a few surface rooms with a kiva in front. Pueblo Bonito turns that unit into a planned house of several storeys and hundreds of rooms in one designed figure, enlarged campaign by campaign into a D: a departure in kind, from dwelling to monument and from household to region. The stake was large: quarrying, timber carried over long distances in a land without draught animals or the wheel, the work of generations committed to one building in a marginal desert. Held at the gate and not above it because the turn was gradual, the early arc still close to its sources, and was shared with the other great houses of the canyon.
Marc Chagall · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Paris avant-garde of 1910 and 1911: Cubism’s faceted planes and Delaunay’s circular, prismatic colour, the most advanced painting there was, both programmatically emptied of story and sentiment. The departure: Chagall took the Cubist grid and the Orphist disc and filled them with what they excluded, memory, narration, a peasant village, feeling, a Jewish and Russian folk iconography. Scale is set by love, gravity is suspended, the inside of a head is shown with its contents: the newest syntax made to speak the oldest material. The stake: a young provincial emigrant, poor, among painters who called such content illustration, wagering on a path no school sanctioned. Held at the gate rather than above it because the formal means were borrowed, and because the folk turn had kin in Russia, in Larionov and Goncharova, in the same years.
Damien Hirst · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance: Duchamp’s readymade; Koons’s basketballs floating in tanks, of 1985; the minimal box and the vitrines of Judd and of Beuys; living and dead animals in the art of the 1960s and 1970s, Kounellis’s horses and Beuys’s hare; Bacon’s figures in glass cages, which Hirst named as a source; and the natural-history museum. The departure: the whole real animal, large, predatory and dead, preserved and posed as alive, set in the white box of sculpture at the scale of a monument, under a title of philosophical pretension. The stake: a young artist’s career, staged with a collector’s money; public mockery in the press; and the risk, which came true, that the material would fail. Held at the bar and not above it because the moves were prepared by Koons and by Hirst’s own work of 1990, and because the funding lessened the cost.
Edgar Degas · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the genre scene, which tells a story and draws a moral, and the figure picture, which puts its figures at the centre. The turn: the figures pushed into the upper right corner, the man cut by the edge, the foreground given to empty furniture, and a viewpoint like a glance from a neighbouring table, owing something to the Japanese print and to the photograph; the genre subject stripped of its narrative and its moral. The stake was real: the off-centre composition risked reading as a mistake, and the drab subject as ugliness. Held at the bar and not above it because the turn belongs to a campaign shared with Manet and Caillebotte in the same years, and Degas had already made the cropped, decentred view his own in the theatre and race pictures.
Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the tall office buildings of New York and Chicago in the 1870s and 1880s, stacked as horizontal bands or arcades; Richardson’s Marshall Field Wholesale Store and Sullivan’s own Auditorium Building with their masonry arches; Burnham and Root’s Monadnock rising as one massive wall; and the steel frame of Jenney and of Holabird and Roche, which Chicago had built but not made into an image. The departure: the frame taken as the subject of the facade, the horizontals recessed, the verticals run through seven storeys, the whole composed as one rising unit under a terminal frieze unlike anything before it. The turn was Sullivan’s own as well, away from his Auditorium manner. It risked little in structure and much in idea. At the gate, not above it: the stake was aesthetic.
Peter Behrens · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The inherited tradition was twofold: the engineer’s shed, the halls of iron and glass that nobody counted as architecture, and the historicist factory, a brick hall dressed in Gothic or Renaissance fronts. Behrens swerved from both: he took the engineer’s frame and made it the front on the long side, and he made the monument out of the factory’s own section rather than a borrowed style. The stake was real. A painter and graphic designer turned architect put an industrial building forward as the serious art of the age, for a firm whose engineers and directors could have refused it, and the stripped classicism of the gable risked looking like neither engineering nor architecture. The turn is half held back, since the temple remains the governing image.
William Gibson · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the science fiction of the clean future and the space programme; behind it Bester’s The Stars My Destination, Delany’s street futures and Dick’s degraded consumer worlds; and from outside the genre Chandler’s noir, Burroughs’s junk world and Pynchon’s paranoid systems. The turn: the future told from the street, by a criminal, in brands, slang and technical jargon left unexplained, so that the reader is placed inside the world rather than toured through it; the computer network made a space a person can enter; the corporation and the machine mind in place of the state and the alien. The genre’s adoption of it shows it was a departure and not an accent, and the stake was real: a first novel, commissioned for a paperback line, built on a technology most readers had never used. Held at the bar and not above it because most of its parts were already present in its sources and in Gibson’s own stories.
The Stooges · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance in 1970 was heavy blues-rock, the expanding album of the late sixties, the garage band, James Brown’s vamp and the band’s own first record of 1969, produced by John Cale. The turn is large: a rock band stripped of the period’s polish, carrying the free jazz of Coltrane’s and Ayler’s late years into a garage riff on its second side and ending in a track of pure noise. The stake was real and was paid: the record failed on release and was little heard for years. What holds it at the bar is the path. The MC5’s Kick Out the Jams, from the same city and label, had set free jazz beside garage rock a year before; the Velvet Underground had made noise and drone a rock language. The swerve is the fusion and its intensity.
Claude Monet · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the finished Salon marine and the tradition of the harbour view; behind Monet, his teachers in the sketch, Boudin and Jongkind; and the hazy harbours of Turner and the nocturnes of Whistler. The departure is not in the motif, nor in the sketch as such, which every landscape painter made. It is in exhibiting the sketch as the work, publicly, under a title that names it an impression, against the institution that defined finish. The stake was paid: the exhibition of 1874 failed financially, the review that named the group mocked this canvas by name, and Monet’s prices did not follow for years. Held at the gate and not above it because the turn in handling had already been made, by Monet himself among others, at La Grenouillère in 1869.
Brian Eno · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance is double: the popular record, made to be listened to as foreground, and the art-music tradition of the work that demands attention. Beside it stand the precedents: Satie’s furniture music, Muzak as a trade, the tape-loop and phase music of Reich and Riley, the German electronic records, and Eno’s own Discreet Music (1975), which had already put a loop system to work as a quiet record. The turn is to music designed to be ignored as well as heard, composed by unsynchronised loops rather than by a line, and named and theorised as a genre. It is large in conception: it changes what a record is for. The stake was smaller than the turn. The method was proven on the earlier record and Satie had made the wager sixty years before; the risk run was of being taken for Muzak. At the bar, under Remain in Light at 8.6.
Wassily Kandinsky · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is representational painting in its European forms, and nearer at hand the colour of the Fauves, the Munich Jugendstil the painter came from and his own Murnau landscapes of 1908 to 1909. The departure is an image in which the objects have nearly dissolved, colour and line freed to act on their own and the subject kept only as a trace; in 1912 that was among the furthest points painting had reached. The stake was real: in 1911 the Munich association he had helped found rejected a large canvas of his, and he and his friends left it to form the Blaue Reiter. Held at the gate, not above it: this is one step in a series begun in 1909, not the turn itself, and the remnants of motif mark a departure not yet completed.
Robert Venturi · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the modern house as Mies, Le Corbusier and the American International Style had fixed it, flat roof, free plan, no ornament, no symbol, form from function; and Venturi’s own masters, Louis Kahn above all, whose Esherick house stands nearby in Chestnut Hill. The departure: a pitched gable as the whole face; ornament applied as ornament, an arch drawn over a lintel that does not need it; symmetry asserted and broken; Mannerist and Shingle Style history taken back into the house as material; contradiction made a principle rather than a fault. Others were near, Moretti’s Casa del Girasole for the split front, Kahn for the served core, Charles Moore in the same years, but none made the turn so plainly in fabric. The stake was real: a first important commission, his mother’s home and money, and an establishment that read the house as a joke. It meets the gate exactly.
Hannah Höch · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is double: the papier collé of Picasso and Braque from 1912, which brought printed matter into the picture as material, and the illustrated mass press of the war, by then the public’s main image of the world. The departure is to make the picture wholly of mass-reproduced photographs, cut and recombined, at the scale of a history painting, as an attack on the state rather than a still life on a café table. Photomontage was being invented in Berlin in 1918 and 1919 by a small circle, Höch and Hausmann among them, so this is among the first large statements of the medium, not its first act. The stake was real: a woman in a movement whose men patronised her. Large, costly and shared: at the gate.
Sex Pistols · Music
7.9 · Tier III
The inheritance is British rock of the mid 1970s, the long progressive record and the stadium act, and the turn is twofold. In sound it is a return: short songs on few chords, the line of the Stooges, the New York Dolls, the early Who and Chuck Berry, made heavy and polished by a producer who had worked with Roxy Music. In voice, stance and word the turn is large: no rock singer had sung like Rotten, a sneer held across a whole record and aimed at the Crown, the industry and the listener. The stake was real and paid: dropped by EMI and A&M, banned from the BBC. Held at the bar, level with Horses and Fun House, because the musical wager had been placed by the Ramones and the American scene before them.
Rem Koolhaas and Joshua Prince-Ramus (OMA/LMN) · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The inheritance is twofold: the Carnegie and Beaux-Arts library, with its reading room and closed stacks, and the late modern library as a flexible floor plate under a uniform ceiling, as in the building of 1960 that stood on this site. The departure: the flexible plan rejected for fixed platforms and free floors between them; the collection made a single ramped floor; the envelope a taut net over a section, neither box nor sculpture. The stake was real and paid in public: a bond-funded civic building in an American city entrusted to a foreign office whose large schemes had mostly stayed on paper, with a diagram the library and its staff had to live in, and open questions of wayfinding and comfort that drew criticism. A turn of plan and section, at the gate exactly.
Erich Mendelsohn · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
The inheritance: the observatory as a domed masonry block, as on the Telegrafenberg itself; the solar tower as steel engineering; and German building before 1914, from Behrens’s industrial classicism to the Werkbund. The departure: a building conceived as a single plastic mass, cast rather than assembled, curved in plan and section, with no column, cornice or wall plane, its openings modelled into its body; Expressionist drawing made into a built and working institution, the first to make the dynamic building in masonry for a modern purpose. The stake was real and was paid: a young architect’s first major commission and a scientific purpose; the material could not be had, the monolith was faked in brick, and the fabric cracked within years. Held at the gate, not above it, because others were taking the turn in the same years, on paper and at Dornach, and because the stake was paid in fabric more than risked in idea.
Helen Frankenthaler · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
The inheritance is the New York painting of 1947 to 1952: Pollock’s poured skeins on canvas laid on the floor, de Kooning’s loaded and worked surface, Gorky’s floating colour, and the Cubist armature still under most of it. The departure: paint thinned until it stops being a surface and becomes a stain; canvas left unprimed so that ground and image fuse; colour, not line or gesture, made the carrier; the whole made light, transparent and open where the school was heavy, dense and dark. The stake was real for a little-known painter whose canvas looked, to the eyes of 1952, unfinished, thin and pretty. Discounted because Pollock had soaked black enamel into raw canvas in 1951; what was new was colour, thinness and openness as the whole picture.
George Frideric Handel · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
The inherited forms are Handel’s own: the English oratorio he had made from Italian opera in the 1730s, the English anthem and the German fugue, with Saul and Israel in Egypt, both of 1739, behind it. The departure lies in the text and its use. Messiah has no drama, no characters and no plot; its subject is the meaning of a story, and it put the Christian mystery, in scripture’s words, into a theatre for a paying public. The stake was real: his opera ventures had failed, he gave the work first in Dublin, and London objected in print to scripture in a playhouse. What holds it below the bar: the musical language departs little, four choruses are reworked from Italian duets written weeks before, and Israel in Egypt had already made the chorus the protagonist of a scriptural oratorio.
Charles Dickens · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the English novel of a young man’s progress, the fairy-tale rise, the Newgate novel’s convict, the fashionable novel’s gentleman, and Dickens’s own David Copperfield (1850), the first-person life of a boy who rises. The turn is against all of them, the author’s success included: the rise is false, the hero is a snob who judges himself, and the benefactor is the convict. Copperfield’s retrospect approves itself; Pip’s is a confession. The stake was real: a narrator whose ingratitude the reader must watch for two stages, offered weekly to a public the magazine needed to win back. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: the retrospective first-person life in instalments was Dickens’s proven path, and the turn is made inside that form, not against it.
Ustad Ahmad Lahauri · Architecture
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance is close and plain: the Timurid tomb; Humayun’s tomb at Delhi, with its garden, its eight-paradise plan and its double dome; Akbar’s tomb at Sikandra; I’timad al-Daula’s tomb at Agra, wholly faced in marble and inlaid; Jahangir’s tomb at Lahore, with minarets at the corners of its platform; the riverfront gardens of Agra. The departures are real: the tomb moved from the garden’s centre to the river terrace; white marble at imperial scale, with red sandstone kept for what serves; the whole under one symmetry, to the point of a twin with no use. What holds the axis is the stake. It was money and labour, which the court had, not a form that might fail, and each departure refines a proven type.
F. Scott Fitzgerald · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance is plain: Conrad’s Marlow, the sceptical, sympathetic narrator who tells a romantic’s story from beside him, as in Lord Jim; James’s scenic method; Wharton’s novel of New York society; Keats in the prose; and Fitzgerald’s own two loose, saturated novels of 1920 and 1922. The turn is from saturation to selection: a short book in which lyric prose and social satire are one instrument, and meaning is carried by objects, a light, a billboard, a car, a heap of shirts, rather than by allegory or argument. In an American field still led by Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis that was a departure, and the stake was real: a popular magazine writer bet his standing on a short, strange book, and it sold less than his others. Held below the top band because the instrument is largely Conrad’s, and the breaks of its years, Ulysses and Mrs Dalloway among them, went further: the book bends the novel and does not break it.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
The work looks back as much as it turns. The Introit’s opening idea and the Kyrie’s fugue subject are widely heard as related to Handel, to the Funeral Anthem for Queen Caroline and to “And with his stripes” from Messiah; the soprano’s psalm verse is set on an old psalm tone; the sequence in contrasting numbers follows the concerted Mass. The departure is in the fusion and the colour, and the synthesis is complete: archaic double fugue and operatic drama held in one dark sonority, the high woodwinds removed, basset horns and trombones at the centre, the inherited remade rather than quoted. What holds the axis is the stake: an anonymous commission, a familiar form, no public risk, and a completion that adds no swerve of its own.
Anonymous · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the developed family saga, the kings’ sagas, the law books, clerical history and hagiography, and the oral tradition of the south behind the lost tale of Gunnarr. This is a late classical saga: it perfects a form already made more than it breaks one. Its turns are real. It doubles the tragic hero and makes the second’s tragedy the cost of the first’s; it makes law, the courtroom and its procedure, the substance of drama; it sets the heroic ethic under a Christian frame that judges it without repudiating it; it lets its sympathy rest, at the end, with the burner. The stake is an argument about law written under a new king’s law. Held lower because the realist prose saga, the larger swerve, was the genre’s before it was this saga’s.
U2 · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the band’s own: the post-punk anthems of Boy and War, then the atmospheres Eno and Lanois brought to The Unforgettable Fire (1984). The turn is to gospel, blues and folk shapes set inside that European production, with Central America, a strike and heroin on a record meant for stadiums, and the bright, gated sound of 1987 refused. The stake was real and large: the band stood at its commercial threshold, after Live Aid, and kept the songs severe. What holds it below the summit is that the wager was placed on a proven path. The producers and the sound were already in place, the roots turn was a well-walked road, and the full swerve came four years later.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is triple: the Italian and northern Triumphs of Death, the frescoes of Pisa and Palermo and the Petrarchan prints; the danse macabre and its woodcuts; and Bosch, whose infernal panoramas and teeming small figures supplied the idiom, Bruegel having been sold to the print market of Antwerp as a second Bosch. The departure is real: the Triumph and the Dance merged; the procession turned into a campaign; the infernal setting moved to an earthly landscape that reads as Flanders under a burning sky; the last judgment left out; the Boschian monster replaced by the skeleton, a thing of this world. The stake is the shortfall. The panel stays inside the manner that was its painter’s market, as the Dulle Griet and the Rebel Angels of the same years do. A strong swerve within a proven idiom.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance was already moving toward this building. At Saint-Denis and Amiens glass had begun to be the wall; the royal chapel at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, just before, is a single glazed vessel in the same idiom; the palace chapel of two storeys goes back to Aachen. The departures: the wall dissolved almost wholly in one vessel without aisles or flying buttresses; the building finished as a reliquary; a programme carrying sacred history into the present reign. The stake was real: more glass than wall, held by concealed iron, raised in a few years. But the turn is in degree, the culmination of a line, bet on a path already proven nearby.
Radiohead · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is plain: the art-rock album of Pink Floyd and the late Beatles, Bowie’s Low, and the band’s own guitar record of two years before. The departure was real in the summer of Britpop’s swagger. The record was made largely away from a conventional studio, the lead single was the six-minute second track, built in several sections, a text-to-speech recitation sits at the centre of a major-label album, and the ninth track carries avant-garde string writing. The stake was a hit band’s following, real and recoverable. What holds the axis below the bar is the path: the art-rock album of alienation had already been made and had sold, most of the tracks remain verse-and-chorus rock songs, and the full swerve came three years later.
Steven Spielberg · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
The inherited tradition is the Hollywood and television Holocaust, Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), the miniseries Holocaust (1978), Sophie’s Choice (1982), with Resnais’s Night and Fog (1955), Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985) and the war film behind it. The departures are real: a director then known chiefly for popular spectacle made a film of three and a quarter hours on the subject, in black and white and documentary grain, with long passages in German and Polish and no star of the first rank, in the year of Jurassic Park. The stake, a studio’s money and his own standing, was large. What holds the axis lowest, and below the gate, is the path the wager was placed on: conversion, suspense, rescue and an orchestral score, the medium’s most proven form.
Ingmar Bergman · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Within Bergman’s own work the turn is large. After two decades of chamber films on islands and in bare rooms came a period saga of a whole family, warm in colour, crowded with servants, food and comedy, with the supernatural admitted on equal terms with the real. The stake was real: one work made in two forms at once, for two media, a serial in five parts and a feature, by a director whose name rested on austerity. What holds the axis a tenth below the bar is the direction of the turn. It runs from Bergman toward his inheritance, Ibsen’s household drama, Strindberg’s dream play, Dickens’s childhood under a cruel stepfather, the Scandinavian family chronicle. Persona broke the medium; this extends a tradition with mastery.
Inca, under Pachacuti · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is a mature tradition: Andean terracing, millennia old; the fitted masonry of Cusco, with Tiwanaku behind it; the Inca compound and the trapezoid; and the royal estate, which Pachacuti had already built at Pisac and Ollantaytambo. The departure is the site. No estate had been set so far down toward the forest, on so narrow and steep a ridge, in a country of rain and slides, with a whole town made to grow from the bedrock as if the ridge had put it out; the outcrops are finished into temples, not cleared. The stake was real, a court carried to a place with one spring and the risk that the slope would not hold, and it held. Kept below the gate because the type was the patron’s own proven path, the forms are Cusco’s, and the wager was paid in labour by a state that commanded labour, not in risk to the form.
Aeschylus · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is tragedy drawn from myth, with one precedent for history: Phrynichus, whose Capture of Miletus was fined, as Herodotus tells, for reminding the Athenians of their own disaster, and whose Phoenician Women of 476 put the Persian court on the stage. The ancient hypothesis says Aeschylus adapted that play, so the subject was not new. The swerve is in what was done with it: the whole victory told from Susa, with not one Greek named, the Greek triumph heard only as Persian grief; a ghost raised to judge his son; a city’s festival given over to mourning its enemy. The stake was real after the Miletus fine, and the wager won the prize. Held below the bar because the path was partly proven by Phrynichus, and because the form itself, lament, messenger and epiphany, is the form of its day, not a break in it.
Sophocles · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers, which sets the same events, and Sophocles turns them. The centre moves from the avenger to the sister who waits. The recognition, which Aeschylus places early, is withheld until four fifths of the play are spent. A false report, a stratagem in Aeschylus, becomes the play’s heart. The mother is killed before Aegisthus, so the play ends not on the matricide but on the tyrant driven in to die; and there are no Furies, no pursuit, no trial. The stake is real: to stage the matricide without the moral reckoning the Oresteia had made the form’s own, and leave the audience to supply or refuse it. Held below the gate because it is a revision within a set story and a proven path, and because Euripides’ Electra swerved further from the same model.
Caravaggio · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Italian Entombment and Deposition: Raphael’s Borghese Entombment of 1507, Michelangelo’s Pietà and his unfinished Entombment, and the Roman altarpiece of the painter’s own decade. The departure is real: no tomb, no landscape, no ladder or cross; the body carried at the viewer, not across the field; the slab turned out of the plane into the church; a carrier of the common people looking straight out; the event compressed into one block against the dark. The cost: this is the painter’s most classical canvas. It quotes Michelangelo’s arm, it was accepted, and the radical turn had been taken in the Contarelli canvases a few years before. The wager is placed on a proven path.
John Ford · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance was the classical Western, much of it Ford’s own: the community as moral centre, the hero who serves it, Monument Valley as the American scene. The departure is real. The star of that tradition plays an unreconstructed Confederate and a racist bent on killing the girl he seeks, and the genre’s grammar of rescue and homecoming is kept intact and turned to show what it carried. The stake was a studio picture resting on Wayne’s persona. Held below the bar by precedent and by form: Anthony Mann’s Westerns with James Stewart, Hawks’s Red River (1948) and Ford’s own Fort Apache (1948) had darkened the hero before 1956, and the film’s means are classical. The turn is of the hero, not of the medium.
Horace · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Greek lyric, Alcaeus first, Sappho and Anacreon, with Pindar as the model declined; Hellenistic refinement; and in Latin Catullus, who had written two Sapphic poems but no lyric book. The claim of 3.30 is exact: “princeps Aeolium carmen ad Italos / deduxisse modos”
“first to have brought Aeolian song to Italian measures”. The turn is large: a whole body of Aeolic metres made strict in Latin, and a voice the Greeks did not have, reflective, ironic and urbane, joining symposium, civic hymn and philosophic epistle in one form, with no Latin precedent on this scale. Held at 8.4 because the departure is avowedly an imitation, often opening from an Alcaean motto (1.9, 1.14, 1.37): the wager was placed on a path the Greeks had proven.
Led Zeppelin · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the band’s own, the heavy electric blues of its first two albums and the acoustic and folk turn of the third (1970), with the English folk revival of Fairport Convention and Bert Jansch behind it and the Delta and Chicago blues behind all. The record joins these on one side and, in Stairway, in one song. Two departures carry consequence: Stairway’s form, a folk song that becomes hard rock without a break in its argument, and Levee’s slowed, massive treatment of a pre-war blues, an old song made into a new kind of weight. The stake was the sleeve: a band at its height issued a record with no name on it, after critics had mocked the third. What holds it: the path was largely the band’s own.
Federico García Lorca · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the oldest form in Spanish poetry, the romance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the deep song of Andalusia; Lorca had organised the Concurso de Cante Jondo with Falla in 1922. The swerve is the fusion: the ballad’s octosyllable and narrative ellipsis carrying a metaphor of avant-garde concentration, the metaphor of the generation that revived Góngora in 1927, so that the oldest popular form takes the newest image. That had not been done at this pitch. The stake was real: the book risked, and suffered, being read as picturesque, and Dalí and Buñuel told him so. Held below the bar of the Epochal Gate because the path was proven and chosen: Machado and Juan Ramón Jiménez had written modern romances before him, and Lorca’s riskier departure was the next book, Poeta en Nueva York, which this one is not.
Johannes Vermeer · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is twofold: the allegory of painting, Pictura with her mask and brushes as the emblem books give her, and the Netherlandish studio picture, from Saint Luke painting the Virgin to the studio scenes of Dou and others. The departure is real. The allegory is dissolved into a genre interior, painted with the same daylight and the same patience as a woman reading a letter; the painter is shown from behind, at work, unidentified; the viewer is placed behind a curtain, an intruder in the studio. The stake is modest. This was no commission and no public wager: Vermeer kept the picture, which says he valued it, not that he risked anything by it. It refines his own manner rather than turning from it, and the turn of its century is elsewhere.
The Cure · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
The stake was real and heavy. After its widest success and brightest singles with Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me (1987), the band answered with seventy-two minutes, six tracks of six minutes or more, and a voice often held back for a minute or longer, staking its widest audience on a return to its darkest ground. The turn is real in scale: a dark vein that had been stark became lush and widescreen at album length. The turn is smaller than the stake, and that holds the axis below the gate. Faith (1981) and Pornography (1982) had already made long, slow, dark records, and other British guitar bands of 1988 and 1989 were moving into reverberant walls. The departure runs back along the band’s own path, scaled up.
Anonymous (the Gawain poet) · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is French Arthurian romance, in which Gawain is the courteous knight and often the ready lover; the beheading game, known from the Irish Fled Bricrenn and from French romance; and the exchange of winnings, a separate tale. The turn: two folk plots joined so that the visible test is a decoy and the hidden one, fought in a bedroom and kept in a ledger of kisses, is the real one; a hero who passes the test of courage, fails the test of fidelity by a hair, and is told so; a romance whose meaning is the measured failure of its hero, closed by laughter rather than triumph; and the high chivalric matter set in provincial alliterative verse while London’s courtly poetry turned to French forms. The stake was real: the poem turns the ideal of the romance on its own champion. Held where it is because the departure stays inside the form it bends, and the turn against chivalric pretension was being made elsewhere in the same decades, by Chaucer among others.
Franz Schubert · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Viennese string quintet of Mozart, with two violas, and Boccherini’s quintet with two cellos, whose scoring Schubert follows. The departures are real: the second cello used not to thicken the bass but to free the first as a tenor voice, so that the cellos carry the first movement’s lyric centre; a first movement of symphonic breadth for five strings; harmony governed by thirds and semitones rather than by the dominant; a Trio slower than its Scherzo, in another metre and a semitone higher; an Adagio that buries its melody in the middle. The stake was bounded. The forces were a proven path, the lyric expansion of sonata had been Schubert’s own since the G major quartet and the Octet. The swerve is deep in harmony and texture, modest in form.
John Steinbeck · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The turn is real and its means are inherited. The alternation of a choric, generalising voice with the narrative of particular people was already Dos Passos’s, in the Newsreels and Camera Eye of the U.S.A. trilogy, and the strike novel was a crowded form of the decade, Steinbeck’s own In Dubious Battle (1936) among them. What Steinbeck changed was register and scale: he lifted the social novel into the cadence of the King James Bible and the size of epic, made the migrants a people rather than a cause, and let the general chapters speak as the used car dealer and the hamburger stand as well as the prophet. The stake was large and was paid: the book was denounced as communist and as obscene and burned in Kern County. The departure cost what it risked, but the formal wager was placed on a path already cut, which holds the axis at 8.4.
Eugène Delacroix · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance: history painting at Salon scale; Gros’s Napoleonic pictures, which had already put contemporary event and modern dress at that scale; Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa of 1819, the pyramid of bodies climbing from the dead to a signal, which this canvas reworks; and the allegorical tradition from Rubens to the Revolution’s own festivals, which kept allegory in a space of its own. The departure: allegory set down in the street among real combatants in the clothes of the week, on a named day, at full scale, the goddess given dirt and hair and the dead given no dignity. The stake: the Salon’s critics found her vulgar, and the regime that bought the canvas soon hid it. What holds the axis lowest of the gated five is that the stake was moderate: the subject was the new government’s founding event, the pyramid came from Géricault, and the painter’s larger swerves had been made in Massacre at Chios and The Death of Sardanapalus. A real turn on a partly prepared path.
Ernest Hemingway · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the war novel and the war romance: Stendhal’s Waterloo, Tolstoy, Crane, and the patriotic love story of the nurse and the soldier. The departure is real. The book refuses every term of the patriotic register, makes its hero desert and calls it peace, and ends its love story not in reunion or sacrifice but in a death with no meaning, told without comfort. The stake was high in 1929: a bestselling romance that withholds the consolations of romance, and a war book that indicts an allied army from inside. Held below the bar because the instrument was already proven. The style that does the work, the concrete noun, the sentence joined by “and”, the omission, had been made in In Our Time (1925) and The Sun Also Rises (1926); here it is applied at full length to the great subject. The wager is placed on a path Hemingway had himself proven.
Bureau of Reclamation, with Gordon Kaufmann · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the arch and gravity dams of the early century, the Bureau’s own earlier high dams in the West, and the public works of the period dressed in classical ornament as civic monuments. The departure: a leap in scale; mass concrete placed at a size that could not have cured unaided in any human span, solved by columns and embedded pipe; a river diverted through four tunnels in a desert canyon; and the decision to let the engineering stand without costume, so that a public work speaks as bare structure. The stake was real: the federal government’s money and six contractors’, the lives of the workers, and a structure of unknown behaviour at that size. Held below the bar because the form was inherited: a proven type scaled up, in a stripped, streamlined manner already in the air.
William Faulkner · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The turn is real. The old Southwestern humour of horse-trades and tall tales, the sketch writers of Georgia and Tennessee before the Civil War and Twain after them, is lifted into the long modernist sentence and made to carry tragedy and myth. Inside Faulkner’s own work it is a swerve as well, from the radical forms of 1929 to 1936 toward an apparently looser, episodic, comic book, and the stake was real: a turn from difficulty to tale-telling risked being read as decline. Held a tenth under the gate because the departure is in voice and mixture more than in the structure of the novel, and the wager is placed on a tradition, the frontier tale, that Faulkner had already proved in the stories the book grew from.
Bob Dylan · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Dylan’s own folk and country records, and the confessional songwriting of the early 1970s that had already made the record of a love’s end a proven form; Joni Mitchell’s Blue (1971) is the nearest precedent. The turn is in the song’s handling of time: Tangled Up in Blue and Simple Twist of Fate move between first and third person and across years inside one verse form, so that a popular song tells a story as a modern novel does, out of order and from shifting vantages. The return to a bare acoustic sound after a year of rock with the Band was a turn too. The stake was smaller: recutting half a finished record weeks before release risked its unity, not his standing. Highway 61 Revisited, at 9.2, swerved further.
Gislebertus · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Romanesque Judgment and the Cluniac style of the 1110s and 1120s: hierarchical scale, the mandorla, the weighing, linear drapery, with Cluny, Vézelay, Conques and Moissac as the field. The departure is in the rendering: elongation pushed past any neighbour into flame-like figures; demons given an invention and a physical horror the field had not shown at this scale; the judgment turned into a struggle at the scale; and a maker’s name cut at the centre, under the judge, an extraordinary claim in its place and decade. The stake was real, since a cathedral portal is the most public and most controlled image the century made. Held at 8.4, below the gate, because the cost was risked rather than paid, and the turn runs within a style other portals were already taking.
Jean Racine · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
After Andromaque (1667) Racine entered the ground Corneille held, Roman political tragedy, and remade it. The Roman subject is no longer a contest of heroic wills and admirable glory but the slide of a young prince’s appetite into murder, told through the intimacies of mother, son and girl. The protagonist is a monster in the making, not a hero or a magnanimous emperor: Agrippine’s “Il commence, il est vrai, par où finit Auguste”
“He begins, it is true, where Augustus ended” turns the clemency of Corneille’s Cinna inside out. The stake was paid: the first performances went poorly, the Corneille party was hostile, and Racine answered in a bitter first preface. Held short of the bar because the turn is made inside the five-act alexandrine tragedy and the unities, which it perfects rather than breaks.
Martin Scorsese · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance was the American vigilante and crime film at its commercial height, Dirty Harry (1971) and Death Wish (1974). The film turns it inside out: the vigilante is a psychotic who first meant to shoot a candidate, the audience is held in his perception, and the ending pays him the genre’s reward, public honour, as an indictment. Into a studio picture it brought the means of European art cinema: Bresson’s diary voice and solitary man, the subject of Schrader’s Transcendental Style in Film (1972), and Godard’s close-ups of objects. The stake was real but small in money. Held below the gate because the swerve was prepared: by Scorsese’s own Mean Streets (1973), by the New Hollywood antihero, and by Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960) and Polanski’s Repulsion (1965), which had already put audiences inside a killer’s perception.
The Smiths · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
The departures are real, and they gather in the title track: six minutes of wah-wah, feedback and a bass line closer to Motown or the Velvet Underground than to the band’s earlier records, opened on a sampled music-hall song. A pop LP attacks the monarchy by name, with a joke about the heir that daytime radio in 1986 could not have carried, and sets comedy and despair side by side as one voice. On an independent label the stake was real, and the band opened the record on its six-minute feedback track. Held below the summit: the band’s own turn, the clean guitar group against the synthesisers of 1983, came with its first records, half this album perfects that manner, and “God Save the Queen” (1977) had gone first.
Balthasar Neumann · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the Latin-cross basilica with its crossing as climax, and the Bohemian and Franconian art of interlocking ovals, from Guarini’s example through the Dientzenhofers to Banz across the valley. The departure: the crossing is dissolved and the centre moved into the nave over the shrine; the vaults are drawn on a geometry that does not repeat the plan below; and a building begun to another man’s design is turned within its walls to a new purpose. The stake was real: a church half begun, a site fixed by devotion, an exterior that had to stay a cross. Held below the gate: the means were inherited, Banz having oval vaults decades earlier, so the swerve culminates a regional practice more than it turns from it.
Yasujirō Ozu · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the shomin-geki of Shochiku, the studio’s marriage drama, and Ozu’s own prewar family films: There Was a Father (1942) already turns on a widowed father and a child, with Chishū Ryū. The turn is in method more than in matter. This is the film in which the postwar style is set: the low still camera, cuts that cross the line of action and put eyelines nearly into the lens, shots of places and objects held without a person, and an ellipsis that drops the wedding and the groom altogether. The stake was real: a slow, plain film on a stock subject at a studio that wanted marriage pictures, in a grammar that refused the continuity every other studio used. What holds it a tenth below the gate: the subject is inherited whole, and Ozu’s departures were gradual and visible in the 1930s, so this is consolidation as much as swerve.
Assyrian court sculptors · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is two centuries of Assyrian palace relief, Ashurnasirpal II’s lion hunt at Nimrud among it: heraldic, stocky figures on a single ground line, the lion a formula of mane and claw. The departure is large: a knowledge of the lion in movement and in collapse that the tradition had not had; figures scattered over open ground with no ground line, so that the field becomes space and the arena opens; the scene made a sequence through registers; and pathos given to the victim. The stake was real but bounded. This was court work for a king whose image it served, inside a programme whose terms it kept: the king stays formulaic, rigid and unharmed, the soldiers repeated types. The swerve is in what the sculptors were free to do with the animals, not in the frame of the commission.
J. M. Coetzee · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the South African novel of conscience, of Gordimer, Paton and Brink, and Coetzee’s own earlier allegories, Waiting for the Barbarians, Life & Times of Michael K and Foe. Disgrace turns from allegory to an apparently plain realism of the present, and from the novel of conscience to one that will not tell the reader where conscience lies: the white victim of a rape that is not reported, the black neighbour whose part in it is never settled, a protagonist neither redeemed nor condemned. The stake was real: the book was read by some as a racist representation of the new South Africa, and the quarrel was long and public. But the turn is made inside the realist novel and inside Coetzee’s own ironic method; the form itself is not remade. A turn of real cost within a known mode.
Philip Roth · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is plain: the Jewish-American novel of Bellow and Malamud, Fitzgerald’s American dreamer, Dreiser’s social novel, Milton in the titles, and Roth’s own Zuckerman books, in which the writer’s self-preoccupation had been the subject for twenty years. The turn is in what Roth does with Zuckerman. The narrator who had been the centre sets himself aside, admits that what follows is his invention, and dissolves into a close third person inside a man he barely knew, never to return: the novelist’s comedy of the self turned into a tragic chronicle of another life and of a nation’s decade. The stake was real, for the author of Sabbath’s Theater, two years before, to stake a novel on a decent, unreflective hero and an elegiac register. Held below the gate because the instrument, the realist social novel, is a proven path, and the swerve lies in Roth’s career more than in the novel’s departure from the tradition it inherits.
Cormac McCarthy · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the western and the boy’s journey, Faulkner’s long sentence and the King James cadence, Melville’s metaphysical digression, and above all McCarthy’s own All the Pretty Horses, two years before. The turn is real. This is a western that refuses the western’s satisfactions: no revenge is had, the horses are not recovered, the brother is not saved. It halts for tens of pages for the philosophical tale, keeps long dialogue in untranslated Spanish and ends on the atomic dawn. The stake was real too: after the commercial success of the first volume, a slower, darker and less rewarded book. Held a tenth below the gate because the instruments, the prose and the border, are the author’s proven ones, and the embedded tale is an ancient form; the swerve lies in their union and in what is withheld, not in a departure from the tradition as large as Blood Meridian’s.
Mohammad Reza Isfahani, under Shah Abbas I · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance was the four-iwan court mosque of Iran, with its minarets and portals, and the Timurid tiled dome, tall and blue. The departures are several and real: a mosque of one domed room without court or minaret on the most important square of a new capital; a portal on one axis and a chamber on another, joined by a bent passage; a dome low and pale where the tradition was high and blue; an interior almost wholly in mosaic faience, on a scale rarely attempted. The stake was the novelty of the type in its most visible site, and the cost of the technique. What holds the axis: the single domed chamber has antecedents, and the bent entry is a known answer to the offset between a street or square and the qibla. The turn is a refinement and a recombination as much as a break.
Franz Schubert · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
The inherited form is the Beethoven sonata, which Schubert in 1828 faced directly. The departures are real: a first movement whose principle is song and stillness, not motivic conflict, at a tempo that suspends time; a key plan moving by thirds, B flat to G flat and F sharp minor, instead of along the tonic and dominant; a slow movement placed a minor third away by juxtaposition, without transition; a finale that starts outside its key. It is a second way of writing a large sonata beside Beethoven’s. The stake is what holds it down. The work was written for no commission and no public that would hear it soon, The frame is Beethoven’s four-movement plan, kept. The swerve is in the harmony and the time, not the architecture.
Radiohead · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
The departure lies in two places, weighed together. In the music the turn is real but small: after Kid A, Amnesiac and Hail to the Thief the record turns back toward song, warmth and a band in a room, on a path the band had walked in the 1990s; Nude dates from 1997. The release is the work’s own wager. With no label and no contract, the band put out a finished album at whatever price the buyer chose, ten days after announcing it. That risked income, the relation to retail and the band’s measure in public, and the cost was borne alone. What holds it short is the music, whose turn is smaller than the turn in how it was published.
Joel Coen and Ethan Coen · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the pursuit thriller and the modern Western, and the Coens’ own crime comedy. The departures are real: the protagonist killed off-screen, by men not his pursuer, at the point where the genre promises its meeting; a score so withheld it is close to no score; a close given to a retired man’s dreams over breakfast, with the killer alive and the money unaccounted for. The stake was commercial, taken on a studio’s money with a prestige cast. Held below the gate because the risks had precedent in the makers’ own practice — Fargo had already let its plot run past its genre’s shape — and in the source: the withheld climax, the dreams and Ellis are McCarthy’s, carried over faithfully. A faithful adaptation of a swerve is a smaller swerve.
George Orwell · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the beast fable from Aesop to La Fontaine, the political animal satire of Swift’s fourth voyage and of Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest, and the nursery animal tale of the twentieth century; Orwell owned the debt by calling the book a fairy story. The turn is in what he put into that form, and when: the history of a revolution and its terror told in a children’s register, deadpan, so that the gap between voice and matter becomes the instrument. The stake was at the top of the scale: an attack on an allied state in wartime, refused by several publishers, one on official advice, at the risk of Orwell’s standing on the left that was his public ground. Held below the bar because the fable, the allegory and the plain style were all inherited; the swerve is of application and nerve more than of form.
Paul Celan · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the German lyric of Rilke and Trakl, read in Czernowitz, and the surrealism of Bucharest in the years 1945 to 1947. The turn is real: Celan brought the surrealist image, the long incantatory line and the musical form into German at the moment the language was most compromised, and turned them on the camps; “Todesfuge” makes the fugue, the most learned of German musical forms, the form of the death order. The stake was paid, at Niendorf and against Adorno’s sentence of 1949. But much of the book stays within its inheritance: the genitive metaphor and the dream landscape are Trakl’s and the surrealists’ more than Celan’s own, and the radical departure of his art comes in later books.
John Milton · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Isocrates’ address to the Athenian assembly, which gives the form and the title; the humanist oration; and the Protestant case for liberty of conscience. The turn is to ground liberty of printing not in the rights of the subject or in charity toward error but in an account of how virtue and truth are made: trial is the means of goodness, and free encounter the means of knowledge. That new foundation is why the speech outlasted its occasion. The stake was real: a known writer, already denounced for his divorce tracts, printed his attack unlicensed. Held below the gate because form and much of the matter were inherited, the risk was not met by prosecution, and the exclusion of Catholics keeps the swerve inside the Protestant settlement.
Pirro Ligorio · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance was the terraced court on an axis, the Roman villas and nymphaea of the first half of the century, and the ancient villa below the town. The departure is to make water the governing medium of a whole garden, at a scale nothing before had attempted, and to recover the hydraulic marvels of antiquity, the organ and the singing birds, as working things. The stake was real: a river diverted under a town, and years of cost on a scale that drained the cardinal’s fortune. But the swerve was not solitary. Other princely gardens were working the same vein in the same decades, and the garden’s grid is a conservative frame. A large turn, not a lonely one, held a tenth below the gate.
Robert Frost · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Wordsworth’s pastoral of country people, Browning’s dramatic monologue, the Virgilian eclogue, and the poetic diction of the Victorian and Georgian lyric. The turn was to take blank verse, the most proven of English measures, and fill it with the actual intonations of Yankee speech, so that sense is carried by tone, the tone of a sentence heard through a door. Dialogue with no lyric heightening, about hired men and hens and a mill accident’s settlement, set in metre with no inversions and almost no poetic vocabulary: a real departure in 1914, the year before “Prufrock” appeared, and a stake, since a book of talk with no music but the talking could have read as flat verse fiction. Held below 8.5 because the swerve is within the inherited form, not against it: Frost walked the path of blank verse and the pastoral dialogue differently rather than leaving it.
Billy Wilder · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is double: the noir confession in voice-over, which Wilder had made his own six years before, and the Hollywood picture about Hollywood, A Star Is Born (1937) above all. The turns are real. The narrator is a corpse. A major studio lends its gate, its name, its leading producer-director and its sound stage to a portrait of itself as a graveyard. The stars of the silent era play their own obsolescence, and Swanson takes a part close to her own life, a casting that was a wager. Held below the bar by precedent: the voice-over noir was the director’s proven path, the self-portrait a genre with a known shape, and the film’s grammar classical studio practice rather than a departure from it. The turns are made on a path already walked, and the form itself does not move.
T. S. Eliot · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The turn is real and it cost. The poet of The Waste Land, three years after his reception into the Church of England, put the modernist method, allusive collage, the dissolving speaker, the line stripped of its stops, to the service of devotion and liturgy, and wrote openly as a penitent when the advanced literary world of 1930 read such a turn as retreat. Many received the poem as a defection, and the stake was his standing with that world. Against that, the tradition he turned toward is old, and he takes its forms almost whole: Dante’s stair, the litany, the Ave Maria, Cavalcanti’s ballata, Herbert and Andrewes behind the voice. The departure lies in joining the two, not in a new form.
Louis Le Vau and André Le Nôtre · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the French château of pavilions and high roofs, the double pile and the oval salon, the parterre de broderie of Boyceau and Mollet, the Italian garden of terraces. The departure: house, garden and interior conceived together by one team as one composition on one axis; the salon turned outward as the hinge of house and land; a garden scaled to the horizon rather than to its walls, built on a perspective that governs the walker’s sight, the canal crossing the axis and hidden by the ground. The stake was very high: three villages of land, a fortune of uncertain origin and the minister’s liberty, which he lost. But the turn is a synthesis carried to a new scale more than a first stroke.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is twofold. From New York: the setback tower of the 1916 resolution, masonry and ornament built to the lot line. From the modern movement: Mies’s glass towers, projected in Berlin in 1921 and 1922 and built at 860 to 880 Lake Shore Drive in Chicago in 1949 to 1951, already with applied steel sections; and Lever House across the avenue, which had already lifted a glass slab off the street. Against New York the departure is total: a straight shaft, no setbacks, the front of the site left empty. Against the modern tower it is a refinement on a proven path. The real turn is toward monumentality: bronze, gravity, land given up on the costliest avenue. The stake was money, paid by the client; the risk of form was small.
Hayao Miyazaki · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the period film of Japan, Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954) and the jidaigeki that followed, set among lords and warriors; the animated adventure for the family that Ghibli had made its own; and Miyazaki’s own Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984), which had already set a heroine between a poisoned forest and the people who burn it. The turn is real and cost something. The period is moved from samurai to the people the genre left out, a leper, a woman at the bellows, an Emishi prince, an ironworking town, and the samurai are a rabble at the gate. There is no villain, and the hero settles nothing. The violence is real, arrows taking off arms and heads, from a studio known for children’s films. Held below the bar because Nausicaä had proved the path thirteen years before, and the turn deepens it more than it leaves it.
Luciano Laurana and Francesco di Giorgio Martini · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance was the fortified seigneurial residence of the Italian lordships, a keep with a courtyard, and in Florence Michelozzo’s closed palace with its rusticated front. The departure: a lord’s house open to its town in arcades and to the country in loggias, towers made frames for a view, the courtyard corner, the weak point of Brunelleschi’s arcades, solved with an L shaped pier, and a library, a studiolo and paired temples as the house’s true centre. The stake was real: a condottiere’s fortune on a residence that gave up much of a castle’s defence on a frontier, with an architect who had little built behind him. Held below the gate because Florence and Pienza had already begun the humanist residence.
Kamāl ud-Dīn Behzād · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Timurid painting of the fifteenth century at Herat and Shiraz: figures set into flat, tiled architectural settings, a high viewpoint, the page divided into compartments. Behzād’s departure is to make the setting the drama. The architecture is no longer a backdrop but a structure the eye must travel, room by room and up the stair, in the order Yusuf does; space is read as sequence, and the figures are small within it. The figures themselves are individually drawn, in motion, with a weight and turn earlier court painting did not ask for. The stake is charged: this was made inside a court atelier for the most refined patron of the age, a proven path refined to its limit as much as a turn from it.
Kate Bush · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Bush’s own and her decade’s. After The Dreaming (1982) sold less and was heard as difficult, she built her own studio, took about three years, and returned with a first side that made rhythm the leading voice of the pop song, drums and Fairlight carrying the argument and balalaika and didgeridoo in a chart single, and a second side given to a continuous suite about a woman drowning, issued at the height of a pop career. The stake was real: a commercial rebound was needed, and side two refused the single. What holds it below the bar is synthesis: the side-long suite was progressive rock’s form, the drum-led Fairlight sound was shared with Peter Gabriel’s records of the same years, and The Dreaming made the more radical turn first.
Built for Taira no Kiyomori · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance was the Shinto shrine on its ground, approached across a precinct, and the Heian aristocratic residence of halls and galleries round a garden pond. Kiyomori’s builders swerved by putting the residence on the sea itself, making the tide the pond and the open water the garden, and by setting the shrine’s gate offshore. The stake was real and was paid: a timber complex in the tidal zone of a typhoon sea, exposed to surge, rot and fire, and in fact burned twice within sixty years. What holds the axis is a question of authorship. There was a shrine here before Kiyomori, and whether it already stood partly over the water is not settled, so how much of a wide departure this campaign made is uncertain.
Maya, under K'inich Janaab' Pakal and his son · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Royal burials in or under Maya temple platforms are older than Pakal, and the swerve is not the burial in a pyramid as such. It is the plan: a deep vaulted crypt built first, the pyramid raised over it with a hidden stair from the temple floor to the tomb, the conduit binding the two, and the temple made a vessel for a long historical text. The swerve is credited on the present record of earlier Maya tombs. The stake was material, a chamber and a stair kept open inside a pyramid against the weight of the fill, and political, a king staking his succession on his own tomb. What holds it below the gate: the turn is made within Palenque’s own idiom, its temple shell, mansard roof and stucco the city’s language.
Bernardo Bertolucci · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is double: the Italian political cinema of the 1960s, with neorealism behind it, and Godard, Bertolucci’s master, whose manner his previous film Partner (1968) had followed into failure. The turn is real and sharp. Against Godard’s essayism and the austerity of political film, Bertolucci made a lush, composed historical picture of the fascist past, with a star cast, an art deco world built by Scarfiotti and a colour design by Storaro in which light carries argument; and he broke the historical film’s straight line into one drive and a disordered memory. The stake was smaller than the turn: an international co-production, a famous novel, and a return to narrative after a failure. What holds the axis a tenth below the bar is the direction of the swerve, which is toward classical pleasure, and partly back from risk.
Marilynne Robinson · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is plain: the King James Bible and the Calvinist sermon, Melville, Dickinson, Emerson and above all Thoreau, whose cabin stands behind this house, and the story of the child who lights out from the civilising household for the territory. The turn is in two places. The book took Huck Finn’s flight and gave it to a girl and her aunt, with housekeeping both the thing fled and the thing remade; and it arrived in 1980, in the years of Carver and the minimal story, as a first novel of almost no event, in a long, cadenced, meditative prose that argues loss, memory and resurrection in a narrator’s voice. The stake was real: a first book wagered on a register its period had set aside. Held below the bar: the instrument is a proven American visionary tradition, and the departure lies more in what the book stood against than in a new road.
Yasunari Kawabata · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Kawabata came out of the New Sensationalist school of the 1920s, with its borrowings from Western modernism. Snow Country turns from that, and from the confessional I-novel, toward a linked form with the logic of renga and haiku: images joined by association and season rather than by plot, the decisive events left off the page, a narrative that advances by its gaps. It departs from both the Western-style realist novel and the sentimental fiction of its day, and it wagered that a novel could be made almost entirely of perception and withholding, written through the war years about nothing the age thought urgent. Held a tenth below the gate because the turn is also a return to an old Japanese aesthetic, and in part a path Kawabata had prepared in his own palm-of-the-hand stories: a swerve from the modern novel back toward classical sensibility.
Louis Kahn · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance was threefold: the library as a reading room under a dome or vault with stacks behind, as in Labrouste’s Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève (8.5); the open-plan library of the 1950s and 1960s, glass and flexible floors, books and readers mixed; and Kahn’s own path, served and servant spaces in his laboratories, brick and concrete at Dhaka. The departure: the reading room taken out of the centre and broken into cells at the perimeter, the books put in the middle ring, and the centre given to a hall that does nothing but show them; load-bearing brick in an age of curtain walls; a building with no front. The stake was real but bounded, a school’s commission and budget and a design that could be read as retrograde, and the swerve continued Kahn’s own turn rather than beginning it.
Wang Ximeng · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is double: the blue-green manner of the Tang, associated with Li Sixun and Li Zhaodao, decorative, archaic and by 1100 long overtaken; and the monumental ink landscape of the Northern Song, Fan Kuan, Guo Xi and Li Cheng, which had made the mountain a structure of ink and atmosphere. The turn joins the old mineral palette to the new structural landscape, at a length the blue-green manner had never reached, and layers the colour so that it models rather than fills. That is a real turn, and it set the template for the revived blue-green landscape. The stake is charged as it was: the archaising taste was the emperor’s, the painter a student under his direction, and the wager, bold and at great risk of failure at that scale, was sanctioned by the court.
Dionysus Flambouras · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Nine registers under one law, a state satire delivered as fable, a central horror staged as a garden walk, and a convergence that refuses the mode’s stock sensations: in the lot there is one boy, one raised hand, and a balloon hanging a fraction lower; at the restaurant the bill is split. The stake was real and unfloored, a twelve-thousand-word monster at the front door, a threat against a child, and no signal that the reader may step outside him. What holds the axis a tenth below its gate is that the debts stay legible as debts: the American maximalists in the first half, and in the second the withholding, self-annotating sentence (“Time here had been applied, not endured”) that is the most current manner in literary fiction, used here with purpose but not invented here. The book reorganises its mode with force; it does not open a possibility that was not already there.
Constantinian, Crusader and later builders · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance in 326 was the Roman basilica, the imperial mausoleum and the temple precinct. The departure was a state monument built over the tomb of an executed man: a pagan temple demolished, a hillside cut back to free a grave, and a martyrium joined to a basilica for assembly, so that a holy place and a church became one complex, with a rotunda over a tomb at the centre of Christian worship. The stake was an emperor’s public commitment of the state to the new faith on a contested site. The Crusader turn is smaller, a Western pilgrimage choir already proven, grafted on with skill. Held short of the gate because much of the first turn is now carried only by the rotunda’s plan.
Euripides · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the chorus of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon had told the sacrifice as a gagged girl lifted like a goat, and Euripides’ own volunteer victims, Macaria, Polyxena and Menoeceus, had already shown the young going freely to death. The swerve is to tell the most sacred and terrible moment of the cycle as near-domestic politics: brothers squabbling over a letter, a general afraid of his staff, a mother and a hero embarrassed by a wedding that does not exist. The risk was charged at once: Aristotle names the play as his example of inconsistency of character (Poetics 15). Held a tenth below the gate because this is the late manner at its sharpest, not a new manner; Orestes and Helen had taken similar liberties.
Mirak Mirza Ghiyas, under Bega Begum and Akbar · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance in Delhi was the Sultanate tomb: the octagonal tombs of the Lodi and Sur nobility with their verandahs and low domes, Isa Khan’s tomb beside the site, Sher Shah’s at Sasaram, set in courts or on tanks, not in gardens. The departure: a Timurid ninefold plan and double dome brought into India at a scale the region had not seen; the tomb set at the centre of a great quartered garden; the Persian form clothed in Delhi’s red sandstone and white marble and crowned with Indian kiosks. The stake was real: a dynasty a decade back on its throne, an imported architect, the largest tomb the region had built. Held below the gate because the turn transplants a form proven in Herat and Samarkand, and the Indian parts are carried over rather than remade; the swerve lies in the fusion and its scale.
Nikos Kazantzakis · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Gospels and Orthodox Christology, and the modern novel of the human Jesus: Renan’s Vie de Jésus (1863); George Moore’s The Brook Kerith (1916), in which Jesus survives the cross and lives on as a shepherd; D. H. Lawrence’s The Man Who Died (1929), in which he survives and lies with a priestess of Isis. The human Christ, and a life after the cross with a woman, were not new in 1955. The turn is in placement. Kazantzakis keeps the Gospel outcome and makes the other life a temptation dreamed on the cross and refused, so that the heresy is lived inside an orthodox ending and the cross is chosen, not suffered; and he gives Judas the commission. The stake was real and paid: a novelist past seventy put his standing in his own church and country on the book. Held below the summit bar because the life with a woman belongs to Moore and Lawrence, and the obedient Judas had precedent, in Borges’s “Tres versiones de Judas” (1944) and the Gnostic tradition: the swerve is of arrangement more than of invention.
Frank Herbert · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The inherited tradition is American magazine science fiction of the 1940s and 1950s, with Asimov’s Foundation the nearest model: a galactic empire in decline, a science of foresight. Herbert turned that tradition from machines to people. The Butlerian Jihad has removed thinking machines, “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.”, and the space is filled by trained minds, the Mentats, the Bene Gesserit, the navigators of the Guild, so that the book’s technologies are disciplines of body and mind. He put ecology, religion and feudal politics at the centre of a genre that had put engineering there, at a length and density it had not carried, and the stake was real: a long, unfashionable book by a newspaperman, taken at last by a house known for car repair manuals. What holds the axis below the gate is the frame. The feudal houses and the galactic court are inherited, and the plot is a story of revenge and restoration of great age.
Jorge Luis Borges · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the English essay of erudite play, De Quincey, Chesterton and Stevenson, with Schwob in French; the Spanish essay of Unamuno and Ortega; and the metaphysical joking of Macedonio Fernández. The turn is criticism written as speculation: theology and philosophy read for their aesthetic value, and the essay made a short, closed, ironic form with the shape of a story. “Kafka y sus precursores” reverses influence; “Nueva refutación del tiempo” carries idealism to its end and then confesses defeat. The stake was real in its place and moment: a Spanish-language essay that refused both nationalism and engagement, written under Perón. Held below the gate because much of the turn was taken in Discusión (1932) and Historia de la eternidad (1936); this book perfects the manner more than it founds it.
W. H. Auden · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance was Auden’s own as much as Yeats’s and Eliot’s: the political, clinical, allusive poetry of the early thirties that had made him the leader of a generation. The turn here is away from that role while still writing public verse: toward the civic elegy, the portrait of the artist, and the ballad, blues and cabaret song set in the same book as the elegies, and toward a voice that doubts its own power. The stake was real. The book appeared after Auden had left England for America in January 1939, it was read in England as the work of a man who had gone, and it undoes the posture of “Spain” in its own pages. What holds it below the gate: the means were largely inherited forms, used with mastery, and the larger formal swerves of the following years lie outside this book.
Matthias of Arras and Peter Parler; completed by later hands · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance was French. Matthias of Arras began a choir of the Rayonnant type, ambulatory and radiating chapels as at Narbonne or Toulouse. Peter Parler, a young mason from a Swabian lodge, turned from it in the middle of the campaign: the net vault of parallel ribs over the main vessel, dissolving the bay; ribs that hang free of the vault in the sacristy and the porch; a pendant boss; the south porch opened on a diagonal; portrait busts of living people in a cathedral’s gallery. The stake was real, a foreign master’s plan overridden by a newcomer under an emperor’s eye. Held below the gate: English net and lierne vaults came first, and the completion, half the building, is deliberately no swerve at all.
Boris Pasternak · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Russian novel of Tolstoy, the novel of history and private lives; against it in 1945 stood the Soviet novel of socialist realism, whose rules the book refuses at every point. Its hero is a doctor and poet who will not serve; the revolution is weighed and found wanting; the Gospel is the frame. The stake was the highest a novelist of the century placed. Pasternak gave the manuscript to Feltrinelli knowing what it could cost, and it cost him the Nobel Prize, which he was forced to decline, and his place in the Writers’ Union. The turn of form is real but smaller: a lyric poet’s novel built on coincidence and recurrence rather than causality, ending in its hero’s poems, a turn that looks back to the nineteenth century’s shape as much as forward. The stake is near the top; the departure of form is not, and the axis scores them together.
Andrea del Verrocchio · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is narrow and strong: the Marcus Aurelius on the Capitol, the antique horses of San Marco, and Donatello’s Gattamelata at Padua, set up in 1453, a calm general on a heavy horse at a measured walk, its raised hoof resting on a sphere. The departure is real. The walk becomes a stride; the raised foreleg is left free, a structural wager in a bronze of this size; the rider stands rather than sits and turns against the horse’s movement, so that the group is two forces at odds; the face is not idealised but threatening. The stake was real in casting and in decorum. Held below the gate because it turns within the genre, extending Donatello’s achievement toward movement more than breaking with it, and much of the casting risk was carried by another hand.
Sienese builders; facade by Giovanni Pisano · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Tuscan Romanesque: banded marble from Pisa and Pistoia, the basilica on striped piers. Giovanni Pisano’s facade is the swerve with most at stake. He set full-length figures, prophets, sibyls and philosophers, high on the front, leaning and turning out of their niches toward the square: an Italian answer to the French portal that gave its figures a dramatic life French jamb figures do not have, and made the facade a theatre. The dome over a hexagon, early in the century, is a further departure from basilican habit. The Duomo Nuovo is the boldest wager in the record, and it was lost. Held below the bar: the body of the church is a rich version of its regional manner rather than a turn from it, and the largest departure was never realised.
Raymond Hood and the Associated Architects · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The departure is in the conception, not the style. The style is the inherited setback skyscraper with a restrained Art Deco ornament, a proven path. The swerve is to build a coordinated group of towers, low buildings, theatres, gardens, a private street and an underground service city as one design on three blocks of the grid, by private enterprise, and to give its centre to open space; nothing of that kind and size had been done in an American downtown. The slab, shaped from the inside by light and elevators rather than by the zoning envelope, was itself a turn. The stake was real: the scheme lost its anchor when the Metropolitan Opera withdrew after the crash of 1929, and Rockefeller built through the Depression on his own capital, renting space no one was taking. Held below the bar by the conservative envelope it turned inside.
Leo Tolstoy · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the frame tale and the murderer’s confessional monologue, which Russian prose already had in Dostoevsky’s underground man and his criminal confessors, and the marriage novel, which Tolstoy had mastered himself. The turn is in what he put at the centre: sexuality within marriage, named as the cause of a killing and discussed with a frankness no major Russian novelist had used, and the realist master’s art made a weapon for a doctrine. The stake was high and was paid: the censor refused the book, copies passed from hand to hand, it was attacked across Europe, and it struck at Tolstoy’s own marriage, so that his wife wrote a reply. Held below the gate because the form itself, the frame, the monologue, the single voice, is inherited, and the risk was taken on the content more than on the shape.
Athenian (architect unrecorded) · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the Greek temple as a single symmetrical body, peripteral or prostyle, on one level and one axis, the canon the Parthenon had just perfected beside it; and the maiden as support, already used at small scale on the treasuries at Delphi in the sixth century. The departure: the temple broken into a composition of unlike parts, four fronts each of its own height and treatment, on two levels, with no peristyle; and the maidens raised to the porch of a temple on the city’s holiest ground. The stake was civic and sacred: the house of the oldest image, built in wartime beside the canonical temple in a form no precedent could check. What holds it: much of the departure answers constraint rather than a wager chosen, and the Ionic vocabulary and trabeated structure are kept whole.
Paul Auster · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is plain and acknowledged: Poe, whose “William Wilson” gives Quinn his pen name; Hawthorne and Thoreau, read by Black; Cervantes, Beckett and Kafka; the hard-boiled novel; and the metaphysical detective story already made by Borges, Robbe-Grillet and Pynchon. The turn is in the joining and in one move. The hard-boiled form is kept, its plain sentences, its hired man and its case, while every promise of the form is withdrawn; and the author’s own name is put into the book, first as the wrong number and then as a writer whom Quinn visits, so that the story turns on the man who writes it. The stake was real: a first novel under the author’s own name, refused many times and published by a small press. Held below the gate because the mode existed, and the trilogy perfects and widens it more than it founds it.
Joseph Wright of Derby · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the candlelit night scene of the Utrecht Caravaggisti and the tenebrist tradition, where candlelight served genre, piety or the merry company, and the English conversation piece, where a family gathers at small scale. The departure is to set a contemporary scientific demonstration among ordinary gentry at near life size, on the canvas of a history painting, with the gravity that painting reserved for martyrdom and myth. The stake was real: Wright was a provincial portraitist, and the academic hierarchy gave no place to such a subject. Held below the gate because the first wager was A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery two years earlier; this canvas raises the stake, a death and not a lesson, and deepens a turn already taken.
Henri Rousseau · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Salon picture of the 1890s: academic modelling, atmospheric recession, the Orientalist desert with its narrative of danger, Gérôme’s lions and sleepers; and against it Impressionism and its aftermath. The canvas departs from both. It paints the Orientalist subject with no narrative, no ethnography and no atmosphere: hard contour, even light, flat colour, figures set like objects in a space that is a stack of bands. The image is a dream with no frame of waking around it, the departure the Surrealists later prized. The stake was real: the painter showed in public and was laughed at, and his offer of this canvas to his own town was refused. Held below the gate because the manner was his already for a decade, so the swerve is the oeuvre’s more than this picture’s, and because the departure was in part the only way he could paint.
Luis Barragán · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is twofold: the international modernism Barragán himself practised in Mexico City in the late 1930s and 1940s, in functionalist apartment and speculative buildings, and the Mexican vernacular of thick walls, patios and colour. The departure: in this house he kept modernism’s abstraction, planar walls, no ornament, the free handling of space, and refused its transparency, its machine imagery and its open plan; from the vernacular he took enclosure and colour without ornament. The stake was real: a modernist who had built for the market staked his own house on an inward architecture at the height of the International Style. Held below the gate because the turn draws on precedents he knew, Ferdinand Bac’s gardens and his own at El Pedregal, and recombines more than it reorganises.
Alvar Aalto · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The departure is double. From the inherited hospital, the corridor block, the pavilion system and the sanatorium as classical palace, Paimio turns to an open, splayed, functional plan; but here it was not first, for the functionalist sanatorium had already been built in the Netherlands, Germany and Switzerland in the 1920s. The deeper swerve is from orthodox functionalism itself toward the body and the senses: noise, glare, the feel of wood instead of steel tube in a chair, colour in a white building. The stake was real. A young architect from the provinces, in his early thirties, staked a national commission on a manner Finland had barely seen, and turned the international idiom in a direction its leaders had not taken.
Joel Coen and Ethan Coen · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the American crime film and its kidnapping-gone-wrong plot, from James M. Cain and Jim Thompson to the brothers’ own Blood Simple (1984), and the independent crime film of the 1990s, in which Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994) had made violence and talk a style. The turns are real and many: noir in white daylight and snow; a heroine who is a heavily pregnant small-town police chief, kind, slow-spoken and right, entering a third of the way through; regional speech made the medium of the whole; violence played without style, as accident and stupidity; and a false true-story card that changes how every scene is received. Held below the gate because the stake was bounded: a small film after The Hudsucker Proxy (1994) failed, by makers whose manner was already formed.
Eastern Ganga builders, under Narasimhadeva I · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Kalinga temple as built for three centuries before it, at the Lingaraja in Bhubaneswar, at the Jagannatha in Puri and elsewhere: curved sanctuary tower, pyramidal hall, axial sequence, carved skin. Konark keeps all of it. The departure is twofold. It turns the whole into one sculptural image, the chariot, fusing architecture and sculpture at the scale of the building, which the type had not done; and it pushes the type’s scale past anything the region had built. The stake was physical, and the building paid it: the tower fell, and the hall stood only because it was filled with sand. What holds the axis is that the turn is within the type: plan, section and vocabulary are inherited, and the departure lies in conception and magnitude more than in the making of space.
Nine Inch Nails · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is industrial music, Throbbing Gristle and Einstürzende Neubauten at the root and Ministry and Skinny Puppy nearer; the band’s own synth-pop debut and the metal of the Broken EP; and the rock concept album of descent, The Wall above all. The turn is large. Industrial noise, sampled and processed beyond recognition, is put to the service of a song cycle with dynamic range, ambient passages, a ballad and an argument, on a major label at the height of the band’s commercial standing. The stake was real: a record far harsher and slower than the expected follow-up. What holds it below the bar: the languages were proven, Ministry had brought industrial music to rock, and the concept album of a self destroyed had a famous precedent.
Terrence Malick · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the historical epic and the film of national founding. The departure is large: a historical film with almost no exposition, built from ellipsis, interior voice and a camera that drifts rather than covers; dialogue thin and often withheld; the native language unsubtitled at length; battle and politics cut to fragments; the rescue at the centre of the legend over in a few seconds. The stake was real: a studio picture with stars, opened in December for the awards season to mixed reviews and recut within weeks. Held below the gate because much of the turn was its maker’s already. The whispered interior chorus, nature cut against violence and the rapture of light were made in The Thin Red Line (1998), and the wager extends a path the same hand had proved.
Dionysus Flambouras · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
What it turns from is the suburban ensemble novel of desire and sightlines, the line from Cheever’s radio to the couples of Updike and the key party of The Ice Storm. The Halloween party stands on that proven ground. The turn lies elsewhere: no protagonist and no plot to hold, a narration that keeps the books on sex, grief and garbage in one register, an apparatus quoted rather than described, an uncanny never explained and never allowed to become a monster, and movements set out of calendar order, so that a sale shows a house nobody will name before the New Year’s Eve that emptied it. The stake is real: a long novel offering no person to follow and more than a dozen explicit encounters a reader may refuse. Held at 8.4, a tenth below the gate, because the ensemble and its appetites are inheritance and the swerve lies in the frame set around them.
Rembrandt van Rijn · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Amsterdam anatomy portrait as Aert Pietersz in 1603 and Thomas de Keyser in 1619 left it: sitters arranged frontally, heads stacked like a register, the corpse or skeleton a prop, everyone looking out. The departure is decisive: the group turned into an event, a demonstration under way, attention directed inward to the act; the praelector set apart at the right as a speaker; the corpse made the centre of light and meaning. Anatomies began with the abdomen; Rembrandt chose the arm, the part that could carry an idea in a gesture. The stake was real: a painter of about twenty-six, newly in Amsterdam from Leiden, on his first great civic commission. Held below the bar because the turn stayed within the portrait’s terms, a sharpening that The Night Watch carried further.
Francisco Goya · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Bourbon state portrait as Mengs and the French court painters had made it in Spain: the sovereign at full length, enthroned or in armour, among columns and drapery, with allegory where needed, and the family portrait as a ceremonial assembly, Van Loo’s Family of Philip V the nearest precedent in the Spanish collection. The departure is large: no throne, no architecture, no allegory, no ceremony; the family stood in a row in a shallow room; faces given with a candour that flatters no one; and the painter put in the picture, in shadow, after Velázquez. The stake was real: the commission tested the newly named First Court Painter before the crown. The family accepted the canvas, so the cost was risked, not paid, and the swerve is held below the bar for that.
Akira Kurosawa · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The departure is large on two fronts. From Shakespeare on film: Olivier filmed the verse, and Welles’s Macbeth (1948) kept it in a stylized setting; this film throws the verse away and refounds the play in another theatre’s grammar. From the period film: the Noh enters, in Asaji’s mask-like face, her gliding walk and her stillness, in the flute and drums of the score, in frontal staging and empty space, set against Mifune’s open violence. What holds it below the bar is the stake. Macbeth had already been moved out of its world (Joe Macbeth, 1955), stylized period cinema had been Kurosawa’s proven ground since Rashomon, and Toho’s period film supplied much of the costume and battle grammar. The turn is decisive; the wager was smaller than the film’s strangeness suggests.
Mughal, under Akbar · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance was threefold: the Timurid and Persian arcuate tradition the Mughals brought, already answered in Humayun’s Tomb (8.4) under Akbar’s early reign; the trabeated stone building of Gujarat, Rajasthan and Malwa, Hindu, Jain and Sultanate; and the Lodi and Sur buildings of the north. The departure is a whole capital in which the trabeated Indian idiom is made the court’s own, on equal terms with the dome and the iwan, and the palace given not as a fortress block but as an open field of pavilions on courts. The stake was large and visible: a new capital raised in a few years on a dry ridge, at great cost, for a reign whose religious policy was itself a wager. Held below the gate because the synthesis had begun at Agra and in the Sultanate buildings of Gujarat and Mandu: this is the turn completed at full scale, not first made.
Led Zeppelin · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the electric blues of Chicago, the British blues of the 1960s, Cream, Hendrix, the Jeff Beck Group’s Truth (1968) and the band’s own first album of the same year. The turn is real: the record moves the blues away from the twelve-bar song toward the riff as the unit of composition, heavier and more spare, builds dynamics of hush and assault into the songs themselves (What Is and What Should Never Be, Ramble On), and sets a passage of studio abstraction in the middle of a hit single. What holds it: the band’s first album had proved the path, and the record leans on its blues sources so closely that some departures are rearrangements of earlier songs, a debt the first release did not acknowledge.
Bruce Graham and Fazlur Khan (Skidmore, Owings and Merrill) · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The tradition the tower inherited in Chicago in 1965 was the steel and glass prism, its structure hidden behind a regular curtain wall and expressed only by applied mullions, its uses kept in single-purpose towers. The swerve is in three parts taken together: the structure moved to the outside and drawn in diagonals across the face; the taper, which broke the prism’s constant section; and the mixed-use stack at a hundred storeys. The stake was real: an untried structural system at a height few towers had reached, a financing that faltered, and a face many would find brutal. What holds the axis below the bar is that the turn was within modernism: it carried the tradition’s own claim, that structure should be honest, further than the tradition had dared.
Wes Anderson · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the American family comedy-drama and the literary family chronicle, Salinger’s Glass family the source most often named. The turn: a live-action ensemble film made as a book, with title cards that show each chapter’s opening page, an omniscient narrator, a fixed palette and wardrobe for each character, and frontal, flat tableaux that refuse the naturalism of the family drama while carrying its grief. The stake was real: a studio picture with Hackman, Huston, Paltrow, Stiller, Murray and Glover, played in a register that could have read as mannered and cold. Held a tenth below the bar by precedent: the manner was largely Anderson’s already in Rushmore (1998), here enlarged rather than invented, in a comedy of eccentrics audiences knew how to receive.
Ogata Kōrin · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the illustrations of the Tales of Ise that showed the episode as narrative, with the courtier, his companions, the bridges and the stream; the gold-ground screen as a format of display; and Tawaraya Sōtatsu, who had already taken court literature into flat, bold colour on gold. The departure: the narrative is removed whole, figures, bridge and water, and the plant is given as a repeated pattern on an unbounded ground, close to the language of the textile and the lacquer box from which Kōrin came. A literary picture becomes a design without ceasing to be literary. The stake was real for a merchant’s son newly a painter of rank. Held below the top because Sōtatsu had opened the road and the decorative screen was a living genre.
Walter De Maria · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance is double: Minimalist sculpture’s grid and industrial unit, the New York work of the 1960s in which De Maria took part, and the new practice of land art, with Heizer’s Double Negative of 1969 and Smithson’s Spiral Jetty of 1970 before it. The departure: to take the grid out of the gallery and the cut out of the earth, to make a work whose material is weather, light and duration as much as steel, and to fix as part of the work the terms on which it may be seen, in a small company, over a day and a night, without one’s own photographs. That last is a real turn against the reproduced image the art world ran on. The stake was large: years, a patron’s fortune, a remote site whose survival depends on one institution. Held below the gate because it swerves within a tradition already swerving; land art had taken the decisive step before it.
Portishead · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the band’s own: the trip hop of Dummy (1994) and Portishead (1997), slow breakbeats, scratched samples, a torch singer over noir strings, a sound so widely imitated that by the end of the 1990s it had become a coffee-table style. The turn is large. After eleven years the band gave up almost every mark of it: sampled breakbeats for played and programmed drums of motorik and industrial cast, cinematic warmth for abrasive guitars and analogue synthesisers, the song’s arc for abrupt cuts. A returning band of large audience offered a record its audience had not asked for. What holds it short of the bar is the path: its languages were proven, and Kid A had made this kind of swerve first.
Euripides · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Attic tetralogy, three tragedies and a satyr play. Euripides set a play of death and grief in the satyr play’s place and gave it a comic Heracles, a drunk servant scene and a restoring ending, and no earlier surviving play does this. The result is the first extant play of the kind later called tragicomedy, and the first in which the hero is the problem: Admetus is praised by every person in the play and judged by its action. The stake was real at a festival where the form was set; the tetralogy lost to Sophocles, though no prize can be assigned to this one play. Held below the gate because the turn is of genre and tone within a set slot, and Euripides’ larger breaks came later.
Philip K. Dick · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is American magazine and paperback science fiction of the 1950s and 1960s: the psionic thriller, the plot of corporate espionage, the time-slip story, van Vogt’s games with identity. The turn is real and Dick’s own. He took the pulp caper, a team of anti-telepaths lured to the Moon and bombed, and made it a metaphysical novel in which the question is which world is real and who is alive to ask. He folded the advertising copy of his decade into the book as scripture, and let the comedy of a metered life stand beside a theology of grace. The stake was real: a writer paid by the word, in a market that wanted plots, building a book whose ending refuses the reader solid ground. What holds the axis a tenth below the gate is that the vehicle is still the caper, and the swerve is made inside it, not against a proven path.
George Orwell · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the war memoir of the Great War, Graves, Sassoon and Blunden, and the political reportage of the 1930s, the committed reportage of the left among it, Orwell’s own The Road to Wigan Pier included. The turn is in the side he turned against: a man of the left, who had fought for the Republic, writing a book whose main charge is against the Communist party and the left press of his own country, in 1938, while the war was still being fought. The stake was real and was paid: the book was barely read on publication and through the war that followed. The form is less a departure: a chronological first person whose innovations are of candour rather than of structure. The warning of partisanship inside the text, and the chapters of analysis set off with a notice that they may be skipped, are a real, if modest, formal turn for the genre. Held below the bar on the form.
Wifredo Lam · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is double: Picasso’s Cubism and the primitivism of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, absorbed in Paris and plainly recalled in the frontal, mask-headed standing figures; and Surrealism, Breton’s circle, automatism and the hybrid. The departure is in source and standpoint: the borrowed African form returned to an Afro-Caribbean world it could speak for; the Surrealist hybrid grounded in a specific religion and a specific landscape; the colonial picturesque of Cuban painting, the guajiro and the palm, refused for the cane field as a sacred and haunted place. The stake was real: Lam risked being read as Picasso’s follower. Held below the gate because the formal means are largely the inherited ones.
F. W. Murnau · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Stoker’s novel, the German fantastic film of the 1910s, Der Student von Prag and Der Golem, and the painted expressionism of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). The departures are real: the supernatural set among real places, in daylight, on roads, ships and rivers, against the studio’s painted unreality; nature itself the medium of the uncanny, in a hyena, a spider, plants and the tide; effects drawn from the camera, negative stock and fast and stop motion, rather than from sets; the vampire as plague rather than seducer. The stake was real: Prana Film’s only completed production, made without the rights, which cost the company its life. Held below the bar because the genre and the source were proven, and much of the style gathers what German cinema already had.
H. H. Richardson · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The inherited path for an Episcopal church in New England in 1872 was the Gothic Revival of the Ecclesiologists: the long nave, the pointed arch, English parish models, dressed stone. Richardson turned from it to the round-arched Romanesque of southern France and Spain, to a near-central plan, to rough granite banded in colour, and to an interior painted throughout by an easel painter and his friends rather than stencilled by a decorator. The stake was high: a young architect’s first great commission, won in competition; the heaviest masonry tower on the softest ground in the city; walls painted at a scale none of the painters had worked at. But the round-arched manner had American precedents, Richardson’s own Brattle Square Church among them. It is a swerve into another past, not out of the past.
Jane Campion · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the period literary romance of early-1990s prestige cinema, the Brontës’ Gothic of passion on wild ground behind it, and the colonial settler film. The turns are real: the romance told from inside a woman’s desire, with the man’s body looked at and the woman’s the one that chooses; a heroine who never speaks; a sexual bargain at the centre of a romance; the Gothic moved to the New Zealand bush and its mud; an ending that refuses the romance’s death for a surfacing and a metal finger. The stake: an original screenplay, a third feature by a director known for small, odd films, Sweetie and An Angel at My Table, on a modest independent budget. Held a tenth below the gate because the form is classical by design, and the costume picture absorbed it readily.
Bret Easton Ellis · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is plain: Dostoevsky’s underground man; de Sade’s catalogues; the consumer litany of DeLillo and, before him, Perec’s Les Choses; Tom Wolfe’s Wall Street, from which the narrator’s firm, Pierce & Pierce, takes its name; the blank minimalism of Ellis’s own first two novels; the slasher film and the true-crime confession. The turn is in the fusion and in the levelling. The book holds the satirical novel of manners and the pornography of torture in a single register, so that the brand of a raincoat and the dismemberment of a woman receive the same attention, and it gives whole chapters to a narrator’s earnest pop criticism. The stake was as high as a novel’s can be: cancellation by its first publisher, protest and boycott before publication, reviews that urged readers not to buy it. Held below the gate because each element was inherited, and the swerve is in their combination and in the risk, not in a new instrument.
Anselm Kiefer · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance: painting at the end of the 1970s under American abstraction, Minimalism and Conceptual art; German postwar painting that largely kept away from the National Socialist past or reached it only through abstraction; Beuys, Kiefer’s teacher, whose felt and fat made material a sign; and the straw, earth and fire of Arte Povera. The departure: a large painting made partly of real matter, in which a poem’s line becomes material, and in which a German painter takes up the destruction of the Jews with the signs of German myth itself. The stake was high: Kiefer had already been charged with ambiguity toward fascism, and to take Celan’s poem invited the charge of aestheticising the camps. Held below the top because the material sign came from Beuys and Arte Povera, and the turn to the German past was already made in Kiefer’s work of the 1970s.
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is David’s: the nude drawn to an anatomical and antique norm, the ideal body of the Salon, and nearer still David’s Madame Récamier of 1800, a reclining figure turned to look back. The departure is the willed distortion: anatomy given up to line, the back lengthened, arm and leg set where the contour needs them, the modelling flattened toward a surface of enamel, and the long forms of Parmigianino, Bronzino and Italian Mannerism admitted into a Davidian art. The stake was real: the picture is reported to have been charged at the Salon of 1819 with false anatomy and an archaic manner. It stands a tenth below the bar of the summit because the turn sharpens what Ingres had already done in his Roman portraits and Jupiter and Thetis of 1811, and the genre and subject risked little.
Renzo Piano · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is twofold: the European museum and cultural centre as a box of galleries, among them Piano’s own Menil Collection (8.0) and the Centre Pompidou (8.4) he made with Richard Rogers and Gianfranco Franchini; and the high-tech tradition of expressed structure that Piano helped found. The departure: a high-tech office turning its whole method toward a non-European culture’s form and toward a climate, working with an anthropologist, and building not a container but a settlement of open shells in timber. The stake was considerable: a commission at the heart of a recent civil conflict, where a European architect risked both pastiche and appropriation, on a remote site, with a structural type without precedent at that height. Held below the top because the turn drew on a regionalist current already strong by 1991.
Christopher Nolan · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the British and American film of battle and evacuation, the 1958 Dunkirk among them, and the combat film after Saving Private Ryan (1998). The departures are real and many: almost no backstory and little dialogue; an enemy almost never seen; three strands on three clocks intercut so that the same events return from other angles; continuous suspense in place of the battle film’s arc; a score of ticking and rising tones that never resolve. The stake was large: a studio summer release on IMAX film at great cost, about a retreat, with no star at its centre and a pop singer in a principal part. What holds it a step below the gate: the cross-cut, convergent timeline was already its maker’s proven means, here applied to history.
Donald Judd · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The departure is not the box, which Judd had established by 1965, but the permanent installation: a work of a hundred units whose meaning depends on a building rebuilt for it, in a remote place, meant never to move. It turns from the gallery, the museum loan and the retrospective toward a fixed place of art made by the artist. The stake was large and real: land, buildings and years in West Texas, and a whole that depended on keeping a foundation alive. Against the figure: within Judd’s own art the boxes extend a proven idiom, and art made for its site had precedents, the chapel among them, the Rothko Chapel of 1971 and the earthworks of the 1960s and 1970s. The swerve is real, costly and partly prepared.
Henry Fuseli · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance is history painting as the Academy taught it: a subject from scripture, a classical text, Shakespeare or Milton, a moment of action, figures drawn from the antique and from Michelangelo, a moral to be read. The departure is to paint, at exhibition scale and in the grand manner’s figure language, a subject with no text at all: a mental state, a dream and its sensation, given as if it were a history, with the irrational and the erotic in it and no moral. It turns toward the subject matter of Romanticism and later of Symbolism and Surrealism. The stake was real: a foreign painter not yet established, showing a picture critics could call indecent or absurd. It is held below the gate because the vocabulary was inherited, and the departure is in subject more than in the making.
Walter Pater · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The turn is from the moral and religious criticism of Ruskin and the objective standard of Arnold to a criticism whose ground is the critic’s own sensation and whose end is the quality of the moment. Pater took Arnold’s sentence and inverted it; he took Ruskin’s subject, Italian art, and stripped it of Ruskin’s ethics. The stake was real and was paid. The Conclusion was read at Oxford as a counsel of hedonism to undergraduates, Pater was attacked from the pulpit and satirised as Mr Rose in Mallock’s The New Republic (1877), and he withdrew the Conclusion for eleven years. What holds the axis a tenth short of the gate is precedent: Gautier and the French doctrine of art for art’s sake, Baudelaire, and Swinburne’s notes on the Florentine drawings (1868) had gone part of the way, and the Hegelian scheme of the Renaissance is borrowed.
Oscar Niemeyer · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the parliament as historical costume, Westminster’s Gothic, the Capitol’s dome and portico, the classical legislatures of the Americas, Brazil’s own Tiradentes Palace in Rio; and the modern movement’s drafts of the type, Le Corbusier’s Palace of the Soviets project of 1931 with its halls expressed as volumes, and his Assembly at Chandigarh, designed in the same decade and opened later. The departure: the legislature reduced to five pure forms on a horizontal, the houses made signs by convex and concave, the towers set apart in water, the roof made a terrace. The stake was a capital built from nothing in under four years. Held below the top because the expressed-volume parliament was Le Corbusier’s idea first.
Vincent van Gogh · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the Dutch flower piece, dark-grounded, built for illusion and for symbolic inventory; the French still life of the century, Fantin-Latour’s exact bouquets and Manet’s late flowers; Monticelli’s thick-painted bouquets, which Van Gogh admired; the Impressionist touch he had learned in Paris; the flat colour and outline of the Japanese prints. The departure: the dark ground abolished and replaced by the flowers’ own colour, so that figure and ground share one hue; colour taken off description and made the key of a picture; the paint made the matter of the seed heads; dying flowers given equal place with living ones in a scheme of decoration. The stake: a painter who had sold almost nothing set a room’s decoration on one colour. Held below the top because the still life was a low-risk genre, and high-key colour was already moving in Paris.
Wassily Kandinsky · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the European history picture and its apocalyptic subjects, the Flood and the Last Judgement, as painting had carried them for five centuries; in Kandinsky’s own case it came through his glass paintings of saints and riders, Russian and Bavarian in source, and the Fauve and Jugendstil colour he had left behind. The departure: a cataclysm at the scale of a history painting with its subject removed, bodies, water and ark dissolved into colour and line on a field without horizon, ground or point of view. The stake: a painter of established name putting a monumental canvas on a picture most of his public could not read. Held below the top because the swerve was not first made here: the Improvisations of 1910 and 1911 made the break, and Composition V, refused by the Neue Künstlervereinigung in 1911, paid its cost.
Félix Candela · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the thin concrete shells of Torroja and Freyssinet and the German barrel vaults; Candela’s own hyperbolic paraboloids from 1951, in a pavilion at the university, the umbrella roofs of warehouses and a church; and the old groined vault of masonry. The departure: a radial groined vault of intersecting hypars with every edge cut free and no edge beam anywhere, the efficient roof of a factory turned into a figure lifting off the ground, at a thinness the theory of the day did not comfortably cover. Candela worked by membrane theory and his own judgement more than by full analysis, and the stake was his as builder as well as designer. What holds the axis: the hypar and the groined form were already his and already proved; this is the summit of a path more than a turn off it.
Eva Hesse · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Minimalism at its height in New York: the serial unit, the regular interval, the industrial material, the object without inner reference, and the friends who made it, LeWitt above all. Hesse kept the unit and the interval and turned the rest: soft for hard, translucent for opaque, hand for factory, hanging for standing, perishable for permanent. The stake was real: a young woman in a field run by men, working with untested materials known to decay, and putting at risk on purpose the permanence that market and museum required. Held below the gate because the turn was shared and under way: Robert Morris’s felt pieces and his essay “Anti Form” of 1968, Lippard’s “Eccentric Abstraction” of 1966, and Hesse’s own Accession, Repetition Nineteen and Expanded Expansion had broken the ground.
Tarsila do Amaral · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Paris of the early 1920s, where the painter studied with André Lhote, Albert Gleizes and Fernand Léger, whose rounded, tubular volumes and clean flat colour this canvas plainly knows, and behind it Brazilian academic painting and the São Paulo modernism of 1922. The departure: a European formal language turned to make a Brazilian archetype, a body distorted not for structure, as in Léger, but for meaning, with a scale that inverts the classical order of head over foot. It turns from the Pau-Brasil manner of her preceding years, villages, flags and bright national scenery, toward the dreamlike and primordial. The stake was modest in the making, a private gift, and large in what followed. The charge: its means were learned in Léger’s studio.
Patricia Highsmith · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The departure is real, and it was a risk. The crime novel Highsmith inherited, the British puzzle and the American hard-boiled alike, solved the crime and punished it, and the American screen of 1955 worked under a code that required the punishment. Highsmith made the criminal the sole point of view, made the reader his accomplice, and let him go free and rich; and she did it, in 1955, in a book whose desire between men is legible though never stated. The turn and the stake are both there. What holds the axis a tenth below the gate is the means. The swerve is not formal in the modernist sense: the narration is linear, the third person close, the prose plain, and the turn lies in moral design and point of view. Against works whose departure is in the form itself, that is a limit.
Ralph Ellison · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance was the protest and sociological tradition in Black American letters, Wright above all, and the Marxist criticism of the 1930s that Ellison himself wrote in, as “The Way It Is” shows; and the liberal social science of Myrdal. The swerve is away from both: the claim that the Black writer’s task is art, that his ancestors may be Hemingway, Eliot and Malraux as well as Wright, and that the vernacular is a high culture. “The World and the Jug” draws the distinction: one cannot choose one’s relatives but can choose one’s ancestors, and Wright was a “relative”, Hemingway an “ancestor”. The stake was paid: the Black Arts movement treated Ellison as an apostate, and the position cost him standing with a generation. Held below the gate by a tenth because the essay form and the New York intellectual milieu it entered were inherited, and the turn was argued in a tradition of the American essay already open to it.
Dante Alighieri · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The swerve is from a tradition Dante had helped to make. Having written canonical poems of the new style, he turned in the stony poems to the hardest manner in the Romance lyric, the trobar clus of Arnaut Daniel: harsh consonantal rhymes, rare rhyme words, Arnaut’s sestina brought into Italian, and then a form pushed further than its inventor had taken it, the canzone on five words repeated across stanzas of twelve lines. The stake was real: it put at risk the claim that love ennobles, and bound the poet to a technique that can collapse into display. The tenzone swerves the other way, into the low comic realism of the abusive sonnet, and the moral canzoni bring philosophy into the canzone as argument, not ornament. Held below the bar because the turns are dispersed across separate poems, and much of the body stays inside the inherited manners.
Charlie Chaplin · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
The turn and the stake together, and the stake was very large. Chaplin, the cinema’s master of pantomime, who had kept dialogue out of City Lights and Modern Times, broke his own form to speak, and broke it further at the end by letting a comic character step out of the story to address the camera for about five minutes. He did it with his own money, to satirise a sitting head of state with whom his country was at peace, against the caution of the studios. The departure from his own tradition, slapstick turned on a regime and comedy made the instrument of political argument at feature length, is real. What holds the figure under the gate is that the means are largely inherited (the two-reel routine, the Tramp’s grammar, and the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup of 1933, already a comedy of the dictator), and that the boldest act, the speech, is a rupture rather than a new form.
Abraham Darby III; designed by Thomas Farnolls Pritchard · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The turn in material is as far as a turn can go. No bridge of this span had been made of cast iron, and the tradition it entered knew iron only as cramps, ties and fittings. The stake was real: a company’s money and name, a public river crossing that had to stand, and a method of making and raising great castings with no precedent. Against this the swerve in form is small. The bridge keeps the mason’s semicircle and the carpenter’s joint; it departs from the tradition in what the members are made of, not in how a structure of that material should be shaped. The axis scores turn and stake together, and the conservative form holds it a tenth below the summit’s bar.
Ray Charles · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is twofold: the country and western song of the Opry and the jukebox, and Charles’s own joining of gospel and rhythm and blues, already carried into pop with strings on The Genius of Ray Charles (1959). The turn is real. A Black singer at the height of his crossover success, with Georgia on My Mind and Hit the Road Jack behind him, gives a whole album to a repertory identified with white Southern audiences, in 1962, and sets it in the two most urban settings to hand. The stake was both his publics. Held below the gate: he had cut I’m Movin’ On at Atlantic in 1959, the arrangements are established idioms of the day, and the swerve lies in the joining, not in a new musical language.
Wu-Tang Clan · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the hip hop of 1992 and 1993: polished West Coast G-funk, the jazz-inflected warmth of the East Coast’s conscious groups, the Bomb Squad’s dense collage. The turn is away from all three: loops left raw and off pitch, drums dry, a mix with no gloss, film dialogue in place of hooks, and a crew of nine with no front man. The stake was real. Unknowns pressed their first single themselves, then signed a deal that let each member record alone elsewhere, a wager on the collective as a brand. The elements were inherited, the dusty soul loop from Marley Marl and Paul C, the Five Percent language from Rakim and Brand Nubian, the posse cut from the Juice Crew: the swerve is the joining and the stance. That holds it just short of the bar, a large turn made from parts already in use, with its boldest wager placed on the business as much as the sound.
Moshe Safdie · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance: Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation, the postwar tower in the park, the deck access of the British estates, the industrialised panel housing of Europe, and behind them the single-family suburban house. The departure: the dwelling made a whole three-dimensional unit, cast whole and set by crane, and the units heaped into an irregular hill, so that each house keeps a garden and a view; no corridor, no repeated floor, no front. The stake was real and paid: a thesis built by its author in his twenties at a world’s fair, an untried structure of heavy boxes in stagger and cantilever, the cost far over the estimate, the scheme cut to a fragment, the claim to cheapness lost. Held just below the gate: the Metabolists, Friedman’s spatial city and Team 10’s streets in the air had the idea in the air.
Alan Moore and J. H. Williams III · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the American superhero comic, the Wonder Woman figure most of all, and Moore’s own deconstructions of it, which had made the genre’s grim turn. The swerve is double. In matter, a corporate superhero monthly became, by its second year, a treatise on magic, the Kabbalah and the Tarot, ending in a revelation addressed to the reader. In form, the page itself is bent: the Tarot drawn as one continuous image, a last issue that is a pair of posters. The stake was real: sales, readers who came for a heroine and got a syllabus, and a writer’s standing staked on sincerity after irony and dread. Held below the gate because the occult comic and the psychedelic page have precedents, in Ditko’s Doctor Strange and the underground, and the swerve is in register more than in kind.
Wang Shu (Amateur Architecture Studio) · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The departure is double, and it cost something. Against the imported spectacular icon then being built across Chinese cities, Wang Shu built with salvaged material and village craft; against the official alternative of pastiche roofs and applied heritage motifs, he refused any historical image and kept the form abstract and modern. Wapan had been a domestic and agricultural practice, never the face of a large public building; its use here depended on masons improvising with a heap of mixed material at civic scale, and on a government client’s tolerance of rough walls in a showcase district. Bamboo-formed concrete was a further wager on imprecision. What holds the axis: the studio had tried salvage at smaller scale first, at the Venice Tiles Garden of 2006 and the Xiangshan campus.
Agatha Christie · Literature
7.7 · Tier III
This is the book’s claim, and it is real. The inheritance in 1926 was the detective story after Conan Doyle, with its tacit contract: the narrator is the reader’s ally, sees what the detective sees, and may be dull but is never false. Christie broke the contract at its centre and made the breach the solution, so that the form’s own convention became the murderer’s cover. The cost was real: the book was attacked as cheating, the debate over fair play it provoked was fierce, and a young author staked a reputation on a trick that could have been rejected as a fraud on the reader. What keeps the axis below the bar is width: the swerve is one turn, of one convention, in one genre, and the novel’s other habits of character, scene and prose are the genre’s as Christie found them.
Michael Graves · Architecture
7.2 · Tier III
The inheritance: the American corporate and civic office block of the 1950s to the 1970s, a box of glass or concrete, functional, colourless and unornamented, and the late modernism that still won public competitions. The departure: a large public building, paid for by a city in its downtown core, given colour, a giant classical order, a keystone, garlands and an allegorical statue, the first time postmodern classicism was built at civic scale rather than in a house, a fountain or a drawing. Venturi’s book and his house for his mother, Moore’s Piazza d’Italia and Graves’s own drawings had prepared the turn; this was the wager made with public money. The stake was paid in ridicule, leaks, dark rooms and a near demolition. Held below the gate because the turn was in the front, not in plan, structure or use.
Robert de Luzarches, Thomas and Renaud de Cormont · Architecture
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance was close and proven. Chartres, from 1194, had set the type: three storeys, a tall clerestory, quadripartite vaults over oblong bays, the cantoned pier, flyers outside; Reims, from 1211, had added bar tracery. Amiens took both. Its departures are of proportion and degree: the arcade raised to about half the elevation, the vault pushed to about 42 metres, the wall reduced further to shaft and window; in the upper choir, the triforium glazed and joined to the clerestory, as Saint-Denis had shown from 1231. The stake was physical: Beauvais, which pushed the height further, lost its vaults in 1284. What holds the axis lowest: the turn perfects a formula already standing within a few days’ ride, and the Rayonnant choir follows Saint-Denis rather than leading it.
Francis Ford Coppola · Film
8.9 · Tier IV
The departures are real. A studio sequel to a commercial triumph refuses to continue: it doubles back into a prequel and runs both stories at once, linked by theme alone. It gives much of a mass-market film to subtitled Sicilian, makes its hero the subject of its indictment, and ends with no catharsis. The stake was real: the studio’s money, more than three hours, a public that had come for the first film’s pleasures. What holds the axis lowest is precedent and cushion. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916) had cut between eras linked by theme; Puzo’s novel had set the young Vito beside the grown sons. And the wager was placed on a proven path: the same studio, director, writer, cast, composer and cameraman.
Albrecht Dürer · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is twofold: the northern devotional and allegorical print, with the Ars moriendi, the dance of death and the knight of the woodcut tradition; and the Italian monumental equestrian. The departure is to fuse them, setting a proportioned horse and a classical calm in a Gothic gorge peopled by northern demons, and to carry the burin to a range of tone and texture it had not had. The fusion is real. But the stake had been placed earlier, in the Apocalypse woodcuts and the Adam and Eve of 1504; in 1513 Dürer was the most famous printmaker in Europe, working within a manner he had built. The culmination of a proven path more than a wager against it.
Jean d'Orbais, Jean le Loup, Gaucher de Reims and Bernard de Soissons · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance was close and proven. Chartres, begun after 1194, had fixed the three-storey elevation, the four-part vault over oblong bays and the flying buttress as a system, and Reims took all three. The departures are real and several: bar tracery in the chapels of the chevet, the window cut in thin bars of stone rather than pierced through a wall; a west front with glass where the tympana were and its stories lifted into the gables; sculpture carried indoors on the inner west wall; the buttress given a body in its angels. The stake was a long, costly campaign in the coronation city, watched by a crown. What holds the axis lowest: the turn is in the articulation of a proven scheme, not in the scheme.
Safavid, under Shah Abbas I · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the Great Mosque of Isfahan, four iwans since the twelfth century; the Timurid mosque, Bibi Khanum at Samarkand (1399–1404) and Gawhar Shad at Mashhad; the Timurid double-shell bulbous dome of the Gur-i Amir (1404); the tile mosaic of the Blue Mosque of Tabriz (1465); and Abbas’s own Lotfollah. The departure: the mosque as one wall of a civic square, subordinated to urban design and then overruling it; the hinge shown rather than hidden, the dome and second minarets visibly off the portal’s axis; haft-rangi at the scale of a whole imperial mosque, quicker and cheaper, chosen so the king might see the building finished, which clothed Iranian buildings for three centuries. What holds the axis lowest is the plan: the type was not turned, and a dynasty securing a creed had reason to affirm it. The stake was a king’s haste, a patron’s risk more than a maker’s wager.
Thomas Mann · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the European realist and naturalist family novel: Zola’s Rougon-Macquart, the Goncourts, Fontane. The departures are real: an ironic narrator who is neither naturalist recorder nor moralist; the Wagnerian leitmotif carried into prose as a structural device; a philosophical interior, Schopenhauer, set inside the commercial chronicle; and the chapter on typhus, which removes Hanno’s death from the scene and gives it as a medical account, “Mit dem Typhus ist es folgendermaßen bestellt”
“With typhoid fever, matters proceed as follows”. The stake was real for a first novel of two volumes by an unknown, set in its author’s own town, which took offence. What holds it lowest of the twelve: the turn is within the form it inherits, not against it. The chronicle stays a chronicle, and the larger swerves of the decade and of Mann’s own career, The Magic Mountain among them, came after.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the temple as it came from Baekje and, behind it, from the Northern and Southern Dynasties of China: gate, pagoda, hall and lecture hall on one axis, as at Shitennō-ji, or a pagoda at the centre of three halls, as at Asuka-dera. The departure is the side-by-side precinct, with a gate of even bays and a post on its axis. It refuses the axial approach of every model available, in the rebuilding of a state temple bound to the prince’s memory, on a plan its predecessor had not used: a turn with a public stake, carried through gate, cloister and pair. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve, with The Unconcealment and The Encompassed, is the making: the cloud brackets and swelling columns keep to the first imported style, and the builders’ intention is not documented.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the early Gothic of Saint-Denis, Sens, Noyon and Laon; the departure is of scale: a main vault higher than any before it, a plan of five vessels like the great pilgrimage and imperial churches, and the flyer, whether or not first used here, used early and as a system. The stake was real: no one had raised thin walls to that height, and the remodelling of the upper storeys shows the risk. What holds the axis lowest: the elevation was conservative even in 1163, four storeys under sexpartite vaults, overtaken by Chartres within a generation; the west front is a synthesis, not a departure; the later additions look back by intention.
William of Sens and William the Englishman; nave by Henry Yevele · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
The turn and the stake together. William of Sens brought to England the Gothic of the Île-de-France: sexpartite vaults, alternating supports, an elevation of three storeys, the pointed arch carried through a whole choir, when English building was Romanesque. For England the departure was large, and the stake was real: a choir raised on burnt walls, reusing the outer fabric of the old one, under a monastery watching every step, its master falling in mid-campaign. William the Englishman pushed further, with paired columns, dark Purbeck marble set against pale stone, and the Corona. But the idiom had been proven abroad, and the swerve is a transfer more than an invention. The Perpendicular nave came after the style was established elsewhere in England, and perfects it.
Raphael · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Italian altarpiece of the Virgin and Child with saints, the sacra conversazione of Bellini and Perugino, the Virgin enthroned in an architecture continuous with the church, and the painter’s own Florentine altarpieces. The departure: throne and architecture removed, the Virgin walking on cloud, the saints kneeling with no ground under them, the whole framed as a vision disclosed by curtains and stopped at a ledge that belongs to our space. A devotional image turned into an event happening now. Against it: the Madonna in glory on cloud above kneeling saints was already in his Madonna of Foligno of a year or two before, the parted curtain had a long life in devotional painting, and the stake was low, a commission for a monastic church far from Rome by a painter at the height of papal favour. The turn is real and sharp; the wager was not. This is the lowest of the five gated axes.
Mexica · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance: Mesoamerican stone sculpture, its frontal blocks and its vocabulary of serpents, skulls and claws, much of it shared across Mexica monumental work of the same decades, the earth deity reliefs, the Coyolxauhqui disc and the great serpent heads among it. The departure: the colossal standing body built wholly of composite sign, with no human head and no natural part left, at a scale and with a rigour that has no known precedent; and the face made of two profiles meeting, a device of relief carried into the round. The stake cannot be measured. A state commission in an imperial capital, it sharpens and enlarges a shared language more than it breaks one. The lowest of the eleven axes the Universal Minimum governs.
Albert Camus · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is plain and heavy: Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, the confessing monologue of a man who argues with an unseen audience; Diderot’s Le Neveu de Rameau; the French moralists, whose maxims Clamence turns against himself; and the confession from Augustine to Rousseau, which the book parodies. The turn is in the address and the stake. The silent listener makes the reader the one addressed and, at the end, the accused, so the monologue becomes a snare rather than a display. The stake was Camus’s own: four years after the quarrel with Sartre and Les Temps modernes over L’Homme révolté, the writer known as the just man of his generation wrote a book in which the just man is a fraud, wearing features of his own and of his accusers. Held below the bar because the form, the voice and the arguing underground man came almost whole from Dostoevsky, and the swerve is a turn within that path.
Piero della Francesca · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is close and visible. The frontal standing Christ, the foot on the rim, the banner and the sleeping guards were Sienese and Tuscan iconography, and the figure is generally held to derive from the fourteenth-century Resurrection polyptych by Niccolò di Segna in the cathedral of Sansepolcro itself. The swerve is in how the type is built: an icon turned into a body under one light, measured by perspective, with two viewpoints set against each other and a landscape made to carry the doctrine. The gaze has no precedent. What it cost was little: a civic commission on a proven subject in a provincial town, a departure of means rather than a wager against what its patrons wanted. The figure stands below the gate for that.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Viennese four-movement symphony of the 1780s, Haydn’s above all, in which the finale is the light movement. The departures are real: a finale that carries the weight of the whole; learned fugue fused with sonata form, not alternated with it; a comic aria quoted inside a ceremonial C major allegro; a minuet that anticipates the finale’s motif. The stake was small. There was no commission and no documented performance, and Mozart risked nothing a reception could charge him for. The road was his own: the finale of his G major Quartet, K. 387, of 1782, had already joined fugue to sonata. The swerve is the synthesis and its scale, not a turn off the path.
Jacopo Barozzi da Vignola and Giacomo della Porta · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance was the aisled basilica, which Roman churches still followed, and, decisively, Alberti’s Sant’Andrea at Mantua, begun in 1472, which had already given a single barrel-vaulted nave with chapels in place of aisles. The departure is real but measured: the Albertian type made shallower and more open, the chapels lowered and linked, the transepts pulled in, the light gathered at the crossing, the whole fitted to a new order’s needs and made a standard. The stake was moderate: no one risked a tested path. The larger swerve is in the later work, Gaulli’s fusion of painting and stucco with the frame broken and Pozzo’s machinery of revelation. Held below the gate because the building’s own turn is a synthesis of a known type.
Donato Bramante · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the Quattrocento, Brunelleschi’s planar walls and lines of grey stone, and Alberti’s writing on the round temple as the most perfect form; the round temples of Rome and Tivoli; and the early Christian martyrium. The departure: the ancient round temple brought back whole, in stone, as a Christian building; the Doric order used with its full frieze of triglyphs and metopes; the wall treated as mass and the building as a sculptural body rather than a frame of lines. In a few metres it states the High Renaissance. What holds it: the turn is a return, a wager placed on antiquity, the most proven path of all, and the stake was small, a minor commission for patrons who asked for nothing untried. The turn in the language of architecture is large; what it cost was little.
Charles Dickens · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Dickens turned from the third person of his earlier novels to a first-person retrospective life, and put into it his own secret: the warehouse, his father’s debts, his first love. The stake was real, a private shame carried into public fiction, and the turn redirected his art toward Bleak House and Great Expectations. But the kind was not new: the novel of a life runs from Defoe through Fielding’s Tom Jones, told in the third person, and Wilhelm Meister to Jane Eyre (1847), two years before the first number. The swerve lies in the depth of the remembered child and the present-tense retrospect, not in the form; the serial frame, the comic cast and the moral close are the proven path. A decisive deepening of a known form, short of the gate.
Juan Bautista de Toledo and Juan de Herrera · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the Spanish royal house built into a monastery, at Guadalupe, at Santo Tomás in Ávila and at Yuste, where Charles V’s rooms looked onto the altar of the Hieronymite church; the grid of courts of the great hospitals, from Filarete’s Ospedale Maggiore to the Spanish royal hospitals; and the centralised church of Bramante and Michelangelo, which Toledo had known in Rome. The departure: every ornament stripped, granite left to speak in plain planes and the orders alone, and monastery, palace, college, library and mausoleum fused under one geometry at a scale no Spanish building had approached. What holds it lowest: the programme is Spanish precedent enlarged, the grammar Italian, and the turn one of reduction and scale more than of invention.
James Baldwin · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The turn is against the protest novel that Richard Wright had made the form of Black American fiction, and which Baldwin had attacked in “Everybody’s Protest Novel” (1949) before he had a novel to show: a public wager he had to make good. The book turns from the white world’s violence as subject to the interior of a Black family and church, and takes its instruments from Henry James and the King James Bible rather than from naturalism. The stake was high for a first novel by a young writer who had broken with his mentor. What holds the axis among the lowest of the twelve: the forms are inherited, the one day with long retrospection, the third person entering several minds, and the conversion narrative, one of the oldest American forms. The swerve is from a field, not from the novel.
Natsume Sōseki · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Japanese naturalist novel and its confessional mode, of which Tayama Katai’s Futon (1907) is the type, and Sōseki’s own practice of the psychological novel. The swerve: a confession set inside someone else’s novel, whose narrator gives up half the book to a dead man’s letter and never returns to close it; a hero who is an enigma for two parts and wholly transparent in the third; a novel of conscience in which nothing happens in the present tense but a dying in the provinces and a train. The stake was real: a newspaper serial for a mass readership whose last fifty-six instalments are a letter. Held in the low eights, the weakest of the gated axes, because the method was prepared in Sōseki’s preceding novels, Higan sugi made (1912) with its shifting narrators, and Kōjin (1912 to 1913), which already ends in a long letter about its hero. The book perfects a turn he had made rather than making it here.
Anton Chekhov · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Russian story of madness and confinement, from Gogol’s “Diary of a Madman”; Dostoevsky’s novel of ideas argued in dialogue; and Tolstoy’s moral fiction, whose doctrine of non-resistance to evil Chekhov had followed for some years. The turn is in two things. This is a story of ideas with no mouthpiece: Gromov’s protest is half madness and Ragin’s stoicism half wisdom, and the action, not a speaker, passes judgment. And it turns against the quietism its author had held, putting it in the mouth of a decent, idle man and letting it kill him. The stake was a public break with a master and a manner. Held below the bar because the departure stays within Chekhov’s art and its tradition: a turn of thought more than of form.
Ernest Hemingway · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the war novel with a love story, Tolstoy above all (Hemingway’s admiration for War and Peace is on record), and Hemingway’s own manner, by then the most imitated style in English. The swerve has two parts. Against his own method: a long, interior, discursive novel, with sentences running a page, in place of the iceberg, and a hero who thinks at length. Against his own side: a supporter of the Republic puts a Republican atrocity at the book’s centre and names a living Comintern leader as a paranoid obstructor, at a moment when the left wanted the war told cleanly. The invented English for Spanish is a real wager, and much mocked. Held below the gate because the novel form itself is a proven path, and the larger departure in Hemingway’s work was made in the 1920s.
Joseph Haydn · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Handel’s English oratorio and the Viennese symphony Haydn had himself brought to its height. The departures are real. The Chaos is a representation written as harmony withholding resolution, and it looks forward to the nineteenth century. The oratorio is built on orchestral tone-painting at a density no one had used, the orchestra announcing each creature before the singer. And it is a German oratorio for a public concert, published in two languages. The stake was moderate. The work was commissioned and underwritten by van Swieten’s society of noblemen, came after Haydn’s triumphs in London, and spoke the Viennese classical style at its most assured. It is a great synthesis more than a turn.
J. M. W. Turner · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the marine picture, the sea battle and the portrait of a ship, beside a history painting that kept its grandeur for heroic deeds. The turn is real, and it is large: a contemporary errand of industry, a steam tug taking a hulk to the breakers, raised to the scale and seriousness of history, with the meaning carried by colour and light rather than by figure or gesture, and a machine given the central agency in a grand elegy this early in the century. The stake holds the axis below the gate. The picture stands inside the manner Turner had spent two decades opening, not at its edge, and it was well received when shown: a swerve on a road the painter had already made.
Andrea Palladio · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the basilican church, whose high nave and low aisles had resisted the temple front since Alberti’s Sant’Andrea at Mantua; the central plan, the ideal of the treatises; and Palladio’s own path, the façade of San Francesco della Vigna and San Giorgio Maggiore, begun in 1566. The departure: three spaces of three characters, hall, tribune and choir, joined on one axis as a sequence rather than a compromise between long and central plans; the apses and windows of the Roman baths brought into a church; a screen of columns to end the vista; and interlocking temple fronts carried to a front that answers the whole section. The stake was public, a state’s vow debated in the Senate, where a central plan was proposed and rejected. Held below the bar because the turn was taken step by step along a path San Giorgio had opened.
Otto Dix · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The turn is real and double. Dix takes the Christian winged altar of the German painters of about 1500 and fills it with the industrial war, secular and without consolation; and in the age of the avant garde, and after his own Dada and Verist work, he goes back to the glaze technique of the old masters, a swerve against modern painting itself. The stake was real: a large anti war altarpiece made in Germany as the nationalist right rose, by a professor at the Dresden Academy who was dismissed in 1933. But the departure is partly a return. The triptych was already in use as a modern secular form (Beckmann began his first in 1932), the war had been Dix’s ground since 1920, and the old master manner was the common currency of the Neue Sachlichkeit.
Norman builders, under William II · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the Middle Byzantine church programme, the Latin basilica of the reform papacy and of Monte Cassino, the Arab building of Palermo, and the two Norman Sicilian churches already made in this mixed manner, the Cappella Palatina and Cefalù. The departure is in scale and in the completeness of the fusion: a Byzantine programme laid over the whole of a Latin basilica rather than over a sanctuary or a palace chapel, at the size of a cathedral, finished in about a decade. The stake was real: the cost, the speed, a cathedral set up against the archbishop, and the bet that one interior could make three traditions speak as one. But the path was proved, and the turn is in degree: the culmination of a manner rather than its invention.
Diego Rivera · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the fresco cycle of the Italian Renaissance, which Rivera had studied in Italy, with its registers, predellas and sacred programme, and the Mexican mural renaissance of the 1920s, which he had led at the Ministry of Education and at Chapingo. The departure is the fresco cycle turned on the industrial plant: the factory as the subject a chapel once held, the machine painted as fully as the body, the predella given to industry. The stake was real and was paid: a communist painting the Ford works for Ford’s son, in a public museum, in the Depression, and calls to whitewash the walls when they opened. What holds the axis among the two lowest, short of the gate, is that the language was Rivera’s own and proven by 1932: the cycle carries his manner to a new subject rather than turning from it, and Chapingo was the greater formal wager.
Sergei Prokofiev · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the full-length narrative ballet of Petipa and Tchaikovsky and, in Soviet ballet, the new dram-ballet of Asafyev’s The Fountain of Bakhchisarai (1934). The departures: a Shakespearean tragedy as a full-length ballet; a score built as continuous symphonic drama with leading themes, not as numbers for variations; dissonance and abrupt harmonic side-steps in a lyrical idiom. The stake was real: the Bolshoi refused it, the dancers called it undanceable, and 1936 was the year of Pravda’s attack on Shostakovich. Held below the gate because much of the turn runs along a road already opened by Tchaikovsky’s symphonic ballet and the dram-ballet’s programme, and because, against Prokofiev’s earlier ballets and Stravinsky’s, it is a turn toward lyric simplicity.
Arcade Fire · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the indie rock of the 1990s, its lo-fi and its irony, beside the earnest folk-orchestral strain of Neutral Milk Hotel, the anthem of Springsteen and early U2, the art rock of Talking Heads and Bowie, and the large collectives of the Montreal and Toronto scenes. The turn is real: a debut that gives up the decade’s cool for open sincerity, sets strings, accordion and xylophone inside a rock band, and makes the shouted chorus of many voices its main instrument. The stake was real too: a first record on a small label, at constant risk of bombast and sentiment. What holds it below the gate is that nearly every element was proven. The swerve is a change of temperature more than of language: a strong accent, not a new grammar.
Josquin des Prez · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the cantus firmus mass of Dufay, Ockeghem and Obrecht: a chant or song laid out in long notes in the tenor as a scaffold, a plan Josquin had used himself. The departure is the dissolving of the scaffold. The hymn becomes the motivic source of all four voices in pervading imitation, the texture of equal voices that the motet had been developing, carried across a whole Ordinary and pared to great brevity. Held below the gate on the stake and the path. Paraphrase was not new, and pervading imitation had been Josquin’s road, and his generation’s, for two decades. A master of settled fame risked nothing; the swerve is a summation that turns the road, not a wager against it.
Vladimir Nabokov · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is plain: Tolstoy’s Childhood and Aksakov’s family chronicle, the Russian gentry memoir, Herzen’s My Past and Thoughts for exile, and Proust above all for memory and the redemption of time. The turn is an autobiography built by the methods of the novelist and the chess-problem composer, by theme rather than chronology, with the reader set to find designs as in a puzzle; memory made deliberate, sought and checked, against Proust’s involuntary kind; a last chapter turned to “you”; and the book remade across two languages, revision made part of its claim to truth. The stake was real, since a memoir that refuses confession, politics and psychology risks preciousness. But the path was proven, and the book refines what Proust and Tolstoy opened more than it turns against them.
William Makepeace Thackeray · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The subtitle is the swerve: “A Novel without a Hero”. Thackeray refused the hero of the sentimental and the silver-fork novel, which he had parodied for years in Punch and elsewhere, and put at the centre an amoral woman who is the book’s most living figure and is never punished in proportion, beside a heroine the book quietly indicts. The stake was real: he was known as a journalist and parodist, not a novelist, and entered the market of the monthly part that Dickens held. But the inherited path is plain. The intrusive, moralising, ironic narrator is Fielding’s, whom Thackeray revered; the satiric anatomy of the town is the eighteenth century’s, Hogarth’s and Smollett’s; and the irony at the expense of sentiment is Austen’s turned to a larger stage. A turn taken with weight, not a new road: held below the gate.
Bertolt Brecht · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the German history play of Goethe and Schiller, in which the great man’s conscience is the drama, and Brecht’s own epic theatre of the 1920s and 1930s. The turn is real: a history play whose hero is denied the heroic death, whose recantation was first framed as cunning and is condemned, in the Berlin text, by the man himself; captions that kill suspense so that the audience judges the how and the why; a hero whose sensuality is the measure of his science and of his cowardice alike. The cost was paid twice, in exile and in rewriting the play against its own first conclusion. Held below the gate because this is the most classical of Brecht’s major plays, the one most often taken in by identification: a swerve from Schiller, not a reorganisation of the theatre.
Käthe Kollwitz · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The turn is real and was costly. A German war memorial of the 1920s and 1930s with no soldier, no weapon, no victory, no fatherland and no inscription of sacrifice: the mourners are the monument, and they kneel. Set beside the heroic memorials of the same years, it leaves the type entirely. The cost was paid in time, eighteen years and designs abandoned, and in standing: within a year of the installation Kollwitz was forced from the Prussian Academy, though for her politics and not for this work. But the means are no swerve. The figures are closed, blocky, figurative carving in a manner shared with Barlach and the German sculptors of the period, and Kollwitz’s graphic mastery is translated here rather than reinvented. The turn of meaning is high and the turn of form modest; the axis scores the two together.
Seamus Heaney · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The turn is real and it cost something. Heaney moved from the rural lyric of Death of a Naturalist into a mythic method that took the Northern killings as its subject in a narrow, almost runic stanza, and in Part II dropped the method for plain speech about Belfast in 1969 and after. To put a Catholic Ulster poet’s tribal sympathy on the page in that way, in that year, was a wager, and the charge that the myth excuses the killing has been pressed against the book since its first year. But the swerve from the tradition is narrower than the swerve from his own past: the archaeological mythic lyric owes much to Hughes and to Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns (1971), and Part II’s confessional plain style owes to Lowell. A strong departure on a partly proven path.
Margaret Atwood · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the twentieth-century dystopia, Zamyatin, Huxley and above all Orwell, whose appendix on Newspeak stands behind the Historical Notes; feminist speculative fiction, Russ, Le Guin and Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, and behind it Katharine Burdekin’s Swastika Night (1937); and Atwood’s own literary realism. The turn moves the dystopia from the state’s machinery to the female body, and from Winston Smith’s rebellion told in the third person to an intimate first-person testimony in which the narrator rebels almost not at all; the found-document frame becomes a satire on the scholars who will receive her. The stake was real and bounded: the most prominent Canadian novelist of her generation staked her standing on a form the literary establishment held at arm’s length. Held below the bar because the path was proven: Orwell’s architecture is visible throughout, and Burdekin and Piercy had already turned the form toward gender.
Pagan builders, under King Kyansittha · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the early Pagan gu in the Mon manner, a dark temple with one ambulatory and a shrine at one end, as at Pahtothamya and Nagayon, and the cruciform temples of eastern India with their curved towers. The departures: the shrine turned to the four quarters, so the temple has no front; a solid core in place of an inner shrine; two corridors in place of one; the interior lit from concealed openings rather than left dark; the whole raised to a height and span Pagan had not built. The stake was real: a brick vaulted mass of this size, in an earthquake zone. What holds it: each element came from somewhere, and the four-faced plan has Indian precedent, the great temple at Paharpur the usual citation.
Joni Mitchell · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the folk-based singer-songwriter album of 1970 and 1971, Mitchell’s own Ladies of the Canyon among it, and the turn goes two ways. In content the song stops being a persona or a parable and becomes an unguarded first-person account, with the singer charged as fully as anyone. In music the open tunings, the dulcimer and irregular phrase lengths draw the songs away from folk chord patterns toward harmonies that do not settle, and the piano songs lean toward jazz. The stake was personal more than commercial: a self exposed at the point of rising fame. What holds it below the gate: the confessional mode had precedents in poetry and in Dylan, Cohen and James Taylor; the musical swerve is moderate beside her later records; and the record kept to the song form and to a market that welcomed it.
Carol Reed · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the thriller and the dark crime film of the 1940s, and Reed’s own path: Odd Man Out (1947) had already made a wounded man’s last night in a city into expressionist pursuit, and The Fallen Idol (1948) had already joined Reed and Greene. Location shooting in real ruins was neorealism’s, and the canted frame was not new. The departures are real and cost something: a whole score for one café zither, against every convention of the thriller; the best speech given to the villain and the hero made a fool; an ending that refuses the reunion; the tilt made a governing law. Held below the bar because the turn is a wager placed on paths already proven, combined with great force.
Reed and Stem, and Warren and Wetmore · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the great railway terminal of the nineteenth century, a head house before an iron train shed, the trains at grade and the smoke in the street; and the Beaux-Arts civic monument, which Warren had learned at the École. The departure is in the plan and the section, not the dress: no shed at all; two levels of electrified track buried and decked over; the air above the yard sold for an avenue and its towers; ramps in place of stairs; traffic carried round the building on its own roadway. The stake was very large: a working terminal rebuilt in place over a decade, the railroad's capital wagered on the sale of air. Held below the bar because Penn Station had put electric trains below a monumental room in 1910, because the face is a confident version of a proven costume, and because the turn was compelled by law as much as chosen.
Billy Wilder · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the hard-boiled novel of Cain, Chandler and Hammett, the Warner crime film, the detective cycle that The Maltese Falcon (1941) had just renewed, and the Weimar cinema of shadow from which Wilder came. The turns are real. The story is told by the murderer, in his own voice, after the fact, so the audience knows the outcome in the first minutes and watches the trap close. The investigator is a friend and a claims man, not a detective. A studio’s light comedian and its most bankable actress are cast as killers. And a novel the Production Code office had refused to pass in the 1930s was brought through it. The stake was real: two stars, and a director in his third American film. What holds the figure: the voice-over, the fatal woman and the low-key light all existed, and the film combined them with a new hardness.
Artemisia Gentileschi · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is twofold. Caravaggio’s Judith Beheading Holofernes, of about 1599, the direct model: a young woman at arm’s length, brow knit in distaste, an old maid waiting with the sack. And the Florentine Judith of Donatello and Allori: the aftermath, the head displayed, Judith composed. The departure is real: the killing taken from distaste into effort, the maid made a young partner, the bodies brought close and locked, the act shown at its most physical by a woman painter in large history painting, where women rarely worked, in the city whose Judiths were all decorum. The stake was real. What holds the axis is priority: the swerve was first made in the Naples canvas some seven years earlier, and this canvas places the same wager again, enlarged and refined.
Max Beckmann · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the medieval and Netherlandish altarpiece of Bosch and Grünewald, the German Expressionist figure, the hard, cold contour of Neue Sachlichkeit, and Beckmann’s own large, crowded allegories of the 1920s. The departure: the triptych taken out of the church and made the vehicle of a modern, secular, political allegory, private myth in place of shared scripture, a form the century had left to religious commissions and a few Symbolists made the painter’s principal instrument for the rest of his life. The stake was real: he lost his post at the Städel school in 1933, and in 1937 the regime hung him among the degenerate. Below the gate because the swerve is from his own path more than from the field’s, and the means, contour, compression and colour, were already his.
Thomas Pynchon · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the detective novel of the California private eye, Borges’s fictions of invented worlds and hidden orders, Nabokov’s play, the Jacobean revenge tragedy, and Pynchon’s own V. (1963), which had already built a long novel on the quest for a conspiracy that may be imaginary. The swerve is the detective story that refuses its solution and ends at the instant before revelation, with a woman as the detective and the postal system as the conspiracy, so that the genre of certainty becomes the genre of undecidable knowledge. The stake was smaller than V.’s: a short, accessible book after a large one, in a genre frame. Held two tenths below the bar because the undecidable quest was V.’s and Borges’s before it was this book’s, and the turn here is concentration more than departure.
Octavio Paz · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The departure is real and specific. The poem joins three inheritances no one had joined at this length: the classical Spanish hendecasyllable, the image-chain and automatic flow of French surrealism (the catalogue of the woman as world stands in the line of Breton’s L’Union libre), and an Indigenous Mexican cosmology made into structure, all held in one unpunctuated sentence that does not end. The stake was real: a long poem with no full stop, no sections and no narrative can sink, and this one wagered its coherence on the motion of syntax alone. Against more: the long modern poem of the self and history already existed, in Eliot and in Pound, and nearer home in José Gorostiza’s Muerte sin fin (1939), which this poem answers; Nerval’s sonnet gave it its idea of the return. A swerve made within a proven modernist path.
David Fincher · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the studio star picture and the film of male alienation: Taxi Driver, A Clockwork Orange with its charismatic narrator, and Trainspotting (1996), whose voice-over had already turned a shopping list into a sermon. The departures are real: a film paid for by a media conglomerate that attacks the consumer life its audience lives; a star vehicle whose star does not exist; a film that tampers with its own frames. So was the stake: it failed at the box office and drew hostile notices. Held below the gate because much of the turn was borrowed: the twist, the rules and much of the voice from the novel, the split-self twist from Psycho, the spliced obscene frame and the image burned in the gate from Persona (1966).
Gabriel García Márquez · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The turn is real and its inheritance is visible. The inverted detective story, with killers, victim and hour known on the first page and the only question how a town let it happen, has antecedents in Sophocles’ Oedipus and in the reporting novel of the 1960s, Capote’s In Cold Blood above all. The swerve is the fusion of the two: a forensic chronicle, with testimony, the brief of the case and the narrator’s footwork, put to the service of tragic fatality. It was also the author’s own turn, after the baroque of El otoño del patriarca (1975) and the marvels of Cien años de soledad, to a plain, almost documentary manner in which the uncanny survives only as coincidence and dream. The stake was moderate. He was at the height of his reputation, and the book risked being taken for a minor exercise in journalism; it met that risk. What holds the axis there is the security of the position and the proven forms the turn was made on: a strong accent, more than a wager of the first order.
Senenmut (attributed), under Hatshepsut · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance stood next door: the terraced, colonnaded temple of Mentuhotep II in the same bay, about five centuries older, with its ramp and porticoes; and behind it the New Kingdom temple of court and sanctuary on an axis. The departures are real. The terraces became the whole figure, a stratified horizontal front against the cliff with no central mass; the axis was carried into a sanctuary cut in the rock; Amun, Hathor, Anubis, the sun and the royal ancestors were ordered on one stepped scheme; and the fluted polygonal column was given a clarity later eyes called proto-Doric. The stake was political. But the wager was placed on a proven path: the turn transforms its model more than it breaks from it.
Andrei Tarkovsky · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is double: the science fiction film, with Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, four years earlier, as its nearest and largest model, and Lem’s novel of 1961, whose subject is the limit of science before an alien mind. The turn from both is wide. The genre’s spectacle is refused: forty minutes on Earth before the station, a ship seen only from the inside, an alien never given a human likeness, a climax that is a man kneeling. Lem’s epistemology becomes a drama of conscience and a return home. The stake was real: after Andrei Rublev (8.7) had been held back from release, a director in disfavour made a long, unspectacular film with a Bach chorale and a Christian parable on a state studio’s money. Held below the gate because the style had been proven in Rublev, and the project was in part chosen as the more acceptable one.
Kyivan Rus builders, under Yaroslav the Wise · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance was the middle Byzantine cross-in-square: one dome or five over a compact plan, a church of modest size. Kyiv’s builders turned it hard: five aisles in place of three, thirteen domes stepped in a pyramid, galleries wrapping three sides, a choir gallery for a court, and a scale far beyond the churches Constantinople built in the same decades. The stake was real. A polity converted some fifty years before, with no tradition of masonry on this scale, set its claim to rank beside Byzantium on a structure larger and more intricate than its masters’ own. Held below the gate because the terms stay Byzantine: vaulting, plan type and programme are inherited, and the departure is multiplication and composition, not a new principle.
Built for Bishop Bernard de Castanet · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The type was not invented here. The single aisleless vessel with chapels between internal buttresses belongs to the southern Gothic of Languedoc and Catalonia, with the Raymondine nave at Toulouse and the churches of the friars before it. The swerve is in carrying that type to the scale and dignity of a cathedral at the moment when the northern cathedral, aisled, buttressed by flyers and walled in glass, was the norm the crusade had brought south. To build the mother church of the see as a fortress of brick, refusing that model, was a real turn and a political stake, and its cost is plain: no glass cage, no west front. Held because the path was regional and proven; Albi enlarges and hardens it more than it turns it.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Gothic of the Île-de-France and its neighbours, the race of height in which each choir answered the last, and the Rayonnant thinning of wall into glass and tracery. The departure: height pushed past Amiens by about six metres, a glazed triforium joined to a clerestory of extraordinary length, supports thinned and flyers lightened past any precedent. The axis scores turn and stake together, and the stake here was physical and was paid, in the vaults that fell in 1284 and in the tower that fell after them. What holds it is the kind of turn: a departure of degree within a proven path, more of what Amiens did rather than a different thing. The Flamboyant transept is a fine late answer within a long-settled language, not a swerve.
Christina Rossetti · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The title poem’s departure is real and cost something. Its metre swings out of every expected English measure: lines of two stresses beside lines of four, rhymes delayed or bunched, a nursery rhythm used for an adult fable of appetite and rescue, and set at the head of a first book. The swerve in matter is as large: a redemption myth with no man at its centre, in which a woman saves a woman bodily, and a fairy tale in which the erotic is unhidden and the shape is still claimed as Christian. Against this, the lyrics refine an inherited instrument, Petrarch’s sonnet, the hymn and the ballad, rather than break it, and their reticence is a manner that Herbert and the hymnal had prepared. One great swerve and one fine inheritance: 8.3.
Francis Ford Coppola · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is open: Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966), a man enlarging photographs of a park until a murder appears; the European film of the alienated professional; and the American suspense film, the voyeur of Hitchcock’s Rear Window (8.4) and the bathroom of Psycho (8.7). The turns are real. The premise moves from image to sound, so that the evidence is heard and the viewer hears it with Harry; a thriller with almost no action is built on a closed man’s interior; the solution is a rehearing, not new evidence. The stake: after The Godfather (9.0), Coppola chose a small, personal film at modest cost. It was cushioned by his standing, and the premise is borrowed whole: its transposition, however fruitful, is a turn on a proven path, and that holds the axis below the bar.
Wim Wenders · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Wenders’s own road cinema of the 1970s and Paris, Texas (1984), at 8.3 on this desk; the New German Cinema’s quarrel with German history; and the city symphony back to Ruttmann’s Berlin (1927). The turn is real: after a road film of American myth had won him the Palme d’Or, Wenders made a static, metaphysical film of one city, in German, built round Handke’s poetry, and that was a stake. The image system is less new than it looks. Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death (1946) had already divided a heaven from an earth by monochrome and colour, in the opposite assignment, and the guardian angel among mortals is an old Hollywood figure. The swerve is in tone and seriousness more than in what cinema could do.
Michael Cimino · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the war film, the American epic of community in Ford and Stevens, the veteran’s-return picture after The Best Years of Our Lives, and the family epic of The Godfather. The turns are real: an hour given to a wedding before a shot is fired; a cut from Clairton to Vietnam with no bridge, and no training, unit or campaign on the screen; the war told through three friends and one game; an ending with no victory and no verdict, only a patriotic song at a funeral breakfast, its tone left open. The stake was large: a long, costly film on the war from a director with one previous feature. Held below the gate because the form is the classical epic swollen rather than broken, and the boldest element, the roulette, is a melodramatic device placed where the war’s own facts would have stood.
Alfonso Cuarón · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the dystopian film, from Alphaville (1965) through Blade Runner (1982) and Brazil (1985), whose futures were designed, gleaming or baroque; the chase thriller; and the handheld war film after Saving Private Ryan (1998). The turns are real. The future is built from the present worn down, with the news images of the 2000s, cages, hoods and checkpoints, carried twenty years on. The action film is shot in long unbroken takes with a documentary camera inside it, so set pieces are endured rather than cut for excitement. The novel’s English Christian fable becomes a story of refugees. The stake was real: a costly studio picture, a downbeat subject, an ending without triumph. Held below the bar because Welles, Tarkovsky and Kalatozov had proved the long take, and The Battle of Algiers (1966) the documentary look in fiction.
Philip Roth · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Jewish American comic novel of Bellow and of Roth himself, the confessional monologue of Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), and behind them the carnival line of Rabelais, Céline and Henry Miller. The turn is in age and in refusal: an old man’s carnality and rage given at full length, with no apology, no redemption and no frame of irony to excuse it, in a decade whose literary culture had grown wary of exactly this. The stake was real. Roth risked, and received, the charge that the book was repellent and that its author shared its hero’s contempt, and the book is still argued on those terms; it also opened the most productive decade of his career. Held below the gate because the instrument, the voice that runs on and spares nothing, had been Roth’s own since 1969, and the swerve is one of degree and of age more than of means.
Maya · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Classic Maya court art: the stela with a single ruler in profile, frontal and still, and the painted vessel with a few figures in a palace scene. The cycle turns that tradition into continuous narrative at architectural scale, with crowds, overlap, figures seen from behind, bodies in foreshortening, and the battle as a field rather than a line. The departure is plain beside any stela of the same decades, and the wager lay in the scale and in the candour of the violence. Its measure is harder to take. The courts were already painting many-figured scenes on walls and vessels, as the market murals of Calakmul and the far earlier murals of San Bartolo show; the painters’ own earlier work is lost; and how far the cycle swerved from wall painting that has not survived cannot be known.
Denis Johnson · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is plain: Hemingway’s In Our Time, the linked book of a young man’s episodes, and the plain working-class story of Raymond Carver and the dirty realism of the 1980s. The turn is in what Johnson brought into that idiom: a poet’s ecstatic line, a visionary and theological register, and a narrator whose unreliability is part of the design, who breaks the past tense to tell what he learned later or claims to have known before. It is Carver’s world without Carver’s restraint of feeling, made hallucinated and holy. The stake was real and bounded: a book about addicts with no moral frame and no redemption a reader could trust risked being read as a celebration, and the collection was the weaker form in the market. Held below the bar because the form, the milieu and much of the plain style were inherited, and Johnson, already a poet and the author of four novels, placed the wager on his own known strengths.
The Smashing Pumpkins · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is mixed and plain: the hard and progressive rock of the 1970s, the guitar walls of My Bloody Valentine and the British bands around them, the heavy riffing of metal, and the alternative rock of the American underground. The turn is to join them, and to set against the rawness of the scene around it, in the year of In Utero, a record of maximal production: guitars overdubbed in dense layers, a jazz-trained drummer, strings and bells, dynamics from hush to roar. Against that scene and that year, the turn was a real one. What holds it short of the bar is the path: each joined language was proven, the guitar walls had been built, and the move toward polish was a move toward the larger audience, not away from it.
George Miller · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Miller’s own: The Road Warrior (1981) had made the tanker chase across a wasteland the form, and the post-apocalyptic road film is largely his. Against the blockbuster of its decade the turns are real and several: a franchise film near wordless; the title hero made a passenger and a pair of hands for a woman’s quest; nearly the whole film one continuous pursuit; stunts performed rather than generated, at a scale few productions attempted. The stake was large: a costly studio picture by a director near seventy, after more than a decade of stalled development and a hard shoot in the desert. Held below the gate because the central wager returns to a path its own director proved thirty years before.
Voltaire · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is threefold: the picaresque and the Greek romance, with their separations, shipwrecks, captivities and reunions; the philosophical voyage of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes (1721); and Voltaire’s own contes, Zadig (1747) and Micromégas (1752). The turn is to make the machinery of romance the refutation itself. Providence in a romance is the novelist’s coincidence, and by driving coincidence to absurdity, the hanged and dissected philosopher alive at a galley oar beside the stabbed baron, the book makes the plot of providence ridiculous. The stake was real: the book was printed anonymously, condemned and burned, and its author disowned it. Held below the bar because the wager was placed on proven paths by a writer already famous and safe at Les Délices; the risk was reputation and confiscation, not the form’s survival or his own.
Aldous Huxley · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
The turn is real. The utopian novel of Wells had imagined a rational world state as the good. Huxley took the same state, kept its science, its eugenics and its plenty, and showed it as a hell made of satisfactions. The dystopia of pleasure, set against the dystopias of force, is his swerve, and it cost something: a novelist of conversation pieces staked his reputation on a futurist satire in a decade when much of the left saw planned societies as hope. What holds the axis below the gate is the form. The visitor’s tour, the outsider who enters and the dialogue with the ruler are the inherited machinery of utopia from More to Wells, and Zamyatin’s We (1924) had already set an engineered, numbered happiness against the irrational man; whether Huxley had read it is disputed, and nothing here rests on it. A turn of vision, made on a proven frame.
Leo Tolstoy · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Tolstoy’s own realism and the Russian novel of the fallen woman redeemed; Dostoevsky’s Sonya stands behind Katyusha. The turn is from the novel as a world to the novel as an indictment. After What Is Art? (1897), Tolstoy wrote a book that sets its art under a Christian anarchist argument against the state, the court and the church, and uses his realism as estrangement: the Orthodox liturgy is described as a priest handling bread and wine and repeating words no one understands. The stake was as high as a novel can carry: the censor, the Synod’s sentence, the risk to his name as an artist, and a public pledge of the earnings to the Doukhobors. Held below the gate because the form itself, the conversion plot and the guided tour of institutions, is inherited, and the swerve lies in use and nerve more than in means.
Jacob Lawrence · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance: history painting and its heroes; the narrative cycle in prints and murals, from Goya’s series to the Mexican muralists, and Aaron Douglas’s Aspects of Negro Life in the library where the captions were written; the social realism and documentary photography of the 1930s; and Lawrence’s own three biographical series. The departure: a history painting with no hero, its protagonist an anonymous mass; an event of the painter’s parents’ lifetime treated as epic; a flat, cut, unmodelled idiom, drawn from Cubism and from Harlem’s posters and patterned interiors, put to a documentary task realism had claimed. Held below the gate because the serial form and the flat idiom were already his: from Toussaint L’Ouverture this is a step, not a break.
Federico Fellini · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance is neorealism, then the governing method of serious Italian cinema: real poverty, real roads, a social cause for suffering. Fellini keeps the poverty and the roads and turns from the cause. The suffering here is of the soul, the figures come from the circus and the parable, the film asks about grace and purpose rather than wages, and at its centre is a comic actress, Giulietta Masina, playing a mime-clown. The turn is real, but it was made on prepared ground, and that holds the axis below the bar: Rossellini’s Francesco, giullare di Dio (1950) and Europa ’51 had already turned neorealism toward the spiritual, Chaplin had made the holy clown, and Fellini’s own I vitelloni (1953) had begun the move.
T. S. Eliot · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
The departure was real and was a wager. In 1935 the English stage had no living tradition of serious verse drama, and Eliot reached past it to the morality play, the Greek chorus and the liturgy, writing for a cathedral rather than a theatre. The rhymed stress lines of the Tempters, taken from Everyman, and the choral writing were new on the modern English stage. The bravest stroke is the Knights’ turn to prose and to the audience, an anachronism that breaks the frame of the medieval play to put the twentieth century in the dock; it could have been a gimmick and is not. Held below the gate because the forms it revived were inherited, and the swerve is a return as much as a departure.
Luis Buñuel · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance is threefold: Kessel’s psychological novel of 1928; the French commercial cinema of stars and quality, from which Deneuve came after Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1964) and Repulsion (1965); and Buñuel’s own surrealism, from Un chien andalou and L’Âge d’or to Viridiana. The departures are real: fantasy cut in without dissolve, filter or music, so that no scene is guaranteed; an erotic film made nearly without nudity, by suggestion, sound and objects; an ending left undecidable. So was the stake: a star, producers who wanted a commercial erotic film, the censor, and a director of sixty-seven in exile. What holds the axis is the path. The unmarked dream was Buñuel’s proven practice, in Los olvidados and Viridiana, and L’Année dernière à Marienbad (1961) had already made the indeterminacy of the real a complete form.
Hayao Miyazaki · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the grammar of feature animation, Disney’s and Toei’s and Miyazaki’s own adventure films, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and Castle in the Sky. The turn is toward a feature with no villain, no quest, no peril until the last reel, and long passages of nothing: a child sitting, rain falling, a frog at the bus stop. A drawn feature built on ma, empty time, and on a child’s attention was a wager against the medium’s commercial logic; it was released on a double bill, and its fortune came later. But the quotidian mode was not new to cinema: Ozu and Hiroshi Shimizu had filmed children’s ordinary days long before. The swerve is the carrying of that mode into animation, and it falls short of the bar.
Zapotec builders · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Formative centres of the valley, San José Mogote above all, with platforms, public buildings and carved stones on the valley floor, and the Mesoamerican vocabulary of platform, stair, plaza and ball court. The departure: the seat of power moved from the valley floor to an uninhabited ridge with no water, the ridge levelled into a plaza on a scale nothing in the valley had attempted, and the city planned round that plaza from the start. The stake was real: water and food had to be carried up for a population of thousands, and a capital on a hill depends on the valley’s consent or its subjection. Building J is a formal swerve with no near parallel. What holds the axis: the buildings speak the region’s shared vocabulary, and the turn lies in siting and scale.
Michelangelo Antonioni · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the thriller of discovered evidence, and Antonioni’s own art cinema: L’Avventura (1960) had already let a mystery go unsolved and turned to the people who forget it. The turns are real. The thriller’s machine, a photograph, a body, a woman who wants the film back, is built and then refused: no solution, no culprit, no police. An Italian modernist made a commercial English-language picture in the most fashionable city of its day and used its surface, colour, pop music and sex as the matter of a philosophical film. The stake was high, an MGM release without a Production Code seal that could have failed and did not. Held below the bar because the swerve is in large part a proven method carried to a new city and a new genre frame.
Alvar Aalto · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
In 1949 the inherited language of Finnish modernism, Aalto’s own included, was the white rendered block of his sanatorium at Paimio. Säynätsalo turns from it to red brick, timber, turf and an enclosed court on a mound: material weight, enclosure and history in place of the free plan and the open block. The stake was real: a public building for a poor postwar municipality, under the rationing of materials, in a language that could be read as regression. But the turn did not begin here. Villa Mairea had already brought timber and collage into the modern house, and Aalto had already built in rough red brick at scale in America. Säynätsalo consolidates the swerve and makes it civic; it does not inaugurate it.
Bill Evans Trio · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
The turn is from the piano trio as pianist with accompaniment, as Oscar Peterson and Erroll Garner had it, and in another way Ahmad Jamal, to three equal voices: the bass free of the walking line, entering the melody and the harmony, the drums colouring time rather than marking it. On this record the turn goes furthest. Scott LaFaro’s lines on “Solar” and “Gloria’s Step” are counterpoint, not support. The stake was real: a working trio that had not sold well, recorded in a club before small audiences, released a record on its bassist’s terms. Held from the top: the swerve was first made on Portrait in Jazz (1959) and Explorations (1961); this record perfects it rather than makes it, and the turns of Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane in the same years cost more.
Jørn Utzon · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the whitewashed Danish village church with its stepped gable and tower, and nearer, the modern church as sculptural object, as at Notre-Dame du Haut at Ronchamp (8.8), or as rational box. Utzon turned from both. He refused the church’s public sign, with no tower, no gable and no figure, put the whole expression inside, and made the inside a free shell that no modernist box would permit, while making the outside from a catalogue of standard parts. The stake: an architect back from Sydney staked his method on a building where it could be tested whole, and a free vault cast in place was a real structural and cost risk on a parish budget. The departure is deep in kind and narrower in consequence.
Robert Smythson (attributed), for Bess of Hardwick · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the courtyard house of the Tudor magnate, its hall entered at one end by a screens passage; and the prodigy houses of the 1570s and 1580s, Longleat and Smythson’s own Wollaton, compact, symmetrical, glazed and towered. The departure: the hall turned through ninety degrees onto the axis; the house ordered by height, the grandest rooms at the top; the outer walls given almost wholly to glass, the flues moved inward to allow it; a compact block with no courtyard and no inward face. The stake was real: a widow near seventy, her fortune beset by lawsuits, building a second great house while her first, beside it, was unfinished, in a material that cost more than stone. Held below the gate because the swerve continues Smythson’s own line rather than breaking from nothing: a step taken to its limit.
Björk · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Björk’s own: the bright eclecticism of Debut and Post, house, big band, trip hop and show tune, each record a magpie’s room; beside it Bristol trip hop’s strings over breakbeats, and the British electronic dance music of Warp and of LFO, Mark Bell’s group. The turn is real. She gave up the eclecticism that had made her famous for a single fixed palette, and joined the acoustic string ensemble and the abrasive programmed beat as one idiom, neither ornament to the other. The stake was a record with fewer obvious singles, harder textures and no pop centre. What holds it near the bar is the path: strings over beats had been placed by Massive Attack, and Bell’s language was proven at Warp. A narrowing and a fusion more than a new language, below Low’s 8.9, where the stake was larger.
Hellenistic · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance is plain: Paionios’s Nike at Olympia (c. 420 BC), descending onto a high pillar with her drapery pressed against her; the wind-pressed, clinging drapery of the Parthenon pediments and the parapet of the Nike temple; the Lysippan figure that opens into space on every side. Type and motif were given. The departure is in what the base does and where the force comes from. The ship is not a support but the scene, and the figure’s form is set by a wind blowing at her from in front, a force outside the sculpture that the marble makes present. The stake was technical, marble wings carried behind a body pitched forward, and the wager was placed largely on a proven path.
The Smile · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the parent band of two of its members, and around it krautrock’s motorik pulse, Afrobeat, London jazz drumming and progressive rock’s uneven meters. The turn is real in kind, not only of degree. Where Radiohead had moved toward electronics and studio layering, this is a trio with guitar and bass at the front, knotted figures in shifting meters, and a jazz drummer whose looseness changes how the songs move; the electronics are set aside for the playing. Held back by the stake. It was a first record by a band with an audience secured in advance, made with the parent band’s producer, by a singer and guitarist who brought their manner whole, in jazz and motorik languages long proven.
Qutb ud-Din Aibak and Iltutmish; upper storeys by Firuz Shah Tughlaq · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Ghaznavid and Ghurid victory tower and minaret of Afghanistan and Iran, in baked brick: the Minaret of Jam its nearest relative, and fluted and flanged shafts at Ghazni. The departures are real. The form is translated into dressed stone, in a land with no tradition of the free-standing minaret; the fluting becomes an alternation of round and angular flutes that no brick tower had; the balconies ride on corbelled muqarnas, an early use in India; and Arabic script is carved by masons whose own art was the temple. The stake was high. Held short because the type was inherited whole; the swerve is of material, scale and ornament, not of conception.
Anselm Kiefer · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is double. Behind it, German Romantic landscape and history painting, Friedrich’s snowy woods among them. Around it, West German art after 1945, which had left figuration and the national subject for abstraction, Zero, Fluxus and the irony of Capitalist Realism, and treated the iconography of German myth as contaminated. The departure: a large figurative history painting of the founding myth of German nationalism, in the forest the Nazis also claimed, painted straight, with the names written in. The stake was real and was paid: Kiefer’s work of these years was read as nostalgia for what it examined, and the hostility came to a head at the Venice Biennale of 1980. Held below the gate because the larger turn had been taken already, in the Occupations of 1969 and the name paintings of 1973.
Richard Linklater · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is plain: the one-night high school film of American Graffiti (1973), whose last night, cars, ensemble and period soundtrack it takes up, and the teen comedies of the 1980s, Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) and the films of John Hughes. The turn is real and thorough. The plot is withdrawn, so that the night builds toward no goal, contest or romance; no story is privileged beyond two light arcs; the songs are the period’s air, not commentary; and the nostalgia the form promises is withheld, since the night is as often boring as golden. It brought the ambling time of Linklater’s Slacker (1990) into a studio teen picture. What holds the axis: the form was proven, and American Graffiti had taken its wager first.
John Vanbrugh with Nicholas Hawksmoor · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Wren’s court Baroque, the French great house on Versailles’s terms, and the rising Palladian decorum of the 1710s. The departure: massing treated as the matter of architecture, masses stepped, broken and piled for effect at a distance, a castle’s skyline on a classical house, a monument’s scale for a subject; and, in Vanbrugh’s paper of 1709 for keeping the ruins of old Woodstock Manor in the view, an argument for the picturesque and for keeping the old, decades ahead of its moment. The stake was real: a soldier and playwright with little training wagering the nation’s money, then his standing, against a Duchess who hated the scheme, and paying in a funding collapse, his resignation, ridicule and a generation of reaction. Held below 8.5 because the turn was made first at Castle Howard, from 1699.
Geoffrey Chaucer · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the French love vision, the Roman de la Rose and Machaut, and the Latin philosophical allegory. The swerve is to let the courtly question be heard, and answered, by the duck, the goose and the cuckoo in their own voices: a comedy of social estates breaks into the love vision, and the vision does not recover its dignity. The ending declines the judgment the form promises, and the dreamer wakes to more reading. In English the stanza itself is new. The stake was real, a court poem that laughs at its courtly matter. The borrowing is not in question here: the swerve lies not in the materials but in what the poem does to them. Held below the bar because the debate poem was a known form, and the turn, though sharp, is made inside a small frame.
Metallica · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the speed and riff of the new wave of British heavy metal (Diamond Head, Motörhead, early Iron Maiden) and the band’s own Kill ’Em All (1983), a fast, short-form debut. The turn is large for its moment: slower and heavier tempos beside the fast ones, acoustic preludes, harmonised guitar lines, songs of six to nine minutes in several sections, a ballad and a long instrumental. A thrash band a year into a scene that measured itself by speed and the refusal of melody gave its second record to dynamics and length, and staked its standing there on it. What holds the figure is the path: Iron Maiden and Mercyful Fate had made long sectional metal, Black Sabbath slow weight.
Gian Lorenzo Bernini · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Mannerist group, above all Giambologna’s Rape of the Sabine Women in Florence, completed in the early 1580s, an abduction whose spiral of three figures draws the viewer round it and has no privileged view. The departure is real and threefold: from formal problem to narrative instant; from stone as form to stone as substance, flesh, hair, tears and fur each worked differently; and from the endless spiral to a principal view with a sequence of secondary ones, closer to a picture. The stake was a twenty-three-year-old’s, on the leading patron’s most demanding commission, with undercutting that could have failed in the block. Held below the gate because the subject, the type of group and the spiralling contrapposto were inherited whole: the swerve is in treatment, on a proven path.
Aleijadinho · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The inherited Mineiro front was flat, between square towers, pierced by windows, under a straight or lightly scrolled pediment. Here the towers are cylinders and stand back; the central bay advances; the window over the door gives way to a carved medallion, so that sculpture takes the place of light at the centre of the front; soapstone becomes the material of the front’s figures; and the frontispiece curves and breaks in a line nearer the rococo of Central Europe than of Lisbon. The stake was real: a provincial brotherhood in a colony staked its prestige building on an untried combination by a local master. Held below the gate because the turn is from a regional line, not a reordering of building, and the interior stays near its type.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Roman love elegy, Propertius above all, with Tibullus and Ovid; and in German, the hexameter and the distich as Klopstock and Voss had naturalised them, largely for sacred epic and for translation. The swerve: a modern poet writes his own love, in the first person, in the ancient couplet, frankly and happily. The genre’s suffering lover, Propertius bound to Cynthia, becomes a fulfilled one, and the measure itself becomes a matter of the body. The stake was real. Goethe’s open bond with Christiane Vulpius was a scandal the poems half confess, and four poems were held back from print as too frank, which marks the risk he judged. Held below 8.5 because the turn was made within a classicism the age was already reaching for, and because Goethe’s own greater departures lie elsewhere.
Franz Marc · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is twofold: German Romantic and Symbolist painting of animals and landscape, and the painter’s own rounded, harmonious animals of the Blaue Reiter years, 1911 to 1912. The departure is from both. He takes the faceting of Cubism, the lines of force of the Futurists, shown in Germany in 1912, and Delaunay’s prismatic light, and turns them from the analysis or celebration of the modern city to a vision of nature destroyed; and he turns against his own subject by making the peaceable animal the victim. The stake was real: a large canvas that broke the idiom his reputation stood on. Held below the gate because the means were borrowed and visibly so, and because Kandinsky beside him was making the same turn toward fracture: decisive for him, less so for the field.
Neutral Milk Hotel · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is American lo-fi indie rock of the 1990s and the psychedelic pop of the Elephant 6 collective, the Apples in Stereo and Olivia Tremor Control, with the Beach Boys and the Beatles of the late 1960s behind them and the folk singers of the voice alone. The turn is real. Mangum sets a fuzz-saturated acoustic guitar, a singing saw and a brass band under songs earnest past embarrassment in a decade that prized irony, and makes a girl killed in the Holocaust the object of a love song. The stake is bathos at every turn, a sincerity the field could have laughed off. What holds it below the gate is the path: the lo-fi means were proven by Daniel Johnston and Guided by Voices, the collective’s studio and producer were in place, and the band’s own first album had begun the manner.
Martin Amis · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is plain: Bellow’s large, appetitive first person, which Amis admired above all; Nabokov’s unreliable narrator and his author who enters the book; Kingsley Amis’s comic novel, and behind it Waugh; Burgess’s invented vernacular. The turn is in the fusion and the risk. Amis gave a British comic novel an American scale, gave an illiterate narrator a style of great virtuosity, and put himself into a realist comedy as a character, a device the British novel of the time left to the avant-garde. The voice, part London street and part high literary performance, was new in English fiction, and it carried a long novel without relief. The stake was real: a book that could read as a self-regarding stunt, or as the thing it satirises. Held below the gate because each element was inherited, and the swerve is in combination more than in a new instrument.
Jim Jarmusch · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The departure is real: a western whose gunman is an accountant who cannot shoot, whose guide is a Native man educated in England who quotes Blake, whose violence is sudden, clumsy and unheroic, and whose movement west is a journey into death. The stake was real too: black and white, a star in a part with almost no agency, a slow tempo, and a poor reception in much of the American press on release. Held below the gate because the ground had been opened. Monte Hellman’s westerns, El Topo and the counter-cultural western of around 1970 had already turned the genre toward the metaphysical and the absurd, and Jarmusch’s own deadpan manner was proven by his earlier films. A large turn, on ground partly cleared.
Brinkman and Van der Vlugt · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Industrial buildings of the 1920s in the Netherlands were largely brick, massive and closed. Van Nelle made a whole multi-storey production complex of a concrete frame and a continuous glass curtain, at a scale and with a consistency the earlier landmarks of daylight industry, Behrens in Berlin, Gropius and Meyer at Alfeld and the American daylight factories of the 1910s, had not combined. The stake was the firm’s main plant, built as a manifesto of the Nieuwe Bouwen and a proof that the new architecture could carry heavy industry. Yet the parts were not new: the mushroom slab was established in American and Swiss engineering, the curtain wall had been tried, the daylight factory was a type. The swerve is the synthesis and the scale.
Inca, under Pachacuti and successors · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance: Andean dressed masonry, from the precise ashlar of Tiwanaku to the coarser stonework of Killke-period Cusco, and terracing as the common Andean way of building on slopes. The departure: polygonal, mortarless fitting raised from a technique of house walls and terraces to a scale nothing before it in the Andes reached, with blocks of a hundred tonnes or more fitted as closely as small ones. The stake was real and physical: the labour of a state over decades, and stones whose fall in the moving would kill. Held at 8.3 because the swerve is of degree and scale more than of kind: the form of a terrace wall is inherited, and the turn is made inside it.
Krzysztof Kieślowski · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is threefold: the doppelgänger tale and its cinema of the uncanny double, in Vertigo and Persona; the Polish cinema of moral concern, documentary in method, from which Kieślowski came; and his own work, Blind Chance (made 1981, released 1987), which had already split one life into branches, and Dekalog (1988). The turn is real. Against the uncanny, the double consoles and never meets its other. Against his own realism, the film is lyric and metaphysical, built on intuition and correspondence, with almost no plot in the ordinary sense, and it kills its first protagonist early to begin again with the same face. The stake was his name as a director of moral and social exactness, put on his first largely French production. What holds it below the bar is precedent: killing the protagonist early and going on was Hitchcock’s move in Psycho (1960), the branching life was Kieślowski’s own already, and the lyric European art film had a path proved before him.
Josef Hoffmann · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance was the curving line of the Jugendstil and of the Belgian Art Nouveau around the site; Horta’s houses stood a few kilometres away. The turn is to a building of right angles, planes and edges, in which the wall is no longer modelled mass but a skin drawn round volumes. Hoffmann’s own earlier work and Mackintosh’s had pointed that way, so the turn was prepared; here it is carried to a palace and to every object in it, and flat-fronted blocks are grouped asymmetrically where a house of this rank would have taken symmetry. The stake is the lesser part. The client’s means were nearly without limit and his taste was Hoffmann’s own; nothing structural was risked, and the cost was carried by money.
Gustav Klimt · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the allegorical mural of the Ringstrasse, history painting on public walls, including Klimt’s own ceiling and spandrel paintings for the Burgtheater and the Kunsthistorisches Museum, finished in the academic manner a decade before. The departure: allegory as flat line and ornament on a bare ground; the wall left empty over most of its length; gold and set pieces in a mural, the Byzantine and the Mycenaean brought into a modern room; the nude given to sickness and lust, not to Venus; the whole conceived as a symphony in space. The stake was real, since the faculty paintings for the University had just been attacked in public. Held below the gate: the turn had company in Toorop, Hodler and the Jugendstil, the Secession had built the room to receive it, and a work made to be destroyed risked less.
Peter Zumthor · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the opening to the sky from the Pantheon onward; the small rural votive chapel of the Catholic countryside, of which the Eifel has many; the twentieth-century church of concrete and light, from Ronchamp to the Scandinavian and Swiss chapels of the century’s end; and Zumthor’s own path, through the timber chapel at Sogn Benedetg and the stone of the baths at Vals. The departure: formwork of whole trees burnt out of the building, so that the residue of the making is the interior; a lead floor open to the rain; a chapel as a closed object without windows in an open field. The stake: a method untried at this scale, which could have failed in the fire, carried by a farming family on a commission with no institution behind it. Held below the bar because the turn is radical in process and modest in programme, the extreme of a path already Zumthor’s.
Lee Chang-dong · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is triple: Lee’s own humane realism in Peppermint Candy, Oasis, Secret Sunshine and Poetry, patient, social and plainly told; Murakami’s story, a weightless urban fable in which nothing is ever done; and the art-film mystery of the vanished woman, L’Avventura (1960) above all, with Vertigo behind it. The turns are real. Against his own manner, Lee made a thriller whose central facts are withheld. Against the source, he moved a Tokyo anecdote into Korean class rage and the border country, gave the narrator a farm, a father on trial and a knife, and made him act. The stake was a return after eight years with a young star in the lead. Held below the gate because the vanishing left unsolved is a path L’Avventura proved, and the genre turn is taken toward a form audiences already know.
Dashiell Hammett · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance was twofold. The detective novel of 1930 was the clue puzzle of Christie and S. S. Van Dine, a game solved by a reasoning mind for a reader invited to compete; the pulp story of Black Mask, of which Hammett’s own Continental Op stories and Red Harvest (1929) were the best, was violent, fast and written for a magazine. The swerve lies in what Hammett carried from the second into the first and what he dropped: a detective whose honesty is unknown until the last chapter, a narration that refuses the inner life entirely, and a resolution that is a moral decision rather than a deduction. The stake was real: a hero who might be crooked, a heroine sent to hang, no consoling interior. What bounds the axis is priority: much of the turn had been made the year before in Red Harvest and in the Black Mask school, and the falcon refined and concentrated a departure more than it originated one.
Bob Rafelson · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is double: the Hollywood drama of family and return, and the youth road picture that BBS had just proved with Easy Rider (1969), in which Nicholson had broken through; behind both, the drifting heroes and open endings of European art cinema of the 1960s. The turns are real and several. A lead without a cause, neither rebel nor victim, unlikeable by design; a man of the cultivated class who has chosen manual work and is not redeemed by it; classical music as a family burden rather than an elevation; an ending in which the hero abandons a pregnant woman and the camera stays with her. The stake was moderate, a low budget and a new company with a hit behind it, and the path freshly opened.
Wilkie Collins · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The departure is of form and of setting together. Collins tells a novel of crime as a sequence of witnesses’ statements, each narrator held to what he or she saw, and he moves the Gothic out of the Italian castle into an English country house, a solicitor’s office and a London lodging. The epistolary and documentary novel existed; the Gothic existed; the Newgate novel existed. To join them, with the reader as jury and the documents themselves as the plot, was a real turn. The stake was real too: a serial in Dickens’s own magazine, following Dickens, that had to hold a weekly public on a method that withholds, and held it. Held below the gate because its moral world and its ending are those of its inheritance.
Juan O'Gorman, Gustavo Saavedra and Juan Martínez de Velasco · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance was international modernism, which the rest of the Ciudad Universitaria largely followed: glazed slabs, pilotis, frames. O’Gorman had been Mexico’s most rigorous functionalist in the early 1930s, the maker of the studio houses for Rivera and Kahlo, and here he turned against the doctrine he had helped bring in, wrapping a modern box entirely in figurative, polychrome, nationalist imagery made of stone. The turn was large and costly: it set him against the functionalist line of his own generation and against the abstraction then ascendant, and staked the most prominent building on the national campus on the claim that a mural could be architecture. The swerve is in the wager on the skin, not in the structure, which is conventional.
Vincent van Gogh · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the peasant interior of the Hague School and of Jozef Israëls, who had already painted a family at a meal by lamplight; Millet’s peasant as the dignified worker of the soil; behind both, the dark tonal palette of Dutch painting of the seventeenth century. Subject, lamp and palette came whole. The departure is in what was refused, the sentiment of Israëls and the pastoral grandeur of Millet: the heads made coarse on purpose, the colour the colour of earth, a picture that will not be pleasant. The stake was large and paid: Theo could not place it, Van Rappard condemned it, and the friendship ended. Held below the gate because the turn is of tone and conviction within a proven subject, not of the means of painting.
The Kinks · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
The field in 1968 was psychedelia passing into heavy blues rock and the counterculture’s forward look. The turn is away from all of it: a quiet record of English miniatures, music hall, folk and baroque pop, whose subject is the wish to go back. The stake was real and was paid. The band was still barred from touring the United States, its standing in the British charts was falling, and the record did not chart; Ray Davies placed the band’s commercial future on a record that went against its year. What holds it below the bar is the path: Face to Face (1966), Something Else (1967), Waterloo Sunset and Autumn Almanac had already turned the band toward English observation and music hall.
Anselm Kiefer · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance is threefold: the Romantic perspective of German landscape and interior; the Expressionist and Informel handling of paint as matter; and the postwar German consensus that the imagery of National Socialism was to be shunned, with abstraction serving painting as an alibi. The departure is to take the regime’s own architecture as the subject of a monumental painting, in the perspective the building dictates, and to make it neither propaganda nor caricature. The stake was paid in reception: Kiefer’s work of these years was accused in the German press of flirting with what it painted. Held below the gate because the turn was taken earlier, in the Occupations of 1969, the attic pictures and the Venice showing of 1980; this canvas carries it onto the regime’s actual buildings.
Burnham and Root; south half by Holabird and Roche · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the Chicago office building of the 1880s in masonry dressed with Romanesque or classical ornament, Root’s own work among its finest, and the first iron frames. The departure: a sixteen-storey commercial block stripped of every ornament, the wall itself moulded into the building’s only expression, base and capital made of the brick’s own curvature rather than of stone or terra cotta. In American commercial building around 1890 that was a stark turn, and it cost something: plainness risked reading as cheapness, and Root set aside the ornament his reputation rested on. Charged: the owners, through Aldis, demanded economy and plainness; the method, the bearing wall, was the old path; and the south half’s turn back toward cornice and ornament shows how little the swerve held even within the work.
Sawai Jai Singh II · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance is double: the Islamic observatory tradition of Maragha and of Ulugh Beg’s Samarkand in the 1420s, whose great meridian arc had already taken the instrument to architectural scale; and the Sanskrit astronomy of the siddhantas, with its small instruments of brass. The departure is twofold. Jai Singh reshaped old types and made new ones, and multiplied scale across a whole field of instruments in masonry, so that the observatory became a city of fixed instruments rather than one great arc. The stake was a royal treasury and the wager that size would win precision. What holds the axis: the wager was placed on a proven path, the model of Samarkand, and it swerved backward against the telescope, which Jai Singh knew of. The risk was in money, not in knowledge.
Frank Ocean · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance is rich and plain: the soul of Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye and Prince, the R&B of the 1990s and 2000s, and Ocean’s own nostalgia,ULTRA (2011) and songs written for others. The turn is of voice and subject. A male R&B singer on a major label sings a love that cannot be returned, and one that is returned, to men, and posts a letter saying so days before release, inside a genre and a milieu built on male seduction of women; the songs become character sketches, not seductions, and one runs to ten minutes in two movements. The stake was real and personal: the career and the audience. The sound looks back to the 1970s, the sketch and the interlude had precedent in hip-hop albums, and the turn is in the singer’s stance more than in the music’s language.
Burial · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the music of the London night: jungle, UK garage and its 2-step rhythm, and the young dubstep of the mid-2000s, whose weight and drops were made for the sound system; behind them, the ambient records of the 1990s. The turn is large. Dubstep’s bass and function are put aside for swung patterns that skip and never drop, the clean digital surface for crackle and hiss, the dance track for music heard alone after the club, and the voices of commercial R&B are taken into an underground music and made to mourn. What holds the axis is stake and date: an anonymous producer on an underground label had little to risk, and the turn was first taken on Burial (2006).
Eero Saarinen · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Two departures, one with a real stake. The suspension roof was not new: Matthew Nowicki’s Dorton Arena at Raleigh (1952) and Saarinen’s own Ingalls Rink at Yale (1958) came before it. Its use for a national airport terminal, at this length and as a public monument, was a turn. The wager was the plan. Every airport of the period grew finger piers and long walks; Saarinen and the agency bet the operating system of a new federal airport on a vehicle built for the purpose, carrying passengers across the apron. It was a stake that could fail, and in part it did; a swerve with its cost paid is what the axis credits. It is held below the bar because the roof had its precedents, and the turn did not reorganise a language.
Vladimir Shukhov · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the iron tower of the engineers, the Eiffel Tower of 1889 at its head, a riveted truss rising on four legs; the guyed and lattice masts of the first radio age; and Shukhov’s own path since 1896, when he first built and patented the hyperboloid lattice, followed by many water towers and masts. The decisive turn, the hyperboloid itself, was taken then, not here. The departure at Shabolovka is the stacking of hyperboloids into a multi-stage tower of a height the type had not reached, and the raising of it from within without scaffolding. The stake was real: a new form at a new height in a country without steel, and an erection that failed once. Held short because this is the largest step of a swerve already made.
Richard Serra · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance: Minimalism’s industrial object, in Judd, Andre and Smith; Serra’s own propped lead and his earlier steel arcs and walls, Tilted Arc of 1981 among them; and the sculptural tradition of the object seen from outside. The departure: a form not made before, a curved plate whose upper and lower ellipses are turned against each other, so that the wall leans in and out along its length; and sculpture made into a space one is inside, known only by walking. The stake was great in fabrication and cost, since the rolling of such plates had to be devised. Held below the top because the swerve itself belongs to the first Torqued Ellipses of 1996 and 1997; by 2005 the room extends and compounds a turn already made and admired, a summation rather than a wager.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance: Minimalism and its floor pieces, Andre’s metal plates and the spills and scatters of Post-Minimalism; Conceptual art’s dematerialised object and its certificate; and portraiture itself. The departure turns each: the inert industrial unit becomes a gift and a body, the floor piece something visitors may carry away, the certificate a set of instructions for mourning, and the portrait loses its face and keeps its weight. The stake was real: an openly gay Cuban American artist, in the years of the culture wars over public funding and of the AIDS crisis, put a lover’s death into museums in a form too pleasant to object to. Held below the bar because the step from his own paper stacks of 1988 and 1989 was short, and because the swerve is in meaning and use, not in look.
Ovid · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance is double: didactic poetry in Greek and Latin, Hesiod, Aratus, Nicander, Lucretius and the Georgics, whose year of farming the poem echoes in its seasons and labours; and Latin love elegy, Gallus, Tibullus, Propertius and Ovid’s own Amores, whose lover is a slave of love, sincere and suffering. The swerve puts the elegiac lover in the teacher’s chair. Love, which elegy made a fate, becomes a skill, and the genre of nature and labour is taken over in couplets to teach the arts of adultery. The stake was real and was paid: the poem was named among the causes of its author’s exile. Held below the bar because erotic instruction already had a place in elegy: Priapus teaching in Tibullus 1.4, the bawd’s speeches in Propertius and in Amores 1.8.
Alfred Stieglitz · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the pictorialism Stieglitz himself had led: soft focus, gum and platinum printing, the photograph made to look like a painting or a drawing, championed through the Camera Club, the Photo-Secession and Camera Work. The departure is to a sharp, unmanipulated, found image, composed in the instant from the forms of a real scene, with modern subject matter, machinery and the poor, and no softening. The stake was real: the leader of a movement turning from its premise, in his own journal. What lowers the figure is how the wager was placed. By his own account he held the plate back four years; Lewis Hine was photographing the poor sharply at Ellis Island in the same years; and his circle’s decisive turn came only in 1915 to 1917, with Strand.
Massive Attack · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Bristol sound system and what it played: American hip hop and its sampling, Jamaican reggae and dub, American soul and jazz-funk on record, and the London precedent of Soul II Soul, whose Club Classics Vol. One (1989) had already set soul singing over a slowed hip hop beat with a sound-system crew as author. The turn is real. The beat goes further down, below the dance floor; the album becomes a thing for listening at home and at night; English voices rap in their own accent at their own unhurried pace; a full string section sits over a breakbeat without irony. The stake was a debut by a collective with no lead singer and no live band. What holds it: Soul II Soul had placed most of the bet, and the swerve is a slowing and a darkening more than a new language.
Henri Matisse · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance: easel painting in oil, Matisse’s own Fauvism and the decorative interiors of Nice, the large decorative commission of the Barnes Dance, and the papier collé of Braque and Picasso, which had brought paper into the picture as material and sign. The departure: a painter of eighty-three makes paper cut from painted sheets his whole art, at the scale of a mural; drawing, colour and composition become one act; the picture becomes a wall of separate parts; and the figure is drawn down to a principle of rotation, close to pure abstraction, without nature being renounced. The stake was real: many took the technique for a sick man’s expedient or for decoration. Held below the top because the turn was made before this work, in the Barnes Dance, in Jazz and in the chapel’s designs.
Mark Rothko · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the painter’s own mythic surrealism of the 1940s and the multiforms of 1946 to 1948; Matisse’s planes of colour; and the gesture of the painters round him, Pollock’s skein and de Kooning’s stroke. The departure, made in 1949 to 1950: no drawing, no figure, no visible gesture; the soft rectangle and the ground as the whole vocabulary; colour made the sole carrier of a claim to tragic content, and size made a condition of meaning. The stake was real: many saw the canvases as decoration, they sold slowly, and they set him against the gestural side of his own circle. The discount is this canvas’s own: by 1953 the turn was three or four years old and the path was his. It inherits the swerve rather than making it.
DJ Shadow · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance is hip-hop production, the break, the loop and the sampler as the producer’s instrument, always in service of a rapper; behind it the collage of Steinski’s Lessons, the density of Paul’s Boutique (1989), Coldcut, and the instrumental tracks of the Mo’ Wax circle, DJ Krush among them. The turn is to take the producer’s craft alone and make of it an album-length composition, long forms that develop, recur and resolve. The stake was real: an unknown producer in his early twenties, years of work, and an album with no voice to sell it, issued into a market that wanted rappers. Its elements were in the air, and that keeps it below the top.
Gustave Caillebotte · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance is double: the finish and perspective of the École and the Salon, and the modern-life subject of the Impressionists, whose exhibitions the painter joined and paid for. The turn joins them where neither was meant to go: everyday Paris painted at the size of history painting, with near academic finish, and hung in the Impressionists’ own exhibition among broken touch and small canvases. The composition turns too: the post splitting the field, the figure cut by the frame, the steep, wide recession, the abrupt jump in scale from near to far, devices kin to the photograph and the Japanese print and pressed further than any Salon picture pressed them. The stake was real but cushioned by the painter’s wealth: the risk of standing in neither camp. Turn strong, stake moderate.
H. P. Lovecraft · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance is plain, and Lovecraft named it himself in Supernatural Horror in Literature: Poe above all, Machen’s “The Great God Pan”, Blackwood’s “The Willows”, Dunsany’s invented pantheon, and the Gothic of ghost, curse and sin. The turn is real. He took horror from the supernatural to the materialist, from ghost and devil to beings from outside space and time, indifferent rather than malign, and from a moral universe in which horror punishes sin to one in which horror is merely what is true; he married the weird tale to the scientific report and gave it deep time. The stake was paid in full: the pulps, rejection by the publishers he respected, death in poverty at forty-six. Held below 8.5 because Machen and Blackwood had already reached for the outer and the impersonal, and the form he kept was a proven path.
Damien Hirst · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is twofold: the Minimalist box, the clean steel and glass of the gallery object offered to the eye; and the vanitas, death represented in a still life. The departure joins them and makes the representation literal: death is not painted or cast but occurs, now, in the box, to living things, and the viewer cannot look away from an actual process. Held below the gate because the turn has close precedents in its own field: Hans Haacke’s living systems in cases at the end of the 1960s, Jannis Kounellis’s live horses of 1969, Beuys’s dead hare, and the caged spaces and carcasses of Bacon, to whom the work is constantly compared. The stake was real: a young artist staking an early showing on a rotting head, liable to be dismissed as a stunt, against the practical and legal difficulty of showing it at all.
Eileen Gray and Jean Badovici · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the white modern house of the 1920s and its doctrine, Le Corbusier’s Five Points, which the house takes up whole: pilotis, roof terrace, free plan, horizontal windows, free façade. The departure is from within. The points are bent toward the inhabitant and the interior, the plan worked from the body and the hour, the furniture made continuous with the walls, and the dialogue published with the house quarrels openly with the machine. The turn is real and specific. The stake was real: Gray, trained as a lacquer artist and furniture designer and without an architect’s training, building her first house on a site no road reaches. Held below 8.5 because the vocabulary is the doctrine’s own, a correction of a current, not a leaving of it.
Built for Frederick II · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance was the castle of the southern kingdom, the Regno, and of Frederick’s own building: square or rectangular enclosures with corner towers, at Castel Maniace in Syracuse, Castello Ursino in Catania and at Prato. The departure is one of kind: a castle generated from one figure carried through every part, defence given up, a classical portal set on a building of Cistercian Gothic vaulting, a residence made into a demonstration of geometry. The stake was real: a building of this precision on a bare hill for no evident military purpose, answering no recognised type. Held short of the gate because the octagon and the central plan came from sacred building and from Hohenstaufen towers, and because the wager was placed by a patron whose position it could not cost.
Richard Rogers · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the City office block, stone-faced, cornice-lined, deferential to the street, and Lloyd’s own buildings of 1928 and 1958 in that manner; and the makers’ own path, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, opened in 1977, which had already turned structure and services out to the street. The departure from the City is as great as any building there had made: an institution three centuries old housed in steel and glass with its plant on the façade, in a square mile minded to conserve. The stake was real and paid: a conservative client’s seat entrusted to a radical scheme, a fabric whose upkeep was untried, a long public quarrel over its fitness. Held below the bar because the turn was made first in Paris; here it is refined and carried into the office and the City.
Luis Buñuel · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is a much-filmed erotic novel, made by von Sternberg as The Devil Is a Woman (1935) and by Duvivier with Brigitte Bardot (1959); the European art film of desire; and Buñuel’s own late French manner with Silberman and Carrière, in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) and The Phantom of Liberty (1974). The departure is the casting: one character played by two actresses who alternate between scenes, sometimes within a sequence, with no sign in the fiction. It breaks the most basic contract of narrative film, that one body is one person, and makes the break the meaning; the bombings threaded through a love story are a lesser turn. The stake was a costly co-production at seventy-seven, discounted because the device came of necessity when the first lead left. Held below the bar because the rest of the film keeps to Buñuel’s proven path, deadpan and classical, and the stroke, radical as it is, is single.
Robert Rauschenberg · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is New York painting of the early 1950s, the large upright field worked by the hand, and behind it collage and the readymade. The departure is large: a painting laid flat and made the floor of a freestanding object, a whole animal admitted to a work that still calls itself painting, the wall abandoned. It cost something. Rauschenberg was not yet established when the work was begun, and it took four years and two discarded states to find. What holds the axis below the gate is that the combine was already his own by 1954 to 1955, in the wall combines and in Bed, a bed made into a painting in 1955: this is the boldest instance of a departure already made, not its first act.
John Constable · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the ideal landscape of Claude and Poussin, composed in the studio from a store of noble motifs; the picturesque of the eighteenth century; the Dutch naturalism of Ruisdael and Hobbema, which Constable studied; Gainsborough’s Suffolk. The departure: a large exhibition canvas of an unremarkable working place, built from oil sketches made out of doors; the tone raised from the connoisseur’s brown to green and daylight; the surface broken, with touches of pure white left as light. The stake is documented: the painter was forty-five, unsold at this scale and not yet a full Academician, and the canvas found no buyer in London. Held below the gate because the turn was taken two years earlier in The White Horse, the first of the six-footers, and because the Dutch had already shown that unideal country could carry a large picture.
Wassily Kandinsky · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Two inheritances, and the departure is from the first. One is Kandinsky’s own prewar abstraction: fluid, loosely bounded, explosive in colour and apocalyptic in theme, by 1914 the most famous claim of any painter on non-objective painting. The other is the geometric abstraction he met in Russia between 1914 and 1921, in Suprematism and Constructivism. Here hard edge replaces flowing contour, compass and ruler replace the loaded brush, and an open, calm ground replaces the thronged field. The cost was real: a painter in his late fifties staked the manner on which his authority rested, and some read the turn as a surrender to the Constructivists he had quarrelled with in Moscow. Held below the gate because the vocabulary was not his invention: Malevich and the Constructivists had placed it before him.
Mark Rothko · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance: Surrealist automatism and the mythic imagery of Rothko’s own 1940s; the multiforms of 1946 to 1948 that dissolved it; and behind them Matisse’s flat colour and Milton Avery’s simplified fields. The departure: the picture reduced to a few soft-edged rectangles of colour stacked on a ground, with no figure, no line, no gesture and no depicted space, the colour itself made the structure and the subject. The stake was real: a painter approaching fifty, who had sold little, set aside the mythic programme that had given him a place among the New York painters. Held well below the top because the swerve belongs to the format, whose first full instances date from 1949; this canvas is an early and full statement of a turn already taken, credited for carrying it into a warm high key.
Eero Saarinen · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the airport terminal as a shed or a modernist box; the International Style the office had used at the General Motors Technical Center, completed in 1956; the shells of Candela and Nervi; and the sculptural turn already in the air, at Ronchamp (1955) and in Utzon’s design for Sydney (1957), with Saarinen’s own Kresge Auditorium and Ingalls Rink as first steps. The departure: a public interior made one continuous sculpted volume, every fitting moulded to the roof’s law, a terminal built as an expressive building rather than a processing plant. The stake was real: a form whose structure had to be found after it was drawn, unusual cost and formwork, and Saarinen’s standing with critics who already charged him with changing style from job to job. Held lower because the turn was shared with its moment.
Joseph Maria Olbrich · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The inheritance is the Ringstrasse, where every public building wore a past style, Greek, Gothic or Renaissance, with the Künstlerhaus near by in the manner of the Italian Renaissance; and Otto Wagner’s school, which was arguing for a modern style but had not yet built one on this scale. The departure: a public building with no historical order at all, plain white masses, battered walls and closed fronts, ornament drawn from plant and emblem and set as panels on flat surfaces, and a dome made of leaves. The stake was real and paid: a young architect and a seceding society staked their whole claim on one object, beside the institution they had left, and met ridicule. Held below the bar because the turn draws openly on Egyptian pylons, on Wagner and on the British arts movement, and its geometry is a stripped classicism more than a new grammar.
Peter Eisenman · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The inheritance: the national monument of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, column, arch, figure on a plinth, wreath and inscription; the Holocaust memorial as figure or relief in the camps and in Israel; the counter-monument that turned against them, Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial of 1982 and the German counter-monuments of the 1980s, the sinking column of Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz at Harburg among them; and Eisenman’s own grid-based houses and his theory of autonomous form. The departure: a national memorial with no centre, no image, no inscription in the field, no gate and no point from which it is seen whole, entered rather than viewed, at the scale of a city block in the centre of a capital. The stake was paid in a decade and a half of public quarrel. What holds the axis: the abstract, enterable memorial was Lin’s turn first, and the grid was Eisenman’s settled language, carried here to its largest field.
Jean Nouvel, with Architecture-Studio · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
In 1981 the high-tech architecture of Paris was the exposed machinery of the Centre Pompidou; the alternatives were the Beaux-Arts manner and postmodern pastiche. Nouvel swerved twice. He took the machine off the frame and put it in the skin, so that the facade became an instrument rather than a display of structure. And he made the high-tech skin speak of a culture, translating a vernacular Islamic device into precision metal and photomechanics, a move neither high tech nor postmodern quotation made. The stake was real: a young office, a national and diplomatic commission on a major Seine site, and a mechanism no one had built at this scale. The cost was paid: the mechanism failed, and that failure is part of what the wager staked. Held below the gate because the turn reorganised a skin, not a whole building.
Bernd and Hilla Becher · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The inheritance is double: the New Objectivity of Renger-Patzsch, Blossfeldt’s plant forms and Sander’s typology of people on one side, and the industrial photograph of engineering and trade on the other. The field entered, West German photography of the late 1950s, was dominated by Otto Steinert’s subjective photography, expressive and formalist, and the art around it was Informel and abstraction. The departure was to return to the most impersonal document, make it serial, comparative and systematic, and offer it to art as sculpture and as concept. The stake was real: decades of travel and labour, a subject nobody wanted, an art the market and the museum did not then recognise. Held below the gate because much of the turn is a return, to the 1920s, and its claim on conceptual art was shared with Minimalism as it arrived.
Jasper Johns · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The inheritance is twofold. There was Johns’s own work, the flags, targets and numbers of 1954 to 1958, mostly in encaustic, each a flat given sign filling the canvas, cool, and by 1958 the ground of his fame, with The Museum of Modern Art buying from his first show at Leo Castelli’s gallery that year. And there was the gestural abstraction of the New York School, against which that work had been read. The departure takes the opposing side’s means, loose oil, full colour and the all-over brushed field, and turns them into a ground for stencilled labels, so that gesture becomes found material, like a flag. The stake was to set aside the emblem a year after it made him, and to risk reading as a late follower of de Kooning. Held below the gate because stencilled letters had entered painting with Braque and Picasso from about 1911, Magritte had already made the word set against what it names a picture’s subject, and the risk was taken but not paid: the canvas was received at once as a major work.
Maurice Ravel · Music
7.9 · Tier III
The inheritance in 1928 is the orchestral work of the symphonic tradition: development, modulation, contrast of themes, the transformation of material. The departure refuses all of it. One melody, unvaried in pitch, eighteen times; one rhythm, never interrupted; one key for nearly the whole work; one dynamic direction. The only variable is orchestration, so that colour, not harmony or line, carries the form. That is a radical turn, and it anticipates later repetitive music. The stake is where it is held. The work was made for a dancer’s commission, not wagered on a symphony; ostinato forms, the ground and the passacaglia, were an old path; and the composer’s standing was secure, so the risk fell on a piece, not on a career. A swerve with a cushion.
Joan Miró · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
The inheritance is Miró’s own detailed Catalan realism of The Farm (1921 to 1922), with Cubism and the Fauves behind it, and the Paris of Picasso, whose harlequins this picture both quotes and dismantles. The departure: the object is no longer depicted but signed; the body becomes an ideogram; the picture space becomes a room in which signs float without weight or modelling; and the painting is made from the image the mind throws up rather than the scene before the eye. The stake was real: the painter left a manner that had just won him notice for a language most of the market could not read, beside a movement whose 1924 manifesto had not settled whether painting could serve it. Held below the top because the turn was made first in The Tilled Field and Catalan Landscape.
Christopher Nolan · Film
7.8 · Tier III
The inheritance is the film noir of the amnesiac and the femme fatale, from the 1940s on, and the fractured chronology of 1990s independent cinema, Pulp Fiction (1994) above all; in other forms, Pinter’s Betrayal (1978) told an affair backwards and Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow (1991) ran a life in reverse. The departure is real. Reverse chronology is not a frame but a perceptual condition the viewer is made to share, braided with a forward strand so that the two meet and the meeting changes both. The stake was real for its scale: a second feature on a small budget with no studio behind it, in a structure that risked incoherence. What holds it below the gate: the turn is in structure, inside a genre kept whole, and its means had precedents.
John Barth · Literature
7.8 · Tier III
The inheritance is the Menippean satire and the comic encyclopedia of Rabelais, Swift and Sterne, Bunyan’s allegory, Joyce’s mythic method, and Barth’s own pastiche of the eighteenth-century novel in The Sot-Weed Factor. The turn goes further than that pastiche of a known form: a whole scripture written as a comic novel, a gospel of the cold war set in a university that stands for the cosmos, with the monomyth of the comparatists taken out of the study and made the conscious plot of a novel, and editors who cannot agree whether it should be published or who wrote it, a computer possibly among the candidates. The stake was real: a very long allegory, after a success. Held below the bar because the instruments were old ones turned, and Pynchon and Nabokov had made the frame of contested documents current a few years before.
The Stooges · Music
7.7 · Tier III
In 1969 rock was moving toward length, virtuosity and expanded consciousness, the summer of festivals and long solos. This record turns the other way: two-chord riffs, untrained playing kept untrained, boredom as subject and monotony as form, and a singer who sings of wanting to be a dog. The stake was real: a major label’s record by a band with almost no repertoire, a band mocked for incompetence. Against the swerve stand its sources. The garage bands of the middle sixties had played the riffs; the Velvet Underground had made drone and abjection a form, and the producer was its viola player; the MC5, from the same state and on the same label, made a loud raw record the same year. The turn is narrower than the Velvets’, and purer: it takes away rather than adds.
Chola bronze casters · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Pallava and early Chola dance of Shiva in stone relief, and the processional bronze tradition the Pallavas began. The swerve of the type was great: the dance freed from the wall into the round; the ring of fire set about it, so that the figure carries its cosmos with it; the posture of the dance of bliss fixed for bronze; the god made portable, to go out among the people at festival. But that swerve belongs to the casters and patrons of the tenth century who formed the type. This cast takes the type at or near its formation and perfects it: the poise surer, the ring truer, the body more alive. That is mastery inside a fixed canon, governed by measure and commanded by the temple; it risked nothing, and was not meant to. A wager placed on a path being proven holds it lowest of the gated five.
Kalidasa · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Shakuntala episode of the Mahābhārata and the codified drama of the Nāṭyaśāstra, with Bhāsa’s plays and the courtly lyric behind them. The turn is real. A tale of law and legitimacy, in which Shakuntala argues her own case at length and a voice from heaven confirms her, becomes a drama of interior life: desire, forgetting, remorse and recollection, carried by the curse and the ring, generally taken to be Kālidāsa’s own additions. The lyric’s world of nature is brought fully into the drama, so that the fourth act is a farewell to a landscape. What holds the axis among the lowest of the twelve is that the stake was bounded: the play keeps the prologue, the jester, the hero of royal birth, the interludes and the benediction, and fulfils the theory of rasa rather than defying it. It perfects a form; it does not reorganise one, and its change to the epic, absolving the king, is a softening more than a wager.
Roman, under Vespasian and Titus · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is plain: the Italian amphitheatre, at Pompeii by about 70 BC, banked on earth; the stone amphitheatre of Statilius Taurus in Rome, of 29 BC, lost in the fire of 64; Nero’s wooden amphitheatre; the arcaded elevation of superimposed orders already at the Theatre of Marcellus; Roman concrete vaulting. The departures are of degree: the type built wholly free-standing on vaults, on drained ground, at a scale none had reached, with a route for every seat and a hypogeum in masonry. The stake was real, a state’s money and a new dynasty’s legitimacy after civil war. What holds the axis lowest is that every element had a precedent: a wager on a proven path, carried further than anyone had carried it.
Ming, under the Yongle Emperor · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
The inheritance is ancient, and the tradition prizes correctness over departure. The round mound for heaven at the southern suburb goes back to the classical rites, and the Yongle precinct copied Nanjing’s. The departures are real but measured. The Jiajing division of the joint altar was a ritual reform with a building programme, and the round hall of the same reign, a great timber hall on a circular plan with tiers of eaves, broke with the rectangular hall that is the norm of Chinese building, answering the old idea of a round-over-square ritual hall, the Mingtang, more than any standing model. The uniform blue sharpened the image. What holds the axis lowest: the stake was the dynasty’s standing before heaven, but the risk in form was small. The precinct perfects a received system.
Mimar Sinan · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
This is the axis on which the building stops short. Sinan had already built a fully centralised plan of four semidomes at the Şehzade, 1543 to 1548. For the sultan’s own mosque he returned to the two-semidome scheme of Hagia Sophia, which Bayezid II’s mosque in the same city, 1501 to 1506, had already taken up: a wager placed on a proven path, chosen to answer Justinian’s church on its own terms. What is new is real: the longitudinal scheme pulled toward one wide room, the buttressing absorbed into wall and gallery, the exterior made a legible pyramid of domes, the mosque set as the governing summit of a terraced foundation. These are refinements and syntheses of a high order, at a real risk of scale. They are not a turn from the inheritance.
Giuseppe Verdi · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
The inherited form is the concert requiem, already large and already dramatic: Mozart, Cherubini, the Grande messe des morts of Berlioz (1837) with its separated brass for the Tuba mirum, and in Italy a church style already near the theatre, as in Rossini’s Stabat Mater. The turn is to carry the full means of late opera into the Mass without apology: soloists as characters, the sequence as a scene, the responsory as a finale that brings back what came before. The stake was real; the charge of theatre in church met the work before its first performance and has followed it since. But the departure ran along Verdi’s own proven road, and the separated brass and the cyclic return each had precedent. A great wager on a known path.
Nasrid, under Yusuf I and Muhammad V · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is present everywhere: the Umayyad palaces of Córdoba and Madinat al-Zahra, the Aljafería at Zaragoza, Almohad ornament, the Marinid buildings of Fez, contemporary and kin, and muqarnas brought west from the eastern Islamic world. The departure is real: a court ringed entirely by slender columns, with pavilions thrust into it, closer to a cloister than to any earlier Islamic court; figural sculpture and painting at the centre of a sultan’s palace; muqarnas carried to the whole dome; verse in the voice of the building. The stake is the weak half. This is the last and most refined statement of a tradition, built by a dynasty with every reason to affirm it, not a wager against it. The risk is a court’s, not an artist’s.
Odo of Metz, under Charlemagne · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the centralised imperial church of the late Roman and Byzantine world, above all San Vitale at Ravenna, consecrated in 547, which Charlemagne had seen, with the octagonal martyrium and baptistery behind it. The departures: San Vitale’s curved exedrae straightened into flat arches and a rigid octagon, the whole made heavier and plainer; the ambulatory given sixteen sides; a westwork added and a throne set on the axis opposite the altar, the building’s own idea; and a vaulted stone church of this scale raised north of the Alps, where the craft had largely lapsed since Rome. The stake was real. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: the building means to repeat an imperial type, and its turn is a translation and a revival, a wager placed on a proven path.
Maya · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the Maya radial pyramid with four stairways, built at Uaxactun and in the twin-pyramid groups of Tikal centuries before; the long Maya practice of encasing an earlier temple in a new one; and the feathered serpent cult that Teotihuacan and later central Mexico had carried, with the long-debated likeness to Tula. The departure: the radial pyramid made a calendar in its counts and joined to the feathered serpent in heads, balustrades and columns, and, if it was designed, light made into a moving image on a stair. The turn is real as a synthesis, a Mesoamerican programme set on a Maya form. What holds it: each element was in hand, and the stake was the cost of a great monument raised over an older one by a practice the region knew, not a wager on the untried.
Roman Polanski · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the hardboiled detective film, The Maltese Falcon (1941) and The Big Sleep (1946), with John Huston, who directed the first, cast as its tyrant; Ross Macdonald’s novels of buried family crime; and the revisionist genre films of the early 1970s, Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973) above all. The turns are real: noir in colour, sunlight and widescreen; a detective whose inquiry causes the death he tries to prevent; incest at the centre of a studio picture; evil unpunished and confirmed by the police. The stake was smaller: a star vehicle from a major studio, made by its head of production, and a commercial success. The ending was a real wager. Held below the bar because the form is classical by intention and the revisionism was already in the air.
José Saramago · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the plague narrative, from Thucydides and Defoe to Camus’s La Peste, the philosophical tale of Voltaire, and Saramago’s own manner, formed fifteen years before: the long sentence, the dialogue run into the narration and the ironic narrator who speaks to the reader were already in Levantado do Chão (1980) and Memorial do Convento (1982). The turn is real, and it is a turn within his own work: from the historical novel, Portugal’s past rewritten, to an allegory of the condition with no names, no dates and no country. The stake was real too: a novelist of history staked his next book on a bare fable of degradation. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve is that the instrument was already his and the allegorical road had already been travelled, so that the turn is of matter more than of means.
Mamluk, under Sultan an-Nasir Hasan · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the four-iwan court, from the mosques and madrasas of Iran, already used in Cairo at the Salihiyya and in the complex of Qalawun; the Cairene funerary foundation with a domed tomb on the street; the stone portal with a muqarnas hood. The departures: the cruciform made fully symmetrical and monumental, the four madrasas packed into its corners so that the plan is one figure, and the tomb moved behind the qibla wall. The stake was enormous and was paid: a minaret fell and killed people, the sultan died before the end, the portal was left unfinished. But the wager was on scale along a proven path, the type pushed to its largest rather than turned.
David Lean · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Hollywood roadshow epic of the late 1950s, The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur, and Lean’s own The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), which had already made the war epic a study of one man’s obsession. The departures are real: an epic whose hero is vain, masochistic and at last a killer who enjoys it; no love story and no woman; the hero’s legend dismantled by the film that builds it; emptiness held in frame as a subject, at a length no epic had risked. The stake was large: a leading man unknown to the public, two years of shooting in the desert, and a hero whose sexuality is left in plain sight. What holds the axis among the lowest of the twelve: the wager was placed on Lean’s proven path and the studio epic’s machinery, and the form is the roadshow, deepened rather than turned.
Nabataean · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is wide: Achaemenid and Lycian rock tombs, Egyptian and Phrygian rock-cut fronts, the Arabian crow-step, and the built architecture of Hellenistic Alexandria. The departure is real. Earlier rock-cut facades were reliefs on a cliff, flat or shallow, imitating timber or a single portico. Petra cuts the whole apparatus of a built Hellenistic front, two storeys, a tholos standing free in a broken pediment, full columns and entablatures, into the living rock at a scale no one had cut; it crosses the crow-step with the orders and invents its own capital. Cut from the top down, the work allowed no correction. Held below the top because the vocabulary is borrowed whole, its transfer to rock was prepared by Hellenistic rock tombs elsewhere, and rich kings placed the bet on a proven repertoire.
Thomas Malory · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the French prose cycle: vast, interlaced, theological, with courtly love at its centre. The turn is Malory’s. He cut the interlace into tales that run more nearly straight, reduced the doctrine of the Grail quest, drew the matter towards earthly worship, fellowship and kinship, and made of a library of romances one book from Arthur’s begetting to Lancelot’s death, in an English prose with almost no precedent at this length for narrative. No direct source is known for the tale of Gareth or for the healing of Sir Urry. The stake was real, since no English prose fiction of this scale stood behind him. Held below the gate because most of the matter, and much of the order of events, is translated and compiled: a large turn made on an inherited path.
Robert Louis Stevenson · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The turn is real, and the risk was of a modest kind. Stevenson took the shilling shocker, a commercial form, and the double of Romantic and Gothic fiction, and joined them to the detective structure of the sensation novel and the documentary method of Wilkie Collins: a chain of incidents read by a sceptical professional, then statements left in writing. The swerve is to place a supernatural premise inside a scientific and legal frame, to give the double a mechanism and a social address, a square, Soho and a lawyer’s will, and to withhold the inside entirely until the end. What it risked was a writer of romance and boys’ adventure staking his name on a thriller. What holds the axis lowest but one is that the paths it joined were proven: the double, the confession and the documentary close had all been walked before. It is a swerve of form and placement rather than of kind, and the shilling form costs it nothing.
Robert Johnson · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
The departure is real and mostly a synthesis. Johnson took the Delta bottleneck tradition of Charley Patton and Son House, turned it inward and compressed it to the three minutes of a 78, and laid onto the guitar the walking boogie bass and turnarounds of urban piano blues. The voice moves from public juke-house delivery to private address; the lyric moves from the communal stock verse toward a single, haunted speaker. That is a turn. The stake was small: a commercial artist aiming at the race-record market, two sides answering other men’s hits, and his best-selling side a wager on a proven path. The swerve of 1961, a prewar country bluesman issued as an album to a new audience, was the compiler’s act, not the work’s.
Peter Paul Rubens · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is double: the Flemish winged altarpiece, and the Italian Deposition, above all Daniele da Volterra’s in Trinità dei Monti, with Caravaggio’s Entombment, which Rubens copied, behind the weight of the body, and, as is commonly argued, the antique Laocoön behind its pose. The departure is the synthesis: Italian monumental figure painting set on a Flemish altar at full scale, the northern triptych remade as one programme rather than a set of scenes, and the body’s weight made the subject. The stake was real, a young painter’s major public commission for his own city after eight years in Italy. But the bolder turn had come a year before, in the Raising of the Cross, with its continuous field and violent torsion; the Descent is the more classical and contained of the two, a perfection of a found mode more than a wager.
Jules Hardouin-Mansart · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Roman domed church after St Peter’s and its French answers: Lemercier’s chapel of the Sorbonne, the Val-de-Grâce, and François Mansart’s unbuilt design for a Bourbon chapel at Saint-Denis, the source of the open lower cupola and the hidden light, which his great-nephew built. The departures: drum and dome raised far more steeply than in any French precedent, so that the dome is a tower of gold over the city; the three shells used as a scenic machine, a painted heaven revealed through an opening; and a centralised royal chapel joined to a basilica at the altar, a double church for two congregations of unequal rank. The stake was the king’s and the architect’s standing at the height of the reign, but the path was proven: a synthesis carried to its fullest, not a break.
J. D. Salinger · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Huckleberry Finn, the vernacular boy narrator on an episodic journey through an adult world he judges; behind it Ring Lardner’s colloquial monologue, Fitzgerald’s New York, and the New Yorker story in which Salinger had trained. The turn is in making a sixteen-year-old’s private idiom, its slang, profanity and tics, the sole instrument of a serious novel about a breakdown, sustained over a whole book without a frame of adult judgment, with the distance between voice and meaning doing all the work. The stake was real: a novel with little plot, in a voice thought sub-literary, with profanity and a scene with a prostitute, risked being read as artless or corrupting, and it was banned and challenged for decades. Held below the bar because the wager was placed on a proven path: the vernacular boy’s odyssey had been a form of the great American novel since Twain, and Salinger’s own stories had already tried the voice.
Burgundian Romanesque builders · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The swerve is real and it cost something. Where the Cluniac tradition was raising pointed barrel vaults, the builders here vaulted a wide nave with round arches and groin vaults and opened a clerestory beneath them, choosing light over the heavier and safer solution; the walls spread under that choice, and the nave came to need added buttressing and, in the end, the nineteenth century’s rebuilding. The striped voussoirs, from a tradition that runs back through Islamic Spain and Carolingian practice, gave the vault a rhythm Burgundy had not seen at this scale. But the turn is made within the Cluniac school of pilgrimage churches, not out of it: a stake placed on a proven path, and raised.
Guru Arjan; rebuilt and gilded under Maharaja Ranjit Singh · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the temple tank of Hindu building; the pavilion in water of Mughal and Rajput gardens; the domed and kiosked vocabulary of the Mughal and Rajput north; and the temple raised on a plinth with a single entrance, rising toward the sanctum of an image. The departures are real and deliberate, and they lie in programme more than in form. The shrine sits low, not high; it opens on four sides, not one; it holds a book, not an image; the water that elsewhere serves a temple is here the setting the temple stands in. The stake was a new faith’s central house, built as it gathered its scripture and rebuilt under persecution. But the forms were known, and the turn is in their reordering: well above an accent, short of the gate.
Charlie Chaplin · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Chaplin’s own silent comedy, the sentimental melodrama in which the blind flower girl is a stock figure, and the mixture of slapstick and pathos he had already made in The Kid (1921) and The Circus (1928). The stake was very large: begun as sound arrived and finished when the industry had converted, made with his own money over nearly three years, a silent feature released into a talking cinema. The opening mocks speech itself, the dignitaries’ addresses rendered as squawking. The departures are real: pathos carried to a weight no comedy had carried, and an ending that stops on a question. But the swerve is of degree, on a proven path, and the great wager was to keep a form rather than to turn from it. Refusal is a stake, not a departure, and the axis scores the two together: a large stake and a small turn.
Luchino Visconti · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is double: the historical super-production, with American money, an American star and a battle in the streets of Palermo; and Visconti’s own road from neorealism, which had already turned to the Risorgimento and to colour in Senso (1954). The turns are real. The climax of the historical epic is a party, not a battle, and the party is given great length; the hero of a Risorgimento picture is a Bourbon prince who arranges his class’s survival; the revolution is shown as a deal. The stake was large: a costly production, at a length its American distributor cut. What holds this axis lowest of the twelve is that the swerve was taken on a path Visconti had opened nine years before, inside the most expensive of inherited forms, and its departures are of emphasis and proportion more than of grammar.
Ancient Egyptian, under Ramesses II · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the built Egyptian temple of pylon, court, hall and sanctuary, and the rock-cut shrine, the speos, already made by Hatshepsut near Beni Hasan, by Horemheb at Gebel el-Silsila and by Ramesses himself at Beit el-Wali. Amenhotep III had already worshipped his own divinity in Nubian temples, and Tiye had a Nubian temple of her own. The departure: the full temple programme cut into a cliff at a scale no speos had approached, the pylon itself made a row of seated colossi of the living rock, and a queen’s façade at the king’s scale. The stake was real: a colossus carved in place cannot be corrected, and one fell. But the turn is a synthesis carried to its limit, boldness on proven paths, rather than a reorganisation of what a temple is.
Jean-François Millet · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the hierarchy of the Salon: peasants belonged to genre, small, anecdotal, picturesque or comic, and gravity belonged to history and religion. The departure gives the rural poor at the bottom of the rural order, not the harvesters but the gleaners, the mass, stillness and classical contour of a frieze, and puts them at the front of a Salon picture. The stake was real and paid in reception: shown nine years after 1848, the canvas was read by hostile critics as a threat, and Millet carried for years the name of a socialist painter, which he disclaimed. Held below the gate because Courbet had made the larger turn first, and Millet’s own Sower of 1850 had already raised the peasant to monumental gravity. This canvas perfects a swerve more than it makes one.
Hayao Miyazaki · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The departure is real. Against the inherited pattern of the feature-length fairy tale, Disney’s chiefly and Japan’s own as well, there is no villain destroyed, no romance completed, no lesson stated, and long passages in which nothing happens. A ten-year-old’s ordinariness stays at the centre of a spirit world. But the stake was smaller than the turn. This was the most trusted animator in Japan, coming after Princess Mononoke (1997, on this desk at 8.5) had broken the box office, on a kind of fantasy he had made before: My Neighbor Totoro and Kiki’s Delivery Service already hold the girl, the spirit and the job. The swerve is from the animated feature, and only partly from his own path.
Almohad builders; cathedral by Gothic masters · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritances are three. The minaret is the culmination of the Almohad type it shares with the Koutoubia at Marrakesh (8.2): its departure is the refinement of the brick lattice and its height, a perfection more than a turn. The church departs in earnest, keeping the mosque’s rectangle and rising as a vast near hall of five aisles with a flat east end, owing little to the French plan of ambulatory and radiating chapels; the stake was a size no Castilian church had attempted, and the crossing fell within five years of its closing. The belfry sets a classical crown on an Almohad shaft. Held short because each turn bends a path proven nearby, and the church’s rectangle was given by the site.
Middle Byzantine builders · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the four-column cross-in-square, the settled Middle Byzantine church, proven and economical. The departure: the katholikon gives up the columns for a wide dome on squinches, asking the corners to carry what columns had carried and turning the naos from a grid into one centralised room. The stake was structural and spatial at once. But whether the type was invented here or adapted from a lost model, of the capital or of the east, is unsettled, and the squinch had long served in Armenia and in Islamic building: the turn is a change within a tradition, not a new structure, and its credit is shared with an unknown source. The smaller church swerves less, a refined cross-in-square whose departure is in its brickwork and ornament.
Peter Jackson · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The turn and the stake are scored together, and here they are unequal. The stake was very large: three films shot at once for one studio before the first was seen, in New Zealand, by a director known for splatter comedy and one intimate drama, Heavenly Creatures, on a scale that put the studio at risk if the first failed. The turn in the genre is real. Fantasy on film before it, Excalibur, Willow, the animated version of 1978, had been marginal, juvenile or camp; this gave high fantasy the gravity of the historical epic. What holds the axis below the gate is form. The grammar is that of Lean’s and Kurosawa’s battles and the Hollywood epic, cut to a modern pace. The swerve lies in genre standing and in production, not in what a film could be.
Christopher Nolan · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the comic-book film, from Tim Burton’s Batman (1989) to Nolan’s own Batman Begins (2005); Michael Mann’s Heat (1995), whose daylight robbery, city-scale crime epic and mirrored cop and criminal it takes almost whole; and the comic The Long Halloween, with its mob war and Dent’s fall. The turns are real. A superhero film is played as a crime epic in an unstylised modern city; its villain is given no history and no motive; a summer tentpole ends in its hero’s defeat and disgrace. What holds it below the gate is the stake: a costly sequel on a path Batman Begins had already opened, with much of what was new tried first in the comics. It swerved inside its genre more than out of it.
Caspar David Friedrich · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the Alpine and mountain view of the late eighteenth century, the sublime landscape of the topographical tradition and of Koch’s heroic mountain scenes; the Dutch and German staffage figure; and the painter’s own practice, settled by 1817, of composing a landscape from separate drawings into a vision. The departure: the staffage figure enlarged and set dead centre with his back to us, so that the landscape is no longer a place but a sight seen by someone, and the viewer is placed behind a viewer. That is a real turn in what a landscape means. The stake was small. The figure seen from behind was already the painter’s device, and the public wager of his career had been run a decade earlier, at the Tetschen Altar and the Monk. A turn made on a proven path.
English embroiderers (probably Canterbury) · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Anglo-Saxon manuscript drawing, above all the Canterbury tradition, and the embroidered narrative hanging, known from written record, as in the hanging of Byrhtnoth’s deeds given to Ely, and from fragments such as the Oseberg textiles. Continuous narrative has ancient precedent, Trajan’s Column among it. The departure: a near-contemporary secular event, politically live, told at monumental length as one continuous strip, with inscriptions, named living men and a running commentary in the borders. The stake was real: English makers telling the defeat of England for a Norman patron, and leaving room for both readings. Held below the gate by survival itself, which makes the hanging look more singular than it was: hangings of its kind existed and are lost, and how far it departed from them cannot be measured. A real turn, its size uncertain.
Kazuo Ishiguro · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is triple: the English boarding-school novel, with its friendships, rules and dread of the adults; the dystopia of bred people, from Huxley’s hatcheries onward; and Ishiguro’s own instrument, the restrained, self-justifying first person of The Remains of the Day (1989), whose narrator does not see what he is telling. The turn is to bring a premise from science fiction into literary fiction with none of the genre’s apparatus, no explanation of the science, no rebellion, no escape, and to hide the premise inside the school story until the reader has accepted it. The stake was real: the book risked being read as genre by one readership and as implausible by another, and it was. Held below the gate because the voice was already Ishiguro’s, and the larger wager in his work had been placed in The Unconsoled (1995), whose broken form this book leaves for a controlled one.
Jakob Prandtauer · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the Austrian monastery as a closed block of courts, newly enlarged into a palace with imperial rooms, a type Carlo Antonio Carlone had begun at St. Florian; and the Italian front of two towers with a crossing dome, naturalised north of the Alps at Salzburg Cathedral and in Vienna. The departure: Prandtauer opened the block at its head and turned it to the landscape, setting the church at the rock’s edge and lowering the gallery between the wings, so that a monastery’s inner court became a terrace and the whole a figure composed to be seen from the river. The stake was real: a provincial master builder, on a scale no Austrian abbey had built, on an abbot’s borrowing. But the vocabulary is borrowed throughout, and the turn lies in the siting and framing of a known type.
Don DeLillo · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the historical novel and its American variants: Doctorow’s Ragtime, Coover’s The Public Burning with its real figures at a national execution, Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song, and the paranoid fiction of Pynchon. The turn is real: a novel that enters the minds of the actual assassin, his mother and his killer, invents a conspiracy around them, declares in its Note that it is imagination, and claims for imagination a truth the official record cannot reach, about an event only twenty-five years old and still contested in public. The stake was considerable: a novelist laying claim to an unhealed national wound. Held three tenths below the bar because the means are inherited: the imagined interior of real figures was Coover’s and Doctorow’s, and the alternating structure is a proven instrument. The swerve lies in subject and stake more than in form.
Denis Villeneuve · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the first-contact film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and Contact (1997), with 2001: A Space Odyssey behind them, and the alien-invasion spectacle the 1990s made a franchise. The turn takes the spectacle’s premise, vast ships over the world and armies on alert, and gives the action to a linguist, with no battle fought; and it hides its structure, so that the grammar of flashback is revealed as flash-forward. The stake was real for studio science fiction at its budget: a climax that is a translation and a telephone call. Held below the gate because much of the swerve is inherited: Chiang’s story supplies the conceit and the structure, and the reveal rides on a familiar form.
Prince and the Revolution · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Prince’s own Minneapolis funk of Dirty Mind and 1999, with its drum machines and synthesiser horns, beside Hendrix, Sly Stone, James Brown and the arena rock of the day. The turn is toward rock: a funk and R&B artist sets guitar-led rock, the power ballad and the hymn at the centre, recorded partly live with a band, and releases as a lead single a dance record with no bass. That subtraction is the boldest departure, and its stake was real. Held below the bar because the larger turn was made on a proven path, where Hendrix and Sly Stone had placed the bet, because 1999 had taken most of the step already, and because the move to rock was also a move toward the largest audience, a wager the film was built to win.
Joseph Haydn · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Haydn’s own: the quartet he had made in Op. 20 and Op. 33 and carried to Op. 71 and Op. 74. Op. 76 departs from it in many places: minuets marked Presto, one beat to the bar, in Nos. 1 and 6, scherzos in fact; two first movements not in sonata form, one of them variations ending in a fugue; a Fantasia for a slow movement, and slow movements in remote keys; a strict canon for a minuet; the cello opening a quartet alone; three finales that begin in the minor and end in the major. The stake was small: a secure master, on a nobleman’s commission, extended his own road. The swerve is real, but one of degree.
Sandro Botticelli · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Florentine painting of the 1490s as Botticelli had helped to make it, and its direction: perspective, proportion, a naturalism carried toward Leonardo. The departure is backward and deliberate: hieratic scale, a flattened and stacked space, figures sized by importance, a gold heaven, a written prophecy across the top. It turns from the century’s achievement toward an older, visionary order in the year the High Renaissance was arriving, and the late manner cost the painter favour. The stake is discounted twice. The canvas was out of public sight for some three centuries, so the risk was taken in a private room; and an archaism turns back along a known path rather than opening a new one. A real swerve, privately placed.
Robert Maillart · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance was the concrete bridge that imitated masonry: heavy solid arches with filled spandrels, often faced in stone. The departure is large: an unclad, hollow, hinged arch whose shape is read from its forces. The stake was real, a competition won on cost, a remote site, a deep gorge, a form a cautious authority might have refused, and an engineer who had seen his first bridge of the kind destroyed the year before the competition. But the turn itself was made in 1905, at Tavanasa. The Salginatobel is that system brought to full form at three times the span or more, its maturation and not its first wager, and the desk scores the turn and the stake together. The mature form’s boldness, its span, deep box and visible hinges, is credited strongly, short of the bar.
Arcade Fire · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the band’s own anthemic chamber rock on Funeral (2004) and Neon Bible (2007), and behind it Springsteen’s records of the American place, Neil Young, and the long tradition of the rock concept album. The turn: a step down in scale from the grandeur of the earlier records to a plainer, mid-tempo rock with a lighter hand; a sixteen-song record of one place; and, at its end, a turn to synthesised disco in Sprawl II that pointed the band’s next records. The stake was real: an acclaimed band made its third record longer and plainer and risked seeming smaller. What holds it near the bar: the concept album of place is an old form, the suburb had been sung for decades, and the plainer sound was also a move toward the larger audience.
Dionysus Flambouras · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The departure is the collision of two inherited instruments. The first nine are past tense, their protagonists unnamed, the prose reaching for resemblance about twice as often as the second half’s, because a system can only report what things are like; the second nine are present tense, mostly named and largely unhedged. Neither register is new, one coming from the parable and the other from the post-Carver domestic story, and the swerve is in setting them against each other across a pairing that is never announced. The first half admits the body as residue, which deepens the argument and slightly blurs the collision. The stake is real: a recessive structure a reader may simply not see.
Aristophanes · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
The departure is real: a comedy that gives its whole second half to a contest of poetics, staged as a formal debate and fought by exact parody of each poet’s style. Literary criticism before this was scattered and implicit; here it is the action. The stake was political as well. In the parabasis, at a moment of near defeat, Aristophanes urged that the citizens disfranchised after the oligarchy of 411 have their rights restored, beside the slaves freed for rowing at Arginusae, and the city honoured the advice. But the turn was made on a prepared path. Aristophanes had already put Euripides on stage, in Acharnians and Thesmophoriazusae, and Cratinus and others had made poets and poetry comic subjects. The wager is bold in its completeness, less so in its kind.
Kenzo Tange · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The vocabulary is inherited: Le Corbusier’s pilotis, sun screen and raised slab, absorbed in Tokyo in the 1930s. The swerve lies elsewhere. Tange took the modern movement’s free ground and made it a memorial instrument, the open ground under the building given not to traffic or air but to passage toward the dead. He joined that vocabulary to Japanese precedent, the raised floor and the haniwa house, without pastiche. And he made a found ruin the terminus of a modern civic axis. The stake was real: a young architect, an occupied country short of almost every material, and a city of the dead. What holds the figure below the bar is the building itself, a disciplined application of a proven language; the turn is in what the language was made to do.
Romano-Egyptian painters · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance is twofold: the Egyptian funerary mask, idealised, gilded and timeless, and the Greek panel portrait of the Hellenistic and Roman world, almost wholly lost elsewhere. The departure is the joining of them: an individual likeness, painted naturalistically with modelled light and shadow, set where an Egyptian burial had put a god’s face. That is a real turn in what a burial could hold and in what a portrait was for. The stake was religious, and the families who chose it took it on their own dead. Held lower because the swerve was collective and gradual, a practice and not a wager by a maker; the painting followed a proven Greek manner, and the turn, made once, is repeated for two centuries.
John Huston · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The departure was real and it cost something. Warner Bros. took its biggest star and made him filthy, unshaven and craven, and had him killed without dignity, his head out of frame under a machete, with no romance and no reversal. The quest of the adventure film becomes a moral tragedy: the treasure is lost and nobody is rewarded but the old man, who wins nothing but a place to stay. The studio sent a crew to Mexico when the American feature lived on the back lot. What holds the figure well below the gate: the swerve is from the conventions of a genre more than from the grammar of film. Traven’s novel already held the plot and its irony, and the style, spare and hard as it is, is classical Hollywood, not a new language.
François Truffaut · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the French studio cinema of the 1950s that Truffaut had attacked as a critic, the tradition of quality built on adapted novels and scripted dialogue, and behind it Jean Vigo’s Zéro de conduite (1933) and Rossellini’s postwar films of children. The departure is real: a personal, autobiographical first feature shot in Paris streets and real flats with a small crew, an unknown boy in the lead, a loose episodic structure and an ending that refuses resolution. The stake was real too: a critic kept out of Cannes the year before staked his polemic, and money by way of his father-in-law’s company, on it. Held below the gate because its grammar is gentler than its claims; the larger formal swerve of that year is Breathless (9.3).
Haruki Murakami · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance is double. In Japanese fiction: the war writing of Ōoka Shōhei and Ibuse Masuji, and the work of Ōe Kenzaburō, against which Murakami had defined himself. In American fiction: Chandler, Vonnegut, Brautigan, Fitzgerald and Carver, several of whom he translated. And his own manner, the cool, detached first person of A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, in which the swerve from the Japanese tradition had already been made. The turn here is from detachment to commitment: the manner of pop surrealism made to carry the atrocities of the Kwantung Army. The stake was real: a writer with an immense young readership gave it a skinning and a war. Held below the gate because the instrument was the author’s existing one, and the turn is in its matter.
Orson Welles · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the American crime film of the 1940s and 1950s, the Universal programmer the film was commissioned to be, and Welles’s own path: the deep focus and low angles of Citizen Kane, the grotesque and the funhouse of The Lady from Shanghai (1947), the moving camera of a stage-trained director. The turns are real: a policier made into baroque tragedy; the villain made the film’s centre and its most moving figure, the hero correct and nearly inert; long takes and overlapping sound carried into a genre built on cutting and clarity; a border town shown as one sick body. The stake was large: his first Hollywood studio picture in a decade, on a programmer’s budget, and he lost the film to the studio and did not direct for Hollywood again. Three tenths short of the gate because most of the devices are a proven path pushed further, not a new turn.
Italo Calvino · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance: Marco Polo’s Il Milione, the frame tales of the Arabian Nights, the imaginary cities from More’s Utopia to Borges’s invented worlds, and the prose poem. The turn is to make a book that is neither novel nor collection: a combinatorial atlas, its order generated by a numerical scheme, in which the frame interrogates the stories and the cities are thought experiments rather than tales. The stake was real: Calvino had been a neorealist and a writer of fables, and here gave up plot, character and narrative continuity. Held three tenths below the bar because the ground had been cleared, by Borges above all, and by Calvino himself in Cosmicomics (1965) and the combinatorial tarot of The Castle of Crossed Destinies (first published 1969): the swerve continues a turn already in progress.
Nick Drake · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
The turn is from Drake’s own previous record, Bryter Layter (1970), with its strings, horns, rhythm section and guest players, to one man and a guitar with almost nothing added. Against the field the departure is smaller: the solo record of voice and guitar was a common form of the folk and singer-songwriter years, and the records of 1970 and 1971 had already made intimacy a market. The swerve is in the degree of the stripping, the refusal of every frame and comfort a label of 1972 would supply, and in the brevity. The stake was real and was paid: two records had not sold, the third gave up the means by which a record might, and its maker would not tour or promote it. The axis scores the turn and the stake together, and this is a turn with a stake, not a stylistic accent. Held below the gate: the turn is mostly from his own path, onto a form the tradition already held.
Alan Moore and David Lloyd · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
The departure is in two places. In form, dropping thought balloons and sound effects, so that a British adventure strip would be told like a film with no captions of inner speech, was a real break in the comics of 1982, and Lloyd’s heavy blacks with little outline carried it. In matter, the hero is a terrorist and a torturer whose ends the book half endorses and whose means it shows without excuse, and anarchism is taken seriously in a mass medium. The stake was real: a black-and-white anthology, an attack on the government of the day, a hero the reader is asked to fear. Held below the gate because the template is inherited: the dystopia is Orwell’s and Huxley’s, the avenger out of a camp is Dumas’s, and the masked vigilante is the costume genre’s oldest figure.
Milan Kundera · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance is plain, and Kundera has named it: Sterne and Diderot for the author who talks to the reader, Broch and Musil for the essay inside the novel, the Central European irony of Hašek and Kafka. The turn is the musical composition of the novel of ideas: seven parts, themes stated and varied, characters born, as the narrator says, of a phrase or a situation, an author who discusses his own figures, and a chronology broken to put death before idyll. The stake was real: a novel banned at home, refusing the dissident pieties expected of an exile, mocking the kitsch of the anti-communist and of the Western left with equal coldness. Held below the gate because the form had been made in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979), seven parts and all, and this book consolidates a swerve its author had taken five years before.
Christopher Wren, with Hawksmoor and Vanbrugh · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the Invalides in Paris, a soldiers’ hospital of the 1670s raised as a royal monument round a domed church; Versailles and the French axial palace; and in England, Webb’s block and Jones’s Palladian house. The departure: a palace composition with its centre left open, the domes split and set aside so that the axis runs through the ensemble to something smaller beyond it, a turn against a type that put the dome at the centre. The manner, with Hawksmoor’s hand in the drums, the massing and the west range, pushes past Wren’s restraint toward a heavier English Baroque. The stake: a palace with no heart could look unresolved. Held below the gate because the swerve was forced by constraint as much as chosen, and its parts, domes, colonnades and courts, are inherited.
Gustav Klimt · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance: academic Viennese history painting, Makart’s above all; the Symbolism and Jugendstil of the 1890s; and the decorative programme of the Secession, which joined painting to the applied arts. The departure: gold and metal leaf, the stuff of icons and of craft, made the field of a modern oil painting; ornament not as border or setting but as the substance of the figures, flat pattern meeting modelled flesh in one form; the secular erotic given the sacred ground. Real, and visible. The stake: Klimt had paid in public for the University paintings, which he withdrew in 1905, and his group had broken with the Secession. But this canvas was bought by the state at its first showing, and it consolidated a manner already proven in the Beethoven Frieze and the portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer: a wager on a path he had cleared before he painted it.
Thutmose (attributed) · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance is two thousand years of Egyptian royal sculpture: the frontal, idealised stone face of the king, with women at secondary scale. The Amarna departure from it under Akhenaten was among the sharpest in ancient art: bodies elongated and exaggerated, intimacy shown, the queen at the king’s scale. The bust belongs to the late, moderated phase, where the exaggeration resolves into a new classical balance, and so it swerves twice: from the old canon by its naturalism and its painted stucco skin, and from early Amarna by its restraint. The stake was paid: the programme was suppressed and the city abandoned. Held because the swerve is the movement’s, and the bust its consolidation.
Oscar Wilde · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the comedy of manners from Congreve through Sheridan, the French well-made play, and the farce of the 1870s and 1880s, Gilbert’s Engaged (1877) above all, which had already played heartless calculation in a sentimental idiom. Wilde’s own three society comedies before it kept a melodramatic plot of a woman with a past under the epigrams. The swerve is to remove the sentiment entirely: no moral crisis, no wronged woman, no pathos, and every value of the theatre’s serious plot turned inside out and played straight-faced. The subtitle states the wager, and the completeness of the turn is what is new. The stake was modest: a three-act farce for a fashionable actor-manager, risking nothing in form, perfecting a line more than breaking one.
Anonymous · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Indian and Persian frame tale, the lost Persian Hazār afsān, in which stories are told to instruct a ruler. The swerve, made over centuries, is real. The frame is turned from instruction to survival, so that the stake of each tale is a life; the night-break, falling mid-tale at dawn, makes suspense a structural device; the embedding is pushed deeper than any predecessor known to the desk; and the matter moves from the forest of beasts to the Abbasid and Mamluk city, with the Three Apples a murder inquiry against a deadline. The cost was real but wagered by no one: the work lived outside the canon of Arabic letters, in Middle Arabic and the coffee-house. A collective, gradual turn that no one risked scores below a wager.
Michelozzo · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the Florentine family palace of the fourteenth century, irregular, towered or battlemented; the public palace with its rough wall and crenellation; and Brunelleschi’s vocabulary of column, round arch and measured bay, already proven in churches and the Foundling Hospital (8.2). The departure: a free-standing regular block on a corner, ordered in symmetry, the battlement replaced by an antique cornice of unprecedented scale, the rustication graded storey by storey, and a square court on columns made the centre of a private house. The stake was political: a palace this size invited the charge of tyranny. Held down because the swerve joins two proven paths, and the court speaks Brunelleschi’s language.
Leonard Cohen · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the folk revival as Dylan had turned it toward literary language, Judy Collins’s art-song folk, and the poet’s own lyric. The turn is real: in 1967, with electric rock at its height, a thirty-three-year-old poet with a narrow baritone made a record of slow, strophic, unamplified songs in a liturgical and erotic diction, over a flamenco-derived guitar figure, with no concession to rock rhythm. The words are the turn more than the music: devotional imagery made intimate, without irony or protest. The stake was real, a published writer staking his name on a voice many heard as unmusical. Held below the gate: Dylan had already made the long literary song popular, and Collins had already carried Suzanne to a public. The swerve is in register, not in kind.
Lana Wachowski and Lilly Wachowski · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The turn is real. A Hollywood studio action film of 1999 took its fight language from Hong Kong, with Yuen Woo-ping training the cast for months, its imagery from Japanese animation, Ghost in the Shell the plainest source, and from cyberpunk fiction, and its argument from philosophy, and made the action itself the philosophy: to fight in the Matrix is to disbelieve its rules. The stake was real too: an original property, not a sequel, from two directors with one small thriller, Bound (1996), behind them, and a long technical gamble on a rig of still cameras at its centre. Held below the gate because each path joined was already proven in its own field, and Dark City (1998) and the cyberpunk tradition had already put the simulated world on screen.
Shona builders · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the farming and cattle-keeping communities of the plateau and the Limpopo valley, and above all Mapungubwe, which had already set the ruler on a hill above commoners and used some stone walling to mark elite space. The departure: stone walling taken from retaining wall and marker to free-standing monumental enclosure, at a scale nothing south of the Sahara had approached, given fine regular coursing, a curved plan in the valley free of the boulders, and decorative bands. The stake was real: the labour of a state over generations, set in a form that declared its rulers’ permanence in a culture of daga and thatch. Held below the bar because the turn was reached by degrees within one tradition, and the ruler on the hill was inherited.
Andrei Tarkovsky · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Soviet war film, heroic and collective, and the Thaw’s lyrical turn from it: Kalatozov and Urusevsky’s The Cranes Are Flying (1957), Chukhrai’s Ballad of a Soldier (1959); and Bogomolov’s story, sober reportage of a boy scout. The turn: the hero is a child; the war is what it has done to a mind, and the dreams weigh as much as the action; heroism is deformation; the hero dies off screen, and his death is learned from an enemy file. The stake was real: a director of thirty given a halted production on a reduced budget. It stops short of the bar, because Kalatozov and Urusevsky had already set the camera loose in the war film, and the lyrical turn was in the air.
David Fincher · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance was the serial-killer thriller after The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and the buddy-cop picture, both of which promise a duel the detectives win. The turn: the killer wins, completes his design with the detectives’ help, and the hero ends destroyed in a car while the old man stays; the worst act is kept off screen, in a box the film never opens. The look is a swerve too, the grime and darkness of a nameless city brought from music video and advertising into a studio thriller. The stake was real, a downbeat ending for a studio genre picture with a rising star. Held below the gate because the city and its rain inherit openly from Blade Runner (1982) and the crime film of the 1970s, and because the genre machinery of the middle is followed, not turned.
The Who · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the band’s own: the mod single, the auto-destructive stage show, the hard rock of Live at Leeds and the rock opera of Tommy (1969). The turn has two parts. The synthesiser and treated organ are made the ground of hard rock, not a colour laid on the band but a repeating pattern it plays against, so that Keith Moon, the least metronomic drummer in rock, locks to a machine pulse. And the band turns from the rock opera it had made famous to a set of songs, its larger project having failed. The stake was real. What holds it: the synthesiser was already in rock and in minimalism, from which the repeating pattern was taken by acknowledgment in a title, and the song collection is the inherited form; the turn was a retreat as much as a wager.
Ilkhanid, under Öljaitü · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Seljuk and earlier Iranian domed tomb, the square or octagonal chamber under a dome, and the Ilkhanid tradition of brick and tile. The departure is of three kinds. Scale: span and height pushed far beyond the tomb type, toward the size of the greatest domed halls. Structure: a double-shelled brick dome on walls hollowed into galleries, a lightened system in place of massive walling. Crown: eight minarets on the octagon, a new silhouette for the type. The stake was real: a dome of this span in brick, raised in about a decade for a ruler who meant to see it finished. Held below the gate because the plan type is inherited intact: the swerve is chiefly one of magnitude and engineering, and the octagonal domed tomb was enlarged, not overturned.
James Brown · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the rhythm and blues of 1962: a singles market, long-playing records made as collections of hits, and live recording used, if at all, for jazz and for comedy. The turn is to issue the revue as one continuous object, its songs subordinate to the show. The stake was real and personal: by the standard account the label refused to fund it and Brown paid, and a record of songs already sold as singles had no evident market. Held below the gate: the music itself does not turn. The songs, the gospel-derived pleading and the band’s arrangements are the revue as it already played, and the swerve is in format and intent. Brown’s larger turn, to the rhythmic architecture of Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag (1965) and Cold Sweat (1967), lies after this record and is not credited here.
Jean-Pierre Melville · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the American crime film of the 1940s, This Gun for Hire (1942) with its solitary killer and his cat above all, and the French policier, and Melville’s own path through Bob le flambeur (1956), Le Doulos (1962) and Le Deuxième Souffle (1966), already a cinema of codes and trench coats. The turn is real: the genre is stripped to ritual, psychology and back-story removed, speech nearly removed, colour drained toward monochrome, procedure filmed at its own length as the film’s substance. In the year of Bonnie and Clyde and Point Blank, it went away from the new violence toward abstraction and stillness. But the stake was small, a star vehicle for Delon and a commercial success, and the turn completes a path its director had already taken more than it breaks one.
George Gilbert Scott and William Henry Barlow · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the great train shed, from Euston and Paddington to King’s Cross next door, whose twin arches by Lewis Cubitt date from 1852, and the Gothic Revival as Scott himself had brought it to secular building. The departures: one span of 240 feet with no intermediate support, tied through the deck rather than buttressed by walls, a record until 1889; a station built as a raised deck over a working warehouse; and a terminus hotel treated not as a classical block but as a Gothic townscape of towers and gables. For Barlow the stake was real, a public risk at the edge of what wrought iron had done. For Scott it was smaller: he reused a design the Foreign Office had refused. The turn of 2007, a Victorian shed made the gateway of a high-speed line, risked little in structure.
Billy Wilder · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the screwball comedy, the gangster picture of the early 1930s, with George Raft playing on his own coin-flipping past, and the stage tradition of the drag farce. The turns are real: a gangland massacre as the motor of a sex farce, so that death and slapstick share one plot; a drag comedy carried at feature length by two male stars without ridicule of the drag itself; a frankness in dialogue and costume that the Production Code could not pass, and a last line that blesses a marriage the Code could not contemplate. The stake was real, in black and white when colour was the prestige choice. What holds it short of the bar: the premise came from an earlier story, the comic machinery is classical, and the swerve lies in tone and daring more than in form.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is twofold: the Hollywood melodrama of Sirk, whose All That Heaven Allows (1955) gives the plot of a widow, a younger man outside her class, scandalised children and a television in place of love; and the austere, distanced political cinema of the young German directors. The turn is to yoke them: Sirk’s plot moved down to a Munich tenement and a cleaning woman, sharpened by race and the guest-worker economy, and played frontally, pathos and distance in one frame. The stake was real in the casting. It was smaller elsewhere: Fassbinder had already made the turn to Sirk in The Merchant of Four Seasons (1971), and this film was cheap, fast and on his proven path.
Mastodon · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
The tradition the record inherits is plain: Neurosis and the Melvins, the progressive and technical metal of the 1990s, the long concept record of rock. Against it the synthesis is a real swerve. A heavy band takes the nineteenth century’s great American novel as its frame; a drummer leads the arrangement as a melodic voice; a country-picked figure is set inside a sludge song; a thirteen-minute closer ends a second album for a label that sold to a small audience. The turn from the band’s first album, Remission (2002), is one of focus more than of kind: the same fusion, organised by a conceit, cleaner in production and more melodic. The stake was moderate, and that holds the figure.
Martin Amis · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
The device is inherited. Carroll’s White Queen remembered both ways, Fitzgerald’s Benjamin Button grew young, Philip K. Dick’s Counter-Clock World ran the world in reverse, and Vonnegut, in Slaughterhouse-Five, had run a bombing raid backward in a paragraph, the bombs returning to the planes. The turn is in what the device is used for, and at what length: a whole novel told in reverse to show the Holocaust from inside a perpetrator, by a British writer known for comic satire of London and its money. The stake was real. The book risked the charge, which some reviewers made, that a formal trick had been laid on the worst event of the century. Held below the gate because the wager was placed on a proven device, which Vonnegut had already joined to a war’s atrocity, and the perpetrator’s view of the camps had been opened by the testimony and history the afterword names.
William Gaddis · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the American comic novel of institutions, Melville’s “Bartleby” and Twain, with Dickens’s Chancery in Bleak House as the nearest ancestor, and Gaddis’s own method of untagged speech from JR. The turn is a novel built of legal documents carried whole and in their own forms, so that the opinion, the deposition and the brief become fictional genres beside the speech, and the reader adjudicates. No American novelist had given the law’s prose this much of a novel, or made it so exactly funny. The stake was real: a writer of seventy, whose last novel had been short and his readership small, staking six hundred pages on legal pastiche and a mediocre play. Held below the bar because the master instrument was proven twenty years earlier, and the swerve is in matter more than in means.
Henry Moore · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the carved figure of the Western tradition, monolithic and closed, already turned by direct carving and the study of non-European sculpture in Gaudier-Brzeska, Epstein and Moore’s own carvings of the 1920s. The departure: the body opened through, the void made a positive form, the figure fused with landscape, the stone’s bedding and colour made part of the meaning. It was not first. Archipenko had opened the figure with a void before 1914, Hepworth pierced a stone in 1931, and Picasso’s bone figures and Surrealist biomorphism stood close. The turn here is to make the pierced figure a whole reclining body set in the land, carved directly, where a hole can break the block. The stake was real: in the 1930s Moore’s carving drew public abuse, in a narrow market. A swerve with company, carried further.
William Van Alen · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the tall office building in Gothic or Beaux-Arts costume, the Woolworth Building of 1913 at its head; and the first setback towers in the new style, Hood’s American Radiator Building, Walker’s Barclay-Vesey, and the Chanin Building nearby. The departure: a crown of bare stainless steel, a metal with no historical ornament, made into the building’s whole figure; ornament taken from the client’s product rather than from any past style; and the spire hidden and raised as a stroke of theatre. The stake was real: a new metal on the skyline, an open race against Van Alen’s former partner, and Van Alen’s own standing, which did not survive his dispute with Chrysler over fees. Held below the gate because the setback tower in the new manner was already in the air, and the building summed a turn more than it made one.
Mike Nichols · Film
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Hollywood sex comedy and the coming-of-age romance, by 1967 glossy studio product. Adultery with the mother of the girl he will love is played as farce and then as desolation. The hero is passive, inarticulate and unglamorous, played by an unknown actor of thirty against the type the role seemed to call for. The cutting takes from the European new cinema: the match across months, the long lens, subjective framings. Existing pop recordings carry whole passages in place of an orchestral score. The stake: an independent picture, a second-time director, no male star, and an ending that will not call its lovers happy. The romance and the chase are classical, and the last act honours the genre the first act mocked.
Geoffrey Bawa · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance is twofold: the public building of the region, from the colonial neoclassical legislature on Galle Face to the modern capitol as Le Corbusier and Kahn had set it, concrete, monumental, abstract; and the maker’s own path, two decades of houses and hotels, the Ena de Silva house among them, in which Bawa had joined the open pavilion, the courtyard and the tiled roof to a modern plan. The departure: a parliament made as a cluster of pavilions under pitched roofs, the vernacular roof taken to the scale and dignity of the state, the building set in water rather than on a plaza. The stake was real: the charge of pastiche lay open, and a state commission at this speed allowed little revision. Held lower because Bawa’s own houses had made much of the turn.
James McNeill Whistler · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the portrait, the Academy’s most commercial genre, and within it the portrait of a parent, a genre of piety. The departure: a portrait of the painter’s mother titled as a musical arrangement of two colours; a strict profile and a near-flat field built of rectangles, out of Japanese prints and Velázquez’s greys; a sitter made an element in a design. The stake was his standing in London, where the title read as provocation, and the same aesthetic later brought him to his suit against Ruskin. The turn was real and the price was paid. Held below the gate because it was not alone: Manet and Degas had flattened and decentred the figure in the 1860s, the Japanese model was common property, and the Nocturnes swerve further.
Gustav Klimt · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the Viennese society portrait in Makart’s grand manner, in which Klimt was trained; the modern full-length of Whistler and Sargent; Symbolism; and the Secession’s programme of joining fine and applied art. The departure: a commissioned portrait of a living patron in which the space of painting is abolished and the figure dissolved into flat ornament in metal leaf, naturalistic flesh set into a field of abstract pattern; a goldsmith’s technique, the trade of the painter’s father, returned to the centre of modern painting. The turn is wide. The stake was real but partial. The University paintings were behind him and he had left the Secession in 1905, but this was a private commission from a supporting patron, and the gold manner was already his in the Judith of 1901 and the Beethoven Frieze of 1902. This canvas carries the turn furthest in portraiture; it did not first make it.
Harappan builders · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The departure is from the village and small-town tradition of the Early Harappan period in the Indus valley, and from the organic growth of early cities generally: a city on raised platforms, its streets set to the cardinal directions, its brick made to one ratio, its drainage public. The stake was high: to build a city of this size on a floodplain that floods, and to commit a whole society to keeping its drains and wells through centuries of rebuilding. Held at 8.2 for two reasons. The departure belongs to the Harappan civilisation as a whole, shared with Harappa, Kalibangan, Dholavira and others, and whether this city led or followed cannot be known. And the tradition it left is itself known only from excavation.
Alan Moore · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the encyclopedic modernist novel, above all Ulysses, each chapter a new style and one city held through one day, and Finnegans Wake; behind them Blake and Bunyan, and nearer, the London psychogeography of Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd. The turn is in the object and the scale: a whole cosmology built on one small, poor district of a provincial English town, and the afterlife given as a literal place in the same streets. The stake was real: about a decade of work and more than a thousand pages, from a writer whose standing lay entirely in comics, published into a market that had no place for it. Held below the gate because the instruments are inherited. The chapter of many styles is Joyce’s method, the Wake pastiche is homage, and the swerve lies in what the means are turned on.
Ana Mendieta · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is double, and both halves were young. Earthworks were monumental, cut by machine and mostly made by men in the American West; body art set the artist’s body to work in the studio or the gallery. The departure joins them at the scale of one body: no machine and no permanence, the land as the place of a self rather than of a geometry, and a woman’s figure as the unit of measure. The stake was real: a student and a Cuban exile, working in Iowa and rural Mexico in materials that vanished, outside the markets of both movements, and for years seen by almost no one. Held below the gate because both fields already held near precedents for laying a body in earth. The turn is hers; the ground it turned from was already moving.
Abbasid builders, under al-Mutawakkil · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the Arab hypostyle mosque, a walled court with a deep prayer hall on the qibla side, as at Kufa, Basra and Damascus; and the minaret, still a young type, usually a square tower. The plan does not swerve: it takes the type and enlarges it, a wager on a proven path. The swerve is the Malwiya: a free-standing tower on the axis, outside the mosque, climbed from outside by a spiral ramp, in a form no mosque had used. It departed in figure and in structure, for a tower with no inner stair must stand on its own mass. The cost was bounded: brick in mass is a safe material, and the risk was of looking strange more than of falling.
Judy Chicago · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The departure is large and it cost. Against an art world still organised around Minimalism and Conceptual art, the work put china painting and needlework, domestic and hobbyist crafts, at the centre of a monumental sculpture; it was made by a workshop of hundreds, credited by name, in place of a single hand; and it made explicit female sexual imagery its central motif. The cost was paid: ridicule from leading critics, years in which no American museum would take it, a debate in Congress in 1990 in which it was denounced as pornographic, and storage. It is held below the gate because the turn was prepared within its own movement: Chicago’s central-core imagery earlier in the decade, the Feminist Art Program and Womanhouse of 1972, and Miriam Schapiro’s work with fabric. It is that movement’s largest public wager, not its first departure.
Thomas Bohier and Catherine Briçonnet; gallery by Philibert de l'Orme and Jean Bullant · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Two real departures, with real cost. Bohier built his house on the piers of a mill in the riverbed rather than on the bank where the old castle stood, breaking with the castle site and staking a new house on foundations in moving water. The second swerve is greater: to bridge a river and then put a two-storey gallery on the bridge, making a house’s grandest room into a crossing. The stake was large: a private bridge across a navigable river, then a palace room on it, in a time of crown debt and civil war. Against the swerve, the block is otherwise a conventional early Renaissance château of the Loire, Gothic in its bones, with Italian ornament applied, and its straight stair belongs to a turn many builders were making. A strong swerve on familiar ground.
Gerhard Richter · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is twofold. In the field: Duchamp’s verdict that painting made for the eye alone was finished, by 1966 the common sense of the avant-garde, with Fluxus in Düsseldorf around the painter, Pop and the readymade revived; and his Nude of 1912, which made the body a mechanism. In the painter’s own practice: the photo-paintings since 1962, mostly grey and mostly from found pictures. The departure: a full-length nude of his wife, in colour and at life size, in oil painting’s most traditional subject, set as the answer to the man who had closed it. The stake was real: a beautiful painted nude in 1966 risked reading as kitsch or reaction, and his standing among the advanced artists rode on the method not being taken for that. Held below the gate because the method was his own proven path; the turn is in subject, colour and target, not in means.
Neil Young with Crazy Horse · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
The turn is plain and it cost something. Young’s first solo album, months before, was a layered studio record with orchestral arrangements; here he drops it for a garage band of limited players, records them nearly live, and lets songs run ten minutes on solos that refuse virtuosity. A songwriter out of a successful band, with a debut that sold poorly, staked his second record on roughness. The swerve from the field is smaller than the swerve from himself: long improvised guitar passages were everywhere in 1969, and the murder ballad and the country shuffle are inherited whole. What departs is the kind of solo, tone and repetition over speed, the single note over the run, inside a conventional frame.
Louise Nevelson · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance: Cubist construction and relief, Picasso’s guitars and the Russian counter-reliefs; Schwitters’ Merz; the found object of Dada and Surrealism; and, nearest, Joseph Cornell’s boxes. The departure is three things together. Scale, from the box held in the hand to the wall that stands over the body. Colour, every fragment drowned in one black so that the found thing loses its identity rather than flaunting it. Type, sculpture as a wall and an environment rather than an object in the round. The stake was real: a woman nearly sixty, long without a market, in a field of welded steel and heroic gesture, putting her work into a form easily dismissed as decor. Held below the gate because each element had precedent: the turn was synthesis and scale more than principle.
Antoni Gaudí · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the Eixample apartment house, a stone front in historical dress over a grid of flats; Catalan Modernisme as Domènech i Montaner and Puig i Cadafalch built it, still of historical parts recombined; Art Nouveau in Brussels and Paris, whose curves stayed in line and iron; and Gaudí’s own path from the historicist Palau Güell to the freer Bellesguard and Park Güell. The departure: a front with no inherited element at all, no order, cornice or frame, treated as one modelled and coloured surface, and the house conceived as an organism. The stake: a remodelling under the city’s eye, beside two of the movement’s chief architects. Held short of the gate because the client was willing and wealthy, the old skeleton was kept, and the bolder wager came at Casa Milà.
Mark Rothko · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the painter’s own, fixed from about 1949 and famous: soft-edged rectangles stacked on a coloured ground, hovering, their edges dissolving, the field glowing to the canvas edge. The departure: the edges harden to one horizontal line; the fields stop hovering and meet; they run to a margin that frames them; colour, his instrument, is reduced to black and grey; oil gives way to acrylic. The stake was real: a famous and ill painter at the end of his life overturned the format his authority rested on, in a shape that could be read as the landscape he had refused for twenty years. Held where it is because the darkness was already his, and the field had gone further before him.
Robert Capa · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the war photograph of the nineteenth century and the First World War: the field after battle, the posed group, the dead arranged or found, the action itself out of reach of slow plates and censors. The swerve is to the moment of death inside the action, taken from among the fighters with a small camera and published within weeks in a picture weekly, and this image is the turn’s emblem. The stake, on the traditional account, was the photographer’s life. Two things hold it short of the gate. The turn was shared: the small camera, the illustrated weekly and the photographer with one side were the conditions of the decade, and others worked in them in Spain. And if the scene was played for the camera, the stake shrinks to a wager on a picture; that question is unsettled, and the figure is set between the two accounts.
Wes Anderson · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the American teen and campus comedy, and behind it the boy hero of Salinger and of Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959), with Hal Ashby’s Harold and Maude (1971) the nearest ancestor in tone. The turn is real and was first made here: a teen comedy played as a melancholy stage comedy, framed in proscenium compositions and divided by curtains, scored to British records of the 1960s rather than the charts of its year, its hero neither loser nor winner but a fifteen-year-old impresario, and Bill Murray, the broad comic star of the 1980s, played dead still as a ruined industrialist. The stake was high after Bottle Rocket (1996) failed commercially. The limit: the departure is a manner within a familiar story shape that resolves warmly.
Jasper Johns · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance was Abstract Expressionism as it stood in New York in the mid-1950s: the gesture as the record of a self, the canvas as an arena, the sublime as the aim. The series made the departure: an image chosen, not invented; a design that needed no designing; a painting that is also a flat object; a brushwork as rich as the gestural painters’ put to work for an image anyone could draw. This canvas makes a second turn. The painting becomes a built object that stands into the room, perspective is turned inside out, and repetition is offered as a method before serial images became a movement. What holds the axis is that the first and larger turn was made in Flag, four years earlier, and the stake of 1958 was smaller: by then the series had an audience and a dealer.
Yves Klein · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The inheritance is double: photography’s document, the press photograph that proves; and the avant-garde gesture, from Dada provocation to the action painting of the 1950s, in which the act stood behind the canvas. The departure is to make the act itself the work and the photograph its only body, then to fake the photograph while presenting it as record, in a newspaper the artist printed himself. That reverses the documentary claim and anticipates by a decade the problem of performance documentation. The stake was real: Klein offered himself to ridicule and to the charge of fraud, and the trick was soon known. Held below the gate because staged and combined photographs were old, from Bayard’s drowned self-portrait of 1840 to Berlin Dada, and because Le Vide had already pressed the immaterial further.
Kallmann McKinnell and Knowles · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The inheritance is double: the American city hall as neoclassical palace, with columns, dome and steps, and the late-modern public building of the 1950s, a box of glass or curtain wall. The departure: a seat of government given no classical order and no glass, made of exposed concrete, its programme turned inside out onto its face, the bureaucracy cantilevered over the citizen, the ground of the city carried indoors. The source is plain and charged against the turn: Le Corbusier’s La Tourette, its heavy upper band of cells over a lighter base and its carved court, and his Chandigarh. But no American city had built its own seat this way, and the stake was paid in full: public money spent on a form the city did not ask for, and decades of ridicule, neglect and threats of demolition.
Louis Sullivan · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The inheritance: the Chicago frame of Jenney, of Burnham and Root and of Holabird and Roche, which had begun to state the grid; Sullivan’s own tall office buildings of the 1890s, which stressed the vertical piers and gave the frame the image of a column; and the department store in masonry and cast iron. The departure: Sullivan turned against his own vertical doctrine and let the frame speak as it was, a horizontal field of wide windows, and set against that plain field the richest ornamental base on the street, sharpening the contrast into an argument. The stake was real: the most valuable corner, a client that wanted to sell, and a practice in decline. A departure in part along a proven path, new in its synthesis.
Charles and Ray Eames · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The inheritance is threefold: the modern house of the 1920s to 1940s, concrete and steel built as craft to look like a machine, at Poissy, in the Lovell house and at Brno in the Tugendhat house; the American dream of the factory house, from Fuller to Wachsmann and Gropius, mostly unbuilt or failed; and the makers’ own first scheme, the Bridge House, a heroic box raised over the meadow. The departure is twofold. The house took the factory’s parts as they came, off the shelf, and built with them as found rather than designing a system; and it gave up its own heroic scheme, after the steel was ordered, for something lower, divided and modest. Its colour and patterned infill swerve from the white or black of the modern house. What holds the axis: the stake was the makers’ own money and home and little else, and prefabrication, the open-web joist and the steel frame were not new.
Gordon Bunshaft (Skidmore, Owings and Merrill) · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The inheritance: Park Avenue as a street of masonry apartment blocks and hotels; the New York office tower as a setback mass of brick and stone filling its lot to the zoning envelope; and, beyond the city’s offices, the glass slab already shown in Mies’s apartment towers at Lake Shore Drive (1951), Belluschi’s Equitable Building at Portland (1948) and the United Nations Secretariat across Manhattan. The departure: a corporate office tower in a sealed glass skin, set as a thin slab on a lifted block, giving most of its buildable area and most of its ground to the street, on the most prestigious avenue in the country. The stake was real: a client’s capital and image placed on a skin with no tested record of weathering, among masonry neighbours. Held below the gate because others had opened the path in the same years.
I. M. Pei · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The inheritance: the French tradition of building in the Louvre, where each age added in the classical language of the one before, Lescot to Lemercier, Perrault to the Second Empire wings of Visconti and Lefuel; a practice of answering old fabric by matching it; and the modern glass pavilion from Paxton to the Miesian box. The departure: an abstract figure in glass at the centre of the most charged classical court in France, matching nothing, with the museum’s whole entrance and service put under the ground. The stake was paid in public: a fierce controversy from 1984, opposition within the heritage establishment and in the press, a foreign architect chosen without competition, and a President’s political capital. Held below the gate because the elements were inherited, and the swerve is one of placement and nerve more than of a new way to build.
Wes Anderson · Film
7.9 · Tier III
The inheritance is double: the animated family feature of the 2000s, ruled by computer animation’s smoothness and by star-voiced comedy, and the director’s own live-action manner. The turn was to make an animated feature by hand, with puppets whose fur visibly shifts between frames, and to let the craft show rather than hide it; to stage it with flat lateral tracking and symmetrical tableaux; to record the voices away from the booth; and to give a children’s film a midlife comedy’s preoccupations, with swearing replaced by the word “cuss”. The stake was real: a live-action director’s first animation, a children’s classic changed in tone, a studio release that did modestly. What holds it short of the bar: the stop-motion tradition was alive, and the manner came with the director.
Doris Salcedo · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The inheritance is the hall’s own short tradition of spectacle filling the volume, Bourgeois’s towers, Kapoor’s red membrane, Eliasson’s sun, Whiteread’s boxes and Höller’s slides the year before, and behind it the negative sculpture of the 1960s and 1970s: Heizer’s cuts into the ground, Matta-Clark’s cuts into buildings, Burden’s excavation of a museum’s foundation. The departure: in the largest showcase of contemporary art in Europe, to make nothing that rises and to show the institution’s foundation broken. The stake was real: a cut floor in a listed building, the risk to the public’s feet, and the risk that the public would walk past. Held at 8.2 because the negative cut had its precedents, Burden’s above all, and Salcedo’s own earlier installations had already set private grief into public architecture.
Peter Gabriel · Music
7.9 · Tier III
The inheritance is twofold: the Hollywood biblical score, orchestral and European since the epics of the 1950s, and the singer’s own art rock, which had already taken in African drumming. The turn on the first count is large: a Gospel film scored with no orchestra, from musics of the Near East, Africa and South Asia played by their masters and fused with samples, then issued as a long instrumental album three years after So (1986). The stake was real: the film was under protest, the record had no single, and it opened a new label. What holds it is a proven path: Jon Hassell, who plays here, and Eno and Byrne’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1981) had placed the bet.
David Foster Wallace · Literature
7.9 · Tier III
The inheritance is Wallace’s own encyclopedic manner, Infinite Jest and the long essays, with Gaddis and Pynchon behind it, and the American workplace novel. The turn is radical in subject and in wager: a novel about boredom that bores on purpose, set inside the tax service, that asks the reader to endure what its characters endure and offers the endurance as the point. Inside it the Author’s Foreword, which opens “Author here”, breaks the fiction to call the book a memoir and the copyright disclaimer a legal device, a metafictional gambit turned toward sincerity rather than play. The stake was very high: Wallace worked on the book for about a decade against the expectation his earlier novel had set, and did not finish it. Held below the bar because much of the instrument, the sectional mosaic, the footnoted self-commentary, the maximal monologue, is his own proven manner, and the swerve lies mainly in subject and in the reader’s endurance.
Damien Hirst · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
The inheritance: the readymade and its vitrine; the Minimalist box and its steel; Koons’s tanks of the 1980s, the nearest precedent for the sealed liquid case; Bacon’s meat and cages; the natural-history museum and the anatomy theatre; and the Madonna and Child of the altar. The departure: a real animal, whole and then cut open at life size, set in the gallery as sculpture, with the viewer sent inside it. The cut is the new move; the tank was not. Hirst’s shark of 1991 had made the wager on the dead animal in formaldehyde, so this is a programme’s second step. The stake, the risk of being taken for a stunt, was partly paid in public scorn. Held below the gate because the maker had opened the path two years before.
Diébédo Francis Kéré · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
The departure is double. It turns from the school the region was being given, a concrete-block box under a tin roof built to a donor’s standard plan, hot and dependent on bought materials; and it turns from simple vernacular revival, since nothing in Gando’s traditional building has a raised steel space-truss roof or a ventilated earth ceiling on bars. It joins the two into a third thing. The stake was real: its maker’s first building, made before he had qualified, on small donations raised in Germany, in earth, the material of houses that wash away in the rains. Had it failed in its first wet seasons it would have confirmed the doubt across the region. It held. It recombines known techniques rather than finding a new principle of structure, and stops below 8.5.
Wong Kar-wai · Film
7.8 · Tier III
The inheritance is the Hong Kong commercial cinema of the early 1990s, the cop film, the triad thriller, the romantic comedy, and the French New Wave, Godard above all, whose casual narration and pop citations Wong takes up; Breathless, at 9.3 here, made the manner this film renews. The turns are real: a film split into two unconnected stories, linked by a place and a passing; the crime story abandoned midway for a romance; step-printed handheld images that make motion itself smear; pop songs used not as score but as repeated structure; voiceover that tells time to the hour. The stake was mixed. It was a quick film, shot on the streets in about two months, with bankable stars and little money at risk. The wager on form was large for a commercial picture; the cost of failure was not.
SANAA (Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa) · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
The inheritance: the museum as an enfilade or a route of galleries, from the nineteenth-century palace museum to the modern white cube; the museum of the 1990s as a sculpted signature, Guggenheim Bilbao above all; and in Japan the lineage of light, thin buildings from Toyo Ito, in whose office Sejima trained, to the Sendai Mediatheque of 2001. The departure: a public museum with no front, a plan without hierarchy, galleries dissolved into separate boxes in a field, the line between paying and free space made fluid, and a glass perimeter round a whole civic institution. Set against Bilbao it was a deliberate retreat from the image, and that was a turn. The stake was real: glass all round, many small rooms and visitors who might lose their way. What holds the axis is that SANAA’s own earlier works and Ito’s prepared the language, and that the swerve lies in plan and attitude more than in structure.
Rem Koolhaas (OMA) · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
The inheritance: the nineteenth-century shoebox halls; the vineyard hall since Berlin, then ascendant; the iconic cultural building after Bilbao; and Koolhaas’s own path, from the Kunsthal at Rotterdam and the Educatorium at Utrecht to the Seattle library opened a year earlier. The departure is real and double. Against the vineyard fashion it returns to the shoebox; against the box in a box wrapped in foyers, it makes the hall the structural core of a monolith and opens its ends to the city, a heresy in a type built to shut out daylight and noise. The stake was paid: a missed festival year, a long overrun, a design taken from an unbuilt house offered as civic monument. What holds it: the free-standing iconic object was already the fashion, and the wager was made inside it.
Danny Boyle · Film
7.7 · Tier III
The inheritance is the zombie film and the director’s own: 28 Days Later (2002) had remade the genre with fast infected, digital video and an empty London, and its sequel had made it an action franchise. The turn takes a franchise sequel and makes it a coming-of-age elegy whose climax is a mercy killing in an ossuary, kept by a doctor who honours the infected dead; it cuts archive war film and Olivier’s Henry V into a zombie picture; and it shoots a studio release on rigs of phones in an extreme widescreen frame. The stake was real: a studio release, the first of a planned trilogy, risked on a tone the genre’s audience did not ask for. Held below the gate because the departure is partly a return to the first film’s premise and digital means, and the coda takes back part of the wager by delivering the franchise hook.
Bruce Springsteen · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is plain and the record wears it openly: Phil Spector’s wall of sound, Roy Orbison’s operatic ballad, Dylan’s flood of images, Van Morrison’s long street songs, the R&B horn section, the rock and roll of the 1950s. The turn is to make those forms carry operatic length and literary ambition at once, in 1975, against the softer singer-songwriter record and the long progressive suite: nine and a half minutes of street epic on a rock record made for radio. The stake was the largest of a career, after two albums that had not sold. What holds it below the bar is the direction of the turn. It is a synthesis of the past, consciously backward, and no convention of the form is broken; it is enlarged.
Agesander, Athenodoros and Polydorus of Rhodes (attributed) · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Hellenistic pathos style already made at Pergamon: the gigantomachy of the Great Altar, where a giant gripped by Athena throws back his head as Laocoön does, and the Gauls. The group does not depart from that tradition; it concentrates it, in the round, around one block, into a relief-like frontal plane. Its departures are real but of degree: three bodies locked by one continuous coil; the story compressed into three stages of one fate; the moment taken at the height of effort rather than after it. What it staked is not known and cannot be shown: a commission for a Roman house, by a proven workshop, in a proven style. A wager on a proven path, carried to its limit, and the lowest of the twelve but one.
R.E.M. · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the band’s own: the jangling American college rock it had led for a decade, and Out of Time (1991), where the mandolin, the strings and the quiet hit had already arrived, with the chamber folk of Nick Drake beyond it. The turn is to a whole record slow, acoustic and about death, made at the band’s commercial peak, in a year when loud guitars ruled the field it had helped to open, with no tour behind it. The stake was real: the follow-up to its biggest record, and a sombre one. What holds it is the path: the palette was proven on the previous record, the song forms are conventional, and the wager is in mood and subject, on ground already cleared.
Jane Austen · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the English courtship novel: Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison, Burney’s Evelina and Cecilia, the sentimental novel and the conduct book. The turn is real. Austen strips out abduction, villainy, Gothic peril and sentimental effusion, and makes a heroine’s error of judgment the whole plot; she carries the narrative in dialogue and in a free indirect voice that moves between the narrator’s irony and Elizabeth’s mind without a seam; and she gives the heroine wit as her chief virtue, where the tradition had given her sensibility. The stake was modest: the book was published anonymously, on a known path, by an author whose first novel had sold. The turn is decisive in tone and economy more than in form, and the larger formal swerve in Austen’s work came later, in Emma, where the free indirect method governs the whole.
Graham Greene · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Catholic novel of France, Bernanos above all, whose Journal d’un curé de campagne appeared in 1936, and Mauriac, and behind them Péguy’s sinner at the heart of Christianity; in English, Greene’s own thrillers and entertainments, with their chases and their seedy settings. The turn is the fusion: the manhunt of the thriller made the vehicle of a theology of grace, and a priest who is a drunkard and a father made the agent of sanctity, by an English convert, in English, where the Catholic novel had been a minor and apologetic mode. The stake was real: the Holy Office later sought changes, and Greene refused. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that the sinful priest as a vessel of grace was already Bernanos’s ground, and the thriller form was Greene’s own proven path. The departure is in the joining and the place, not in a new kind of novel.
Cormac McCarthy · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Two inheritances. The first is McCarthy’s own manner: the King James cadence and the Faulknerian lexicon of Blood Meridian and the Border Trilogy. The second is the novel of the last survivors, from Mary Shelley’s The Last Man through Earth Abides to Riddley Walker, with Beckett’s two figures on a bare road behind both. Within the first the departure is real: the baroque narrator is stripped to short declaratives and fragments, the vast canvas to two people. Within the second the turn is a refusal of what the genre lives on: no explanation, no politics, no plot of rebuilding. The stake was real and bounded: a celebrated writer in his seventies, with a secure readership, taking up a form the literary novel had held at arm’s length. Held well below the bar because the genre’s path was proven and the pared manner is still recognisably the author’s: a turn of degree, not a new road.
Dionysus Flambouras · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is plain and the book takes it whole: the linked book of one man’s episodes, the declarative sentence of the code hero, the procedural register of the working-life story. The turns are two. The title story inverts the teaching scene, making the man who will become the book’s standard the one who says “It’ll move” and smears a damp crescent flat with his boot, so that the code is shown being learned rather than possessed. And Boxer brings the corporate file inside the idiom built to keep it out, letting a disciplinary record retell the earlier stories as entries. Both turns are real. The stake is modest: the instrument is proven, and the departure lies in what it is pointed at, not in what it is.
Roman, under Diocletian · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The departure is in the type and in certain parts. The type fuses country villa, urban palace and fortified camp into one walled figure, a turn the inherited villa, spread and open among gardens as at Tivoli, did not take; it reads the late empire’s insecurity into a residence. In the parts, the arcades of the peristyle spring directly from the capitals, and the Golden Gate carries arches on colonnettes set on brackets: the rule that a column carries a beam is set aside in the emperor’s ceremonial court. Against this, the tetrarchic palaces at Thessaloniki and Gamzigrad show kindred thinking, the arch on a column was not first raised here, and the camp plan is borrowed whole. A turn in an available direction, taken boldly.
Charles Barry and Augustus Pugin · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the classical public building of Georgian London, Soane’s additions to the old palace among them, and a Gothic Revival that had been picturesque and domestic, at Strawberry Hill and Fonthill, or ecclesiastical. The departure: Gothic for the largest secular building of the state, detailed with archaeological exactness in every room; a modern institution of hundreds of rooms, with iron roofs and mechanical ventilation, built entire in a medieval idiom; a symmetrical body under a deliberately unequal skyline. The stake was real: costs and years far past the estimate, long quarrels with the ventilator and the commissioners, Pugin worked to collapse. Held below the gate because the competition, not the makers, set the style, and because the plan is the classical tradition the elevation claims to leave. The turn is half made.
Jorge Luis Borges · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is plain and named: the silva de varia lección of Pero Mexía, the commonplace book, the parable as Kafka had made it, the Modernista lyric of Lugones, to whom the book is offered, and Borges’s own Ficciones and El Aleph, whose devices, the false citation, the mirror and the double, are here at their briefest. The turn is in two moves. A writer famous for impersonal fictions put his own name, blindness and family into the book, and made confession through the mask of the parable; “Borges y yo” is the hinge. And he returned to verse in fixed forms at the height of his fame in prose, which set the course of his later work. The stake was real but bounded: a gathering of brief pieces risked being taken for a sweeping of the workshop. The book departs from his own manner more than from the tradition.
Japanese, under Emperor Shōmu · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Tang Buddhist monastery, with its axial court and halls, and the colossal Buddhas of China, the Vairocana at Longmen above all, cut into rock; in Japan, the temples of the Asuka and Hakuhō periods. The departure of 752 was of scale and medium: a colossus cast in bronze and housed indoors, in a timber hall larger than any before it, at a cost that strained the state. The stake was very high, political and economic as well as technical. But the plan, the hall type and the figure all came from the continent, enlarged, and a wager placed on a proven path is not a swerve. The turn in kind is Chōgen’s: the Daibutsuyō, a new system in Japan, whose fullest survivor is the Great South Gate. The hall of 1709 turns little.
Willa Cather · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the American regional and local-colour novel, the plotted novel of courtship and ruin, the work of Sarah Orne Jewett, Cather’s mentor, and the pioneer romance. The turn: a novel with almost no plot, made of remembered scenes laid side by side; a heroine who never marries the narrator, whose seduction happens offstage and is reported, and whose triumph is a farm and a houseful of children; the immigrant labourer, not the settler of English stock, as the figure of the nation’s making. Cather named the method four years later in “The Novel Démeublé” (1922), the unfurnished novel, and this is its fullest practice. The stake was real: a book with no climax, by a writer known as a magazine editor and a regionalist. Charged because the prose stays traditional and the narration orderly: the departure is deep and quiet, and no form broke.
Philip Roth · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the American novel of passing, from James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and Nella Larsen’s Passing to Faulkner’s Joe Christmas; the campus satire; and Roth’s own manner, the Zuckerman frame and the long argumentative period. The turn is in the choice of mask: a Black man who passes not as a white man in general but as a Jew, so that the Jewish-American novel Roth had written for forty years is shown to be one of the identities a man may put on. That was a real stake, for a writer charged all his life over his treatment of his own people, to write a Black life from inside and make its secret the centre. Held below the gate because the instrument is the one Roth had already made in American Pastoral, the witness who imagines another man’s life, and the swerve lies in the matter.
Zhang Yimou · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Fifth Generation’s own: Chen Kaige’s Yellow Earth (1984), and Zhang’s Red Sorghum (1987) and Ju Dou (1990), the last of which already has Gong Li as a young wife in a tyrant’s house, colour as passion and an enclosed space as a social order. Behind it stand the family melodrama of Chinese cinema, Xie Jin above all, and Su Tong’s novella. The turns are real: the exterior almost removed, the master faceless, a strict frontal symmetry in place of Ju Dou’s tactile closeness, an invented ritual in place of the novella’s plain domestic intrigue. So was the stake: made in the years after 1989, with foreign money, after Ju Dou had been restricted at home. But the wager was placed on Zhang’s own proven path, the formula that had already won abroad.
Stevie Wonder · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Motown soul and above all Wonder’s own run since 1972, Music of My Mind, Talking Book, Innervisions and Fulfillingness’ First Finale, where the self-produced, self-played album and the synthesiser in soul had already been made. The turn here is of scale and range: a double album with an extra disc carries jazz harmony, Latin, a song in Zulu, Spanish and English, a fusion instrumental, a string pastiche, a classroom drill and gospel into one soul record. The stake was real, two years’ delay and the risk of sprawl before the largest audience in soul. What holds it well below the bar: the decisive swerve was made on the earlier records, and Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On (1971) had already made soul a vehicle of social argument.
Alfred Hitchcock · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the suspense thriller, Woolrich’s story of a confined man who sees a murder, and the director’s own experiments with confinement, Lifeboat (1944) and Rope (1948). The turns are real: a whole feature held to one viewpoint from a chair; a hero who cannot act, while the woman and the nurse do what heroes do; a courtyard made a wall of screens, many windows shown in long shot without dialogue; a score heard almost wholly as source music across the yard; the thriller’s question turned from who did it to what the watcher wants. The stake was smaller than the turn, and it holds the axis low: a major studio picture with two stars at their height, by a director on a proven path, which succeeded at the box office, its confinement tried by him twice before. It is a wager placed on that path.
The Strokes · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the New York rock of the 1970s, the Velvet Underground, Television and the Modern Lovers above all, with the British guitar pop that followed. The record’s own decade was nu metal, post-grunge, polished pop and electronic music, and the turn was against that decade: back to a lean two-guitar band with almost no effects, a voice filtered to sound cheap, and drums played to the exactness of a machine. The stake was small in money and real in fashion, a band betting that the old form would sound new. What holds it below the gate is that a wager placed on a proven path is not a swerve, and this path was proven twenty-five years before. The originality is in the mixture, the interlock and the restraint: a strong accent and a well-timed return.
Cormac McCarthy · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is plain and heavy: Faulkner’s South and his sentence; Joyce’s Ulysses, with its city walked, its young man who has refused his inheritance and its comic life of the low; Agee’s Knoxville; the Southern Gothic of O’Connor. The turn is real. The book took the Southern novel off the farm and out of family history into a city slum, made its hero a man who chose the slum, and built a long novel without a plot from a life’s days, in a prose that joins the Joycean catalogue to a King James cadence and a dictionary’s rarities. The stake was real: a long book without a plot, published in a decade that rewarded neither length nor this kind of difficulty. Held below the bar because the departure is one of degree from two masters who are always audible, and the greater break in its author’s work came after it.
Dionysus Flambouras · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The register is the most extreme instrument on the bench, mean sentence about eight words and a two-word acceptance as the primary verbal response, and the idiom is still McCarthy’s and Hemingway’s: a man and a woman in a car, cash, a revolver in oilcloth, the cold. The swerve the book makes is formal. Each section is answered by an entry from the state’s log, in fields and times, and the log knows what the people do not: who called them in, where the officer’s goodwill was filed, which brother cleared the mother’s prior name. A documentary voice set against a narrative has precedents, and the road form is taken whole. The stake is real: a novel that already gave its people nearly nothing now gives the reader more than them, and trusts the gap to carry the book. A turn of degree, firmly made.
Michael Mann · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the heist film and the policier, from Rififi and The Asphalt Jungle to Melville, and Mann’s own television film L.A. Takedown (1989), which tells the same story at about half the length. The turns are real: a genre picture given the length and the parallel households of a novel; thief and cop held at equal weight, neither the hero; a documentary exactitude of tactics, procedure and gunfire, the battle staged on real streets; Los Angeles at night as a field of glass, light and distance rather than noir shadow. The stake was considerable: nearly three hours, two stars meeting on screen for the first time, and the remake of a failed pilot. Held below the top because the form stays classical, and its turns perfect a genre rather than leave it.
Louise Bourgeois · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the monumental public sculpture of the twentieth century, abstract, steel, heroic or impersonal, from Calder’s stabiles to Serra; and beside it the enlarged figure or object made monumental, Oldenburg’s from the 1960s and Koons’s Puppy (1992). The departure: the monument made intimate, autobiographical and ambivalent, a mother as a predator, at a size that puts the viewer beneath her, by a woman of eighty-seven at the opening of a great museum. The stake was the risk of spectacle: a giant spider in a public hall could read as a fairground effect, and its content as confession. What holds the axis: the turn is the scaling of a motif made since 1994, the confessional content had been hers for decades, and the swerve belongs to the oeuvre, of which this is the largest statement.
Ridley Scott · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The premise is inherited from the monster film of the 1950s and 1960s, a crew, a ship, a thing aboard, and the film knows it. The departures are real and several: a B-movie premise given the patience, photography and design of a prestige picture; a spacecraft worn, cluttered and industrial, worked by tired employees arguing over shares, against the gleaming ships of the genre; a biomechanical creature of a kind no one had put on screen; and a woman as the survivor, in a role not written to require one. The stake was real: a studio budget on a horror premise, a long silent first act, a director with one feature behind him. It was also bounded, since this was a commercial genre picture made in the year after Star Wars made space a proven market. A swerve in register and design within a form it keeps.
William Gaddis · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance is twofold: the Gothic novel, and Gaddis’s own invention in JR, the novel made almost wholly of unattributed talk. The departure from the first is real: the Gothic turned into a domestic satire of Reagan’s America, the supernatural replaced by the conspiracies of money and faith. The departure from the second is a compression: a method that in JR needed a very long book and a whole town is made to work in one house and a short book, with long descriptive passages admitted as a counterweight to the talk. Gaddis described the book as an attempt at a short, conventional novel that observes the unities. But a writer turning his own instrument on a smaller object makes a lesser wager than inventing it, and the turn is of degree more than of kind.
Steely Dan · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the band’s own: five albums on which a rock group had already become a studio partnership using session players and jazz harmony, with The Royal Scam (1976) the step before; beside it, jazz-rock fusion and the polished soul and pop of the Los Angeles studios. The turn is one of degree and of one track. The record carries extended and altered chords further into the popular song than any rock record of its standing, and in the title track builds a through-composed piece of about eight minutes around a jazz master’s solo and a drummer’s climax, inside a record meant to sell. The stake was real in labour and cost, a year of sessions with whole bands of players tried and discarded, but small commercially. It perfects a swerve made earlier.
Ingmar Bergman · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The real turn is formal. Past, dream and present are entered without a change of physics, and the old man walks into his own memories at his present age, seen by no one, unable to alter what he watches. That made memory a place in the frame rather than a flashback, a departure from the framed flashback of the studio film. The inheritance is heavy, and the film declares it: Sjöström’s own The Phantom Carriage (1921), with its death cart and its night of reckoning; Strindberg’s dream plays; the expressionist street; and the dream of one’s own coffin, filmed by Dreyer in Vampyr (1932). The stake was bounded: Bergman came to it after the Cannes success of Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), and the road picture and an old man’s reckoning were proven forms. The departure is of a device more than of the whole, and that holds the axis among the lowest.
Steven Spielberg · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The departure is real and costly in one place. A star vehicle from the most popular director of his time, made for a summer release, opened on a long passage of carnage: the star introduced by a shaking hand, the beach seen at ground level without a map, a hero or a plan, the image degraded on purpose and the sound made the soldier’s own. The studio war film’s clear geography and readable heroism were set aside, and that risked the audience. Beyond the beach the film returns to a proven road: the squad on a mission, its types (the joker, the sharpshooter who prays, the city tough, the medic, the green interpreter), its last stand at a bridge. Swerve and inheritance stand side by side rather than one transforming the other, and the frame and the Washington scenes are the most traditional patriotic cinema. Below the gate.
Bong Joon-ho · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is double: the American serial-killer film of the 1990s, Se7en (1995) among it, whose killer is a mastermind and whose detectives at last see; and the Korean police and crime film, with the political cinema of the Korean New Wave behind it. The turns are real. The killer is never seen as a person and the case is not solved; the detectives are provincial, brutal and comic; slapstick and rape-murder are governed by one law in the same scenes; and the genre becomes a history of the dictatorship’s last years. The stake was a second feature after a commercial failure, on a real case with the killer at large. Held below the gate, and well below it: the unsolved inquiry was a path the art film had proved, from L’Avventura (1960) to Imamura, the open ending was given by history, and this was a studio-backed genre picture whose wager paid at once.
Radiohead · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the guitar rock of the decade before: U2 and R.E.M. for sweep and chime, the Pixies for loud and quiet, the Smiths for the wounded voice, the grunge of the band’s own first album, Jeff Buckley’s falsetto nearby. The turn and the stake were real. After a hit that threatened to make them a one-song band, with their label’s patience in question, they refused to repeat it, mocked it in My Iron Lung (“total waste of time”), and moved to three-guitar textures, falsetto and an anxiety set against the laddish nostalgia of British pop in 1995. What holds it below the bar is the path: every element was proven, and the turn was toward a fuller guitar rock, not away from it.
Michel Gondry · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is twofold: the romantic comedy of meeting, quarrel and reconciliation, and the cinema of time and memory, from Resnais’s Je t’aime, je t’aime (1968) to its own years, Memento (2000) and Kaufman’s Being John Malkovich (1999). The turn is to set the romance inside the mind that is losing it, so that the comedy’s structure runs in reverse and the reconciliation comes before the quarrel is known. The stake was real: a studio-distributed film with Jim Carrey cast against his comic persona, and an opening that withholds what it is. Gondry’s in-camera means, against the digital fantasy of the period, are a departure too. Held below because the paths were open: the reverse structure, the mind-game film and the Kaufman premise had each been proved within five years.
Barry Jenkins · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is twofold: the American neighbourhood film of the 1990s, Boyz n the Hood and Menace II Society, with its dealers, absent fathers and violence; and the art cinema of mood and ellipsis of Wong Kar-wai and Claire Denis, whose In the Mood for Love (8.7) and Beau Travail (8.4) stand on this desk. The turn is real: the matter of the neighbourhood film given the lyric form of the art film, its violence kept largely offscreen, its protagonist a gay Black boy whose story is a love story. The stake was considerable for a director whose one earlier feature, of 2008, was made for almost nothing. Held below the gate because each half walks a proven path: the manner is Wong’s and Denis’s, and the matter had precedents in independent queer cinema.
Deerhunter · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Deerhunter’s own records, the ambient drift and noise of Cryptograms (2007) and the cleaner songs of Microcastle (2008), and behind them shoegaze, krautrock’s pulse, the pop of the early 1960s and the drifting home recordings of their indie contemporaries. The turn is toward clarity: songs in the plainest old forms, doo-wop, a saxophone rock and roll, a chiming ballad, played straight and then blurred by production into memory. That is a real choice and a coherent one, a band known for drift committing to the song. What holds it: Microcastle had already turned toward the song, the haze was a sound the indie field of 2010 shared widely, and the move toward clear song was also a move toward the larger audience.
Johnny Cash · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the country album of 1968, studio songs gathered around a single, and the clean live album recorded before a paying public. The turn is to record inside a prison, for the prisoners, with a set chosen for them: death, prison and execution make up most of the record, the stage talk is rough, the audience is kept as part of the work, and a prisoner’s song closes it. The stake was real: a declining star with a known drug history, a label reported to be doubtful, songs no country radio format wanted, and a performance that could fail before the people it was for. Held from the top: Cash had played prisons for a decade, the songs were proven, and the swerve is in setting and frame, not in the music.
J. G. Ballard · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the English dystopia and the castaway fable, with Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954) the nearest precedent; behind it stand the vertical division of classes in Wells’s The Time Machine and the British disaster novel, of which Ballard’s own early books were part. The turn is real. The catastrophe has no outside cause: no flood, no wind, no war, no state. The disaster is chosen, inside a building that works, by affluent adults who could leave at any time. Golding’s boys are rescued by an officer; Ballard’s residents are never rescued and do not want to be. The narration also withholds the moral judgment the tradition supplied, and lets the regression read as fulfilment. The stake was bounded. Ballard had placed the larger wager in The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash; here he returned to linear narrative and a legible allegory, a proven form bent hard rather than broken.
Built for Yajnavaraha · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The departure is real, and it lies in the decoration and the scale. Before Banteay Srei, Khmer pediments mostly carried foliage or a single figure. Here they carry whole narrative scenes, set in many-lobed, flame-edged frames and stacked in recessed tiers, carved deeper and more plastically than anything before them in Khmer stone, in a fine sandstone chosen for it. The whole is a temple of the first rank built by a patron who was not a king, at miniature scale, against the royal temple-mountains of its own decade, and it accepted that it would not compete in size. But in plan and structure it departs little from its inheritance. The swerve is decorative and figural, carried by an orthodox building, and stands at 8.1.
Max Ernst · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The departure is real. Decalcomania was a Surrealist parlour method of chance, introduced to the group by Oscar Domínguez about 1935 to 1936, and Ernst turned it into the means of a panoramic history picture: a landscape of contemporary catastrophe made of accident disciplined by fine painting. That is a turn from the Surrealist automatic image toward the old genre of the ruin landscape, remade by chance. The stake was real too: a picture of this ambition carried from France into exile, its method open to the charge of trickery. Against it: the technique was Domínguez’s, Ernst’s frottage forests of the 1920s had already made the accident into landscape, and drawing figures out of texture was his settled practice. A decisive extension of his own path more than a break from it.
Cormac McCarthy · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the crime thriller and the western, and McCarthy’s own high style, the biblical periods of Blood Meridian and the Border Trilogy. The swerve is double. Within the genre, the hero of the chase is killed offstage and reported after the fact, with much of the book still to run; the killer is not caught; the sheriff never meets him in any decisive way, and retires. The book turns a thriller into an elegy by refusing it its climax, and the alternation with the monologues makes the chase a matter for an old man’s conscience. Within the author, the turn is toward a stripped, procedural prose. The offstage death is a wager against the reader’s investment, and a real one. Held at 8.1 because the genre itself was a proven path, and the refused climax has precedents in the crime novel and in film.
Emily Kame Kngwarreye · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance is double. Aboriginal painting on canvas and board, from Papunya Tula in 1971, had made a code: the dot and circle of the Western Desert, with dotted infill around signs for sites, tracks and ancestors, read as a map of a Dreaming. Utopia’s women had made batik since 1977, with its loose, flowing line. Kngwarreye’s departure, from 1988, was to dissolve the sign into the field: dots that carry no icon, laid until the design beneath is veiled, the whole country painted rather than a diagram of its sites. The stake was real when she took it, against the codes then taken for authenticity. But this is a painting of 1994, when the turn was six years old and her market secure; it carries the swerve at full scale rather than making it.
Mastodon · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the band’s own sludge and progressive metal, from the abrasion of Remission (2002) through the concept records Leviathan (2004) and Blood Mountain (2006), and behind it the Melvins, Neurosis and the progressive rock of the 1970s. The turn is real and wholly taken: tempos slowed, the screamed voice almost entirely given up for clean singing in three voices, the songs given room, keyboards and a warmer, cleaner sound, and two long suites. The stake was real too, a first record of this kind on a major label, before a core audience that valued the band’s ferocity. What holds it below the bar is the path. Neurosis, Tool, Opeth and the band’s own two previous records had already joined metal weight to progressive length and concept, and the record turns toward older models more than away from its tradition.
Joseph Beuys · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the performance of the 1960s: the Happening, Fluxus, in which Beuys had begun, and the body works of New York at the turn of the decade. The turn is from event and provocation to rite with a historical charge, carried across days, with a live wild animal as partner and not as prop, and from the art world to a nation’s history as the subject. The stake was paid in earnest: physical risk from an animal not trained to a gallery, the risk of ridicule before New York critics who distrusted his mysticism, and his first action in America staked on refusing to see America. Held here because the animal action was already his, since How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965), and others had shown live animals in galleries before.
Georgia O'Keeffe · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the flower piece, the most domestic and decorative genre in Western painting, and in 1926 the American modernism of the Stieglitz circle, with the close-up photography of Paul Strand and Stieglitz and the hard-edged clarity later called Precisionism. The departure: the still life is abolished as a still life. No vase, no table, no arrangement; one bloom magnified to the size of a chest and cropped, so that the genre becomes a field close to abstraction while staying exact. The stake was real: a woman in a circle that framed her as its feminine voice, choosing the genre most easily dismissed as feminine, at a scale that invited the reading she resisted. Held below the top because the move was made from 1924 and this canvas is a late instance of it, and the close-up was the camera’s before it was hers.
Decimus Burton and Richard Turner · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance was the orangery and conservatory of masonry with large windows, glass set in a wall; J. C. Loudon’s curvilinear wrought-iron sash bar of 1816 and the small curved houses built from it; Turner’s own curvilinear ranges at Belfast and at Glasnevin; and the great conservatory that Paxton and Burton had raised in 1836 to 1841, larger and framed in laminated timber. The departure was to take the curved glasshouse to this scale on a frame of iron alone, to put the rolled beam to architecture, to drop masonry entirely and make the whole body one continuous surface of glass on slender ribs. The stake was real: the spans were new in iron at this height, and the client was a public garden under scrutiny. Each element had precedent, and the house completed a turn already taken.
Kara Walker · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Walker’s own: some twenty years of cut-paper silhouettes in the manner of the nineteenth century and cycloramas of plantation violence, which made her reputation and its controversies. Behind that stand the public monument, the site-specific commission, Creative Time’s own tradition, and the use of food and sugar as sculptural matter by artists before her. The departure is real: from the wall to the colossal figure in the round, from black on white to white over black, from the gallery to an industrial ruin in the open city, at a scale she had not worked before. The stake was high and partly paid: a mass audience, the risk of offering the stereotype she had always attacked as a spectacle to be enjoyed, the certainty of misuse. But the subject and the provocation were hers already.
Talk Talk · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the band’s own synthesiser pop of the early 1980s, with It’s My Life (1984) the immediate precedent. The turn is large within the band: the synthesisers are nearly gone, replaced by organ, piano, guitars, double bass, harmonica, choir and many guest players; the songs lengthen, slow and open into space, and the silence between sounds becomes part of the arrangement. The stake was real: a band with a hit-making contract turned from the sound that had made it, at the height of synthesiser pop. What holds the figure is the path. Organic art pop in long forms was a known British road, travelled by Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush, the record kept songs in single form, and the larger swerve was left for the next two albums.
Mike Leigh · Film
7.9 · Tier III
The inheritance is British social realism, and Leigh’s own comedies of manners in the family and the street, made by improvisation. The turn is large: the same method carried into a night picaresque, metaphysical talk, sexual violence and an anti-hero whom the audience is made to find brilliant, attractive and repellent at once, with no social diagnosis to rest in. The stake was real. Leigh’s audience and critics expected the warm, observant comedy of his earlier films, and the film risked being read as cruel to women and as endorsing its hero, as a strand of its reception read it. It also left the pattern of the British film of its period, with no moral settlement and no redemptive arc. Held below the gate: the swerve is made within a strong tradition by its own methods, and the picaresque is old.
David Lynch · Film
7.9 · Tier III
The inheritance is film noir and the erotic thriller, Lynch’s own path through Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks, and the European film of doubled identity, Persona above all, with Buñuel’s two actresses for one woman in That Obscure Object of Desire turned inside out. The turn is large: a feature with a known cast changes its protagonist, actor and all, never explains the change, and closes on its own first line. The stake was real. It followed the commercial and critical failure of Lynch’s previous feature, in 1992; most American reviewers rejected it, and it earned little. What holds the figure is how much of the grammar was already Lynch’s proven manner, the dream logic, the doubled women, the grotesque comedy among dread, and that the middle movement’s genre surface is a path long walked.
Norman Foster (Foster and Partners) · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The inheritance: the London office block and the extruded glass tower of the 1960s to the 1990s, rectangular in plan and section, and in the City a skyline policy that guarded St Paul’s and kept towers few. The departure: a round, tapering tower of curved diagrid in the old financial core, with no flat front and no upper floor like the lower ones, its environmental scheme the stated reason for its form. The stake was real: the first tall building in the City for a generation, on a contested site, and a form that drew ridicule before affection. What holds the axis: the turn was prepared in Foster’s own work, the Climatroffice of the early 1970s and the Commerzbank at Frankfurt of 1997, and Torre Agbar was rising at Barcelona at the same time.
Albrecht Dürer · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The inheritance: the model-book animal studies of Lombard and Italian draughtsmen, the circle of Giovannino de’ Grassi and Pisanello’s drawings of animals; the close natural detail of Netherlandish panel painting, where animals and plants were exact but subordinate; and German workshop practice, in which such studies were tools for larger works. The departure is to make the study of one common animal a finished, signed and dated sheet, in a medium pushed to a density no one had given it, the creature isolated and complete, an autonomous image rather than a pattern for use. What holds the axis is the stake: a private sheet, made and kept in the workshop, risking nothing in public, and some of its autonomy is a later judgment. Monogram and date argue that he meant it as a work.
Apollodorus of Damascus (attributed) · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
The inheritance: the vaulted concrete architecture Rome had developed for palaces and baths, mature by AD 100, and the standard elements of the taberna, the arcade and the terraced substructure. The departure: that vaulted architecture turned to a utilitarian complex of shops and offices, and the brick-faced concrete shown as a finished surface with its own brick order of pilasters and pediments, not hidden under marble. The Great Hall puts cross vaults on corbels over a multi-storey commercial street and carries their thrust outward over the side rooms, a structural system for a hall of trade. The stake was real: six or more levels against a freshly cut hill, the slope held by the building itself, in a city that burned. What tempers it: a bold application of a proven art more than a turn from it.
George Gershwin · Music
7.8 · Tier III
The turn is from two sides at once. From the concert hall: a concerted work for piano and dance band, built from blues inflection, the popular ballad and the vaudeville turn, played in Aeolian Hall to the musicians of the classical establishment. From popular music: a Broadway songwriter of twenty-five, with no orchestral work behind him, writing a single movement of sixteen minutes in about five weeks, for a concert whose premise many expected to fail. Held below the gate by precedent and cushion: James Reese Europe at Carnegie Hall in 1912; Stravinsky’s Ragtime (1918) and Milhaud’s La création du monde (1923), more radical; the rhapsody form Liszt’s; and Whiteman’s symphonic jazz the polished side of the idiom.
Herzog and de Meuron, with Ai Weiwei and Li Xinggang · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
The inheritance: the modern stadium as a concrete bowl under a roof expressed as a separate system, cantilever, truss or tent, from Nervi’s work in Florence and Rome to Munich’s cable net of 1972; and the makers’ own path, the ETFE skin of their Allianz Arena in Munich, opened in 2005, a stadium given a uniform envelope. The departure: the separate roof abolished, structure, facade, roof and stair enclosure made one apparently random weave, a stadium with no front and no visible hierarchy of members. The stake was real and paid: steel and engineering at the edge of practice in a seismic zone, a cost that took the retractable roof, and a foreign team building the state’s most visible commission. What holds it below the gate is that the weave is partly feigned: the swerve is in the look of the structure as much as in its law.
Alejandro González Iñárritu · Film
7.7 · Tier III
The departure is three wagers at once. A comedy of backstage manners shot as one unbroken movement for nearly two hours, every join concealed. A score for a solo drum kit by Antonio Sánchez, improvised against the picture, the drummer sometimes seen in the frame, in a corridor. Magical realism, a man moving objects with his mind, carried without explanation inside a realist theatre film. The stake was real: a studio picture on a modest budget built on a conceit that leaves no coverage and no recourse in the edit, with a lead whose casting risked turning the whole into a gag. What holds it below the gate: the road was mapped, by Rope (1948), by Russian Ark (2002) and by Lubezki’s own long takes, and the backstage comedy of ego is an old form.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
The turns are real, and the largest is the work’s own. The foundation made a relic mound into an imperial and monastic monument. The enlargement doubled it and translated the timber railing into stone, keeping the carpentry, posts and crossbars jointed as wood is: fidelity, not departure. The gates are the swerve: deep, crowded relief carrying continuous narrative, the same figure appearing more than once in one field, and bracket figures carved nearly in the round, a clear advance on the flatter, labelled panels of Bharhut. What holds the axis lowest is that Bharhut came first, in the telling of the life by signs and in the carved railing and gateway, so the founding wager was not Sanchi’s; and the stake was a community’s gift spread over generations, not a builder’s risk.
Venetian builders · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Justinian’s church of the Holy Apostles, a sixth-century model some five centuries old when Venice copied it, and the Byzantine mosaic church. The core is a deliberate archaism: a wager on the old Constantinopolitan type in a Latin city, a choice of identity rather than a turn of form. The swerve lies in what the life of the building made: raised outer domes that give a silhouette no Byzantine church had, the narthex Genesis, a façade turned into a collage of plunder, a Gothic crown on a Byzantine body. What holds it at 8.0: the departure risked little structurally, and it is a turn of accumulation more than of decision.
Tibetan, under the Fifth Dalai Lama · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the Tibetan fortress-palace on a ridge, the dzong; the great hillside monasteries of the Gelug order, such as Drepung, where the Fifth Dalai Lama’s government took its name from his residence; behind them, the royal palace on this very hill. The departures: a scale without precedent in Tibet; fortress, palace, seat of government, monastery and necropolis fused in one mass; the two orders of rule coded in colour; the government moved to the hill of the empire’s founder. The stake was real. What holds the axis lowest is the means: batter, pillared hall, frieze and window are the inherited vocabulary, used larger and more completely. The turn is in degree and in synthesis, a wager on proven means at a new scale.
Pink Floyd · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the band’s own long-form space rock, Echoes on Meddle (1971) above all, the rock concept album from Sgt. Pepper to Tommy, and tape collage brought into rock by the Beatles. The turn is from long improvisation to plain songs by one writer, joined into one continuous piece about a stated subject, with a synthesiser sequence as a track’s whole engine, a session singer improvising the centre, a till cut into a rhythm in seven, and recorded speech. Each device had precedent, and the move toward the song was toward the larger audience. A turn that consolidated more than it risked. OK Computer, at 8.4, names this band among its precursors and swerved further: a precursor can turn less than the work that answers it.
Naguib Mahfouz · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Mahfouz took the form of the European realist family chronicle, the tradition of Balzac, Zola, Galsworthy and Mann, and made it carry Cairo’s old quarter and Egyptian modern history in classical Arabic, at a scale the Arabic novel had not reached. In its own literature the turn was large and costly: a realist novel of a Muslim household at this length, with its sexuality, drink and doubt, set in the quarter’s speech rendered as fusha. Measured against the tradition it inherits, though, the wager was placed on a proven path. The form is borrowed whole; the departure is of subject and language, not of the novel’s means. That holds the axis second lowest of the twelve. Mahfouz’s larger swerves came after, in Children of the Alley and the shorter novels of the 1960s.
Diego Velázquez · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is plain and close: Raphael’s seated Julius II and Titian’s Paul III had fixed the papal three-quarter-length more than a century before, and Velázquez knew both. The pose, the turn and the chair are theirs. The departure is in candour and in handling: the type stripped to one colour, the sitter given no allegory and no idealising flattery, the face painted with the same open, loose brush as the silk, so that the paint itself declines to separate the man from his clothes. The stake was real and bounded: a foreign court painter in Rome, seeking favour, painting the reigning pope at this pitch of truth. The picture was accepted. A turn within a proven path, sharpened to its limit.
Fra Angelico · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The departure is real: from the gilded, crowded Annunciations of the International Gothic, and from the painter’s own Cortona panel of about 1433 to 1434, with its gold and its words written in the air, to a bare field, a loggia in perspective, no gold and almost no attribute. It takes the new Florentine geometry of Brunelleschi and Masaccio and puts it to contemplative use rather than civic or dramatic use. The cost is the question. The turn toward austerity was made in a house of reformed Observant friars whose rule asked for poverty, and the patron and the setting asked for exactly this: a wager inside a community that wanted it, not against a public. The perspective was already proven. The turn is substantial and the stake modest.
Dominikus Zimmermann · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The decisive turn in Zimmermann’s work came earlier, at Steinhausen, built 1728 to 1733, where an oval nave with a ring of freestanding piers first carried a frescoed ceiling over an ambulatory in a village pilgrimage church. The Wies takes that invention and extends it: the oval lengthened, the piers paired, the choir drawn out as a second space, the stucco pushed further toward dissolving the frame. That is a refinement of a proven path by its own inventor, carried to its last consequence, not a new wager. The stake was real in another sense, an abbey spending heavily on a meadow church in a late style; but the turn from the tradition, which includes the maker’s own church, is modest.
Balthasar Neumann · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the French palace planned round a cour d’honneur, from Versailles and the Parisian hôtel, brought in through de Cotte and Boffrand; the Viennese palace of Hildebrandt; the Italian ceiling, from quadratura to Venetian colour; and the stair as a palace’s chief display, already made so for the Schönborns at Pommersfelden. The departures: the stair set under one vault without supports, so that the stair hall becomes the palace’s greatest room and its ceiling as large as the hall; and the ceremonial sequence composed as one rising work. The stake was real: a masonry vault of that span, and the see’s revenues spent over three decades. What holds the axis at 8.0 is that the turn is a synthesis carried to its limit: the type inherited, the plan passed through several hands, and the boldest painted invention Tiepolo’s, made within his own tradition.
The Rolling Stones · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the band’s own turn back to American roots, begun on Beggars Banquet (1968) and carried through Let It Bleed (1969), with the blues, Memphis soul and the country of Bakersfield and Nashville behind it, and Gram Parsons’s country rock beside it. The departures are real and local: a coda in which a rock band becomes a Latin-jazz combo and lets the tape run, strings and an Eastern-tinged modal figure on Moonlight Mile, a drug ballad set without moral comment. The stakes were high in the band’s affairs: a new label, a new guitarist, the first record after Altamont and Brian Jones’s death. What holds it: the musical wager was placed on a path the band had already proved.
Edward Yang · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Taiwanese New Cinema, which Yang helped to found, and his own films above all: The Terrorizers (1986), A Brighter Summer Day (1991) and Mahjong (1996); behind them, Ozu’s family drama and Antonioni’s modern city. The ensemble of strands, the distant camera, the reflections in glass and the long takes were Yang’s proven means by 2000, and the film is their summation and their gentlest use, not a turn. What is new is the reconciliation of his cold city with warmth, and cutting across generations at full scale. The stake was real but bounded: three hours, financed from Japan. What holds the axis lowest is that a wager placed on a proven path is not a swerve, and this is a master’s most assured film.
Gabriel García Márquez · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The departure was real, and risky in its moment. After One Hundred Years of Solitude had made his manner the emblem of a continent’s fiction, García Márquez wrote a novel of love and marriage in the manner of the nineteenth century, close to the serial romance and to Flaubert, with almost none of the marvellous, at the height of his fame and against the expectation of the Boom that the serious Latin American novel was a novel of history, dictators and formal experiment. The stake was sentimentality and the charge of retreat, and the book took it. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that this is in large part a wager placed on a proven path. The forms it turns to, the realist love novel, the family chronicle, the circular frame, are old and secure; the swerve is from the author’s own manner and his field’s fashion, not from the possibilities of the novel. What it adds of its own, a comic seriousness about old age and a double love story without a ranking, is a turn within the tradition, not out of it.
Akira Kurosawa · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is King Lear, the period film, and Kurosawa’s own: Shakespeare refounded in the grammar of the Noh in Throne of Blood (1957), and the colour epic of armies in the twilight of the warring states in Kagemusha (1980). The departures from the play are real: the daughters become sons, the evil passes to a daughter-in-law with a grievance the play does not give, the king is made guilty, and Cordelia’s death becomes one return among many. The stake was real too: a director of seventy-five, the money found at last in France. What holds the axis is the path. Shakespeare in the Noh and the painted epic of colour and armies had both been proven, by the same director, and the turn from his own inheritance is smaller than the turn from Shakespeare’s.
Henry Purcell · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the English masque and court entertainment, the French tragédie lyrique of Lully and the Italian lament; John Blow’s Venus and Adonis had already shown an all-sung English stage work ending in a death. The departures are real: a full tragedy sung through in English and compressed to an hour; an English recitative bent to the stress of the language, not to French or Italian rhetoric; the witches of the London stage’s Macbeth tradition in place of Virgil’s gods; an ending with no reprieve, no apotheosis and no machine. The stake was small: a school performance, a form Blow had shown, and no further risk taken in the genre, since Purcell turned afterwards to semi-operas for the public stage.
T. S. Eliot · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Eliot’s own: The Waste Land, three years before, had already made the poem of fragments, voices, allusion and a broken liturgy. This poem departs from it in two ways. It narrows the many voices to one choral “we” and strips the line almost bare, to a near-childish incantation; and it brings a nursery rhyme, “Here we go round the prickly pear”, and the Lord’s Prayer into one group of stanzas, so that the last part is a game and a liturgy that both fail. That is a real turn, and it points the way to Ash-Wednesday. The stake was real but bounded: so spare a poem from the most watched poet in English risked being read as exhaustion. What holds the axis is that the method and the idiom were his own and already proven; the wager was placed on a known path, narrowed.
Robert Penn Warren · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The lowest of the twelve, level with The Inevitable. The departure is real: the political novel, a form of exposure and documentary, fused with a metaphysical first-person narrator whose subject is his own complicity and the nature of historical knowledge, and a Civil War journal set inside it as its theorem. Jack’s voice, a hard-boiled wisecracker who is also a failed historian and a philosopher, was new. But the form is inherited. The witness who tells another man’s story and finds it his own is Conrad’s Marlow and Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway, and the Southern meditation on inherited guilt had been made by Faulkner in the decade before. Warren placed his wager close to proven paths and won it; the stake was moderate, and that holds the axis here.
Clint Eastwood · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the western from Ford through Leone and Siegel, and Eastwood’s own nameless gunman, already revised in High Plains Drifter (1973) and The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976); Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969) and Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) had made the turn twenty years before. The departures are real: the star who embodied the western gunman plays him as a pig farmer who cannot hit a can, and makes killing take a long time; the cause is the women’s injury and the women’s money; the legend is shown being written. The stake was real: the western was commercially spent after Heaven’s Gate (1980). Held lowest of the gated five: the form is classical by intention, the revisionism inherited, and the ending returns to the genre’s rules.
Metallica · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the band’s own. Kill ’Em All (1983) had joined the speed of punk and hardcore to the riffing and lead guitar of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal. Ride the Lightning (1984) had made the turn that matters here, to long, multi-section songs with acoustic introductions, harmonised leads, a ballad that breaks into fury, a Lovecraft song and an instrumental. This record takes that template almost slot for slot, at greater length and with more command. The stake was real: a band with no radio play and no video gave a major label eight long songs, one of them an instrumental past eight minutes. What holds it is the path: the form was proven, and the deal already signed.
Chen Kaige · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is threefold: the Fifth Generation’s break, which Chen had made himself in Yellow Earth (1984), with its static frames, silence and refusal of melodrama; the Chinese theatrical and Hong Kong melodrama; and the international historical epic of China, Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor (1987) above all. The turns of subject are real: male love and a man who lives as a woman at the centre of a mainland production, the Cultural Revolution shown as a machine of betrayal, Peking opera as the body of a national history. The stake was real too: the film was withdrawn in China and released cut. What holds the axis lowest is the form, which turned back from the austerity of Yellow Earth to the lavish chronicle melodrama that The Last Emperor had proved with Western audiences.
Gunnar Asplund · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance was the classical rotunda library under its dome. Asplund stripped it: no dome, no order, no columns, the drum reduced to a plain cylinder and the ornament to a thin incised band and a few reliefs. The step from the domed first schemes to the bare built drum is the swerve itself, and it carried classicism to the edge of the modern, further than others carried it in a public monument of this weight. The stake was moderate. The stripped manner was the Nordic idiom of the moment, shared across Scandinavia, and the building is the finest statement of a current rather than a break against it. Its maker’s break came two years later, at the Stockholm Exhibition of 1930, and this building does not make it.
Unknown court painters (Heian period) · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the painting the Heian court knew: the Chinese-derived kara-e, the native yamato-e of screens and sliding doors, and the illustrated tale, which existed before these scrolls (the Tale itself mentions picture contests and illustrated stories) but whose earlier examples are almost entirely lost. The departure, as far as the survivors show, is a fully made pictorial grammar of interior feeling, with viewpoint, diagonal, colour and the suppressed face working together to carry a psychological novel, and text and picture alternating at the scale of a book in the hand. Held well below the gate: against lost precursors, invention cannot be told from inheritance; most scholarship treats the conventions as established and used here at their height; and a court commission of the most admired tale of its age risked little.
Three Kingdoms Korea · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Chinese pensive figure of the Northern Wei and Northern Qi, itself descended from Gandhara: often small, often an attendant or a subsidiary figure in a group, often Prince Siddhartha in a narrative setting. The departure comes in two steps. Korea made the pensive figure an independent cult image at large scale, and this figure carries the change furthest in its plainness: beside the older pensive figure in the same museum, with its tall crown and long scarves, it strips the ornament, bares the torso and lets the modelling of the body and the gesture carry the whole. The stake was real in the casting and smaller in the conception, since the pose and the type were already established. A sharpening and a turn within a tradition, not a break with it; level with The Unconcealment as the lowest of the gated axes.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Against the museum tradition it inherited, enfilades of top-lit rooms and the walls a gallery is made of, the upper hall is a radical refusal: a museum whose principal room has no walls at all. The turn is real, and its cost was paid in use for fifty years. Measured against its maker’s own path it is less a swerve than a consummation. The clear-span hall on perimeter columns was Crown Hall in Chicago (1956); the square plate on edge columns was Bacardi and Schweinfurt, both unbuilt; the podium and the free plan were Barcelona and Farnsworth. Mies placed the wager on a path he had proved, and the building is the distilled last statement of a language rather than a departure from one. The stake lay in the institution’s acceptance of it, not in the architecture’s risk.
Hoysala builders · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The Hoysala manner grows out of the Western Chalukya temples of the Deccan, and its parts were in play before: the stepped plan, the platform, the friezes, the lathe-turned pillar, the soapstone. The Chennakeshava at Belur, begun a few years earlier, had already set the type. What Halebidu adds is scale and doubling: the twin temple carried at this size, the frieze system extended into the most complete sequence of its school, the outer wall given almost wholly to figure. The stake was real, a capital temple of a dynasty asserting itself against its Chalukya overlords, in a material that asked for a workshop of masters over decades, and in one sense it was lost. But the departure deepens an idiom rather than turning from it.
Aghlabid builders · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the courtyard mosque of the first Islamic century as the Umayyads rebuilt it, the Umayyad Mosque at Damascus (8.5) with its widened transept to the mihrab, halls whose aisles already ran to the qibla wall, and the Roman building stock of Ifriqiya. The departures: the T-plan made explicit, the axial aisle and the qibla aisle crossing before the mihrab under a dome, with a second dome marking the axis at the court; the square tiered minaret as one monumental tower facing the hall; the mihrab as an assembled showpiece of marble, lustre and wood. The stake was moderate: a provincial dynasty asserting itself at a distance from Baghdad, adapting a known type rather than wagering on a new one. A real turn, within the inheritance.
Edward Hopper · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the American realism of the Ashcan painters, Sloan’s New York at night with its crowds and anecdotes; the French café picture of Degas and Manet, people alone in public; and Hopper’s own city interiors from 1927 on. The departure, in his work as a whole, is real: anecdote stripped out, the city emptied and geometrised, the figures held still under a light that is the true subject, the viewer placed as a witness outside. But by 1942 that turn was fifteen years old and secure; Automat and New York Movie had already made it, and this canvas is its most complete statement, not its first act. The stake was small: the painter was established, had had a museum retrospective in the 1930s, and the picture sold to a museum within months. Held well below the gate for the security of the turn.
Charlie Chaplin · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The stake was real: in 1936, nine years into sound, Chaplin made a film without dialogue, on his own money, at the top of the industry, against what the industry and its audiences then expected. But much of the turn is refusal, a wager on the proven path of his own silent comedy, and such a wager is not a swerve. The departure is in what he made of the refusal: sound given to machines and power alone, the human voice withheld until it arrives as nonsense, so that the coming of speech becomes the subject. That is an invention, as is the joining of slapstick to satire of the industrial order, and both were prepared: the hybrid in City Lights (1931), and the satire of the assembly line in René Clair’s À nous la liberté (1931).
Diogo de Boitaca and João de Castilho · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance is late Gothic. The hall church was an established form, in the German lands above all and in Iberia, and the net vault was current. The departure is in the treatment: the Manueline turns late Gothic ornament toward naturalism and toward maritime and royal emblem, with an exuberance taken in part from Spanish Isabelline and Plateresque work, and here that turn is carried furthest and largest. The slenderness of the columns under a vault of this width was a real wager, and the transept span a structural risk taken and held. Against that, much of the turn is of surface on a proven body, and the later phases bend back toward the Renaissance and a classical correctness. A real swerve, regional in its distance.
Evelyn Waugh · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the comic society novel, Waugh’s own first three books, Firbank, and the manner of Wodehouse made sinister, together with the novel of the broken marriage. The turn is to use the farcical technique, unaltered, for a tragedy: the same deadpan, the same telephone conversations and party chatter, now carrying a child’s death, an adultery and a ruined man. Inside Waugh the swerve is real and its stake was real. He risked losing the readers of Vile Bodies by denying them the comic release, and he grafted onto the society novel a forest ending taken from a short story, a structural risk still argued over. Beyond Waugh the departure is smaller: the impersonal, ironic, dialogue-led novel was available from Firbank and from Hemingway, and the Eliotic frame was the decade’s common property. A turn of real cost inside a known mode.
Sergio Leone · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The turn from the American western, from its ellipsis of violence, its heroes with causes, its sound and its time, was made in A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and pressed in For a Few Dollars More (1965). This film’s own departure is in scale and in the open entry of history: an Italian western carried to epic length, with the Civil War as its landscape, and the duel stretched into an operatic form in which music and cutting take over from speech. The stake was real, a far larger budget, three stars, a war staged with hundreds of extras and a bridge built and blown. But the wager was placed on the director’s own proven path, and most of the turn belongs to the two films before it.
Joseph Strauss, Charles Ellis, Leon Moisseiff and Irving Morrow · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the long-span suspension bridge of the New York school, from the masonry towers of the Brooklyn Bridge to the bare steel towers of the George Washington Bridge (1931, 3,500 feet), whose design already had Moisseiff’s deflection theory in hand. The departures: a span 700 feet longer, the record by a margin; a tower founded in open water at the edge of the ocean, which engineers of standing said could not be done; a steel tower given an architecture of its own, stepped and tapering, its struts and recesses drawn in the manner of its decade rather than left as frame; and a colour no bridge of its rank had worn. The stake was high: money raised in the Depression, opposition from the War Department and the ferry interests, and the wind, current, fog and faults of the site. The type and its theory were inherited whole; the swerve is in scale, site and dress, not in principle.
Wim Wenders · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Wenders’s own road film, Alice in the Cities (1974) and Kings of the Road (1976), where a man and a child or two men drift through a landscape and the journey is the film; the American western and its desert; the European art film’s view of America. The turns are real: a road film that arrives, its destination a confession; a climax played as two static conversations through a mirror; silence made the hero’s first state; a melodramatic subject, a broken family and the sex trade, played without melodrama. The stake was real: an American film made on his own terms after the long trouble of Hammett with Coppola’s studio. Held well below the bar because the form is a proven path carried to its finish, and the man and child on the road were already his.
Johannes Vermeer · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the kitchen scene of the Low Countries: Pieter Aertsen’s and Joachim Beuckelaer’s piled markets and kitchens a century before, and in Vermeer’s own decade the kitchen maids of Gerrit Dou and Nicolaes Maes, often with an anecdote, a moral, a sleeping or flirting servant, a hint for the knowing viewer. The turn is subtraction and seriousness: the anecdote removed, the moral reduced to an undertone if any, the figure set close, large in the frame and seen slightly from below, the room stripped to wall, table and light, and light made the substance of the picture. The stake was moderate: the wager was placed inside the market’s favoured genre, on a proven path, and sharpened further than anyone had. A real turn, not a break.
The White Stripes · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the blues of the Delta and of Chicago, Detroit garage rock and the Stooges, the heavy blues rock of the late 1960s, and the band’s own three earlier albums. The turn is against the production of its year: two players, no bass guitar, and a loud, dry room, held across fourteen tracks for a mass audience. That is a stance with a cost in sound, and the record pays it. It is also heavier and fuller than anything the band had made, a bigger room than before. What holds the axis is direction and path: the turn faces backward, the method was the band’s own from the start and had just succeeded on White Blood Cells (2001), and the garage revival was already under way around it.
John Updike · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the American realist novel of the small city and the ordinary man, Sinclair Lewis, Dreiser and O’Hara, whose Pennsylvania lies close by, with Joyce and Proust behind its attention to the instant. The turn is threefold: a full-length novel sustained in the present tense, rare in American fiction of 1960; a lyric and theological seriousness given to a suburban adultery and a man without ideas; and a frankness about the body at the edge of what an American publisher would then print, as the cuts made to the first edition show. The stake was real: a second novel, after the small and quiet The Poorhouse Fair, risking prosecution and a hero readers would hate. Held below the bar because realist social fiction is a proven path, and the present tense and the frankness are accents on it rather than a new instrument.
Michael Haneke · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the thriller of threat and surveillance, from Hitchcock to The Conversation (1974), and the anonymous-letter film, Clouzot’s Le Corbeau (1943) above all. The turn is to take the genre’s engine, the question who is doing this, and refuse to answer it, so that the investigation stops being a plot and becomes the viewer’s own: the frame of the film and the frame of the tape are made indistinguishable, and the last shot hides its possible solution in plain view. The stake was real in reception, a thriller with no payoff and an ending most viewers miss on first sight. Held well below the gate because the path was Haneke’s own and proved: Benny’s Video (1992), Funny Games (1997) and Code inconnu (2000).
Kanye West · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the hip hop album of its decade and the maker’s own: the soul-sample rap of his first three records and the minimal, sung grief of 808s & Heartbreak (2008). The turn is toward maximalism: art-rock and folk sources, choirs, orchestral swells, guitar, tracks of eight and nine minutes, a rap record built as an overwrought art object. The stake was real. The maker was in public disgrace after an awards-show incident in 2009, and staked his return on a long, expensive, difficult record rather than on singles. What holds it here is that the swerve is largely a synthesis of his own earlier modes, the larger bet already placed on 808s, and that it wagers more on scale than on a new language.
Aeschylus · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is epic, the Theban cycle and its lost Thebais, and the tragedy of Phrynichus and of the young Aeschylus himself. The turn: an epic catalogue of champions made into a dramatic engine, so that description is decision and the audience watches a man arrange his own death while doing his duty; and a protagonist whose character is the place where civic reason and inherited curse meet, a pattern Greek tragedy then made its own. The stake was real, for the whole middle of the play is two men speaking of things unseen. Held at 8.0 because the swerve is made within Aeschylus’ own form (paired speeches, a lyric frame, a trilogy) rather than against it, and the larger turns in his work are not here.
Hellenistic (Roman marble copy) · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Greek battle sculpture of the classical and late classical centuries: the fallen of the Aegina pediments and of the friezes, idealised bodies, with Amazons and centaurs standing in for enemies, and the enemy seldom given a face of his own. The departure takes two turns. The defeated is a contemporary people, marked by dress and body as foreign, not a mythical surrogate; and he is given the full pathos of the Greek nude, isolated on a base and made the subject. That is the Pergamene turn: the victor’s monument centred on the vanquished, and a court’s claim to defend Hellenism staked on it. Charged because the copy carries the composition and not the bronze’s surface, and because the swerve belongs to a programme of which this is one figure.
Michael Jackson · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the record’s own predecessor, Off the Wall (1979), made by the same singer and producer, and around it disco, funk, soul balladry and the rock of the radio. The turn is in the range: a Black pop singer places a hard-rock song with a famous guitarist’s solo beside funk, a horror novelty, a soft-rock ballad by Steve Porcaro and John Bettis and a duet with a Beatle, in one record aimed at every audience at once. That joining of segregated formats was a real move, and Beat It’s crossing into rock carried a stake. Held below the bar because the method was a proven path, the producer’s craft extended, and the wager was commercial: a swerve of breadth, not of direction.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Douglas Sirk’s Hollywood melodrama, which Fassbinder had already taken up in Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974); the woman’s picture of the 1940s and 1950s, of whose line Mildred Pierce is nearest; and the German rubble films and Heimatfilme of the years the film depicts. The turn binds the melodrama to national history and to Brechtian distance at once: the woman’s rise as a ledger of the recovery, the radio as a public text over the private one, and an ending that will not say whether the explosion is accident or choice. The stake was real: a larger budget than his earlier films, a production troubled by money disputes with its producer, a bid for a wide public. Held at 8.0 because the Sirkian method was already his: the swerve from his own path is in scale.
Frank Sinatra · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the popular singer’s record as a set of singles, the 10-inch ballad collection, and Sinatra’s own Columbia years. The turn is to the long-playing record as one sustained mood: sixteen slow songs of loss chosen for one hour of the night, with no up-tempo relief and no hit single built in. Riddle’s turn is to arrangement as atmosphere, sparse and string-led, where the band of the day would have swung. The stake was real: the comeback was under way and not secured, and a whole record of despair from a crooner who had been written off was a wager. What holds it below is that the path was proven. Songs for Young Lovers (1954) had already sequenced a mood, and the instrumental mood albums of the early 1950s had shown the market.
Pierre Peysson and Jean de Louvres, under Benedict XII and Clement VI · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The departure is real: no pope had built a palace of this kind, and no palace of the period joined fortress, monastery and court at this scale. Benedict XII turned the Cistercian cloister plan into a castle; Clement VI brought a northern French master, Jean de Louvres, and northern vaulting into the Midi, and set a royal chapel of Parisian ambition on top of a law court. The stake was large: a building that declared the papacy settled outside Rome, a wager the Church argued over for seventy years. But the elements are inherited, the cloister, the keep, the machicolated arch, the two-storey palace chapel, and the swerve lies in their combination and scale.
Guillermo del Toro · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The departure is a fairy tale made at full cruelty and for adults, set inside the most specific of political histories, in Spanish, with the genre’s rules applied without softening: the princess dies, and the fairy tale’s demand is refused. The stake was real: a costly creature film on a modest budget, in a language that narrowed its market, for an audience that neither children’s fantasy nor art cinema had prepared. But the turn was not made from nothing. Víctor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) had set a girl’s imagination against the Francoist countryside, and del Toro’s own The Devil’s Backbone (2001) had joined a ghost story to the Civil War. The film completes an opened path, and that holds the axis below the rest of its profile.
Robert Altman · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Altman’s own: Nashville (1975) had made the multi-strand ensemble a form, with a public event at the close that gathers the strands, and A Wedding (1978) and The Player (1992) worked the same instrument. The turn here is to adapt a writer of compressed, single-incident stories into one mosaic, crossing characters between stories that never met, inventing a mother and daughter to carry the music, and moving a working-class Northwest to a mixed-class Los Angeles. The stake on the source was real: Carver’s readers charged it as a betrayal, and the film was made with independent money, at three hours, with no lead. The stake on the form was smaller, since the form was Altman’s proven path: five tenths short of the gate.
David Fincher · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance was the biopic, the courtroom picture, Citizen Kane’s frame of hostile witnesses and Sorkin’s own television drama of fast, intelligent talk. The turns are real. The subject was the near present, a company six years old and a founder of twenty-six, still living, made as tragedy rather than topical comedy, at the risk of being mocked as “the Facebook movie” and of dating within a year. The score turned the prestige drama, which had been scored for orchestra, toward an industrial and ambient record placed as the film’s nervous system. Dense, rapid dialogue was set in a dark, still, cool frame, where it had usually been staged bright and moving. The stake was moderate: a studio picture with a proven director and a proven writer, in a form classical by intention. Each turn bends a known path rather than leaving it.
George Saunders · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Twain and Vonnegut, Barthelme’s fabulist story, Gogol’s comic grotesque and, nearest of all, Saunders’s own manner, fixed in CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (1996) and Pastoralia (2000): the corporate dystopia, the theme park, the speaker whose mind is made of jargon. The turn is in degree and in direction. The satire, which in the early books held its people at the distance of the grotesque, is brought close and made tender; the close third person moves inside minds a satirist would have mocked and finds their goodness there, and the realist suburban story is opened to the same voice. The stake was bounded: the author was established, the manner proven, and the move toward sincerity was one American fiction had been making for two decades. The wager was placed on a proven path, by the path’s own author.
Alfonso Cuarón · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Italian neorealism and its untrained players, the memory film of childhood, Fellini’s Amarcord (1973) and Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander (1982), and Cuarón’s own long-take spectacle, as in Gravity (2013). The turn is to put that spectacle’s means, large-format photography, choreographed long takes and a surround sound field, at the service of a servant’s year, and to set the memoir’s centre on the nanny rather than the child who remembers. The stake was real: a black-and-white film in Spanish and Mixtec, with an untrained lead, no score and no stars, given to a streaming company. Held below the gate: the long take was a proven path for this director, and the memory film keeps its form whole.
Paul Thomas Anderson · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the British costume drama and the gothic romance: Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940) and Suspicion (1941), Ophüls’s Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), Powell and Pressburger’s colour and appetite. The departure is real: a heritage surface of couture and 1950s London carries a perverse marriage plot that ends in consented poisoning as its happy ending, played as comedy and romance at once. For the director it was a turn from the oil fields of There Will Be Blood to a chamber piece. The stake was tonal. Held well below the gate: the departure is made within a proven mode by classical means, and a wager on a star and a lavish surface is not a wager on the form.
Sumerian, under Ur-Nammu and Shulgi · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the Mesopotamian temple raised on a platform, the platform growing higher as each temple was rebuilt on the last, from Eridu to the high terrace of the White Temple at Uruk. The departure: the platform made a designed stepped tower, raised in one campaign rather than accumulated, with battered faces, a baked envelope, engineered drainage and the triple stair; and the type set out as a state programme, since Ur-Nammu’s dynasty raised such towers at Uruk, Eridu and Nippur too. The stake was labour and authority on a scale few states had attempted, and a new dynasty’s claim to rule. Held below the bar: the turn is in degree from a proven path, the risk was cost rather than structure, and how much of it is Ur’s own is unsettled.
Norman Foster (Foster and Partners) · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance: Wallot’s imperial building with its dome; Baumgarten’s modernised interior; the postwar German preference for modest and glazed parliamentary building; and the high technology of Foster’s own path, glass, steel and environmental engineering. The departure: to rebuild a burned, ruined and contested national monument neither as reconstruction nor as erasure, but by keeping the shell and its wounds and setting on it a new dome that is a public route and an environmental machine. The stake was real. The decision to sit in the Reichstag was narrowly made and fiercely argued, the dome was a contest between architect and parliament, and the risk of reviving an imperial crown was in the brief. What holds the axis: the means were Foster’s proven path, and the dome itself was a concession, turned rather than chosen.
John Milton · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Stuart court masque of Jonson and Inigo Jones, where spectacle carries the meaning, the antimasque is grotesque and brief, and the noble masquers dance and do not speak. Milton turned it nearly inside out: the noble children speak, at length; the antimasque figure is given the most seductive verse in the work and argues; the core is a debate and an ordeal, not a revelation of the court’s order; the spectacle is minimal. A Puritan critique of the masque’s ethos is made inside a masque, for a great household, through its children. The stake was bounded: an occasional piece for a private audience, by a young poet without a name, printed anonymously. And Jonson had moralised the form already in Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue (1618), which has a Comus of its own.
John Ruskin · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The tradition is Rousseau’s Confessions, Wordsworth’s Prelude, Newman’s Apologia (1864) and Mill’s Autobiography (1873): the autobiography of confession, of a poet’s growth, of a faith or a mind defended. Ruskin turns from all four. He refuses confession, keeping silence over what was painful; he refuses apology and argument, for the book defends nothing; and he writes instead a history of perception, in chosen scenes and a cheerful, comic, tender voice laid over a life he knew had been ruinous. The stake was real: it was written in parts, against his own collapse. Held below the gate because the turn is of tone and selection more than of form: the frame is the ordinary chronology, and the growth of a mind is Wordsworth’s subject.
John Everett Millais · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the Royal Academy’s literary subject picture, Shakespeare among its staples, painted to Reynolds’s precepts of general form, a brown tonal ground and a hierarchy of emphasis, the figure lit and the setting subordinated. The departure, the Brotherhood’s of 1848: paint from nature, leaf by leaf, in bright colour, with no hierarchy of finish, so that the setting is as true as the figure and a stream painted from nature stands for Denmark. Here that departure is carried further in landscape than any canvas before it. The stake had been paid in 1850, when Christ in the House of His Parents was savaged in the press, Dickens among the attackers. Ophelia renewed the wager rather than placing it.
Peder Vilhelm Jensen-Klint; completed by Kaare Klint · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The church turns from the historicist church of the nineteenth century, which quoted Gothic in carved stone and plastered detail, to an abstracted, almost geometrical Gothic made of nothing but standard brick. It strips the style to structure and repetition, and it carries the vernacular gable to a scale no Danish church had attempted. The stake was real: a vast church in an outworn style and one humble material, by an architect who had been an engineer and was a self-taught builder, carried through two decades in which the modern movement was declaring such a building obsolete. The wager held. Held at 8.0 because the turn is made within Gothic and national romanticism, not out of them, and brick expressionism in Germany and the Netherlands was moving the same way in the same years.
Chamberlin, Powell and Bon · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the London County Council’s mixed estates of slabs and point blocks; the Corbusian city of towers in parkland; the street-deck proposals of the 1950s, the Smithsons’ entry for Golden Lane and Sheffield’s Park Hill. The departure: a whole quarter of the City rebuilt on a deck, with housing, schools, a church, a music school and a full arts centre held in one structure, and the modernist city of towers and decks given a romantic, almost medieval grain of vaults, crescents, moats and enclosed gardens in place of open parkland. The stake was a scheme of some twenty-five years, rising costs, and a wager that the middle classes would live in concrete in the City. Held down because the deck, the tower and the slab were already in play.
Don DeLillo · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the novel of Americans abroad, from Henry James to Graham Greene and Paul Bowles, the political thriller of the Cold War, and Pynchon’s quest for a hidden order in V. and The Crying of Lot 49. The turn is in what the thriller is used for: the novel has a cult, killings, an intelligence secret and a shooting, and it spends them on a meditation on language, setting a child’s misspelled fiction as the answer to a murder plot. It is also a turn in DeLillo’s own work, from the compressed, paranoid manner of Players and Running Dog to a slower, more inward prose. The stake was real: a book that refuses its thriller’s payoffs risks losing the reader it has called. Held five tenths below the bar because the instruments are inherited, the expatriate comedy of manners and the quest plot, and the swerve lies in purpose more than in means.
Rachel Whiteread · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the casting of negative space, which Bruce Nauman had made a sculptural act in the 1960s; the Minimalist block and its refusal of the figure; the British public monument, and public art paid for and placed by commission. The departure: to take a proposition of the studio and the gallery, space as solid, and set it at the full scale of a dwelling, on its own site, in public, without permission to stay, so that the sculpture is also an event in a city’s life. The stake was real and was paid: the work was ridiculed, fought over in the council and the press, and pulled down. Held below the gate because the method was her own and proven in Ghost three years before: the swerve is of scale and of place, not of kind.
Joel Coen and Ethan Coen · Film
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the private-eye story of Chandler, the noir and its revisions of the 1970s (Altman’s The Long Goodbye, 1973, had already set a drifting Marlowe loose in Los Angeles), the Western, the buddy picture and the Busby Berkeley musical. The turn is to put in the detective’s place a man with no profession, no curiosity and no desire beyond bowling and a White Russian, and to let the plot’s machinery run past him to nothing; and to bind noir, Western narration, musical number, the rhetoric of the war film and stoner comedy in one body. The stake was real: after Fargo (1996) had won a wide public, the brothers made a film whose plot dissolves and whose hero does nothing. Held below the gate because the swerve has a model in Altman, genre pastiche was the currency of the field in the 1990s, and the risk was cushioned by stars and a proven partnership.
Michel Virlogeux and Norman Foster · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the cable-stayed bridge, by 2000 a mature type, with multi-span stayed bridges already built, Morandi’s at Maracaibo and Ting Kau at Hong Kong, and Virlogeux’s own Normandy Bridge of 1995 holding a record span; and the tall viaduct on concrete piers. The departure: a continuous stayed deck over six equal main spans at a height no bridge had reached, the piers split to release the deck’s movement and drawn as one tapering line with the masts above, and a steel deck launched across the gorge at that height. The stake was real: wind on a deck 270 metres up, a private consortium carrying the cost and the risk, the method of launching itself. The type was inherited, and the turn is in degree and in synthesis more than in kind.
Harriet Beecher Stowe · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance was the domestic and sentimental novel of the American 1840s, the evangelical tract, and the slave narratives: Douglass’s of 1845, and Henson’s, which Stowe used. The turn was to set the machinery of the domestic novel, the household, the mother, the dying child, the conversion, to work on the nation’s central political question, and to address the reader as a voter and a Christian with a duty to act. No novel before it had been made a political instrument at this scale, and a woman wrote it under the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, in a country where the South suppressed and answered it. The stake was real. What holds the axis is that the formal means were inherited whole: Stowe changed what the sentimental novel was for, not how a novel is made.
Ingmar Bergman · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is double: Strindberg’s dramas of marriage, and Bergman’s own chamber cinema, the closed casts and close faces of Winter Light and Persona. The departure is real. A director of international standing gives five hours to the domestic life of one couple, for television, in weekly parts, on 16 millimetre, with almost no music and no metaphysical frame: no God, no figure of death, no dream, the allegory of the earlier work stripped out. The serial form had belonged to popular drama, and this made it the vehicle of a major work. But the stake was smaller than the turn. Bergman owned the means, the production was cheap, and television was a known market for him; and the turn is in part a retreat to plainness, of format and subject more than of grammar. The face in close-up, talking, was his proven path, and a wager on a proven path holds the axis well short of the gate.
Elena Ferrante · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is in plain sight: Morante’s long novels, the serial of the nineteenth century, the realist chronicle of a quarter, the novel of education. The departure is from the literary Italian novel and from the Bildungsroman as usually written: a flat, rapid, almost popular prose; a whole social world told through a friendship between two women rather than through a family or a man’s rise; and an author withdrawn behind a pseudonym, so that nothing but the text vouches for it. The wager carried cost, since the plain register risked being taken for the feuilleton it borrows from, and in Italy it partly was. But the turn is from a proven path more than off it: the swerve is in the recombination and the voice, not in the grammar of the form.
Antonio Vivaldi · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Italian ritornello concerto, which Vivaldi had himself codified in his Op. 3 of 1711, and the long line of descriptive music: Jannequin’s birds and battles, Kuhnau’s Biblical Sonatas of 1700, Biber’s representative sonata, the storms of French opera. The departure is to put the programme inside the concerto’s own form, keyed line by line to a printed poem, so that the ritornello becomes the season and the solo episodes its events, and to do it across a cycle of four. The stake was bounded. It was a commercial print by a famous virtuoso in his established idiom; descriptive effects were a proven pleasure. The wager was on taste, not on the form’s survival.
Sofia Coppola · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the romance of the love not taken, Brief Encounter (1945) its pattern, and the European cinema of alienation, Antonioni’s empty hotels and drifting couples; nearer, the American independent film of the 1990s and Coppola’s own The Virgin Suicides (1999), which had made adolescent ennui a mood of light and music. The turn is real and double. A mainstream comic star, Murray, is played almost still, comedy turned inward to melancholy; and a romance is built with neither consummation nor confession, carried on dream-pop and shoegaze rather than a score. The stake was a second feature made small. Held below the gate because the path was proven: Brief Encounter and Antonioni had made the turn, and Murray’s own move to a minor key had begun in Rushmore (1998).
Andrew Stanton · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is triple: silent screen comedy, Chaplin and Keaton above all, with Tati’s comedy of machines and modern surfaces; ecological science fiction, with Silent Running (1972), its robots tending the last forest aboard a ship in space, as the near precedent; and Pixar’s own form, the buddy adventure for a family audience. The turn is real. A studio’s flagship feature opens with a long passage nearly without speech, gives its lovers no language, turns its satire on the consumption of the audience it was sold to, sets live-action footage inside animation and models its camera on real lenses. The stake was real. What holds the axis at its figure is the reading’s own pair of charges, both heavy: the silent idiom is a return to film’s oldest grammar rather than an invention, and the second half turns back onto Pixar’s proven path of chase, rescue and reunion, a wager placed on a road already laid.
George Stubbs · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the English sporting picture of Wootton and Seymour, a horse in profile with groom or jockey, the owner’s park or the course at Newmarket, all at modest size; and above it the grand equestrian portrait of Van Dyck and Rubens, in which the horse carries the man. The departure is double: a sporting painter took the scale of the state portrait and then withdrew everything the state portrait was for. The plain ground breaks the rule that a painting is a place. The stake was real, since a canvas of this size left bare risked being read as unfinished. Held at its figure because the departure is of degree within a genre Stubbs already commanded, and his frieze pictures of the same years had tried the bare ground at a smaller size.
Nok · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The axis asks how far the work departs from its inheritance and at what cost, and here the inheritance is unknown. No earlier tradition of large fired figurative sculpture is known south of the Sahara, and none in the region from which Nok could be shown to depart. That gap belongs to the record and is not charged as a cost; nor is an undocumented departure credited as if it were known. What is credited is the turn the evidence shows: figurative sculpture in fired clay at near life size, built hollow, by a farming and iron-working society, with a stylisation of eye and head unlike any other ancient tradition. The stake is material and real: large hollow forms fired in the open fail often, and the making accepted that risk at scale.
Thomas Jefferson · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the Virginia plantation house in the Georgian manner, brick, two storeys, a central passage, the service buildings set out in view, as at Westover and Shirley; and the English Palladian villa of the pattern books. The departure: a planter’s house on a mountaintop, away from the river and the road, where water was scarce; the service hidden underground instead of displayed as wealth; a dome on a dwelling; a French single-storey hôtel transplanted to the Piedmont; the orders taken from the Roman temples rather than from the Georgian builders’ books. The stake was real: the builder’s fortune and his creditors, forty years of work that left him in debt, and an exposed site that cost wells, labour and comfort. Held below the gate because the turn runs on proven European paths, Palladio’s and the Parisian hôtels’.
Ovid · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Gallus, Tibullus and Propertius: a genre twenty or thirty years old, whose premise was the lover’s exclusive and ruinous devotion to one mistress. Ovid turns it on itself. His lover confesses that he loves all women alike (2.4), sleeps with the maid and lies about it (2.7, 2.8), fails in bed (3.7), and makes the metre the subject of the first poem. The gestures of the genre are kept and their sincerity drained, so that elegy is shown as an art of performance. The turn is wide and lasting. The stake was real but bounded: a young poet’s first book, playing a fashionable game with more daring than its masters, under a regime whose laws on adultery the book brushes against.
Jean-Michel Basquiat · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The inheritance is wide: Picasso’s masks, Dubuffet and Art Brut, Twombly’s scrawl, the anatomical plate, the comic and the street, and, in its own moment, the return of large figurative painting in New York and Europe, already being sold as a wave. The departure is to bring the graffiti line, the diagram and the anatomy plate into the heroic head on a large canvas, without the polish of the Neo-Expressionist figure and without irony, and to put a Black head at the centre of a kind of painting where it had seldom been the subject. The stake was real: a painter without training, entering the gallery from the street, risked being read as a primitive or a fashion. But the turn was shared with the season’s revival of the figure and the gesture.
Park Chan-wook · Film
7.9 · Tier III
The inheritance is the revenge thriller, the Korean genre cinema of the late 1990s that had just found a home audience, Park’s own Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002), and the Japanese manga by Garon Tsuchiya and Nobuaki Minegishi whose premise it takes. The turns are real: a commercial Korean film built on incest and self-mutilation; a mystery inverted, the question being the release and not the capture; a hero whose quest leads only to his own guilt and who chooses forgetting; a register that swings from slapstick to tragedy without warning; violence shot as choreography and endurance rather than as action. The stake was real for a mainstream production with a star. Held below the bar because the swerve is largely one of degree and tone within a genre, the extremity was a strain of its moment, and the form of the revelation mystery is classical.
Balkrishna Doshi · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The departure is measured against two inheritances: Le Corbusier’s sculptural concrete in India, and above all Louis Kahn’s monumental, closed geometry of brick at the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad, a commission Doshi had himself brought about and on which he had worked with Kahn. Bangalore turns from the monument to the open matrix, from the closed court to the permeable gallery, from a single heroic order to a system meant to grow and to be overgrown, and from imported material expression to local granite. The stake was a campus that might read as unfinished or indistinct, and Doshi accepted it. The turn is held at 8.0 because it was made within a regional modernism that he and his contemporaries, Charles Correa above all, were already making.
Gerhard Richter · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The inheritance is double: the painting of atrocity and its collapse after the war, in the long argument over whether the camps may be shown, in which Kiefer and Boltanski worked; and Richter’s own two idioms, the painting made from a photograph and the scraped abstraction, kept apart for fifty years. The departure joins them in one canvas, the abstraction laid over the photograph so that it carries history rather than standing free of it, and makes four documentary photographs from the camp, the most guarded images in the record, the ground of a painting. The stake was real: at eighty-two, on the one subject where failure is a moral charge, in his own abstract method. Held below the gate because covering an image is a proven path in his own work, and the covered picture as memorial has precedents.
John Wood the Younger · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The inheritance is the elder Wood’s: a palace front laid over a terrace at Queen Square, begun in 1728, and the Circus, a closed ring of three segments of houses turned inward under three superimposed orders; behind them the English square, also closed, and the Palladian giant order, already standard. The departure: the urban terrace opened to the country, its form drawn from the view rather than the street, on a half-ellipse; and the front stripped of the Circus’s three orders and its ornament to a single giant order, so that the curve does the work. The stake was real and bounded: a speculative venture at the town’s edge, sold plot by plot, which could have stalled half built. What holds it: the means were the father’s, and the turn, though decisive, was taken within the family’s own system.
Pallava, under Narasimhavarman II · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The inheritance: the Pallava tradition at Mahabalipuram had just made its temples by subtraction, and the rathas and cave halls nearby are cut from living rock, models of buildings rather than buildings. The departure: among the first wagers that the same form could be built up from dressed granite blocks and made to stand as structure, and made to stand at the surf line, the most hostile site on the coast. The turn from carving to building is real, the stake, a tall slender tower of dry-laid granite on a wave-washed rock, was high, and the building has paid part of the cost in its fabric. What holds the axis: the swerve was the reign’s programme, made also, at larger scale and with fuller order, in Rajasimha’s Kailasanatha at Kanchipuram; and the vocabulary, storeyed vimana, pavilion frieze and octagonal crown, is the rathas’ own, carried over rather than remade.
Meret Oppenheim · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The inheritance is the readymade, from Duchamp, and the Surrealist object as Breton and Dalí called for it at the start of the 1930s: the found or assembled thing with a symbolic and erotic function. The departure is real. Oppenheim does not choose and leave alone, as the readymade does; she alters the chosen thing in one stroke, so that its use is abolished and its look kept, and she addresses the sense art had hardly addressed, touch, and touch at the mouth. Against the busy, anecdotal objects of the movement it is economical to the point of severity. The stake was a young artist offering the sharpest object of a movement led by older men; but the wager was placed on a path the movement had asked for, and it was embraced at once. A real turn at modest cost.
Snøhetta · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The inheritance is the opera house as monument raised on a podium, from the Palais Garnier (8.2) to the Sydney Opera House (8.6), where the public climbs to enter a building it looks up to; the Nordic modern civic building of brick and timber; and, nearer, the landscape architecture of the 1990s, which had already built a roof as public ground. The departure: the podium becomes the roof, the building is walked over rather than up to, and the monument lies down. The stake was real: the country’s largest cultural building in generations, on an undeveloped port edge cut off by a coastal road, staking its civic case on stone open without guards to the public and the weather, and on a site reclaimed from the water. What holds the axis: the landscape roof had been shown before, the hall departs from nothing, and the risk was a well-funded state’s, borne with general support rather than a fight.
Sigur Rós · Music
7.9 · Tier III
The inheritance is broad and close at hand: the slow crescendo of post-rock (Talk Talk’s late records, Slint, Mogwai, Godspeed You! Black Emperor), the voice as texture of the Cocteau Twins, the wash of shoegaze, ambient practice after Eno, and the band’s own first record, Von (1997). The turn is to make post-rock’s austere crescendo lyrical and orchestral: strings and brass, a falsetto as lead instrument, the bowed guitar as a voice rather than a noise. The stake was real but not large: a small band on a small label in a small language. What holds the figure is the path: each element was proven, and the swerve is the joining, and its warmth.
Queen · Music
7.9 · Tier III
The inheritance is Queen’s own Sheer Heart Attack (1974), already eclectic and in places already music hall, beside glam, hard rock, the British progressive suite and the stacked harmony of the Beach Boys and the late Beatles. The turn has two parts. One is Bohemian Rhapsody: a six-minute single with no chorus, built as ballad, mock opera and hard rock in succession, its voices stacked into a studio choir no group could sing live. The other is the album’s ambition, a rock record made as a revue of eight manners, made as the band was leaving its first management. What holds the figure is the path: Sgt. Pepper had made the revue album, the suite was the common coin of the decade, and the band’s previous record had begun the pastiche.
Nam June Paik · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
The turn: a sculpture whose image is live, a devotional object set into an electronic loop, and the closed circuit made to carry a meaning rather than demonstrate a technique. Paik had made the television set an art material since 1963, and the stake of that earlier move was large; by 1974 the closed circuit was in use by other artists, so the work stands on a path partly proven, including by its maker. Its departure is to fuse the new medium with an object from the oldest religious tradition of its maker’s continent, which turned video from the art of the gadget toward the art of meaning, at the real risk of looking merely glib. Credited for the fusion; not credited as the first closed circuit, which it was not.
Amrita Sher-Gil · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
The inheritance is double and the swerve is from both. From Paris: the academic figure painting of the painter’s training and the Post-Impressionist line, Gauguin above all, whose flattened, dark-skinned figures and saturated cloth stand behind this canvas. From India: Raja Ravi Varma’s oil academicism of the ornamented heroine, and the Bengal School’s revival of wash and miniature as a national style. The turn takes the Parisian means to Indian subjects without Gauguin’s exoticism or the Bengal School’s revivalism. The stake was real: a painter of twenty-one staking her return on a manner that belonged to neither camp, and that her early Indian critics did not all accept. Held below the top because the debt to Gauguin is plain, and the fuller swerve came two years later.
Jeff Koons · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
The inheritance is Duchamp’s chosen object, Warhol’s consumer image, Oldenburg’s soft versions of hard things, Brancusi’s polished bronze and the stainless steel of Minimalism. The turn is to take the softest, cheapest object of the toy shop and make it hard, mirrored and permanent, with no irony in the finish: the reverse of Oldenburg, and the readymade made by fabrication instead of by choosing. It put the language of luxury manufacture at the centre of sculpture. The stake was real: the steel was costly, and the reception of the late 1980s was largely derision, the charge of kitsch carried for a decade. Held at 8.0 because the turn was prepared, by Koons’s Inflatables of 1979 and by Luxury and Degradation of the same year, and because it rests on Duchamp and Warhol rather than turning from them.
Daft Punk · Music
7.8 · Tier III
The inheritance is the duo’s own Homework (1997), Chicago house and the filter house of Paris. The turn is large. A duo whose standing rested on raw, underground club tracks made a record of sweet melodies, vocoded love songs, guitar heroics and the timbres of soft rock and late disco, sounds the club culture of 1997 held in contempt, and staked its credibility with the audience that had made it. What holds the figure below the gate is precedent. Moroder and Kraftwerk had made the machine sing, the talkbox and the vocoder were old in funk, and the Paris filter disco sound, Bangalter’s own Music Sounds Better with You with Stardust (1998) among it, was already proven. The swerve was the scale of the embrace, not the invention of its parts.
Aphex Twin · Music
7.8 · Tier III
The inheritance is double: Detroit techno and Chicago acid house, with their drum machines and analogue bass lines, and the ambient tradition of Eno, lately joined to the dance floor by The Orb and The KLF as music for the chill-out room. The turn is real. James keeps techno’s beat and grid, slows and softens them into music for listening, builds on plain, modal, often childlike melody, and leaves the domestic means audible: neither ambient house’s beatless drift nor the club track. What holds it: the stake was small, a young man’s tapes issued by a techno label, and Warp’s Artificial Intelligence series, The Black Dog, B12 and Autechre were clearing the same ground at the same time.
Adrian Smith (Skidmore, Owings and Merrill) · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
The inheritance: the supertall as a bundle of tubes or a framed tower, in the Sears Tower and Taipei 101; the structural expression long practised by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill; Smith’s own Jin Mao Tower in Shanghai, tapered, stepped and alluding to its region; and Wright’s dream of a tower a mile high. The departure is a structural system, the buttressed core, that made possible in concrete a building more than 60 per cent taller than the previous record, and a shape found with the wind rather than imposed on it. The stake was very large: the leap was without precedent, and the tower was rising when Dubai’s finances failed. Held below the top because the turn is in engineering more than in what a building is: a tapering glass shaft with a spire is the late twentieth-century supertall’s language, and the regional reference repeats Jin Mao’s.
Frank Gehry · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
The inheritance: the shoebox halls of the nineteenth century at Vienna and Boston; the vineyard hall from the Berlin Philharmonie of 1963 to Suntory Hall in Tokyo; the Music Center across the street, in the monumental modernism of the 1960s; and Gehry’s own path, from his house at Santa Monica through the fish and the Vitra museum to the curved metal masses he drew in the late 1980s. The departure: a concert hall whose envelope is a field of free curved surfaces, with no front, no box and no colonnade, and an interior of wood in the same billowing language. The stake was paid in years of stall, open ridicule and a divided patronage. What holds the axis: the swerve reached the world first, built, at Bilbao, and the room inherits its type.
George Saunders · Literature
7.8 · Tier III
The inheritance is plain: Vonnegut’s dark comic fable, Barthelme’s absurdist story, Gogol’s abject clerks, and the workshop realism of Carver and the writers around him, against which a new American story of 1996 was measured. The turn grafts the language of corporate management and a lightly displaced near future onto the first-person confession of a working man, and joins satire’s cruelty to an open moral tenderness. Against the minimal realism and the cool irony of its decade that was a real departure, a voice and not an accent. The stake was real: a first book, in a market that rewarded realism, built on ghosts, theme parks and invented futures, at constant risk of sentiment on one side and the gag on the other. Held below the top because Vonnegut and Barthelme had cleared most of the ground, and the near-future satire is an old mode turned rather than a new one made.
Herzog and de Meuron · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
The inheritance: the vineyard hall from Scharoun’s Philharmonie in Berlin (1963) through Suntory Hall to Toyota’s rooms in Los Angeles and Paris; the cultural building as civic emblem after Sydney and Bilbao; the conversion of industrial fabric, which the architects had made their own at Tate Modern (2000); new mass set on an old shell, as at Foster’s Hearst Tower and the firm’s CaixaForum in Madrid. The departure: a concert hall raised some fifty metres over the water on top of a warehouse block, with a public square in the air at the seam and a vertical town of hall, hotel and housing in one glass body. The stake was paid in full: a construction stopped for more than a year, a cost that rose many times over, an inquiry, and the credibility of the city and of the firm. What holds the axis: by 2003 the emblem building was a proven path, and each part of the swerve had a precedent. The departure is in their combination and their height.
Bridget Riley · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
The inheritance is geometric abstraction: Mondrian, Albers’ studies of interaction, Vasarely’s black and white optical works of the 1950s, and, in the painter’s own formation, Seurat, whose divided colour she had copied. The departure is real. She takes the grid, the most stable of modern forms, and makes it fail before the eye; she makes the viewer’s perception, not the panel’s composition, the subject; and she does it with the barest means, black, white and a progression. The stake was high: an unknown painter of about thirty, against British painting of the late 1950s, gestural and figurative, in a manner that could be taken for design or trick, as it soon was. Vasarely’s decade of precedent makes the turn a sharpening, not a break from nothing.
Ai Weiwei · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
The inheritance: the readymade and its descendants; the floor works of Minimal art and the scatter pieces of the 1960s; the spill of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, a mass of small things the public may take from; and the Turbine Hall commission itself, by 2010 a known genre of spectacle, with Eliasson’s sun and Salcedo’s crack in the floor behind it. The departure reverses the readymade: not a manufactured thing chosen, but a thing that looks manufactured, made by hand a hundred million times, so that making becomes the content. The stake was real: a town’s labour on one throw, in a hall where the work could read as gravel, and a Chinese artist already under pressure staging the people as individuals before the world. Held at 8.0 because the form, small units on a floor, is decades old.
Luis Buñuel · Film
7.7 · Tier III
The inheritance is threefold: the relay film, with Max Ophüls’s La Ronde (1950) its classic; Buñuel’s own late manner, the picaresque of The Milky Way (1969) and the interrupted dinners of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972); and the surrealism he had brought to film in 1929. The turn is real. La Ronde passes its baton inside one theme, one city, one period and a closed circle of lovers; here it passes with no theme announced, across centuries, classes and genres, and the protagonist is abolished for a whole feature. What holds the axis is the stake: Buñuel, at seventy-four and after an international success, extended a path already proven, with the commercial risk cushioned.
R.E.M. · Music
7.7 · Tier III
The inheritance is twofold: American guitar rock, and the band’s own manner, ringing guitar and murmured voice, which Green (1988) had already brightened. The turn is real, and it was taken here first. The guitar recedes; mandolin, organ, pedal steel and strings come forward; the lead voice is shared with Mike Mills, Kate Pierson and a rapper; and the lead single is a mandolin song with no conventional chorus. The stake was real: a band newly on a major label, with a large contract to answer to, chose a quiet, acoustic, chamber palette and declined to tour. What holds the figure is that folk rock, chamber pop and country balladry had cleared the path, and Radio Song’s rap is a gesture more than a turn.
Zaha Hadid · Architecture
7.6 · Tier III
The inheritance: the Soviet monumental public building that fills Baku, a frame or a slab with a front; the folded, continuous-surface architecture of the 1990s, from the theory around Deleuze’s fold and Greg Lynn’s blobs to Foreign Office Architects’ Yokohama terminal (2002), where the ground becomes the building; and Hadid’s own line from the Vitra fire station through Phaeno in Wolfsburg (2005) and MAXXI in Rome (2010). The departure is to carry the continuous surface across a whole public building at large scale, inside and out, without a straight line or a corner. Against Baku the turn is total; against its own field it completes a path already cleared. The technical stake was real, a surface of this extent built in a country with no such industry; the money was a state’s, and the maker’s standing was already made.
Zaha Hadid · Architecture
7.5 · Tier III
The inheritance: the museum as a sequence of rooms, from the palace gallery to the white cube; Wright’s Guggenheim, which made the visit one continuous ramp; the free-form museum after Bilbao; and Hadid’s own line, from the paper projects through the Vitra fire station and Phaeno in Wolfsburg. The departure is a national museum with no rooms, its walls bands that bend and cross, its concrete cast on curves at the scale of a city block, and that in Rome, a city of masonry, axis and palace. The stake was high: a decade from competition to opening, a state client, a hostile reception for the galleries, a casting few had attempted at this length. What holds the axis: the swerve lies on Hadid’s proven line, and the turn from the room had been taken by Wright and by Bilbao.
Vlado Milunić and Frank Gehry · Architecture
7.3 · Tier III
The inheritance: the nineteenth-century embankment of Prague, in a city whose centre had been held almost unaltered, and the planning of the capital under the regime, which built its modern work outside the historic core; and, on Gehry’s side, his own fragmented and assembled work of the 1980s. The departure: a free-formed, leaning building set into the protected historic centre within a few years of 1989, the first such insertion of note in a Central European historic core. The stake was real: public opposition, the charge of vandalism against a heritage city, a political cost to the president who supported it. Held below the gate because the turn belongs more to the place than to the art: in Gehry’s own line it is a step between Vitra and Bilbao, not a break, and deconstructivism had been named and exhibited by 1988.
Ming, under the Yongle Emperor · Architecture
8.9 · Tier IV
The inheritance is two thousand years of the Chinese palace: the ideal capital of the ritual classics, the palace cities of Chang’an and Kaifeng, the Yuan palace on this site, and the Ming founder’s palaces at Fengyang and Nanjing; the official timber manner had been codified since the Song. The departures are of degree: a scale beyond the Nanjing palace; a whole palace city planned at once and built in fourteen years; and the palace fixed at the centre of a capital laid on one axis. Its makers sought orthodoxy, not departure. The stake was enormous, a capital moved to the frontier at a cost in treasure and lives, but it was political, not formal. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that the form itself risked nothing.
Henry of Reyns and successors; Henry VII Chapel by Robert and William Vertue (attributed); west towers by Nicholas Hawksmoor · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is French. Henry III’s church takes the chevet, the bar tracery, the height and the proportions of Reims and Amiens and, by most accounts, the court work of Paris; its first master’s name points the same way. The departures are English and real: Purbeck marble set against pale stone, carved diaper over the walls, a lower and shorter vessel than the French, one rich surface in place of a skeleton. The stake was a king’s treasury, spent over decades. The later turns are the work’s too: a nave of 1376 refusing the Perpendicular then current, and the pendant vault, a wager at the limit of its line. What holds the axis lowest: the founding turn imports a proven path, and the later turns move within English traditions already moving.
The masons under Ismaila Traoré · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the earthen mosque of the middle Niger, with its pilastered walls, projecting toron, tower over the mihrab and hypostyle hall, a tradition centuries old by 1906 and standing in Timbuktu and the towns of the delta. The departure is in scale, in the monumental symmetry of the eastern wall with its three great towers, and in the decision to rebuild the town’s great mosque at all, against the reforming state that had let it fall as too ornate. That decision was a stake, a choice about what Islam in Djenné should look like. What holds the axis lowest: method, material and vocabulary are the tradition’s, carried to its largest statement, a wager on a proven path; and the part that may be new, the symmetry, is the part whose authorship is contested.
Anonymous · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The axis asks what the work turned from and what the turn cost, and here most of both is lost. The inheritance survives in fragments: the spotted horses of Pech Merle, and, far older and unknown to these makers, Chauvet, with its shaded, overlapping, composed panels. What the corpus does show is distance: no other Palaeolithic cave has figures of this size, colour at this scale, a painted ceiling that needed a scaffold, or a programme using a whole cave, and one idiom of small head, swollen body and bristling mane is held throughout. The stake cannot be seen; nothing is known of what was risked but labour and the dark. The figure records the visible distance and the invisible stake together.
Reginald Ely, John Wastell and others · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance was fully in place. The Perpendicular had been the national idiom since the Gloucester choir; the fan vault was worked out in the Gloucester cloister and carried into larger vessels at Sherborne and in Wastell’s retrochoir at Peterborough; at Westminster Henry VII’s chapel had just made the bolder vaulting turn. Henry VI’s plan was itself conservative, the Eton model enlarged. The departures are of degree: the fan vault carried in one field over the widest span and longest run it was given, and Renaissance glass and carving set in a Gothic frame. The stake in the vault was real. What holds the axis lowest is that this is a culmination, placed on a proven path.
Giacomo Puccini · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Italian opera of the early 1890s: Verdi’s late continuous style, Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana (1890), Puccini’s own Manon Lescaut (1893), and Massenet’s intimate lyric opera. The departures are an opera of four tableaux with almost no intrigue, in which nothing happens but weather, money and illness; a near-contemporary setting treated with neither verismo’s violence nor historical grandeur; a parlando so close to speech that the set pieces rise out of chatter; comedy and death in one idiom. What holds the axis here is that the road was largely laid: Otello (1887) had made the continuous texture Italian, and La traviata (1853) had brought the sick heroine into a contemporary room. A swerve of tone and scale more than of form.
Edith Wharton · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Henry James’s international theme and the novel of manners from Austen through Trollope, with Wharton’s own The House of Mirth and The Custom of the Country. The departure is real and bounded. Wharton turned the novel of manners into a retrospective: a historical novel of a vanished society, written from inside it after the war that ended its world, its irony doubled by a distance of fifty years. The last chapter’s leap of a generation, which recasts the whole romance as something already history, is the formal swerve, and a good one. The stake was small. Wharton was established, the form was proven, and the book was a success with critics and buyers at once; in 1920, against what the novel in English was becoming, it refined a path rather than turning off it. The weakest of the gated axes.
Aretha Franklin · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
The turn is real and partly a return. Franklin’s Columbia records set her voice in standards, strings and supper-club pop; here she plays her own piano, in the gospel idiom she was raised in, in front of a Southern rhythm section that built the arrangements in the room. That was a turn for her, and the stake was a career after six years of modest sales. But the path was proven: Ray Charles had joined gospel to secular love a decade before, Sam Cooke had carried the church voice into pop, and Wexler had already taken Wilson Pickett south with success. A wager on a proven path is not a swerve. The swerve on the record is “Respect”, Otis Redding’s song made a different song, and that is credited.
Frank Capra · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Capra’s own: the populist pictures of the 1930s and Meet John Doe (1941), in which a decent small man stands against money, and the angel fantasies of the early 1940s, in which the heavenly correct a mortal’s account. The turns inside it are real: a Christmas picture brings a man to a bridge in the snow to kill himself, by way of a long realist chronicle rather than a farce; the unborn town is shot as a noir, the genre of the decade; the villain goes unpunished. The stake was real too: the first picture of Capra’s independent company. What holds the axis lowest is the shape: the wager is placed on Capra’s proven path and on a form the studios already sold (fantasy frame, flashback, sentiment).
Elias of Dereham and Nicholas of Ely (attributed); spire by Richard of Farleigh · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The lowest of the gated axes, with The Encompassed, and the reason is the body of the church. It inherits English Gothic as already made at Canterbury, Wells and Lincoln: the long plan, the double transept, the square east end, the dark marble shafting, the thick wall with its clerestory passage. Its departure is one of method and wholeness: a new cathedral on a virgin site, carried through in one campaign as one design, and a conservative design, keeping to lancets and plate forms while the court style moved on. The one high swerve is the spire, a real wager, raised on a crossing and foundations made for a low lantern; it bent the piers and has needed bracing ever since. The stake was taken and held. The turn of the whole is in degree.
Arnolfo di Cambio (attributed) · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance was at hand. In Florence the podestà’s palace, begun in the 1250s, was already a fortified block with a tower; there were the fortified houses of the magnates and the civic halls of Lombardy; and Siena was raising its own civic palace in the same years. The departures: a block more massive and more closed than any before it in the city; the tower set off the axis and built out over the gallery, its front carried on the corbels, a structural wager visible from the street; the gallery made one continuous crown round the whole. The stake was real in the tower and slighter in the type, which the city had already chosen. The turn is one of degree within a proven type, sharpened and made an emblem.
Auguste Rodin · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the heroic nude and the seated contemplative figure: the Torso, Michelangelo, and Carpeaux’s Ugolino of the 1860s, itself a figure out of Dante. The departure is real and of two kinds. The body is modelled as a living surface broken into lumps and planes that catch the light, not closed in an academic contour, and the thought is put into strain rather than repose. And a figure made for one place in a larger work is taken out and enlarged as a free monument, a part treated as a whole, which Rodin made a method. But in this figure the departure is moderate. It is the most classical, closed and Michelangelesque of Rodin’s major figures, legible to a Salon of the 1880s, and it was admired as soon as it was shown. The fragment, the Balzac and the Walking Man swerve further, and paid for it. The lowest of the five gated axes.
Medang (Mataram) builders · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Central Javanese candi, a square cella on a base under a stepped roof, as in the small Dieng temples of the eighth century; and the Buddhist mandala compounds of the two generations before, Sewu above all, its central temple ringed by rows of lesser shrines. The departure is scale and verticality: that plan turned to Shaiva use and lifted into a tower far taller and steeper than any Javanese temple before it, with three great temples at the centre in place of one, faced by their mounts. The stake was real, a royal programme at the edge of what corbelled andesite could stand. What holds the axis lowest: the plan is borrowed whole, the cella and roof are traditional, and the change is of magnitude.
Fela Kuti and Africa 70 · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Fela’s own: Afrobeat, the fusion of highlife, jazz, Yoruba rhythm and James Brown’s funk that he had built from about 1970, and a political song he had already turned on the police and the authorities in earlier records. The musical turn is small. The form, the band and the method were proven, and Zombie is a faster, tighter instance of them. The stake is as large as a record can place: a musician in a military state mocked the army by name, on a record sold in its streets. Turn and stake are one judgment, and an enormous stake on a proven musical path is not a large swerve from the tradition. The departure is in address more than in form: the soldier named and drilled to his face. That small turn holds it lowest of the eleven.
Muhammad ibn Mahmud Isfahani (attributed), under Timur · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance was the domed tomb of the Iranian world, among it the Dome of Soltaniyeh (8.2), whose double shell and great dome stood a century earlier, and Timur’s own earlier works. The departures: the drum lifted high enough to become a body of its own; the outer shell made bulbous and ribbed, a sign separate from the room; the whole compressed into a single compact tower of colour. The stake was real: a tomb raised in about two years for the conqueror’s heir, and a dome lifted high over a void. Held below the gate because the turn is of degree: a shrine of Timur’s own had already carried the double dome on a high drum, and this building brings the formula to its most compact and perfect statement on a proven path.
Winslow Homer · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is plain: Copley’s Watson and the Shark of 1778, with its boy in the water, its shark and its rescuers; the Romantic shipwreck of Géricault and Turner; and Homer’s own anecdotal marine and genre painting. The departure is real: the rescue is taken out of the picture, the hero is a Black seaman and not a white boy saved by a crew, and the outcome is withheld. The stake was paid in reception: the canvas was thought grim and hung unsold at the dealer’s for years. But it was made by the most established American painter of the decade, inside the realist marine he had made his own, with the tradition’s means, finish, legible narrative and deep illusion. The turn is in subject and resolution, not in the making.
John Ford · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The stake was real. A major studio, for its most commercial producer, filmed a novel that had been banned and burned in places and called communist, and Ford made it against the studio’s own gloss: dark interiors, real faces, little music, the photographic sobriety of the government’s documentary pictures of the Dust Bowl. For Hollywood in 1940 that is a turn in subject and in look. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the form and the hedge. The form is Ford’s classical form, and the matter is shaped toward reassurance: the camp set last, the political edge filed down to endurance, Ma’s speech at the close. A wager placed and then partly covered; a swerve inside the studio, not one that changed the grammar of film.
Jonathan Demme · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the police procedural, the serial-killer film (Psycho and Peeping Tom, both 1960; Michael Mann’s Manhunter, 1986, from Harris’s earlier Lecter novel), the slasher’s surviving heroine, and Demme’s own grounding in Roger Corman’s exploitation pictures. The turns are real. The investigator is a young woman whose competence and point of view govern the film and whose body is never offered to the camera; the cellar is shot from the killer’s eyes but the film is on her side; exploitation material is played as a prestige picture, the gore kept mostly to photographs and aftermaths. The stake was moderate: a bestseller already adapted once, a middle-budget picture for Orion, a proven genre. What holds the axis lowest of the eleven: the swerve is in emphasis and treatment, not in form, and it was placed on a known path.
Mimar Sinan · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The departures are real and measured. Earlier Ottoman tiling, the mihrab wall of the Süleymaniye, the older cuerda seca and blue-and-white work, was confined to zones; here the walls themselves become tile, at the moment the bole red appears at scale. The platform over rentable shops has precedents in vaulted substructures but is pushed here to define the whole building. The octagonal baldachin is one of Sinan’s important variations on the centred plan. Against this: each move is a variation within a secure court tradition, made for a patron who could afford any risk, and the plan is a refinement rather than a turn. The boldest wager is the tile, and its excess is what the tradition then partly declined.
Terry Gilliam · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is twofold: Chris Marker’s La Jetée (8.3), a photo-roman of twenty-eight minutes about a man sent back into the memory of his own death, and the Hollywood time-travel thriller of its decade, in which the future can be changed. The turns are real. A costly Universal picture with the top star of its moment keeps Marker’s closed loop, in which nothing is changed and the hero dies; it makes the hero doubt his mission and want to be mad; it sets a psychiatrist’s conversion at the centre; and it gives the action star a frightened, weeping part. The stake was real, a downbeat end on studio money after Gilliam’s own recent failures. Held by precedent: the loop and the airport are Marker’s.
Martin Scorsese · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The departure is from Scorsese’s own manner more than from the genre. The tracking shot that opens the film turns the Copacabana shot of Goodfellas into a walk among the dying; the voice-over that once sold the life now comes from a man who has outlived everyone; the freeze-frame captions that once introduced a crew now issue obituaries; violence is quick, flat and without pleasure. That is a real turn against his own most imitated idiom, and the stake was large: an unproven technique for de-ageing three leads across decades, a running time no studio would release, and a budget the studios declined, which took the film to a streaming service and kept it from most large cinema chains. What holds the axis down is the form. The elegiac gangster epic had been made before, by Coppola in The Godfather Part II among others, and in genre terms the wager is placed on a proven path: the turn is against one director’s idiom, not against the form he inherited.
Mark Rothko · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The swerve belongs first to the format, and the format is not this canvas’s alone. Rothko fixed it in about 1949 to 1950, out of the multiform canvases of 1946 to 1948, with Surrealist automatism and Matisse’s flat colour behind them: a few soft-edged planes of colour at the scale of a wall, with no figure, gesture or incident, against the action painting around him, at a cost of years of poverty and incomprehension. That turn is credited only as the canvas inherits it. What the canvas adds is the darkening after the Seagram murals, the warm format turned toward weight and night, at a risk to a painter of established fame. A real move within the format; not a new departure.
Raymond Chandler · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The departure is from the hardboiled form Chandler had himself perfected: a long, slow novel of character and manners, the mystery subordinated to friendship, drink, money and the writer’s trade, the hero ending lonely and partly wrong. The stake was real. The book is much longer and more ruminative than its predecessors, and it put into the drinking novelist Roger Wade a portrait of its author that cost him something; it was written while Chandler’s wife was dying. What holds the axis lowest of the five gate axes: it is not a break in the form. The detective, the corpses, the police, the gangsters and the reveal are all present and obey the convention, and Dashiell Hammett had already shown the hard world with less comfort. A real wager, made on familiar ground.
Built for Bishop Bernward · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance was the Carolingian church with a choir at each end, as in the plan of St Gall and at Fulda, and the westwork; in Saxony, St Cyriakus at Gernrode, begun in 961, already had the alternation of supports and the galleries. The departures are real: the plan made wholly symmetrical, two transepts and two crossing towers so that neither end outranks the other; the crossing marked off as a square and that square made the unit of the whole building; the alternation used to state the unit in the arcade. The stake was a founder’s fortune and his tomb, on a building of new size for the diocese. Held here because the turn is one of rigour and system within a proven type, not a new type.
Lauryn Hill · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the hip hop and R&B of the 1990s: the Fugees, Hill’s own band, whose The Score (1996) had already set her singing and rapping side by side; Mary J. Blige’s hip hop soul; the neo-soul of D’Angelo’s Brown Sugar (1995) and Erykah Badu’s Baduizm (1997); behind them the soul and reggae records she plays from. The turn is real: one woman as rapper, singer, writer and producer of a whole record, both modes at full strength in one voice, live players under hip hop drums, and the subjects love, motherhood and faith in a field that prized hardness. The stake was the solo career itself, a first record after leaving a band at its height. But each element had been proven, the central one by Hill herself on The Score, and the record unites existing traditions more than it leaves them. A synthesis made whole is an achievement of command; as a swerve it is a wager placed on a path already shown to hold.
Bichitr · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Persianate court painting and the Akbari workshop’s narrative chronicles, crowded scenes from the life of the ruler. The departure: a portrait made into an allegory, an emblem of kingship built from European devices, the halo, the putti, the hourglass, a copied English portrait and modelling in light and shade on the faces, set into a Mughal page, with a painter placing his own likeness in the emperor’s argument. The turn is real and specific to the reign. The stake is moderate: the allegorical portrait was a genre of the court in these years, Abu’l Hasan worked in it at the same time, and the emperor asked for it. A swerve inside a commissioned programme, credited and not ranked high.
Han Gan · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The tradition Han Gan inherited, in which his teacher is traditionally named as Cao Ba, drew the horse as a lean, linear and often emblematic body. The swerve credited to Han Gan is toward the observed animal, with flesh and mass, and its cost is on record: Du Fu, in his poem on Cao Ba, charged in substance that Han Gan painted the flesh and not the bone. A departure that drew a great poet’s censure risked something. In this sheet the departure is plain, volume made by light wash inside a tense contour, an animal with weight and fear. But it is a turn within court painting of the horse, not out of it, and the sheet’s own share of the swerve is clouded by the attribution.
Billy Wilder · Film
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Hollywood romantic and office comedy, Lubitsch above all, with The Shop Around the Corner and its clerks; the sex comedy of the late 1950s; and Wilder’s own path from Double Indemnity (1944), Sunset Boulevard (1950) and Ace in the Hole (1951) to Some Like It Hot (1959). The turns are real: a romantic comedy whose centre is adultery as an office perquisite and a heroine’s suicide attempt, played in a bedroom the comedy has made familiar; the change of tone carried without a seam; Fred MacMurray, a star of decent family pictures, made the smiling predator. The stake was real in 1960, with the Production Code still nominally in force. Held below the bar because the wager was placed on proven paths: Wilder’s own mixture of cynicism and sentiment, and the Lubitsch touch extended.
Gerhard Richter · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance is twofold: Richter’s own photo-painting, established from 1962, with its blur, its found and family snapshots and its argument against both the hand and the photograph; and his grey monochromes of the 1970s. The departure is to bring the two into one canvas, the figure turned toward a field in the grey he had made his own, and to render her with a finish close to the photograph’s, almost without the protective blur. The stake was real: in the late 1980s, when illusionistic painting was widely held to be indefensible, to paint a child tenderly and exactly risked the charge of sentiment, academicism and kitsch. What holds the axis: the photo-painting and the Rückenfigur were proven paths, the swerve is made within a system the painter had built himself, and the canvas confirms more than it overturns.
Bram Stoker · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance is known and near: Polidori’s “The Vampyre” (1819), the penny serial Varney the Vampire, Le Fanu’s “Carmilla” (1872), the Gothic novel from Walpole and Radcliffe, and from Wilkie Collins the novel told in testimonies, which The Woman in White had made a popular form. The turn is to drive the Gothic into the present. The monster arrives in a modern England of typewriters, phonographs, Kodaks, shorthand, Bradshaw and blood transfusion, and is defeated by an office procedure; the vampire is no longer a seducer in a far castle but a foreigner buying London property through a solicitor. That was a real departure, and it took. The stake was modest: a popular genre, a proven documentary form, and a writer of sensational fiction working for a market. A swerve, firmly made, on known ground.
J. R. R. Tolkien · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is double: the English children’s book of the nursery voice and the adventure (Grahame, Nesbit, and George MacDonald’s goblins under the mountain), and the literature of the North that Tolkien taught, the Eddas, the sagas and Beowulf, with William Morris’s prose romances between them. The turn is the joining: a philologist’s North, with its own dwarvish history, runes, tongues and maps, set under a bourgeois English hero and a fireside narrator, in an invented world whose depth shows past the edges of the story, in Gondolin, the Necromancer and the elder history of the dwarves. From that joining modern fantasy came. The stake was small: a book written for his children, by an Oxford professor whose name was not staked on it, in the established form of the children’s adventure; and the larger break in the same direction was the later book’s.
Vijayanagara builders · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Dravidian temple of the Chola and later periods: walled court, gateways, a sanctum on an axis, pillared halls. The departures are in the hall and the chariot. The composite pier, a core shaft clustered with colonnettes and fronted with rearing beasts and riders, is pushed further than in its predecessors, until the support passes into sculpture and into sound. The chariot turns a portable festival object into architecture. The stake was the hall’s legibility as structure against its sculptural profusion. But these are swerves within an inherited plan type, taken by a royal workshop on a proven path; the type is not reconceived. It is a strong accent on the tradition, not a turn away from it.
Built for Ashikaga Yoshimitsu; rebuilt 1955 · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the palace with its pond garden, the Pure Land temple by water of the Heian period, and the two-storeyed garden pavilion, of which Musō Soseki’s Ruriden at Saihō-ji, now lost, was the model Yoshimitsu followed. The departure is three storeys in three manners in one small body, a building that speaks court, warrior and Chinese Zen in sequence, with gold over its two upper floors. The stake was political: a shogun’s claim to a station the court reserved to emperors. What holds the axis is that each manner was proven and the type was Saihō-ji’s, so the turn combines known parts at a new pitch. The gold is the boldest stroke, and it is the Pure Land’s own image taken literally.
Don DeLillo · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is plain: the novel of the writer and his vocation, from James’s tales of the master to Roth’s Zuckerman books and the many novels of the reclusive author; the political thriller; and DeLillo’s own Players, Running Dog and The Names, novels of terror and its theatre. The turn was to stake a novel on an argument about the novel’s own obsolescence, made from within a novel, and to set the photograph and the mass image beside it as rival forms; the prologue’s choral method departs from the writer’s novel as well. The stake was modest: the book followed DeLillo’s two largest successes, worked ground his earlier novels of terror had opened, and kept a conventional third person. A swerve in its subject more than in its instrument.
The Walkmen · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
The departure is real, and it carried a stake. The band had made its name on the jagged, loud urgency of Bows + Arrows, followed by a less admired third record and a cover album. You & Me turns from that urgency toward slowness, space and older music, the crooner ballad, the waltz, the hymn, played by a band out of the New York guitar revival. It gave up the band’s most recognisable manner and the tempo of its one hit for a long, quiet record in a narrow palette, a cost paid before the result was known. What keeps it below the high figures: the turn was toward a past others had already reclaimed, and it refined what the band’s earlier slow songs had begun.
Diane Arbus · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the documentary and street photography of New York: Lisette Model, Arbus’s teacher, with her bodies seen close and without flattery; Weegee’s flash; Walker Evans’s frontal plainness; Robert Frank’s America seen askew. The departure, which belongs to Arbus’s work of the 1960s as a whole, is frontal, consenting confrontation: the subject faces the camera, knows it is being made into a picture, and returns the look; and ordinary people are looked at with the same attention as those the culture called freaks, so that the boundary between them is put in question. The stake was real: the work was attacked in her lifetime and after, Susan Sontag’s essay of 1973 the documented case. Held below 8.5 because the swerve is the body’s, made in many frames before 1967; this picture is its purest instance, not its turning.
Renzo Piano · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the museum of the late 1970s and 1980s as civic monument and image, the Neue Staatsgalerie at Stuttgart (8.2) among its examples; the top-lit gallery, which Kahn had joined to the vault at the Kimbell; and Piano’s own path, through the Centre Pompidou, the most extrovert museum of its decade. The departure: a museum that refuses to be seen, wrapped in the vernacular of its street, its whole invention spent on the roof and the light. The swerve from the Pompidou is very large; from the Kimbell it is smaller, since daylight and the vault were already joined there. The stake was paid in an untried roof element and in the risk of anonymity, of a celebrated architect building a shed. A real turn, within a known line.
Johannes Vermeer · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Dutch townscape and the courtyard scene. Townscapes of the 1650s were of named places: churches, squares, canals, the town as civic boast. Delft painters, Houckgeest, De Witte and Fabritius, had turned to church interiors and odd views, and Pieter de Hooch was beginning his courtyards in the same years. The turn is to paint an anonymous, ordinary house front square on and cropped, as a whole picture: no landmark, no anecdote, the building as subject and its surface as the event. The frontal, shallow, near-geometric façade is more radical than de Hooch’s deep courtyards. The stake keeps the axis low: a small canvas for a local market or patron, by a young master whose career did not hang on it, in a mode already being worked.
Jules Verne · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
The turn is real. Verne made the voyage novel carry the science of its day as its matter, and made the machine, explained and plausible, the hero’s means and the book’s centre. But the scientific romance did not begin here: Poe, and Verne’s own Cinq semaines en ballon and Voyage au centre de la Terre, came first, and the departure from the adventure novel runs within a programme already set, Hetzel’s educational magazine and the series of Voyages extraordinaires already under way. The stake was in the figure of Nemo: a protagonist whose politics were radical, whose acts included the killing of a warship’s crew, and whose history the book refused to give, in a book for the young under a cautious publisher. The stake there was real; the form ran on a proven path, and that holds the axis below 8.
Jordan Peele · Film
7.9 · Tier III
The inheritance is plain: Night of the Living Dead (1968) and its Black hero, Rosemary’s Baby (1968), The Stepford Wives (1975), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), whose premise the film turns inside out. The turns are real. A Black protagonist stands at the centre of a studio horror film made for a mass audience; the monster is the white liberal, not the open bigot; and a sketch comedian’s first feature plays comedy and terror on one law. The stake was smaller than the turn. Blumhouse’s model of the low-budget horror film, with its proven economics, carried the risk, and the satire of the liberal was already a subject of Peele’s own sketch comedy. A wager on a proven path is not a full swerve.
Gerhard Richter · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The inheritance is twofold: the Socialist Realism Richter was trained in at Dresden and left in 1961, and the gestural abstraction of the West he found on arrival. The photo-painting was the turn away from both, and it cost something: to paint snapshots by projection, in grey, was to seem to give up invention, style and the painter’s hand when both German traditions prized them. This canvas adds a second turn: it brings the impersonal method to the painter’s own family and to the Wehrmacht, when West German art largely kept the recent past out of the picture or treated it in allegory. The risk was personal and public. Held well below the top because the method was three years old in 1965 and his own: the canvas is a hard application of a swerve already made, not the swerve itself.
Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders and the London Symphony Orchestra · Music
7.9 · Tier III
The departure is double. An electronic and dance producer writes a continuous orchestral work around a single keyboard figure; a free-jazz elder known for fire agrees to play almost entirely within it, softly. The stake was real: Shepherd’s first large orchestral writing, a long project, a format with no commercial path, and the risk of each side diminishing the other. Against it, the tradition is well prepared. Saxophone improvising over composed strings has a strong precedent in Stan Getz and Eddie Sauter’s Focus of 1961; Alice Coltrane’s records joined spiritual jazz to strings and organ; the repeating cell over slow change is the language of minimalism and of ambient music since Eno. The turn is in the combination and in the restraint.
Alfonso Cuarón · Film
7.8 · Tier III
The inheritance is the survival thriller, one person against the elements and the clock, ending in rescue. The departure is in the telling, and it is real and costly. A large studio film was made with essentially two actors, one of them a woman alone for most of its length, in near real time, with no up or down, in takes long enough that the cut becomes rare. The means had to be invented: faces filmed inside a box of light that projected the surrounding image onto the actors, robotic camera rigs, the whole film previsualised and the performances fitted to animation fixed years ahead. The stake was large. Held below the bar because the turn is in the means, and the means serve a proven form: a wager placed on a proven path, a swerve in how and not in what.
Vilhelm Hammershøi · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
The inheritance is twofold: the Dutch interior of the seventeenth century, which Danish painting of the Golden Age had taken up in its own quiet domestic scenes, and the academic practice of the Copenhagen Academy, against which Hammershøi had already set himself in the 1880s. The departure is the interior emptied of narrative, of incident and almost of colour; the figure turned away so that she cannot be the picture’s subject; the room’s architecture and light made the subject in her place; grey made a full palette. That is a real turn toward the abstraction of the room, made without leaving representation. The stake was moderate: by 1901 the painter had dealers, patrons and some standing, and this canvas is one placing of a wager already laid.
Bonanno Pisano (attributed) and Giovanni di Simone; Tommaso Pisano · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
Two departures. The first is the form. The Italian campanile was usually square, and round towers, like the brick towers of Ravenna, were plain; to wrap the open arcaded galleries of the Pisan front round a cylinder, in marble, to full height, is a turn in its own tradition. The second, and the costlier, is the decision of 1272: to resume building on a tower that had leaned for nearly a century, raise four more storeys and correct the lean in the masonry rather than pull it down. That was a wager with the city’s monument on its own ground, and it held. Against both: the idiom is Buscheto’s and Rainaldo’s, carried from the cathedral, a variant within a regional manner.
John Nash · Architecture
7.6 · Tier III
For a royal residence in Britain this was a wild turn: a palace for the heir and then the king in the dress of Mughal India and of imagined China, by an architect whose public work, Regent Street and the terraces of Regent’s Park, was classical stucco. The stake was real. The cost was immense, the building was mocked in print and caricature from the start, and the monarch’s reputation was spent on it. Against that, the turn was prepared: chinoiserie interiors were a century old in Europe, Sezincote had already dressed an English house in Indian forms, the royal stables beside the site by William Porden were already Indian, and Humphry Repton had published Indian designs for the same client in 1808. Nash brought a line to its height rather than opening it.
André Waterkeyn; André and Jean Polak · Architecture
7.5 · Tier III
The inheritance is the world’s fair emblem and pavilion: the Eiffel Tower of 1889 above all, the engineering spectacle as a nation’s sign, and the exhibition pavilion as a decorated hall. The departure is to take the shape of a building not from architecture, engineering type or ornament but from a scientific model, enlarged without translation into an architectural vocabulary: no base, no order, no front, nine spheres on a corner. The turn is wide. The stake was real but bounded. Structurally it was a wager on an unproven figure, and the wager was partly lost in the bipods; but it was placed in a temporary pavilion for a fair, the place where such risks are expected and cost little if they fail.
Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Franco-Flemish Mass: Josquin, Gombert, Clemens, Morales and Palestrina’s own earlier masses, dense pervasive imitation in which the words are often lost. The departures: a free Mass, on no chant and no model; the Gloria and Credo turned to chordal declamation passed among groups, so that the text is audible in six parts; a texture brightened and thinned at will; dissonance governed more strictly than in the northern masters. The stake was the question of its decade, whether polyphony could carry words intelligibly. What holds the axis here is that the turn refines a proven path. Chordal declamation was already in the practice of the age, and the art is a synthesis, not a break. The risk was small: a papal singer refining the style of his own chapel.
Nayaka builders (and earlier) · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the Dravida temple of the Cholas and Pandyas, in which the vimana over the sanctum was the great tower, as at Thanjavur about 1010; then the turn, at Chidambaram and elsewhere from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, by which the gateways outgrew the sanctum; then the pillared halls and composite piers of Vijayanagara. The departures here: the gopuram carried to the scale of a city’s landmark; enclosures, corridors and halls multiplied into a temple-city; the goddess’s shrine made equal to the god’s and first in worship. But each is a step on a proven path, and the Nayaka builders worked the same idiom at Srirangam, Tiruvannamalai and Rameswaram in the same decades. The stake was of resources, not of grammar. A culmination, not a turn.
Polykleitos the Younger (attributed) · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Epidaurus perfects; it does not swerve. Its departures are real and refined: a full cavea in stone at a time when stone theatres were still new, a curve reported to be struck from more than one centre to correct the sightlines, and a whole proportioned to an evident rule. These are the decisions of a master working inside a settled type, and the stake was small: nothing in the building wagered against its inheritance. A wager placed on a proven path is not a swerve. The figure records refinement of a high order and the absence of a turn; to set it higher would be to credit polish as departure.
Peter Paul Rubens · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Rubens’s own: the political allegory he had made a public language in the Medici cycle and the Whitehall ceiling, and above all in Minerva Protects Pax from Mars, where wisdom drives war away and peace feeds her children. The departure is its reversal: no wisdom intervenes, peace has already lost, and a form made for celebration and the praise of princes is turned to lament. That is a real turn in the meaning of the form. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that the form itself is unchanged: the vocabulary is the one he had perfected, the composition a variant of his own battle and abduction pictures, and the turn was made in a private commission to a sympathetic prince, at small cost.
Dmitri Shostakovich · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the four-movement symphony of Beethoven, Tchaikovsky and Mahler, and the work’s turn is, on its surface, a turn back. After the Fourth, with its three movements, its huge orchestra and its unresolved close, the Fifth returns to classical proportions: sonata form, a scherzo, a slow movement, a finale in the major. The swerve is in the double voice, a public form made to carry an undertone it cannot be held to. The stake in 1937 was his standing and perhaps his life, but it attached to departing at all; the wager is placed on the proven path, made to speak twice. Beside Webern’s Symphony, Op. 21, of 1928 or Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta of 1936, it moved the form least.
Nicolas Poussin · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is twofold: Guercino’s canvas of the same title, in which two shepherds come on a large skull on a ledge, and the painter’s own earlier version, an agitated upright composition in which the shepherds press on the tomb. The departure is real and deliberate. The skull goes, the drama of discovery becomes a meditation, the group is laid out as a classical relief parallel to the picture plane, and the woman enters as an embodiment of composure. The phrase’s sense shifts with the image, from death speaking to the shepherds to the dead one speaking of a past in Arcadia. The stake is modest: the painter was established in Rome and painting for collectors who wanted this learned, quiet kind of picture, and the turn is toward a classicism he was already making his own.
Ernest Hemingway · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the sea tale of Melville, Conrad and Crane’s “The Open Boat”, the naturalist story of a man against nature in Jack London, and above all Hemingway’s own prose, the style of omission he had made in the 1920s. The turn is real but bounded: the realist idiom of the code hero carried into fable, a story exact on its surface to the craft of fishing while its whole shape is a parable, with no key supplied; and the old man’s speech written as Spanish heard through English. The stake was real for its author, after the poor reception of Across the River and Into the Trees (1950), and printing the whole book in one issue of a magazine was a wager of a kind. But a wager placed on a proven path is not a swerve. The instrument was Hemingway’s own and long established, and the book returns to it and purifies it rather than departing from it. The axis stands lowest of the eleven that count.
Pearl Jam · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the hard rock of the 1970s, Led Zeppelin, The Who and Jimi Hendrix’s guitar above all, and the Seattle scene from which the band came, Green River and Mother Love Bone, the second ended by its singer’s death. The turn is real but small. The record joins arena-rock form, guitar solos and a big baritone to the confessional seriousness and the subjects of the new Seattle bands, and sets aside the irony and glamour of late-1980s hard rock. The stake was real for a new band. What holds it lowest of the twelve: the bet was placed on a proven path, verse, chorus, solo, coda, the classic-rock album, and the record departs less than its Seattle contemporaries did.
Paul Valéry · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Valéry inherits Mallarmé directly and wholly: the poem as a made object of language, the hermetic density, the cult of form. Charmes does not depart from that inheritance; it carries it into strict classical prosody, the decasyllable, the alexandrine, short-lined stanzas in the manner of the eighteenth-century ode, when free verse, Apollinaire and Dada were the live direction. That was a swerve against the current of 1920, and it carried a stake: the wager that rigorous constraint could still make a modern poetry of the intellect. But a return to proven forms is a turn along a proven path, and the departure from Mallarmé, in lucidity, argument and the drama of a consciousness spoken in clear syntax, is one of degree more than of kind.
Mexica · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance: Mesoamerican calendrical and cosmological imagery, long established, and the Mexica imperial sculpture of the later fifteenth century, which already carved solar discs on the tops of round monuments, the Stone of Tizoc and the Stone of Motecuhzoma I among them. The departure: the solar disc enlarged from the crown of a monument to the whole work, and filled with a cosmic history, the four ended ages placed inside the sign of the present one, so that the disc becomes a single map of all time. That compression is a real turn, and the stake was high in labour and in political claim. But the turn was made within a programme, by its own means, on a proven path, and it departs in scope more than in kind. The lowest of the eleven axes the Universal Minimum governs.
Ottoman builders, under Mehmed II and successors · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The palace inherits much: the pavilion-and-garden palace of the Islamic world and of Byzantium alike, the palace of the Byzantine emperors on the neighbouring ground itself a complex of halls and pavilions, and the dynasty’s own earlier palace, whose layout it continues. Its departure is in the codification: gates and courts fixed to a written ceremonial, the ruler withdrawn behind them as no earlier Ottoman sultan had been. Mehmed’s eclecticism gave the first campaign a real stake, political rather than formal: a claim to Rome’s succession. What holds the axis lowest is the form: no new structure, no new type of room. The swerve lies in the ordering of known parts, a synthesis carried to its limit, not a first stroke.
Ming builders (and earlier dynasties) · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
This is the lowest axis, and what holds it is the inheritance. Chinese states had built frontier walls of rammed earth and beacon against the steppe for two thousand years, from the Warring States through the Qin, Han, Northern Qi and Jin. The Ming departure is real but in degree: a brick and stone curtain carried over mountain crests at a scale no earlier wall attempted; Qi Jiguang’s hollow tower, a garrisoned masonry blockhouse set into the curtain, which changed how the line was held; and a dynasty founded on campaigns into the steppe turning, after 1449, to static defence. The turn was costly and contested. But the wager was laid on a proven path: the swerve is the scale and finish of an inherited answer.
Liao builders · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance was moving toward this tower. The Chinese timber pagoda was known from texts in towers taller still, the Yongning pagoda at Luoyang among them, burned in 534; the square plan of the Tang was giving way to the octagon; and Liao carpenters had already, in 984, built a concealed braced storey into the Guanyin Pavilion of Dule Temple at Jixian. The departure is that system carried to five storeys and nine levels, the double ring of columns taken to a height no surviving timber building matches. The stake was real and physical. But the turn is one of degree: a proven Liao system summed at its greatest scale, not a new path.
Rembrandt van Rijn · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Amsterdam corporate portrait: the regents and syndics pieces of Thomas de Keyser, Nicolaes Eliasz, van der Helst and Frans Hals. The type already set men about a table with a book and was already moving from a row of heads toward a scene. The departure is in unity and address: one instant for the whole group, the half-rising figure, the gaze turned as one toward the viewer, a composition built for a viewpoint below it, and the late handling carried into an official commission. The stake was real but bounded. After The Night Watch, and after the bankruptcy of 1656, the painter accepted the type and worked within it: a turn inside a proven path, not a wager against it. That is the figure’s ceiling.
Cistercian builders · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is twofold: the Cistercian programme, already formed and built in the order’s first houses, with its refusal of sculpture, colour and towers; and Provençal Romanesque, with its pointed barrel vaults, its fine ashlar and its classical memory. The abbey’s turn is to carry the refusal further than most of its sisters into the regional idiom, and to let the site bend the plan. But the stake lay in the vow, not the building: austerity was the order’s rule, and the structure is the conservative structure of its region. Two Provençal sisters made the same moves in the same decades. The departure is one of degree and intensity on a proven path; it is not a swerve.
Roman · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Roman arcaded aqueduct, long practised (the arcades of the aqueducts of Rome from the second century BC, those of the Aqua Claudia near in date), the masonry arch bridge, and dry-laid ashlar raised on centring. The departure is height: three superimposed tiers carried to nearly forty-nine metres, the highest the Romans built for an aqueduct, with an arch of about 24.5 metres over a river given to violent floods. The stake was real: a city’s supply hung on a structure crossing a river that rises fast and high, and a collapse would have lost the aqueduct and lives. But every means was in hand. The turn is one of degree, scale and refinement of a type: a wager placed on a proven path.
Interpol · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the British post-punk of 1979 to 1985, Joy Division above all, with the Chameleons, the Comsat Angels, the Cure and Echo and the Bunnymen, beside New York’s Television. The turn is to bring that language back in New York, after its decade’s polished rock, with a melodic bass carried in front, interlocking guitar figures and a baritone voice. The stake was a first record on an independent label staking everything on resemblance to a known model. The record’s own accents are real: the slowness, the length of the codas, the warmth under the cold surface. What holds it lowest of the axes the summit counts is that the inheritance is restored rather than departed from, closely enough that the resemblance became the first thing said of it, and a wager on a proven path is not a swerve.
Vakataka · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is twofold: the narrative relief of Bharhut and Sanchi, which tells a story in framed panels or crowded friezes and shows the Buddha only by symbols, and the early paintings of Ajanta’s own first phase, long friezes in which the Buddha is likewise not shown. The departure is large: the Buddha enters as a figure, the Mahayana Bodhisattva stands at the threshold, narrative spreads over whole walls without frames, and the figures are modelled. The stake is harder to find. The turn to the image belongs to the century, not the workshop: Mathura and Gandhara had made the Buddha image long before. The modelled figure is the Gupta classical style at its fullest, the summit of a tradition rather than a wager against it.
William Thornton, Benjamin Latrobe, Charles Bulfinch and Thomas U. Walter · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The lowest axis, held here because the wager was placed on a proven path. The inheritance: the Roman temple front; the dome over a drum of Saint Peter’s, Saint Paul’s, the Invalides and the Panthéon in Paris; and the English Palladian house of central block and wings. The departures: those forms given to a popular legislature, the dome of the church over a hall without an altar; Latrobe’s American orders, the maize cob and the tobacco leaf put into the capital in place of the acanthus; and a dome of cast iron at a scale few had tried, Montferrand’s Saint Isaac’s the nearest precedent. The stake was real, a dome raised through a civil war in a new material. But the forms are Europe’s, assembled with skill; the capitals are a swerve of ornament; the iron is a swerve of means that hides itself, painted to look like stone.
Neil Young · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the folk and country of the singer-songwriter years, the singer’s own work with Buffalo Springfield and with Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, and the long, ragged electric jams made with Crazy Horse on Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (1969). The turn is toward the small and the domestic: piano ballads, a high voice left exposed, an unpolished, close-miked sound, with the garage roughness of the previous record kept for two songs. The record walks the singer-songwriter path with a rougher edge than most, and the edge is its own. What holds it lowest of the axes but one: the path was proven, the stake modest, and the gentler record widened its maker’s audience rather than risking it.
Joseon builders · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Chinese ancestral temple, with its separate halls and its hierarchy of buildings. Jongmyo’s founders took instead one hall divided into chambers for many ancestors, and their successors chose to lengthen that hall rather than build anew, then to begin a second hall of the same kind. The result, a single building grown along its length across four centuries into something unlike its models, is a real departure. What holds the axis is the stake. The turn was taken by increments, each extension a conservative act within the rule; the first form of seven chambers was a measured adaptation of a classical type, and the plain manner was the court’s Confucian norm, not a risk. The swerve accrued; it was not wagered.
Chaulukya, under Queen Udayamati · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance was complete before the building: the stepwells of western India from the seventh century, the single-entry corridor braced by pavilions already established, and the temple idiom of the Chaulukya court. The departure is the stepwell raised to the scale and decorative density of a royal temple, its walls carrying a sculptural programme of temple rank, its corridor carried down through level after level. The stake was real: money, labour, and a long deep cut in alluvial ground beside a river, which the river in the end collected. What holds this axis lowest of the twelve is that the move is an intensification and a summa, not a turn: type, structure and vocabulary were all in hand, and the wager was placed on a proven path.
Alice Munro · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the short story of Chekhov and of Joyce’s Dubliners, the regional realism of the American South that Munro named among her teachers, and above all her own form: the long story that covers decades, leaps in time without transition and arrives at its meaning sideways, in a late scene the reader did not know was the point. That was a large swerve in the history of the story, and it was made before this book, in The Moons of Jupiter, The Progress of Love and Open Secrets. Here the form is refined, more elliptical, readier to end on what is not said, and “Family Furnishings” turns the method on itself by making the writer’s theft its subject. The stake in 2001 was small: a master working in her proven way, a wager placed on a known path.
Indian builders (Gupta and later) · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the stupa, the rock-cut hall, the open pavilion round the tree that the relief at Bharhut shows, and small flat-roofed shrines of the early Gupta kind. The departure: a tall, hollow, straight-sided brick tower over an image, which replaces the open tree shrine with a building standing in front of the tree; among the earliest surviving brick temples of the tower kind in north India, with Bhitargaon of the same broad moment. The stake was real in scale, brick and stucco raised higher than anything round them. What holds the axis among the lowest is the date: it is not settled, so whether this temple led the turn or followed it cannot be shown, and the tower temple was emerging in Hindu building at the same time. It is a decisive instance of a turn under way.
Norwegian builders · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is double: the post-built timber church of Norway in its first Christian century, and the Romanesque church of stone that came north with the faith. The departure of about 1130 is to join them: an arcade of free-standing posts with arches and cushion capitals, the vocabulary of stone Romanesque, made in timber within a stave frame. The reuse is itself a turn, to carry the art of the earlier church into the new one rather than discard it. The carving of the earlier campaign was the last turn of the animal style, its forms thinned and loosened from the denser Ringerike manner. Held at 7.8 because the stake was modest: the builders worked inside a tradition that was forming, not against one, the same synthesis was being made across the region in those decades, and the portal’s style was the culmination of a long line rather than a break from it.
Almohad builders, under Abd al-Mu'min and Yaqub al-Mansur · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the square minaret of the Maghreb and al-Andalus, from Kairouan to the minaret of Abd al-Rahman III at Córdoba; the T-plan hypostyle; and the dense ornament of the Almoravids in Marrakesh itself, whose mosques the Almohads condemned or remade. The departure is real and was a stake: from Almoravid surface richness to an austere, architectonic ornament drawn in the structure’s own terms, and a tower raised to a height and a proportion the square minaret had not reached in the west. The cost was a whole mosque built and given up. What holds it lowest among the gate axes: the turn is of degree and of programme, every element is inherited, and an earlier Almohad mosque, built a few years before the second Koutoubia, already states the hall. The swerve is a style’s, not this building’s alone.
Sebastião Salgado · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is concerned photography: Lewis Hine’s pictures of labour, the Farm Security Administration, W. Eugene Smith’s long essays, above all Minamata, and the humanist tradition of Magnum, which Salgado joined in 1979. The departure is real but not a reversal. He took the documentary essay as the press was turning to colour and the short assignment and made it black and white, epic and slow: long access, weeks in the pit, a monumental and classical composition applied to the poor. The stake was material, the access and the physical risk and the cost of a project outside the editorial market, and critical, since the beauty invited a charge that came. But the turn intensifies Smith more than it leaves him: the dramatic print, the heroic figure and the essay form were there before.
Basil Spence · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Turn and stake together. The swerve is in the unit: to keep the ruin as a ruin and set the new cathedral beside it at a right angle, joined, rather than clear the site or rebuild the medieval church, was a real departure, and the stake was real in a country rebuilding cheaply. But the new church departs little from its tradition: a long nave and a high altar at the end, Gothic proportions in modern clothes, at the very moment the Liturgical Movement was arguing for the altar among the people. Critics of its own day on the modernist side judged it conservative, and the turn its field was making, toward the central altar, it declined. The decision that cost most proved the popular one. The axis stands, with Pressure on Tradition, at the foot of the twelve.
Roman · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is twofold: the Greek ideal body of the fifth century BC, Polykleitos above all, and the Republican Roman portrait with its veristic record of age and office. The departure is to join them: a Roman ruler’s portrait set on the Doryphoros, the warts and years of the Republican tradition refused for a calm classicism, and a historical narrative laid across the chest in relief. The turn is real, and it set the image of a regime. But the stake was political rather than artistic, and each part was a proven path: cuirassed statues of generals existed, Hellenistic rulers had been idealised, Roman copying of Greek types was an industry. This is a workshop marble, generally held to follow a bronze, and the wager was the bronze’s and the regime’s. A considered synthesis more than a swerve.
Filippo Brunelleschi · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the maker’s own: the Old Sacristy at San Lorenzo, a cube under a ribbed dome with a domed scarsella, grey stone on white, built some twenty years before; behind it, the Florentine Romanesque of San Miniato and the Baptistery, and the chapter rooms of the mendicant convents. The departure: the domed bay stretched sideways into a rectangle, reconciling a centred room with the long seat of a chapter; and a portico whose arch rises through its entablature, a motif that anticipates the Serlian opening by decades. What holds the axis lowest of the eleven is the stake. The commission was modest, the means proven, the dome of a known kind: the turn is in degree, along a path already walked.
The Rolling Stones · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the band’s own: the return to blues and country roots made on Beggars Banquet the year before, after the psychedelic detour of Their Satanic Majesties Request. This record walks that path further. The additions are real, a gospel singer at the top of the opening track, a classical choir at the close, a country remake of the band’s own hit, and they enlarge the palette; but each extends a proven manner rather than turning from it, and the wager made was small. The stake that existed was circumstantial, not formal: a band losing its founder in mid making and finishing with a new guitarist, and it kept its course. A consolidation of a style at its height, a deviation that risked little. Under The Dark Side of the Moon at 8.0.
Charles Garnier · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the French and Italian horseshoe theatre; Victor Louis’s Grand Théâtre at Bordeaux (1780), with its great stair and colonnaded front, which Garnier answered; the theatres at Mainz and Semper’s first at Dresden, which had already shown the auditorium as a volume outside; and the academic classicism of the École. The departure: the circulation made equal to the hall, the stair and foyers raised to the chief rooms; a polychrome, plastic eclecticism, Venetian, Michelangelesque and baroque at once, against academic restraint; and the functions made to read as a cluster of volumes from every side. The stake was real: a little-known architect of thirty-five over established names, and a programme that ran through two regimes and fourteen years. Held below the gate: a synthesis carried to its limit inside a proven path, in the regime’s own manner.
Miloš Forman · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the costume biography of the composer, from the studio lives of musicians to Ken Russell’s lurid ones of the late 1960s and 1970s, and the prestige adaptation of a stage success. The turns are real. The great man’s life is told by his enemy and judged by him; Mozart is played as a vulgar, giggling, ruinously human young man, with American voices throughout the cast rather than a mannered Old World speech; the music is given long, uncut spans as action rather than background; the composer is not the film’s consciousness. The stake was moderate, and that holds the axis among the lowest: a play already proven on the stage, a producer and director coming from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, a lavish period surface. Casting unknowns and shooting in communist Prague were risks; the form was not.
Antonín Dvořák · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the four-movement symphony of Beethoven and Brahms. The departures: melody shaped on pentatonic and modal lines, flattened sevenths and drone fifths, offered as American rather than Bohemian; a symphony presented as a public answer to a national question, written in a new country by a foreigner; the slow movement made the centre of gravity, scored for cor anglais and framed by a chorale; and cyclic return across all four movements. The stake was real: Dvořák staked his name on the claim that America’s art music lay in its Black and Native song. But the form is a proven path. Cyclic recall was already Berlioz’s practice, in the Symphonie fantastique (8.8), and Liszt’s and Franck’s; and much of the “American” idiom runs along Dvořák’s own Bohemian practice. The swerve is in the material and the claim, not in the architecture.
Teutonic Order builders · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The departure is real but partly inherited. The Order’s convent castle, a regular quadrangle that is cloister and keep together, was worked out in Prussia before Malbork and repeated across the Order’s lands; the High Castle takes it up rather than invents it. The swerve is in the Middle Castle. A military religious order made its fortress the seat of a state, set a prince’s palace inside the walls of a convent, and opened it to the river in tall windows that a fortress should not have, under vaults on pillars so slender they look a wager against attack and against gravity. The siege of 1410 tested the stake. What holds the axis lowest is that the core type was proven.
Anselm Kiefer · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance: Beuys’s sculpture of charged materials, felt, fat and copper as carriers of meaning; the raw matter of Arte Povera; the industrial shelf and serial unit of Minimal art; and Kiefer’s own idiom, in which lead books and the lead library were established by the late 1980s. The departure: a sculpture that bears a cosmogony, the bookcase made a cosmos with the infinite above and the fallen world on the floor, and Jewish mysticism taken up as the frame of German memory. The stake was real and partly paid: the charges of mystification, of aestheticising catastrophe and of borrowing a tradition not his own have followed the work. Held below the gate because the turn is made inside an idiom the artist had already made and been rewarded for, and because the language of material sculpture was living, not left.
Greek (Classical) · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the archaic kouros: frontal, symmetrical, the weight shared, the advanced left foot a convention rather than a shift of mass. The departure is the Classical one: the weight thrown to one leg, the axis of the body broken and answered, the head turned. In these figures that departure is carried through at full heroic scale in bronze, with the freely extended arms that a hollow cast allows and marble does not. But the swerve belongs to the period, and these figures do not demonstrably make it. The Kritios Boy and the bronzes of the Severe Style come first, and B’s pose, if later, stands nearer the canon of Polykleitos than ahead of it. What the figures risk is technical rather than a wager against their field: among the finest surviving statements of the turn, not, on the evidence, its origin.
Georges de La Tour · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Caravaggesque nocturne, Caravaggio’s tenebrism carried north by the Utrecht painters, the candlelit scenes of Honthorst and Terbrugghen, Saraceni and the Lorraine followers of the Roman manner, and the Counter-Reformation image of the penitent Magdalene. The departure is real. La Tour takes the candle picture, in Honthorst a genre scene of laughter and company, and empties it: no drama, no second figure, no gesture outward, forms reduced to smooth planes and simple volumes, light that reveals rather than strikes. Caravaggio’s dark was violent; this one is still. The cost holds the axis lower: the turn was made across a body of work, not in this canvas, one of several variations on a proven devotional subject, and it risked little in its own making.
Frida Kahlo · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance: Christian martyr and devotional imagery, the Mexican retablo and ex-voto with their small panels and plain statement of injury, the anatomical plate, and the self-portrait. Surrealism stood near, and she refused its name. The departure: the self-portrait turned inside out, the sitter as her own martyr and her own anatomy, the interior a constructed metaphor rather than a dream image; a woman painting her own body in pain, frontally and without appeal. The stake was real in its decade, a private and disfigured subject offered against the public programme of Mexican mural painting. The discount: by 1944 this was the painter’s established manner, made in the 1930s, and the panel is a mature statement on a proven path, not the turn itself.
Victor Fleming · Film
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Baum’s book and its earlier versions, the stage musical of 1902 and the silent film of 1925; Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), whose success prompted the purchase; the studio musical; and the colour sequences and Technicolor features already made by 1939. The turns are real. The change from sepia to Technicolor is made the threshold of the fable, so that the medium’s newest means carries the story from one world to another. The songs are written to the scene and move the story more than the revue numbers of the decade’s musicals did. The cast is doubled across the two worlds, so the dream is legible as dream. What holds the figure: the stake, large as it was, was a wager on a path Disney had just proven, by a studio at the height of its means, and the dream-frame and the fairy-tale musical were not new.
Cass Gilbert · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the tall office building in historical costume, Beaux-Arts or Gothic; Sullivan’s argument that the tall building should be proud and soaring and express its vertical frame; Gilbert’s own Gothic West Street Building of 1907, a few blocks away; and the towers of the Singer and Metropolitan Life buildings just before it. The departure: Gothic verticality carried the whole height of the tallest building in the world, the piers unbroken from the base to the crown, the skin a pale glazed terra cotta coloured at the top so that the ornament reads from below. The stake was real, Woolworth’s own money and a height never built before. But Gothic on a steel tower, and a tower on a base, were proven in New York before 1910. A wager on a proven path, at an unproven scale.
James Cameron · Film
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the stalker film after Halloween (1978), the paranoid science fiction of television, Harlan Ellison’s Outer Limits teleplays above all, the chase picture, and the urban night of 1970s crime cinema. The turn is real. The slasher’s unkillable pursuer is given a reason and a future war; the slasher’s victim becomes the protagonist of an apocalyptic history; a bodybuilder star is cast as a machine and his limits become its strength; time travel is used not for wonder but as a closed loop that fixes fate. The stake was real: a low-budget picture from a director whose one feature had been a troubled sequel, for a minor company, with no assured market. Held below the bar because the wager was placed within forms that already sold, and the premise is shared with Ellison’s work.
Master James of St George, under Edward I · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the castle of the late thirteenth century in Edward I’s realm and the Savoyard practice Master James brought with him. Against it the castle departs in its dress: polygonal towers where its sister castles in Gwynedd have round ones, banded walling where they have plain, a single line of curtain where the most advanced of them build rings. The departure was a stake: it chose image over the concentric plan that was the strongest defence of its day, and spent heavily to do it. But it was a departure in rhetoric more than in structure. The gatehouse type, the mural passages and the system of tower and curtain belong to the tradition, and the castle did not change what a castle was.
Henri Cartier-Bresson · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the photograph as a made picture: the pictorialist print, the studio, the large camera on a tripod, and against them the modernist photography of the 1920s. The departure is to make the found instant, taken handheld with a small camera in the street, the whole of the art, with chance in the surrealist sense as its method: the picture as an encounter rather than a construction. The turn is real, and this picture is its emblem. What holds the axis is priority and stake. André Kertész had made pictures of this kind in Paris in the 1920s, Martin Munkácsi’s boys running into the surf came before it, and Brassaï worked the same city. A young man with a new camera risked little; the swerve belongs to a generation.
Maya, under Jasaw Chan K'awiil I · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the Petén temple-pyramid, built at Tikal for a thousand years, with its stepped terraces, frontal stair, summit temple and roof comb; and the funerary temples of the North Acropolis, rebuilt layer on layer over earlier kings. The departure: the funerary temple pulled out of the crowded acropolis and set alone on the plaza as an independent figure; the profile pushed toward the vertical so that a moderate base yields great height; the plaza made a stage between two facing temples. The stake was real for a dynasty lately recovered from defeat, and height in rubble fill was a risk. But the turn is one of degree on a path the tradition had proven, and Temple II, built in the same reign, shares the type.
Nina Simone · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the blues as it reached a 1960s jazz and supper-club singer: standards of the 1920s and 1930s, sung with a small band for the long-playing market. The departures are real and specific. “Be My Husband” is a field holler for voice and percussion on a Philips LP. “Nobody Knows You” is played by a classically trained pianist, with counterpoint and rubato foreign to its source. “Sinnerman” is given ten minutes, a revival trance at a length the popular LP did not then give a song. The stake was bounded: Nina Simone in Concert (1964) had already carried “Mississippi Goddam”, a more open wager, and much of this record is a strong singer’s way with standards.
Egyptian (Old Kingdom) · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the sculpture of the Third and Fourth Dynasties: royal statuary idealised, frontal and bound to the block, and private statues that followed royal conventions of the standing figure or the figure on a chair. The scribe type, a man who is not a king seated on the ground in the posture of his office, was itself a departure of the Old Kingdom, portraying a man by his function rather than by rank in the royal mould. This statue carries that departure further than any instance the desk knows, into slack flesh, bony knees and individual features. But it was a private commission inside a workshop practice, and the type existed in other examples: the turn cannot be credited to this object, only its finest surviving instance.
James Gibbs · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
A library as a free-standing domed rotunda in the middle of a public square was rare and daring; few libraries had been built round, and none on this footing in Britain. But the turn was largely Hawksmoor’s: the round library was his scheme, and Gibbs took it up after his death. Gibbs’s own swerve was against the taste of his moment: a Roman Baroque building, schooled on Fontana and on Michelangelo’s drum, raised when English Palladianism had taken the field, so that it arrived as the last great work of a style already passing. The stake was real, a monument the age’s taste might scorn and a library form that worked poorly as a library, and it was won. As a turn from inheritance it is bold in type and conservative in language.
Sufjan Stevens · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Stevens’s own Michigan (2003), which had set the method, a state’s places and people in banjo folk, brass and long titles, and Seven Swans (2004); beside them the chamber pop of the decade, the minimalism of Reich and Glass in the interlocking piano and mallets, the marching band, the church choir and the show tune. The turn is real in scale: the indie folk record made maximal, orchestrated, choral and seventy-four minutes long, its confessional songs set inside a civic pageant, a children’s-choir brightness carried into songs about a killer and a dying friend. The stake was small. His previous state record had proved the template, the plan of fifty states protected the risk as a game, and each means was inherited. A large turn in degree on a path already laid: level with Zooropa at 7.8, well under Low at 8.9.
Anselm Kiefer · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance: history painting, which Kiefer himself had brought back into German art in the 1970s; material painting from Burri and Tàpies; assemblage from Rauschenberg’s combines; Beuys’s materials as meaning; the Neo-Expressionist return to large figurative canvases. The departure is twofold. The subject moves from German history and myth to Egypt, and an electronic component enters the sacred field: an object of the newest technology fixed at the apex of a tomb in a painting about the oldest myth of resurrection. That second move is the real turn. The stake was small. By 1985 the manner, crusted ground, deep perspective and found matter, was established and in demand, and the risk, the charge that Egypt was a way out of Germany, cost little.
Denis Johnson · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the literature of the American West in its elegiac strain: Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It and Young Men and Fire, Wallace Stegner, Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, McCarthy’s frontier, and behind them Hemingway’s plain declarative sentence and the chronicle of a single humble life, of which Flaubert’s “A Simple Heart” is the nearest model. The turn has two parts. Within Johnson’s own work, the hallucinated voice of Jesus’ Son and the visionary manner of Tree of Smoke are turned to a plain third-person chronicle of a man without words, and the visionary breaks come through that plainness rather than through a damaged narrator. Within the Western, the book refuses the plot of conquest and gives the frontier’s end as one labourer’s slow forgetting. The stake was small, a novella in a magazine, and the turn is one of degree on known paths.
Francisco de Zurbarán · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance is twofold. The Spanish bodegón of Sánchez Cotán and van der Hamen set objects on a ledge against a dark void under strong light; the devotional tradition showed the Lamb as an emblem, with banner, halo or the Apocalypse’s book, often small within a larger scheme. The turn is to paint the emblem as a still life, the sacred sign stripped of narrative and of its attributes, and to make the still life a devotional image whose object is a living, bound creature. The fusion is a real departure, and Zurbarán carried it further than anyone of his decade. The stake was modest: the bodegón’s means were proven, the subject orthodox, and the versions show a repeatable devotional image with a market.
Antonio da Sangallo the Younger; Michelangelo; Giacomo della Porta · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the Florentine palace block with its court; the Roman palaces of Bramante’s generation, the Cancelleria and Bramante’s house for Caprini, with an order over a rusticated base; and Sangallo’s own archaeology of the Roman orders. Sangallo’s departure is real but measured: the front gives up the applied order and makes windows and corners carry it, and the vestibule brings an ancient columned hall into a house. The larger turn is Michelangelo’s: a cornice scaled to the building, not its top storey, and a court storey that bends the grammar Sangallo kept correct. The stake was public, a dead master’s design overruled before a pope. Held down because the whole perfects an inherited type, and the swerve is a graft.
Johannes Vermeer · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Dutch tronie as Rembrandt, Jan Lievens and their followers made it: heads in costume, studies of character and age, modelled out of the dark with strong chiaroscuro and visible handling; and around it the Delft painting of light. The turn: the tronie stripped of character study and given over to optics, the edges dissolved, the face built from soft modulations of light rather than modelled from shadow; the direct turn toward the viewer and the parted mouth, which make a study of a head into an encounter; the blue and yellow laid as flat, bright fields. The result is unlike any other tronie. The stake was small, a modest saleable study within the painter’s own practice, with no doctrine overturned and no public risk taken, and the cost holds the turn here.
Honoré Daumier · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance: Dutch and French genre painting of the poor, the Realism of Courbet and Millet in the 1840s and 1850s, and Daumier’s own trade of caricature, where the railway was already a subject. The departure: the urban poor in a modern machine, not peasants in a field and not an anecdote, painted with a caricaturist’s power of synthesis turned to gravity, the figures reduced to masses and contours with no comic exaggeration left, the space a box, the crowd facing out so that the viewer sits in the opposite seat. The broad finish ran against the Salon’s surface. The stake was private: Daumier painted largely for himself and a few friends, and this canvas carried no public wager. A deep turn, a small stake.
Etruscan · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is twofold. From abroad, the reclining banqueter of the Near East and the Greek symposium, which reached Etruria through Ionian craftsmen and goods, and the Ionian style itself, which the faces, the smile and the soft rounded forms plainly carry. At home, the Caeretan practice of funerary terracotta and of the tomb as house. The departure is in the marriage of these: the Greek male banqueter changed to a married pair on one couch, the wife reclining as the husband does, the whole made at about life size in fired clay as the vessel of the dead. The stake was considerable in craft and modest in convention: the type, as the Louvre pair shows, belonged to a workshop and a city, not to one maker’s wager. Held below 8 because the swerve is a culture’s, shared, and its style is borrowed nearly entire.
Frederick William Stevens · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Venetian Gothic, the High Victorian language of Ruskin and Scott. Stevens set on it a masonry dome, which the Gothic Revival in England generally refused, and he let Indian carvers and Indian motifs into the ornament and into the building’s rhetoric of empire. The result is a synthesis a London architect would not have made: Gothic organised on a Renaissance and Indian scheme of symmetrical wings and a central dome. The stake was moderate. A confident company in a booming city commissioned it with money to spend, and the language was in fashion; the dome was the boldest move, and a fusion more than a wager. A lasting accent with real departure in it, not a swerve that risked the work.
Giuseppe Mengoni · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the Paris passages of the early nineteenth century; the Galeries Royales Saint-Hubert in Brussels (1847), already long, glazed and lined with Italianate fronts; Milan’s own smaller Galleria de Cristoforis; and the iron and glass of the railway shed and the Crystal Palace. The departure: the arcade taken out of the inside of a block and made a public monument at the centre of the city, on a cross plan with a domed crossing, at a height and span that turned a shopping passage into a covered piazza, and given a triumphal front on the cathedral square. The stake was real: a district cleared beside the Duomo, the city’s new centre staked on one scheme, and the architect’s life, lost on the scaffold. Held below the bar because the turn is one of scale and civic rank within a type already proven, a wager on a path whose direction others had set.
Herzog and de Meuron · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the museum as public place, at the Centre Pompidou in 1977; the museum made inside an old building, in Paris in 1986; the industrial building used raw for art, in artists’ lofts and the bare industrial galleries of the early 1980s; and, in 1997, the free sculptural museum at Bilbao. The departure: a national museum that refused the new icon and made its monument by leaving an industrial ruin almost as found, its largest room left empty, the architects’ hand kept to a lantern on the roof, a ramp and the detailing. The stake was real: Herzog and de Meuron were then known chiefly for small buildings in Switzerland, and a light touch on a national commission risked reading as no architecture at all. What holds the axis: the conversion of an industrial hall for art was an established path by 1995, and the restraint, though principled, risked less than its scale suggests. The tower of 2016 turns toward the icon the conversion first refused.
Gustav Holst · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the late Romantic programme suite and the large modern orchestra of Strauss, with three nearer models: Schoenberg’s Five Orchestral Pieces, heard in London in 1912 and 1914; Debussy’s Nocturnes, whose Sirènes had already used a wordless female chorus; and Stravinsky’s ballets. The departures were real for English music: an ostinato in 5/4 as the whole ground of a movement, bitonal layering in Mercury and Neptune, a fade to silence as an ending, a cosmology in place of the folk-song pastoral and the Elgarian ceremonial around it. The stake was modest: a little-known teacher writing for an orchestra he could not hope to hear, under no commission. The swerve is from his English surroundings more than from Europe, which had cleared the ground.
Russian carpenters · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the wooden church of the Russian north: the tented church, the tiered octagon and the multi-domed church of logs, all established before 1714. The church at Kizhi is the extreme of a type, not its inventor. The departure is in degree: twenty-two domes on a cruciform octagon, the tiers stacked to a height that pressed the limits of log construction, and the domes organised into a single converging pyramid rather than set as a crowd. The stake was real, structural and in timber, and the deformation of the frame in later centuries shows it. But the turn culminates a line along a path already proven on the same lake and river routes.
Edward Hopper · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the American realist street of the Ashcan painters, Henri, the painter’s teacher, and Sloan above all, crowded, anecdotal and peopled; behind it the European city view. The departure: the people are taken out and the anecdote with them; the street is turned flat to the plane as a frieze; the light, not an event, becomes the action; and the commonest commercial building is given the gravity of classical painting, with a clarity near the Precisionists’ but without their machine. The stake was modest. By 1930 the manner was the painter’s own, in House by the Railroad of 1925 and the empty city interiors and storefronts of the later 1920s. This canvas is the purest statement of a turn already taken, a wager on a proven path.
Jean-Siméon Chardin · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Flemish and Dutch kitchen and fish piece, Snyders and Fyt with their cats and larders and the Dutch fish still lifes, and the French decorative still life of Desportes and Oudry, game and plenty for the great house. The departure is in seriousness and scale: a kitchen subject on a canvas near the size of a history picture, made with a history picture’s gravity, its centre one opened body rather than an abundance, its plenty turned toward death and use. The stake was real. The painter had no grounding as a history painter and stood in the lowest of the academic genres; the canvas wagered that a still life could carry the weight of the high genres. Held below the top because the devices, cat, hung fish, cloth and vessels, are the tradition’s own, and the turn is of weight more than of form.
Denis Johnson · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is plain and heavy: Conrad; Greene’s The Quiet American; Michael Herr’s Dispatches; the Vietnam fiction of Tim O’Brien; and above all Robert Stone, whose Dog Soldiers and A Flag for Sunrise had already joined the spy, the drug and the spiritual crisis in an American novel of Asia and Latin America. The turn is Johnson’s own: the visionary, broken-down sentence of his poems and stories carried into a long epic of the intelligence apparatus, with a theological seriousness the war novel had seldom allowed. The stake was real: a writer whose fame lay in short, ecstatic forms staked years on the largest book of his life. Held well below the gate because instrument and matter were both largely inherited, and the swerve lies in coupling a voice to a received form.
Pierre Bonnard · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance: Degas’s bathers, seen from above and caught in private acts; the Impressionist dissolution of form in light; the painter’s own Nabi past of flat decorative pattern and Japanese prints; Matisse’s colour as the structure of a picture. The departure: the nude subordinated to the room; colour freed from description, so that the body takes the hues of water and enamel; a near-aerial viewpoint that flattens the tub into a band across the canvas; and a picture made from memory over years, so that what is painted is a remembered intensity rather than a seen moment. The stake was real, since by the 1930s the vanguard of Paris was writing this intimist colour painting off as belated. But it was the steady deepening of a proven path more than a wager placed in one canvas.
Mimar Hayruddin · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the stone arch bridge of the Roman and Byzantine tradition, the Ottoman bridge building of the sixteenth century, in which Sinan and his school raised long bridges of many spans across the empire, and the suspended timber crossing that stood here before. The departure: a single span of some twenty-nine metres, thrown high in a narrow stone ring, at a scale and slenderness unusual in the Ottoman Balkans of its date, a permanent work at the river’s most exposed point. The stake was physical: a failure when the centring was struck would have been total, and the bridge’s reception records that the risk was felt. What holds the axis: the turn is one of degree, within a known type.
Woody Allen · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the American romantic comedy and Allen’s own comedies, and the turn is real. A comic star and director made a romantic comedy in black and white anamorphic, scored entirely to Gershwin, with long takes in which speakers leave the frame and conversations play in near darkness. Comedy was taken toward the chronicle of manners, toward Chekhov and Bergman by way of New York, with the jokes kept and the ending left open on a face. The limit is the stake. Allen came to it from his greatest success, with wide control over his films, and the subject, his own milieu and his own persona, was a proven path. The swerve is in the look and the tone more than in the kind: a strong turn placed on a secure base.
Ray Bradbury · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is plain: Zamyatin’s We, Huxley’s Brave New World, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four four years before. The swerve is real on two points. The censorship comes from below, by consent, the state finishing a work the public began, which departs from an imposed tyranny and is the book’s own idea. And the fireman who sets fires rather than putting them out is a single image that carries the whole premise. A third turn is of manner: a writer formed in the pulps brought a lyric, metaphor-rich prose to the dystopia, where Orwell had brought plainness. What holds the axis is the stake. This was a paperback genre novel whose arc of awakening, flight and refuge keeps closely to its predecessors in shape: the conforming functionary woken by a woman, the man who is the law’s mouthpiece, the underground. A real turn, at a measured risk.
John Huston · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Hammett’s novel, filmed twice before by the same studio, in 1931 and as the comic Satan Met a Lady (1936), and the gangster and detective pictures of the 1930s. The turns are real. Huston kept Hammett’s dialogue and his hard ending, where the first film had softened the story and the second mocked it; the detective is neither clean nor sentimental, sleeps with his partner’s wife and gives the woman he loves to the police; the villains are a comedy of manners played straight, with a homosexual coding in Cairo and Wilmer that the Production Code forbade naming and the film let stand in plain view; Edeson’s low angles and ceilinged sets push the frame toward what would be called noir. The stake was modest, a first film on a proven text, and the swerve lies in tone and fidelity, placed carefully.
John Singer Sargent · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Salon society portrait as Sargent learned it from Carolus-Duran, with Velázquez’s full lengths on dark grounds and Manet’s flat silhouettes and frank surfaces behind it. The departure is in degree and in candour: the society portrait stripped of setting, of flattery’s warmth and of anecdote, drawn down to a silhouette and a profile, the sitter offered as an artifice rather than a person at ease, and one note of undress, a slipped strap, in the most respectable genre the Salon had. The stake was the largest the painter placed in his career, and it was paid. Held below the gate because the formal turn was prepared by Manet and Whistler and sharpens their path.
Taddeo Gaddi or Neri di Fioravanti (attributed) · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The inheritance: the Roman stone bridge of semicircular arches on many piers; the medieval inhabited bridge, already established at Old London Bridge and the Krämerbrücke at Erfurt; and the earlier bridges on this site, each lost to the river. The departure of 1345: arches flattened to segments, so that a wide span could be carried at a low rise on only two piers, a bold choice in a river that had just destroyed its bridge, and a stake repaid in survival through the floods of 1557, 1844 and 1966. In 1565 a second departure: a covered passage of state laid along a commercial bridge, a long urban corridor built through existing fabric. Held below 8.0 because the inhabited bridge was not new, the segmental arch had Roman precedents and medieval contemporaries, and the corridor is a bold urban stroke but a passage, not a new kind of building.
David Cronenberg · Film
7.9 · Tier III
The inheritance is double: the 1958 picture of a man with a fly’s head under a towel, and Cronenberg’s own body horror of the 1970s, in Shivers, Rabid and The Brood. The turn from the first is real. The remake throws out the swap of heads and makes the change slow, internal and genetic, so that a monster film becomes a love story about wasting, and it carried a director of low-budget Canadian horror into a studio picture with stars, asking a gore audience to weep. What holds the figure: the swerve is within its maker’s own line far more than from it, and the shock was in carrying his concerns to a wide audience, not in a new kind of film.
Chimú builders · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The inheritance is the Moche platform mound of the same valley, the Huacas del Sol y de la Luna a few kilometres away, where power was a vertical mass of adobe. The departure is power laid out horizontally: the seat of rule made an enclosed precinct rather than a raised mountain; palace, storehouse, court of audience and royal tomb joined in one walled plan; and that plan repeated reign by reign until a capital of palaces filled the plain. It is a real turn, and the earthen wall, not the mound, becomes the medium of rule. The stake is harder to name. The turn was made over generations, each compound refining the last, and how far walled enclosures elsewhere in the valley had already anticipated the compound is argued. Nothing was wagered in one act: the departure is large in total and incremental in its steps.
Cy Twombly · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The inheritance is double: history painting, the oldest high genre, which took the Trojan War as a stock subject and the cycle of canvases as its grand form; and the gestural painting of New York in the 1950s, from which Twombly took the mark and the large field and turned them toward script. The departure is a Homeric cycle made of handwriting, names, crayon scrawl and bare ground, history painting remade as the trace of a hand remembering. In 1978 that ran against the field: narrative cycles, classical subjects and the written name stood far from Minimal and Conceptual art, and the painter’s standing in New York was then low. The stake was real. But the manner and the subject were his own and proved by 1962 to 1964.
George Lucas · Film
7.9 · Tier III
The inheritance is many-stranded and worn openly: the Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials; Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress (1958), for its two squabbling peasants and its princess; the western, whose burned homestead recalls The Searchers (1956); the air picture of the Second World War, for the trench run; and Campbell. The turn was against its moment: in a decade of disillusion, an unironic fable of good and evil in space, with a worn and dirty future in place of the clean one of 2001 (1968). The stake was real: a studio uneasy with the project, a budget that ran over, an effects company with no record. Held below the bar because the swerve is largely a return: old forms revived and refitted, a wager on the serial’s proven pleasures, made new by money and craft more than by a turn in what a film could be.
Mary Cassatt · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The inheritance is Impressionism, with which Cassatt exhibited from 1879, and behind it the Madonna and the genre mother of the Salon. The departure is real and specific. After the exhibition of Japanese prints at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1890 she took from Utamaro and the ukiyo-e print the high viewpoint, the tilted floor, the flat patterned planes and the firm contour, and set them against a fully modelled, unsentimental pair of figures. She turned from the broken touch of Impressionism to drawing and pattern, and from the sentimental mother to the working one. The stake was moderate: she had a dealer and a following, and her colour prints of 1890 to 1891 had already made the turn in another medium. A clear swerve, partly paid for in the prints.
Jasper Johns · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The inheritance is twofold: the gestural painting of New York in the 1950s, its drips and dragged strokes at full scale; and Johns’s own departure from it in the flags and targets, where a flat given sign coincides with the flat canvas. The turn here is real. The sign is now a whole territory of compartments and words, not one emblem; the medium turns from slow encaustic to fast oil; and the brushwork is let loose, wetter and freer than anywhere in the sign paintings, so that the gesture he had been held to oppose comes back in full and is set to colour in an outline. It was taken at a cost to how his position was read. But the decisive wager, a given flat sign as the whole of a painting, was placed in 1954 to 1955; this is a large new move on a path already proved.
Isambard Kingdom Brunel; completed by Hawkshaw and Barlow · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The swerve was Brunel’s, in 1829 to 1831: a span longer than the judge of the competition, the leading bridge engineer of the country, held to be safe, with no pier in the gorge and the towers set on the cliff tops. The stake was real and the cost was paid: the work failed for want of money, stood as two towers for two decades, and was finished only after its designer’s death. But the turn was made within an established type, the chain suspension bridge of Brown and Telford, and longer chain spans had been built on the continent before Clifton’s deck was hung. The completed work also steps back from the wager: a third chain a side, a deck widened and stiffened, a prudent revision drawing on the lessons of the 1850s, on chains taken from another bridge. The bridge as completed is a bold design made safe.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The inheritance is plain: Degas’s café-concert pictures, with their cropping, their oblique view and the figure sliced by the frame; Manet’s bar and its mirror; the Japanese print’s diagonal and flat silhouette; and the painter’s own poster, which had already put the Moulin Rouge into flat colour on the street. The departure is in two places. Artificial light is painted as artificial, green and orange laid on faces as no Paris painter had yet dared on a large canvas. And the strip: the painter broke open a finished group picture by adding a face that rearranges everything behind it, a real stake on his most ambitious canvas. Held below the gate because the crop, the oblique view and the café subject were the proven path.
Agnes Martin · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The inheritance is Abstract Expressionism in New York, with its gesture, its scale and its claim to the sublime, from which Martin came; and beside it the reductive painting of Reinhardt, Kelly and the early Stella. The departure of her grids was to keep the scale and the spiritual ambition of the older generation and give up gesture entirely, for a hand-ruled, even, quiet structure, neither expressive nor mechanical. This canvas adds a second wager: gold leaf, a craft material of the altar and of decoration, in serious abstract painting in 1963, at the risk of seeming precious, and the cut line in place of the drawn one. The stake was real. Held below 8 because the grid itself was begun in her work of about 1960 to 1962, and the gold is a turn within the series that she did not long pursue.
Nine Inch Nails · Music
7.9 · Tier III
The inheritance is the maker’s own: The Downward Spiral had made industrial rock a mass form, and the expected sequel was another compact assault. The record turns from it toward length, texture and quiet: piano, acoustic guitar, a third of its tracks without song, passages built as soundtrack rather than as rock. The stake was real. A double album of 103 minutes came after five years of silence into a market moving toward nu-metal and teen pop, fell from the charts within weeks and was taken as indulgent. What holds it: the language it moved toward, the ambient instrumental and the double album as a mind’s sprawl, had been made by Eno and Bowie and by Pink Floyd, and the songs on Right return to the inherited manner.
U2 · Music
7.8 · Tier III
The inheritance is post-punk: Joy Division, Television, the echoing guitar the band had used on Boy and October, and the political punk of the Clash. The turn is toward the explicit and the earnest, when the post-punk around it ran on irony and distance: the echo stripped out for a dry, martial sound, the drum moved to the front, violin, horns and dance rhythm let in, and songs that name their subjects and a faith the band does not hide. The stake was real: an Irish band put its name to a song about Bloody Sunday that could be heard as a rebel song by the people it refused. What holds it is the ground: the forms are rock forms, and the political song in rock had been cleared by the Clash.
Gerhard Richter · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Measured against the tradition the window enters, figurative stained glass in a Gothic cathedral and the post-war practice of artists’ windows in historic churches, the turn is large: no image, no sign, a distribution by chance in one of the most prominent windows of a cathedral that is a World Heritage Site, where an iconographic programme would be expected. The stake was public, and the wager could have been lost. Against that, the method was Richter’s own and proven: the grid of colours placed by chance belongs to his colour-chart paintings of the 1970s, here brought to glass at a new scale. The swerve lies in the placing more than in the invention, a wager on a method already won, set where it could be lost.
Man Ray · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
The inheritance is double: the academic and salon nude, in painting and in the art photography of the turn of the century, with Ingres as its model; and the Dada practice of altering and captioning images. The departure is to take a straight, beautiful studio nude, the most conventional subject of art photography, and deface it by hand with two signs that turn it into a pun, while keeping its beauty intact. The photograph stays seductive, and the marks make the seduction visible. Neither Pictorialist softness nor Berlin photomontage did quite this. The stake was modest: Man Ray earned his living by portraits and fashion work, Dada had made the defaced masterpiece familiar in Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q. of 1919, and the image went to a friends’ review. A clever swerve at small risk.
Jenny Saville · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
The inheritance is the painted nude of flesh: Rubens, Rembrandt’s late women, Stanley Spencer’s self-portraits with Patricia and, nearest, Lucian Freud’s naked portraits and de Kooning’s Women. The turn is real. The flesh is painted by a woman from her own body, at a monumental scale given before then mostly to male painters’ looking, from a viewpoint that puts the subject above the viewer, with theory carved into the surface. The stake was real too: a student in 1992, when the art of her generation in Britain was turning to the object and the installation, staked her degree on a single large figurative oil. Held below the gate because the departure is in viewpoint and authorship more than in means, which come from Freud and the heroic nude.
U2 · Music
7.8 · Tier III
The inheritance is twofold: the tradition of rock, and the band’s own former manner, which Achtung Baby (1991) had already turned from. This record turns further down that road and at speed: ambient openings, drum programming and sampling, a falsetto lead, a guitarist speaking a deadpan list, a country patriarch closing over a synthesizer. The stake was real: an experimental record issued mid-tour by a band at the commercial summit, with no obvious radio single. What holds the figure is inheritance: Eno’s ambient method, Kraftwerk’s Europe, Bowie’s Berlin records and the dance-rock crossover had cleared the ground, and the departures are more from the band’s past than from the tradition.
Carl Orff · Music
7.8 · Tier III
The inheritance is the German tradition of development, counterpoint and harmonic process, from Bach to Strauss and Schoenberg. Orff turned from it completely: no development, almost no counterpoint, harmony reduced to triad and drone, form to stanza and ostinato, a cantata made to be danced and staged. The stake was real. He disowned his earlier work to his publisher, staked his name on the new manner and wrote for a theatre, not a concert hall. What holds the swerve is precedent. Stravinsky had already made the turn: Les Noces (1923) is the model for the percussive ritual of pianos and voices, and Oedipus Rex (1927) had set Latin as stone. The departure is radical against Germany and much smaller against the decade.
The Smashing Pumpkins · Music
7.7 · Tier III
The departure is from the alternative rock of its moment, which was defined against excess: short records, dry sound, suspicion of ambition. A band at the height of its audience answered with a two-hour double album of orchestral pop, piano pieces, metal, a drum loop, a lullaby and a novelty song, and the stake was real for a band whose previous record had made it. 1979’s turn to a drum loop and soft synthesis is a smaller, genuine move inside the band’s own language. What holds the figure: the form it turns toward is inherited, the double album as total statement of the White Album, Physical Graffiti, The Wall and London Calling, so the swerve is against its decade more than against the tradition.
Yorgos Lanthimos · Film
7.6 · Tier III
The inheritance is double. First the dystopian allegory and the absurd: Kafka, Ionesco’s beasts in Rhinoceros, Buñuel’s late satires of social rule, and the English-language fiction of the regulated life. Second, Lanthimos’s own manner and that of the Greek cinema of the late 2000s: Dogtooth (2009) and Alps (2011), written with Filippou, had already made flat delivery, arbitrary rule and institutional tyranny into a form. Against the romance and the English-language art film the turn is wide: a love story told as farce, stars dressed down and made to speak without inflection, no score of its own. Against its director’s own path it is a transfer more than a turn, and that part is discounted. The stake was real: a first film in English, with a star cast, in a manner that could have read as affectation.
Tracey Emin · Visual art
7.5 · Tier III
The inheritance: Duchamp’s readymade; Rauschenberg’s Bed of 1955, the artist’s own quilt and pillow painted and hung on a wall; Oldenburg’s Bedroom Ensemble; the confessional and body art of the 1970s; Nan Goldin’s photographs of beds and lovers; Louise Bourgeois; and, in Emin’s own generation, the found and the abject in Hirst and the Chapmans. The departure: the readymade taken from industry into the most private life, unaltered and unpainted, the artist’s own breakdown offered as the found object, so that authenticity itself is the material. The stake was real and paid: years of derision in the press, the charge that anyone could do it, and an exposure that cannot be withdrawn. Held below 8 because the artist’s own bed was Rauschenberg’s turn forty years before, and the confessional mode was Emin’s own, proved in the tent of 1995.
Tom Wright (Atkins) · Architecture
7.3 · Tier III
The inheritance: the international luxury hotel tower, a slab or a point block on a beach, and in the Gulf the modern commercial tower with regional ornament applied. The departure is wide in two places. The building is set on its own made island, so that the site itself is constructed for the image; and a tall building’s principal face is made of fabric, a technique of tents and stadium roofs raised to some 200 metres on a hotel. The turn in purpose is wider still: a tower commissioned to be a logo, its silhouette designed to be drawn in a few strokes. The stake was real, a very large sum on reclaimed sand for a city then little known abroad, on a bet that an image could make a destination. What holds the axis is that the turn is in strategy and image more than in architecture: the tower type, the hotel plan and the structure are known means, recombined.
Ancient Egyptian · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
The precinct is the tradition, not a turn from it. Egyptian temple building kept one plan for two thousand years, and Karnak is its largest instance. The turns inside it are real but local: the Akh-menu’s tent-pole columns, thickening upward; the basilican section of the Hypostyle Hall, a raised nave lit by a clerestory at a scale not tried before, though the raised nave may already have stood in the Akh-menu and in Amenhotep III’s colonnade at Luxor, a point not secure; and Hatshepsut’s granite obelisks. The great departure made here, Akhenaten’s, lies outside the work and was unmade by it: the precinct answered with restoration. The stakes in stone and labour were enormous, but they were placed on a proven path, and that is what holds the axis.
Chandela builders · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
The inheritance was already standing on the same ground. The north Indian Nagara temple, the plan with an inner ambulatory, transepts and balconies, was realised at Khajuraho in the Lakshmana temple, of 954, and the Vishvanatha, of about 1002, and the clustered spire had been developing across Central and Western India. The departures are of degree: more replicas on the spire, a steeper and more unified rise of roofs, a taller, more compacted mass, a sculptural programme denser and more bound to the wall’s projections. The stake was real in scale: a dry-laid mountain of stone larger than anything on the site. What holds it lowest is that it is a culmination, a proven path carried to its end, not a turn.
Hans Puchsbaum and others · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The lowest of the twelve, and what holds it is that the turns were the region’s. The inheritance: the hall choir of the Austrian Cistercians, Heiligenkreuz the near model; the French cathedral a bishop’s church was expected to be; the great single tower of the German towns, Freiburg’s. The departures are real and credited: a hall nave made the main vessel of a would-be cathedral in place of a basilica; the towers set at the flanks with the old front kept; one colossal tiled roof making the building a single mass; a tower that dissolves its stages into one upward drawing. The stake was the dynasty’s, a parish church built against Prague over a century and more. But each departure was in the air, the hall above all: the building ripened a manner more than it broke from one.
Ilya Repin · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Imperial Academy’s history painting, the wide format and the large figure group reserved for scripture, myth and the state, which Repin had just mastered. The departure: that format given to the lowest labour on the river, a peasant gang painted with the gravity of a history, in plein-air light rather than studio brown. The departure was real but not unprecedented: Courbet’s The Stone Breakers of 1849 and the Russian genre painting of Perov had already turned to labour and the poor, and the Wanderers began exhibiting in 1871. The stake was moderate. Academic hostility is reported, but its words cannot be checked, and the picture was shown at once in Saint Petersburg. This is the lowest of the five gated axes: a sharpening of a path already opening.
Thomas Cole · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is triple: the topographical view, the printed panorama from a known lookout, and the European ideal landscape in its two modes, Salvator Rosa’s wild and Claude’s ordered, which the picture sets side by side across one line. The departure is to make a topographical view carry an argument: two modes of landscape painting become two conditions of a nation’s land, and the painter enters his own view as the one who must choose. That is a real turn for American painting. The stake was modest. A view of a known lookout was a saleable kind, the painter’s risk in that decade lay in his allegorical cycles, and the devices, the dark tree at the edge, the storm, the lit distance, were the tradition’s.
Mudéjar builders, under Peter of Castile, and later hands · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the Andalusi palace of courts, water and stucco, from Madinat al-Zahra to the Almohad palace on this site, and the royal Mudéjar already practised by Alfonso XI in the Sala de la Justicia here and at Tordesillas. The departure: a Castilian king building not a hall in the Moorish manner but a whole palace, with craftsmen from Granada among his workmen, in the decade Muhammad V was building there, and signing it in two scripts. The stake was political and real: his enemies called him a friend of Moors and Jews, and his half-brother made war on him with that charge. What holds the axis low is that the turn is in degree: idiom, plan and craftsmen were in hand, and the step from Alfonso XI’s hall is a step along a proven path.
William Hogarth · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The decisive departure in Hogarth’s art came three years before this work. A Harlot’s Progress (1732) was the first of the modern moral subjects: a painted and engraved narrative of a contemporary London life in sequence, outside history painting and outside Dutch genre both. The Rake extends that departure: a male protagonist, eight scenes rather than six, a wider sweep of institutions, a structure of two falls. The stake was real, a subscription and an issue timed to a new law, a large commercial and legal wager, but it was laid on a market the earlier series had already proved. The turn deepens a path its maker had cut himself, and it is charged for coming second.
Shreve, Lamb and Harmon · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the setback tower of the late 1920s in New York, already given its style by Hood, Walker and Van Alen. The departure is not of style but of process and degree. The cladding, metal strips covering the joints, windows nearly flush, spandrels cast and repeated, turned the stone face of a tower into an assembly of parts set at industrial speed; the ornament is stripped back almost to nothing; the setback mass is purified into one shaft. The stake was large and financial: 102 storeys of speculative space begun as the market fell. But it was a commercial risk on a proven form, and beside the PSFS Building in Philadelphia (1932), which left the setback tower behind, the building is conservative. It perfected a type at its end. This is the lowest of its eleven gated axes, and that is what holds it there.
Iris Murdoch · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The turn is to hand a comic novel of manners, a philosophical novel and a gothic tale to one self-deceiving memoirist and let his journal lose control of its genre: it begins as a retirement diary of meals and swimming and becomes a narrative of obsession, kidnap and death without the narrator noticing the change. That is a real move, and Murdoch staked her most serious ideas on a narrator who mocks them. But the tradition is near and well proven: the egoist narrating his own love, Humbert Humbert most obviously and Ford’s Dowell before him; the English country house comedy of arrivals; the magus novel of the 1960s. Within Murdoch’s own work the book refines methods she had used for twenty years rather than breaking with them. The wager was placed largely on paths already walked.
Denis Villeneuve · Film
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the narco and border thriller: Traffic (2000), No Country for Old Men (2007), the procedural of Michael Mann, and the paramilitary realism of Zero Dark Thirty (2012). The turns are real and they compound. The protagonist is moved to the edge of her own film, and the last act is given to a character whose interior is never entered. The climax is not a firefight but a family dinner that ends in the shooting of two boys. The heroine signs and does not shoot, and the last image belongs to a Mexican child she never meets. Sound and tempo are the art film’s, not the action film’s. What holds it: the stake was a mid-budget picture with stars, the ideas were in the air, and the procedural with a hidden purpose is a proven path.
Many masters, from 1386; facade completed in the nineteenth century · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance: northern Gothic and the brick and Romanesque building of Lombardy. The departures: a cathedral of the northern type at a scale no Italian city had attempted, clad wholly in marble; a section lowered and broadened against the foreign masters’ advice, a Lombard proportion imposed on a French system; a roof made into a place. The stake was real. The debates of 1389 to 1401 show a building whose stability was openly doubted, and to proceed on the local masters’ judgment was a wager. But the Gothic it chose was already the old style, and within a century the Renaissance made it an anachronism in Italy: a wager on a proven path, adjusted to local taste.
Built for Ashikaga Yoshimasa · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The Kannon-den does not swerve far. It takes the type of Kinkaku and of the Ruriden at Saihō-ji, stacked storeys in different manners, a phoenix on the roof, a pond in front, and departs by subtraction: two storeys for three, dark wood and lacquer for leaf. That restraint is a real turn of taste, taken by a shogun against the display of his grandfather’s building, but it cost little and risked nothing structural. The larger swerve is in the Tōgu-dō: the Dōjinsai sets desk, shelves and matted floor into one small room as fixed architecture, where earlier rooms had furniture and movable mats. Whether it was the first such room or only the first that survives is not settled, and the axis is discounted for it.
Ragnar Östberg · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The building gathers its inheritance more than it turns from it. Its departure is from the Beaux-Arts civic palace and the symmetrical town hall: an asymmetric, picturesque mass grown round courts, the tower set at a corner, built of handmade brick and craft rather than cut stone and academic order. That was a real choice, held through a twelve-year campaign while modernism gathered across Europe. But the turn is made within National Romanticism, already advanced in Sweden and Finland, and it bets on a synthesis of familiar sources, Venice, the Vasa castles and Hanseatic brick, rather than on a new principle. The stake in money and civic pride was large; the risk to architecture’s idea of itself was modest.
Soundgarden · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is twofold: the heavy rock of Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin that the band had reworked on Badmotorfinger (1991), and the Seattle punk-metal scene it had helped make. The turn is toward psychedelia and song: Beatles harmony and a guitar turned liquid on Black Hole Sun, slow vast ballads, odd meters carried into radio songs without sounding like exercises. The stake was real: a band known for weight, as its scene sold in millions, made a long, slow, melodic and strange record and asked its audience to follow. What holds the figure: the turn is from the band’s own past more than from the tradition, since psychedelic heaviness was a road Sabbath and Zeppelin laid and odd meters had been the band’s habit from the first.
Andrei Tarkovsky · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Two inheritances. Tarkovsky’s own grammar, settled from Mirror (1975) through Stalker (1979) and Nostalghia (1983): long takes, water and fire, a crisis of faith in a remote place. And Bergman’s chamber cinema, whose apparatus the film takes over whole: Nykvist, Josephson, a Swedish island and a household under strain. The turn is against the second. Bergman’s islands are places where God is silent; here prayer is answered, a miracle is staged without irony, and the film ends in faith. The stake was real: a dying exile making a religious film in a language he did not speak. Held well below the gate because the swerve from his own path is small. Nostalghia had already given a man setting himself on fire to save the world, and the form refines a manner rather than turns it.
Denys Lasdun · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the proscenium theatres of the Victorian and Edwardian West End; Le Corbusier’s late béton brut and the British brutalism of the Smithsons; the open foyers of the Festival Hall next door; and Lasdun’s own strata at the Royal College of Physicians and the University of East Anglia. The departure: a national theatre as a terraced landscape of bare concrete with three houses of three kinds, its largest an open stage on the Greek model, its foyers given to the city. The stake was real: the open stage was untried at that size in Britain, the building took years and a long public argument, and the concrete invited derision. Held down because the material and much of the language were the period’s, the open stage came from Guthrie and Chichester, and the strata were Lasdun’s proven path.
Canaletto · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the Venetian view of Carlevarijs and the topographical print, which show the city as a stage, the Molo, the Piazza, the regatta and the ceremony. The departure: an unremarkable campo, a building site put in the foreground and the famous water behind it, painted with a dark tonality and a weight of shadow that belong more to the theatre painting the painter came from than to the clear view trade. That is a real turn, and it made the view a serious painting rather than a souvenir. The stake was modest. This was early work in a young genre, with no establishment to defy and no market yet set against it, and the painter did not pursue the swerve himself, moving to the brighter manner the English market wanted. A departure of judgment more than of risk.
Jane Campion · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the western and its revisionist line, McCabe & Mrs. Miller (8.5) and Days of Heaven (8.5) among it, and Campion’s own films of desire and constraint, The Piano (8.2) above all. The turn is real: a western with no gunfight, whose violence is surgical and offscreen, whose plot is a poisoning concealed as a friendship, and whose villain is also its most pitied figure. The stake was considerable for a director who had made no feature for twelve years. But the turn is taken on a proven path: the western as a study of repressed masculinity was the revisionist line’s own work, the plot is the novel’s, and the form, classical in pace and composition, does not risk its audience’s sense of the medium. A real swerve within an accepted kind.
Roy Lichtenstein · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The inheritance is New York painting after Abstract Expressionism, whose gestural mark was the sign of the self. The departure is total in kind: a painting that copies a comic panel, by hand, in the look of cheap printing, at the scale of history painting, and puts a war comic’s sound effect where the heroic brushstroke was. The cost of the move was real; the comic paintings of the early 1960s met derision as well as buyers. But the turn was made in 1961, with Look Mickey and the first comic and advertisement paintings, and shown at Castelli in 1962; by 1963 the path was proven and Pop had its exhibitions and its market. Whaam! is the turn enlarged and made complete, with authority: a swerve widened, not first made.
Nicholas Ray · Film
7.8 · Tier III
The inheritance is the juvenile-delinquency picture, the social-problem film and the family melodrama. The Wild One (1953) and Blackboard Jungle (1955) had already made youth a subject, and both treated the young as a threat from outside. The turn is to the inside: the delinquents are the children of comfortable houses, the film takes their side, and adult authority is weak rather than menaced. It gives a melodrama of the suburban family the width of CinemaScope and an expressive colour, a scale the studio kept for spectacle. What holds the figure: the swerve is of subject and point of view more than of form. Its means are the studio melodrama’s, its psychology its decade’s, and its surface stays within the conventions of Warner Bros.
César Pelli · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
The inheritance: the setback tower of New York in the 1920s and 1930s, which Pelli had already revived in his American towers of the 1980s, the Norwest Center in Minneapolis, now the Wells Fargo Center, among them; and the late modern glass office shaft. The departure: the record taken in reinforced concrete, not steel; a plan drawn from Islamic geometry rather than from the grid, so that a regional ornament becomes the whole floor; the tall building made a pair joined by a bridge. The stake was real: a national prestige project before the Asian financial crisis of 1997, a record staked on a concrete system, two foreign contractors set against each other. Held below the gate because the turn lies within Pelli’s own manner, and the setback silhouette is a revival.
Wassily Kandinsky · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
The inheritance by 1925 is double: Kandinsky’s own abstraction of 1910 to 1914, free, expressive and painterly, which was his great swerve; and the geometric abstraction that followed the war, Suprematism, Russian Constructivism and De Stijl, which he had met in Moscow and saw around him at the Bauhaus. The departure is a synthesis. Ruled lines, hard planes and a clean disc share one field with a near-figurative presence and a free serpentine line, the constructed with the felt: a real position, apart from Mondrian’s exclusion of the curve and Malevich’s exclusion of everything. The stake is smaller than the turn. The geometric manner was his by the time of Composition VIII in 1923, and this canvas extends a position already taken: a swerve within his own road.
Joel Coen and Ethan Coen · Film
7.8 · Tier III
The inheritance is the American comedy of the road and the folk tale: Preston Sturges, whose Sullivan’s Travels (1941) supplies the title as the name of the serious film its director means to make, and the brothers’ own regional comedies of bungling criminals. The turn is a combination: Homer’s epic carried to the Depression South as a screwball road comedy, and a musical whose songs are archive recordings and old-time performances of a music then out of commerce, the whole image finished by a digital grade then new to the feature. The stake was real: a period comedy built on unfashionable music could have failed with every audience at once. Held where it is because the wager sits largely on its makers’ proven path, and its boldest part, the music, departs further from the American film musical than from the Coens.
Howard Hawks · Film
7.8 · Tier III
The inheritance is The Front Page, a proven stage hit already filmed by Lewis Milestone in 1931, and Hawks’s own screwball comedies, Twentieth Century (1934) and Bringing Up Baby (1938). The turn is one decision with large consequences: Hildy becomes a woman and Walter’s former wife, so that a newspaper melodrama of male comradeship becomes a comedy of remarriage and of a woman’s vocation, with the original plot kept whole beneath it. The second turn is in the sound: lines spoken over each other at a density the American sound film had not attempted, with in-jokes that treat the film as film, Grant speaking his own birth name and Bruce likened to Ralph Bellamy. What holds it below the bar is the stake: the speed was already Hawks’s, and the property was a sure thing.
Terry Gilliam · Film
7.8 · Tier III
The inheritance is double: the Hollywood redemption drama and buddy picture of the late 1980s, with a star comic in a part made for him, and Gilliam’s own fantasy, in which the imagination stands against an administered world, from Time Bandits to Brazil (8.5) and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. The turn is real. The film sets the fantasy inside a present-day American city, with no fantastic world to house it, so that the vision becomes a symptom: the Red Knight a hallucination of trauma, the Grail quest a widower’s delusion. A studio romance carrying an Arthurian legend, mass murder, homelessness and psychosis in one body was an unusual wager. What holds it: after the losses of Munchausen its maker took a studio’s script and stars, and the shape of the cynic redeemed by a holy fool and a loving woman was a proven path.
Arcade Fire · Music
7.8 · Tier III
The inheritance is the band’s own manner, the anthemic, choral indie rock of its first three albums, with Springsteen and Bowie behind it. The turn is real and wide: toward the dance floor with a dance producer, toward Haitian rara rhythm and carnival percussion, toward the double album and an ironic alter ego. The stake was real too. The band’s previous record had won the largest prize in its field, and this one wagered the audience and the earnestness the band was loved for. What holds the figure: the path was proven. Remain in Light, Achtung Baby and Zooropa, and the producer’s own records, had shown a rock band turning to the dance floor and to Caribbean or African rhythm, and the turn imports a language more than it invents one.
Chinese builders (Northern Wei foundation, Ming and Qing rebuilding) · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
The inheritance is twofold: the Buddhist cave temple of north China, of which Yungang, cut into a cliff near Datong, is the Northern Wei model, and the plank road, the timber gallery carried out from mountain cliffs on beams set in sockets. The departure is to join them: to build temple halls of the ordinary kind out from the cliff by the plank road’s means, rather than cutting the temple into the rock. That is a real turn, and the stake was physical and lasting, since timber on a cliff must be kept up or lost. But the swerve is bounded: both means were known, the halls are conventional, and only the type and the site can be credited, the first design being unknown.
The White Stripes · Music
7.7 · Tier III
The inheritance is the Delta and Detroit both: the country blues of Son House and Robert Johnson, the garage rock of the Stooges, the punk-blues of the 1990s, and the duo’s own first two albums. The turn is by subtraction: no bass, and a drummer who plays almost nothing but the beat. The wager was real for an independent band about to be heard widely: a sound this bare could be taken as a joke or a gimmick, and the sibling story and the colour scheme risked it further. What holds the figure: the duo format and the red, white and black frame were already in place on the earlier records, the bare blues-rock record had precedents in the Gories, the Oblivians and Jon Spencer, and the departure is more from the rock of its day than from its own tradition. Under Remain in Light at 8.6.
Bong Joon-ho · Film
7.7 · Tier III
The inheritance is triple: the dystopian science fiction of class, Lang’s Metropolis with its vertical city, the train of Le Transperceneige, Terry Gilliam’s Brazil; the Hollywood action film with a rebel hero, then at its height in the young-adult dystopias; and Bong’s own Korean genre cinema with its swerves of tone. The turn is to make the action film’s advance an argument, to set a grotesque minister and a schoolroom sing-along inside a massacre, and to end not in victory but in the wreck of the whole world with two children left. The stake was real: a first film in English, at a scale far beyond his earlier work, and a cut held against its American distributor. Held below the gate: the dystopian rising stays recognisable, and the swerve is in tone and ending more than in what film can do.
Maya (Puuc) · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
The inheritance is the Maya temple-pyramid: rectangular, terraced, a single stair to a sanctuary at the summit. The departures are two. The oval plan with rounded ends breaks the rectilinear rule of the type and turns a stepped platform into a single mass. And one body carries two regional manners, the Chenes monster-mouth temple on the west and the Puuc sanctuary at the summit, with two fronts of different character. What the departure cost is harder to state. Accretion explains much of the oddity: the oval may follow from enclosing earlier structures, and the mixture of manners records successive campaigns rather than one wager. A swerve made in increments, each stage taking a moderate risk, stands below a turn staked at once. It is real, and well short of the gate.
Paul Thomas Anderson · Film
7.7 · Tier III
The inheritance is the American ensemble mosaic proven by Altman, in Nashville and above all Short Cuts (1993), which had already closed a Los Angeles mosaic with a natural catastrophe. The frame is a proven path, and its catastrophe has a precedent. The turns are real and local: a sing-along that breaks naturalistic drama into something like musical theatre, without irony; frogs of no natural cause in place of Altman’s tremor, prepared by a prologue that insists such things happen; and a pitch, three hours of near continuous emotional volume with music under almost every scene, far from the cool observation of the model. The stake was large, a third feature at three hours with sequences that could have been laughed off the screen. But the form itself is inherited, and that holds the axis well below the bar.
Don DeLillo · Literature
7.7 · Tier III
The turn is real: a novel of finance written not as social realism, the way American fiction had written money from Dreiser to Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, but as a stylized, nearly allegorical drama in which characters speak in aphorism and the market is a metaphysics. It joined the single-day form to the networked present and made a trader’s interiority a meditation on time, and the stake was real, since a book so cold invites the charge that its people are mouthpieces and its air is thin. Held where it is because the manner is DeLillo’s own, pushed further rather than turned; because the novel of money in stylized talk has a lineage, in Gaddis’s JR; and because the one-day frame is borrowed whole.
Jim Jarmusch · Film
7.5 · Tier III
The departure is the graft itself: a hit-man film inherited from Melville and the Japanese gangster cinema, set among Italian American mobsters, carried by a hip-hop score and a Black lead who lives by an eighteenth-century Japanese manual, all in a minimalist, comic, drifting style. In 1999 that combination was not a proven path. A genre picture made by an art-house director, with RZA writing the score and the Hagakure read aloud over it, risked looking like pastiche or affectation, and some reviewers found it so. The stake was real but bounded: each component was known, and the director’s manner was already established by Stranger Than Paradise and Dead Man. A real swerve rather than an accent, short of the reorganisation that Citizen Kane or Breathless placed.
Gerhard of Cologne and successors; completed by Ernst Friedrich Zwirner · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
This is the lowest axis, and the reason is plain. The inheritance is French High Gothic, and the choir takes it whole: the plan and elevation of Amiens, begun in 1220, with the glazed triforium and linear refinement of the court style of Saint-Denis and the Sainte-Chapelle. The departures are of degree: a five-aisled nave on a scale no French cathedral of the type carried through, and a west front of two openwork towers drawn as one vertical figure, larger than any built front. The stake of 1248 was great in money and years, but the path was proven. The completion swerved as little as it could: its wager was fidelity to a medieval drawing, the opposite of a departure.
Kongo · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is Kongo minkisi in general: bundles, pots, shells and figures charged with medicines, some without any nails. The turn in the nkondi is the nail itself, which makes the act of use a cumulative, visible part of the sculpture, so that the object is never finished and its surface is written by its public. That is a real departure in the logic of sculpture, and the large Mangaaka push the carved figure to a monumental, formal scale unusual in the region. But the axis scores the turn with the stake, and the stake cannot be seen: the type is a tradition, not one maker’s wager, the date and source of the nailing practice are uncertain, and what was risked, and by whom, is unrecorded. That, and not any smallness in the turn, holds the axis lowest with The Encompassed.
Ancient Egyptian, under Amenhotep III and Ramesses II · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance was formed before the work began: pylon, open court, hypostyle and sanctuary on one axis. The departures are real but limited. The colonnade, a processional nave of great height standing alone between a forecourt and a court, is the boldest turn, and it is credited; whether it was meant to stand alone is not certain, since many hold it to be the nave of a hall whose lower aisles were never built. The sun court’s generous double rows are a refinement. The Ramesside bend gives the building its odd front, but it is an accommodation, not a wager. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that the stake was political rather than architectural: a proven path, walked at great scale and with great finish.
Wang Xianchen; Wen Zhengming (attributed design) · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The garden departs little from what it inherits. Pond at the centre, halls facing water, islands, galleries, borrowed view and named scenes belong to a tradition of literati gardens reaching back through the Song, most of whose works are lost. Its distinction is scale and the dominance of water: water not as a feature but as the ground of the whole, held at a size that makes the sequence long and the reaches far. That is a real decision, but a decision within a practice, not a turn against it. The later stages swerve less: the Qing filled the garden with buildings in the manner of the time, and the 1950s relaid the eastern part closer to a public park. The stake was a retired man’s fortune, not a form.
Unknown (English or French) · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance is ordinary for the fourteenth century: the donor portrait, a kneeling patron presented by saints, common in Italian, French and Bohemian painting; the portable devotional diptych, common at the French court; the heraldic badge, common in livery. The departure is in their fusion. The donor is a reigning king, painted as a recognisable young man. The heavenly host is put into the patron’s livery, a step devotional painting rarely took so wholly. And the exchange is carried across the hinge, so that the gap between the panels is part of the subject. The stake was real but private: the object was made for one man’s use, not for a church or a public, and it risked no reception. It sharpens the court style toward personal myth more than it turns painting.
Bruce Springsteen · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is twofold: the rock and roll, soul and Spector-scaled anthems of his own earlier records, and the bleak folk of Nebraska two years before. The turn is real. Songs from the same writing as Nebraska, about ruin, were recast as bright, drum-driven band records with synthesiser hooks, and he took up the production idiom of the year, gated drums and keyboard riffs, for the first time. The credit goes to the method of the title track, a protest song built as a stadium anthem with no ironic marker to warn the listener, and to the plain, almost spoken close. What holds the figure: the turn ran toward the mainstream sound of the moment and a larger audience, and risked an artist’s seriousness more than his standing.
Built for Rao Jodha and successors · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the hill forts of Rajasthan and central India, Chittorgarh and Gwalior, and Kumbhalgarh rising in the same decades; the Rajput palace of courts and screens; and from the late sixteenth century the Mughal manner of pavilion, cusped arch and mirrored hall. The departure is of degree rather than kind. Mehrangarh takes the fort on the rock to its sheerest, fusing cliff and wall into one face, and lets the palace grow along the top of the fortification, so that the defensive and the domestic share one elevation. That fusion is its own, and the stake was the ruling house’s survival through Mughal and Maratha pressure. But the vocabulary is inherited, and the palace campaigns follow the taste of their reigns. This is the lowest axis: a swerve of intensity on a proven path.
Steven Spielberg · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the creature film of the 1950s, the disaster cycle of the 1970s, Hitchcock’s suspense and The Birds above all, a town attacked by nature while authority looks away, Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People in the civic plot, and Melville for the hunt. The turns are real: a monster film made with the craft of an A picture; the monster withheld for most of its length and made present through its point of view, the barrels and the music; a long monologue at the climax of an action film; the change of genre at the hour, from civic thriller to a three-hander at sea. The stake was real too: a young director, a film far over schedule and budget, shot on the open sea. The wager on form was smaller, and that is what holds the axis lowest of the eleven the Universal Minimum covers: the withholding was in part forced by machines that failed, then made a principle, and the project was a studio’s adaptation of a best-seller.
Knights Hospitaller builders · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance: Byzantine fortification of the Levant, with its curtains and towers; the Frankish keep; Arab and Armenian military building; and, among the Franks themselves, the concentric castle already built, at the Hospitallers’ own Belvoir. The departure: concentric defence carried to its fullest scale and depth, the inner ward raised to command the outer; the talus made a monumental work in its own right; machicolation on parts of the outer wall; a Gothic hall and loggia brought into the heart of a frontier fortress. The stake was real: the order’s resources sunk in a frontier that could be lost, and was. What holds the axis lowest is that the turn is of degree: a culmination of a line already drawn, not a wager on an unproven path.
Luigi Vanvitelli · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
This is the lowest axis, and the reason is that the work perfects its inheritance more than it departs from it. The type, the royal palace on a grand axis with formal park and water, is Versailles’s; the language, the scenographic vista and the staircase, is Roman and Neapolitan late Baroque; the regular, restrained fronts already lean toward the classicism that followed. The real departures are two: palace, court and state compressed into one rectangle of four courts with a commanding centre, in place of accreted wings; and a single telescope of view run through the building into the landscape, so that the house becomes a lens on the park. Both are intelligent turns. Neither was a wager against the tradition. The stake was money, not form.
Claude Lorrain · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the landscape of Paul Bril, Agostino Tassi and Elsheimer and the ideal landscape of the Carracci. Against it the seaport with the sun painted directly at the centre was a real turn: light made the subject of a large history picture. But the turn was taken in the 1630s, in the earlier harbours and the Louvre Seaport at Sunset of 1639, and by 1648 this canvas is the type’s most perfected statement, not its wager. The stake was small, since the painter’s harbours were already sought by patrons in Rome and France. The axis scores the turn and the stake together. The canvas is credited in part with the type’s departure because it is the type’s defining instance, and with little risk.
Ikeda Terumasa · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance was in place by 1600: the keep as a tower of display, begun at Nobunaga’s Azuchi and continued at Hideyoshi’s Osaka and in Himeji’s own earlier keep; the stone wall on its concave curve; the plastered, gabled keep and the turning approach, in use across Japan. The departures: a connected group of four keeps round a court, at this scale and with this unity; a whole fortress held in one white surface; defence carried through so many layers that the approach is the architecture. The stake was real in money and labour, but it was a wager on a proven path, at the height of a boom in which every great lord built the same way. The castle completes its type rather than turning it.
Master Enrique and Juan Pérez · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The departure is one of degree, from a path already proven. The plan is that of Reims (8.8); the glazed triforium was used before at Saint-Denis (8.8) and Amiens (8.9); the masters worked within the French manner. What is León’s own is the extremity: the wall dissolved further, over a whole cathedral, than in nearly any French model, on a thinner skeleton and in a poor stone. The stake was real and was paid in centuries of structural distress and a near total rebuilding. Against its region the turn is larger: in Castile, which had already taken the French Gothic, León is the most purely French and the most daring in glass. But the swerve is from Castilian practice toward an existing model, not a turn of the model, and that holds it at 7.6.
Alexandre Dumas · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Dumas inherited the revenge tragedy, the Gothic, Scott’s historical romance and the new roman-feuilleton, in which Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris (1842 to 1843) came first. His turn is to set the revenge romance in the present, in the Paris of the reader’s own banks, Chamber and newspapers, and to make the avenger a man who manufactures identities and runs a plot inside society by money and information, a figure later fiction took as its own. That is a real departure in kind. The stake was small. The serial, its cliffhangers and its paid length were a proven market, and Les Trois Mousquetaires had proved the path in the same year. The prose and the method of narration are conventional; the swerve is in the conception of the hero and the setting.
Claudio de Arciniega and successors; facade by Manuel Tolsá · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Renaissance hall cathedral of Andalusia, the type of Jaén and its kin: a rectangular plan, a flat end and heavy classical piers, brought to New Spain and answered almost at once at Puebla. Arciniega’s plan takes that type with little turn, and the masters of the seventeenth century followed it. Two departures within the work are real. Balbás’s Altar of the Kings brought the estípite to New Spain as the governing support of a retablo, and that turn had consequence. Ortiz de Castro’s crowns and Tolsá’s completion are inventive answers to finishing a front two centuries in the making, but they reconcile; they do not wager. What holds the axis this low: the great stake the work carried, building in stone on lake clay, was a stake of necessity, not of art.
Pablo Picasso · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance is plain: Daumier’s saltimbanques; Manet’s The Old Musician of 1862, a frieze of marginal figures on waste ground; the emptied pastorals and pale harmonies of Puvis de Chavannes; the circus of Seurat and Toulouse-Lautrec. The departure is the circus with the circus taken away, the figures lifted out of any event onto an abstract ground, and the painter’s own turn from the misery of the Blue Period to a rose and ochre key and a classical stillness. The cost was real: a painter of twenty-four working a canvas of more than two metres for months with no buyer. But it is a turn within a proven path, and this maker’s decisive swerve came two years later.
Thai builders, under Rama II and Rama III · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Khmer tower sanctuary, taken up in Ayutthaya as the prang, at Wat Chaiwatthanaram and Wat Ratchaburana above all, and the stuccoed brick monument of central Thai building. The departures: the prang drawn taller and slimmer than before, raised with its four corner towers as one group on a terraced platform; and the surface turned from stucco to a continuous mosaic of porcelain, the manner of Rama III’s reign, whose court looked to China, carried here to its largest scale. The stake was real: a masonry tower of this height on the soft clay of a river bank. What holds the axis, level with the page’s lowest, is that the turn is one of degree within a line, and the porcelain manner was shared by the royal temples of the same reign.
Antonio Canova · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Roman Baroque of Bernini and his heirs, marble driven to violent motion, and the lovers group of the antique, the Capitoline Cupid and Psyche, standing and embracing. Canova turned to a reclining, open, pierced group in a held instant, with the cool surface and calm contour that Winckelmann’s taste asked for and an intimacy the antique groups do not have. A two figure marble so open in the air, its forms crossing rather than massed, was unusual, and the stakes were technical and critical: it was read in its time as both too sweet and too daring. But the Neoclassical turn was a programme of the period, with Winckelmann, Mengs and the Roman academies behind it, and this is a leading instance of it rather than its cause.
Vladimir-Suzdal builders, under Andrey Bogolyubsky · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The departure from the inherited Kievan and Byzantine church is real: white ashlar instead of brick, a Romanesque articulation of arcade belt, attached columns, stepped portals and carved relief grafted onto an Orthodox plan, and the plan stretched into a slender figure. But much of the swerve was made before this church, in the white-stone churches built under Andrey’s father, Yuri Dolgoruky, about 1152, and in Andrey’s own cathedral at Vladimir, begun in 1158. What this church adds is the turn to verticality and the building set as a figure in the land. The stake was moderate: a votive church on a prince’s estate, a recent departure refined.
Timurid and Ashtarkhanid builders · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the courtyard building of Timur’s reign in the same city, the Bibi-Khanym mosque and the Gur-e Amir, with the four-iwan madrasa and the tiled pishtaq. Ulugh Beg’s madrasa refines that tradition at the scale of a royal foundation; it does not turn from it. The seventeenth-century campaign was conservative by choice: Sher-Dor copies the building it faces, two hundred years on, and Tilya-Kori fills the third side in the same grammar. Two departures carry a stake: the planned square of facing madrasas, completed across centuries, an urban wager of real ambition; and Sher-Dor’s figural portal on a religious college, a strong convention broken in public at the city’s centre. What holds the axis lowest: the paired madrasa and the framed square were current in the region, Bukhara building them in the same decades, and the figures are an accent on a proven type.
Built for Tokugawa Iemitsu · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The forms are inherited. The joined plan of worship hall and sanctuary stood before Nikkō, at Kitano Tenmangū and Ōsaki Hachiman, and the mausoleum of a deified ruler had its immediate precedent in Toyokuni-byō, for Toyotomi Hideyoshi, dismantled by the Tokugawa. The taste for gold, colour and dense carving was the castle and temple style of the preceding half century. Nikkō pushed that taste to a pitch no shrine had attempted and fixed it as a dynastic sacred style: a real turn against the restraint of the Ise tradition, with a stake in money and labour that was a matter of state. But it is intensification along a proven path, a wager on more, not on otherwise.
Tibetan, under Songtsen Gampo · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The departure is the transplant: a Buddhist temple of the Indian and Newar vihara type, with Newar carvers, set down in a kingdom that had no such building, as an act of a new state’s conversion and alliance. It was a real wager, made against an indigenous religious order the tradition remembers resisting, and its cost was political as much as architectural. What holds the axis is that the turn is one of place and faith more than of form: the plan is the vihara’s, the woodwork Newar, the later roofs Chinese, the later halls the common idiom of Tibetan building. The temple’s distinctiveness grew by accretion, not by a single invention, and other early Tibetan foundations depart further in plan.
Bob Marley and the Wailers · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is roots reggae as the Wailers themselves had remade it for an international public since Catch a Fire (1973): Jamaican rhythm and Rastafarian speech in an album built for rock’s audience, with rock guitar and Island’s finish. The record turns along that path, not off it. The turns are real and modest: a title track held past any song form, close in spirit to dub’s extension; the open division into a militant side and a love side; a softer, rhythm and blues address on side two. The stake was in the moment, a record made in exile weeks after an attempt on its maker’s life that chose to end in love songs and so risked the charge of softening. That stake is moral more than formal, and the swerve is a refinement: that is what holds the axis lowest. It stands well below Low at 8.9 and Remain in Light at 8.6.
Federico Fellini · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is double: neorealism and the Italian comedy of the provinces, and Fellini’s own films, above all I vitelloni (1953), set in the same town among its idle young men, and Roma (1972), which had already made a city’s portrait from episodes, direct address and memory. The departures are real: a film about Fascism made as carnival and memoir rather than as accusation, when Italian political cinema of the early 1970s worked in the register of indictment, and a town built whole in the studio with its artifice shown. But the stake was small. Fellini was at the height of his fame, the production was large, and the form extended a manner he had proved the year before. That holds the axis among the lowest of the twelve: much of the turn was made by the earlier films, and this one refines his road.
Jorge Luis Borges · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
The departure is from Borges’s own manner. The dense, erudite fiction of the 1940s, with its footnotes and invented scholarship, gives way to dictated tales in a deliberately plain style, oral in rhythm, carrying the old themes without the apparatus. For a famous writer whose manner had become a school, that was a stake. But the turn had been made five years before, in El informe de Brodie, whose prologue set out the programme; here it is applied rather than risked, and the themes, the double, the infinite, the sacred word, the sect, are his own proven ones. Against the Spanish-language story of 1975, after the Boom, this is the late work of the writer the Boom had swerved from. A wager on a proven path is not a swerve, and much of this book is that wager, placed well.
Sidney Lumet · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is close. Kazan and Schulberg’s A Face in the Crowd (1957) had already made a television demagogue out of a man’s rage and shown his makers using him. Chayefsky came from live television drama, Marty (1953) among it, and had written a satire of an American institution in an apocalyptic rant in The Hospital (1971); Dr. Strangelove (1964) had set the register of cold farce. The turns are real: the institution itself makes the protagonist, the satire moves from plausibility to a murder ordered in a boardroom and played straight, and a studio picture gives its longest speech to a chairman’s metaphysics. What holds the axis lowest: the stake was moderate, a star picture by a prestige writer on his proven path, and the swerve is one of degree on a road already open.
Donna Tartt · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is plain and the book owns it: Crime and Punishment, the murder by a theory of exception; Brideshead Revisited, the middle-class narrator seduced by a gilded circle; the campus novel; the inverted detective story, in which the murderer is known from the start and the question is how and why; and Euripides himself. The turn is in the fusion. A literary novel of classical learning, in a late-Jamesian register, was put to the uses of the suspense novel, at great length, in 1992, when the American literary novel of the moment was minimalist or postmodern and the campus novel was satire. For a first novel of over five hundred pages that was a real wager, and it was placed. What holds the axis in the middle sevens is that the forms are inherited whole: the inverted whodunit is old, the seduction by a circle is old, and what is new is the scale and conviction of the joining, not a reorganisation of any one part.
Edward Weston · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is twofold: the soft-focus, painterly pictorialism in which Weston himself had worked into the early 1920s, and the straight photography already made by Strand and Stieglitz in the 1910s and, in Europe, by Renger-Patzsch and Blossfeldt in the late 1920s, close studies of plants and things in full sharpness. Weston’s own shells of 1927 had made the move in his work three years before. The pepper’s departure is one of degree and of subject: the humblest object in the kitchen given the full apparatus of the large camera and the long exposure. That carried some risk, of absurdity and of the charge of mere still life, but the path was proven. A refinement carried to its purest instance, not the swerve itself.
Alfred Hitchcock · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
The film inherits a path its maker proved: the innocent man on the run across a country, pursued by police and spies at once, from The 39 Steps (1935) and Saboteur (1942), which ended on the Statue of Liberty as this ends on Rushmore. It perfects that form at the scale of a studio colour spectacle rather than turning from it. Its turns are local and real: the crop duster moves menace out of shadow into open daylight and empty space; the spy plot’s object is treated as meaningless, very nearly said aloud; and light comedy is pitched near farce inside the thriller, a mother laughing at killers in a lift. The stake, an expensive original screenplay with no source, was placed on a proven path, and that holds the axis lowest of the eleven.
Steven Spielberg · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the invasion film of the 1950s, from which the film takes the landing, the agents and the quarantine and inverts them, the visitor innocent and the state the menace; the Disney family picture; and its maker’s own Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), which had already made the alien benevolent and the encounter a revelation, on the ground of suburban family life. The turns are real: the alien as a small, frail, comic body to be cared for rather than worshipped; science fiction shot from a child’s eye height; a personal film of modest budget after Raiders of the Lost Ark. What holds the axis lowest of the gated five is the stake. The wager was placed on its maker’s proven path, in the oldest story in children’s fiction, a boy and his creature.
Alex Proyas · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is plain and acknowledged: German Expressionism and Metropolis (1927) for the city and its underworld; the noir of the 1940s, its detectives, automats and fedoras; Hopper for the empty diners and streets; Brazil (1985) and the films of Jeunet and Caro for the retro-modern machinery; Proyas’s own The Crow (1994) for the rain-dark city. The turn is to make the noir city itself the artifice under investigation, so that the genre’s eternal night, its amnesiac hero and its femme fatale become the makers’ construction and the conventions become the plot’s evidence. The stake was real: an expensive, uncommercial studio picture, which lost money. Most of the surface is borrowed, and the swerve lies in the premise more than in a new way of making film.
Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is plain: the American gangster chronicle, Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990) above all, with its narrator, freeze frames and decades told as a career; the chaptered, looping telling of Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994); the advertising and music-video cutting in which Meirelles had worked; and at home the Cinema Novo tradition of the poor on screen and Héctor Babenco’s Pixote (1981). The turn is real: that language carried into a Brazilian housing estate, told from inside by a cast largely from such places. So was the stake, a large Brazilian production with almost no stars on a subject the market had little appetite for. What holds it lowest of the twelve: the means were borrowed whole, and the departure carries a proven form to a new world rather than making a new form.
Wassily Kandinsky · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is double. From outside: the discs of Delaunay’s simultaneous paintings from about 1912, Kupka’s discs, and the compass-drawn circles of Russian Suprematism and Constructivism, Malevich, Rodchenko and Lissitzky, which Kandinsky knew at first hand in Moscow before 1922. From inside: his own turn to geometry from about 1921, the circle already a principal form in Composition VIII and Circles in a Circle, both of 1923. The departure: the vocabulary cut to one form, line and angle dropped, the discs made transparent and set on a dark atmospheric ground, so that geometry becomes space rather than diagram. It is a real refinement and a recognisable turn. The stake was small: a master at the Bauhaus consolidating his own late language, with nothing risked.
Grant Wood · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
In 1930 the ambitious path of American painting ran through Paris and abstraction, and Wood had himself painted soft Impressionist landscapes in France in the 1920s. The turn is backward and sideways at once: the hard, enamelled finish and frontal staging of fifteenth-century Netherlandish portraiture, applied to plain Midwestern people and a Carpenter Gothic house. That departs from the inherited modern path and from the genre picture of rural America, and it carried a stake: it could be read as provincial, as reactionary or as mocking, and it has been read all three ways. What holds the axis at nine tenths below the gate is that the turn is toward an older proven manner, not into the unknown, and its stake was a reputation, not a wager on what painting could do.
Norman Rockwell · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is American narrative illustration, Rockwell’s own above all: the anecdotal scene of ordinary life, told in exact realism for a mass magazine, warm in register and mild in politics. The departure is in subject and in one formal move. The subject is a national wound, shown without comfort to that same mass audience; the move is the cropping of every adult head, which his pictures, built on faces and expressions, had not made. The stake was real for the maker: a painter loved for a gentler America turned his public’s attention on itself. It was lower for the field: by 1963 Look was a liberal venue, the realism was proven, and the event had already been pictured. A turn of a career more than of an art.
Terrence Malick · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is double: the Second World War drama, and the martyr film from Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc to Bresson’s prison films; and Malick’s own late manner, settled since The Tree of Life. Against the war drama the turn is real: no battle, the regime seen as noise and machinery, German left untranslated so that power speaks a language the film declines to decode, an obscure farmer in place of a resister of rank, three hours given to a man who does nothing but refuse. The stake was real too, a long film without stars made for a general audience, and these the figure credits. Against its maker’s path the film turns back rather than out, to a linear, dated story after three films that had dissolved narrative, and keeps the late manner whole: the whispered voice-over, the roving wide lens, the cut on movement, by 2019 a proven path. Two paths already walked, joined, make a recombination more than a departure; the swerve lies in what the manner was turned upon.
Denis Villeneuve · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is triple: Herbert’s novel and its adaptations, Lynch’s film of 1984 above all; the desert epic, Lawrence of Arabia (1962) most of all, to which the outsider turned leader and the sand compositions answer; and the franchise blockbuster of its decade. The turn is against the last. A tentpole of great cost ends with its hero’s triumph staged as horror: a duel won, a war of conquest declared, and the last shot given to the woman who walks away. The hero’s speech is filmed as a demagogue’s, with no promise of rescue. The stake was real: a mass audience asked to watch its star become a tyrant. Held well below the gate: the turn is Herbert’s, the form stays the epic’s, and the manner was proved by Part One three years before.
Nikos Kazantzakis · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Greek novel of manners and of the countryside, the ethography of Papadiamantis and his followers, with the first-person memoir novel and, behind them, the philosophical dialogue and the master’s life told by a disciple. The turn is real in its own tradition. Kazantzakis brought Nietzsche and Bergson, the Buddha and the Dionysian, into a Greek novel of village and labour, wrote it in a full, unpurified demotic while the language question was still charged, and made a labourer the bearer of the philosophy and the intellectual its pupil. The stake was real for a writer known as a poet, translator and polemicist, and the book’s frankness about the Church and about sex invited the hostility his later novels drew in full. Held below because the form is a proven one, a retrospective first-person narrative told in order: the swerve lies in its matter and its language more than in what the novel as a form could do.
Philip Johnson · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The inheritance is plain, and Johnson stated it: Mies van der Rohe, whose Farnsworth House, designed from 1945 and shown as a model in 1947 in the Mies exhibition Johnson curated at the Museum of Modern Art, is the source of the glass room in nature. Behind Mies stand Schinkel, Ledoux and the Bauhaus house. The departures are Johnson’s: the room set on the ground, not floated; strict symmetry; the corner closed by a column; the solid cylinder as a free figure in the room; and the pairing of glass with a blind brick box, which turns a pavilion into an argument. Completed in 1949, before Farnsworth, it was the first such house built. But the turn is a turn within a path another architect had just cut, and the stake was small: Johnson’s own money, his own comfort and his own land, with no client to fail. A borrowed main move and a private risk hold the axis lowest of the eleven.
Daniel Burnham · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The inheritance: the Chicago skeleton frame and the tall office building ordered as a column, which Sullivan had set out and Burnham’s own office had practised; and the Beaux-Arts dress of the City Beautiful, Burnham’s chosen manner after 1893. The departure: a tower of this height on a lot so narrow that the frame stands almost as a free figure, seen whole and in the round from the open square, far north of the existing district of tall buildings. The stake was real: public prediction of collapse in the wind, ridicule of the shape, a builder’s money on a site few would have built high. But the style was the safe one, and wedge buildings on gore lots already stood in other cities. The turn is in the site taken.
Godspeed You! Black Emperor · Music
7.9 · Tier III
The inheritance is the band’s own. The long crescendo for a large ensemble had been its language since 1997, and both pieces were played in concert before the hiatus. The turn is made inside that language: the record is heavier and more riff-led than its predecessors, narrows its palette to the ensemble, with no tape collage, and sets its drones apart as tracks of their own. The stake was real. A reunion after ten years, from material already played, could have diminished the band; it was made heavier, not softer. What holds the axis well below the bar is the return itself: a wager placed on a crescendo form that the band had proven, and the field had imitated, by 2012.
Sesshū Tōyō · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The inheritance is double: the Chinese ink tradition, and within it the abbreviated wet manner associated with Yujian and Muqi of the Southern Song, whose paintings were held in Japanese temple and shogunal collections; and the Japanese school of Josetsu and Shūbun, careful, tonal and Chinese in its models, in which Sesshū trained. The departure: a painter in his seventies, after a lifetime of firm, angular, constructed landscapes, carries the abbreviated manner further toward the edge of the legible than his Japanese predecessors had, and makes it his own by the hardness of the accents. The stake was real and not large: a known mode with an honoured pedigree, a private gift to a pupil, and an inscription that claims continuity, not revolt.
Jeff Nichols · Film
7.9 · Tier III
The inheritance is double: the American independent realism of the working family, regional, observed and unhurried, and the apocalyptic and horror film. The turn sets the second inside the first without irony and binds both to a clinical study of the onset of schizophrenia, so that the genre’s visions are the case’s symptoms. The stake was real for a second feature on a small budget: a two-hour film that withholds its storm for most of its length and ends by refusing to say whether its hero is ill. Held where it is because the path was open: Todd Haynes’s Safe (1995), M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs (2002) and William Friedkin’s Bug (2006) had joined domestic life, paranoia and the uncanny. A refinement of tone and setting, honestly risked.
Denis Villeneuve · Film
7.9 · Tier III
The inheritance is the space epic as the studios had made it since Star Wars (1977): fast, comic, scored for adventure; behind it, David Lynch’s Dune (1984), whose failure made the novel a byword for the unfilmable. The turn is real: an epic made slow, austere and grave, spectacle carried by scale and sound more than action, dialogue cut to little, humour refused almost entire. The stake was real: a large budget spent on a story whose second half was not secured, released in cinemas and on streaming the same day. What holds the figure is that the manner is the director’s own, proven in Arrival (2016) and Blade Runner 2049 (2017).
Arthur Conan Doyle · Literature
7.9 · Tier III
The inheritance is Poe’s three tales of Dupin, Gaboriau’s Lecoq and the sensation novel. Two departures are the book’s own. The first is of form: a series of complete stories, each one number long, around one recurring pair, so that the character is the continuing thing and the plot is not. The magazine story and later the series on radio and television inherited that shape, and it is made here. The second is quieter, of content: a detective beaten in the first story, who loses his client in the fifth, finds no crime in two, and lets a thief go at Christmas. Held in the sevens because the method, the display of inference and the narrating companion are Poe’s, and because the stake was small: the venture was commercial, and it paid at once. A swerve that risked little.
James Cameron · Film
7.8 · Tier III
The turn is real. The sequel to a revered haunted-house horror film becomes a combat film; the single creature becomes a society with a queen; the heroine of a survival structure becomes a commander and a mother. The stake was not small, a second studio feature by a director with one hit, under the shadow of Scott’s film. But the swerve runs onto proven paths. The platoon picture is inherited whole: the lost patrol, the green officer, the tough sergeant, the wisecracker. Much of the machinery repeats the earlier film’s, the Company, the synthetic crewman and the airlock ending among it. A woman leading an action film was rare at this weight in 1986 and was not new. The departure lies in recombination and scale, not in form, and that holds the axis where it stands.
Pierre Koenig · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
By 1959 the steel frame, the glass wall, the open plan, the flat roof and the pool were the Case Study programme’s common language, and Koenig’s own Case Study House No. 21, the Bailey House of 1958, had already made the steel pavilion his. The turn here is to take that language to a site that seemed to forbid it, to hang the living room out over the drop, and to make the view, not the garden, the house’s other half. The stake was real: a lot that had been passed over, a small budget, and a cantilever to be made to work in steel by a young architect on a client’s wager. It is a strong move within a proven path, not a break with it, and the axis stands at 7.6 for that.
Antony Gormley · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
The inheritance: the colossal monument, from statues at harbour mouths to civic war memorials; the angel in public sculpture; and, in the artist’s own practice, the figure cast from his body. The departure: a colossus that commemorates no person or event, set by a road rather than in a square, built not in bronze or stone but in welded steel with its structure on the surface, and given wings that are flat engineered planes. The stake was real. Many locally opposed the commission before it was built, as a waste of public money and as an eyesore, and engineering for wind on an exposed hill was not routine. It risked becoming a ridiculed folly, and it won. Held below 8: the turn is in setting and fabrication more than in what a sculpture can be.
Fariborz Sahba · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Departure is measured from three inheritances. From the Bahá’í houses of worship before it, the turn is real: the ornamented concrete dome of Wilmette, and the domes of Kampala, Sydney and Frankfurt, gave way to a building with no dome at all, the nine-fold law fulfilled by petals. From Indian sacred building it turned away from the shikhara, the mandapa and the bounded precinct to an open, figurative modern shell. From modern architecture it joined the line of the thin concrete shell, of Candela, Nervi and Saarinen. The stake was considerable: an untried geometry at large scale, built in Delhi with largely manual means, for a small faith. But the decisive wager on that path had been placed at the Sydney Opera House, which the building answers, and a flower all could read is the safer bet.
David Hockney · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
The inheritance is double. Abstract Expressionism had made the splash of paint the sign of feeling and of the painter’s body; the hard-edge and colour-field painting of the 1960s had made the flat, unmodulated plane its opposite. The departure puts both in one figurative picture and reverses their values. The flat planes become a house, a sky, a pool; the gestural splash, emblem of spontaneity, is built slowly from small strokes, a likeness of a splash rather than a splash, a joke at the gesture’s expense and an act of patience at once; and this was done in representation when advanced painting had largely left it. The stake was moderate: the painter was young but known and selling, the motif was his own and tried in two pictures of 1966, and Pop had made the vernacular image safe. A turn with wit and authority, on a path he had opened.
Egon Schiele · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
The inheritance is Viennese: Klimt’s portrait, its figure embedded in gold and pattern; the psychological portraits of Kokoschka and the raw self-portraits of Richard Gerstl; behind them Van Gogh’s self-portraits, which Vienna had seen, and the Japanese print’s asymmetry and empty ground. The departure is real. Klimt’s ornament is stripped away and the figure left in a blank field, the contour sharpened into an angular, nervous line, the flesh given in unnatural, bruised colour, the figure tipped and cut off centre. The stake was real too, for a painter of twenty-one whose work was already being called obscene. But the larger turn was taken in 1910 and 1911, in the gaunt nude self-portraits on paper. By 1912 this panel consolidates the swerve in a measured cabinet format.
I. M. Pei · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
The inheritance: the classical museum of the West Building, a temple with a rotunda and enfilades; the neutral modern box; Wright’s Guggenheim; Kahn’s geometric monumentality and his galleries at Yale and the Kimbell; Pei’s own concrete museums at Syracuse and Ithaca and his diagonal experiments. The departure: a monumental public building on the Mall made wholly of its site’s geometry, a modern building in its classical neighbour’s stone, and a museum whose centre is a social court rather than a hall of art, in a Washington where modern federal building had mostly been dull. The stake was a difficult site, a national institution’s reputation and the risk that the triangle would make galleries unusable, which it partly did. What holds the axis: the turn refines late modernism rather than breaking from it.
Alejandro González Iñárritu · Film
7.8 · Tier III
The departure is in the making of a studio epic. A large picture with a star in nearly every frame was shot on location in deep cold, in natural light at the edges of the day, at length, with a wide lens held inches from the actor’s face, close enough for his breath to fog the glass. That was a costly wager, and the stake is credited. The idiom it staked on was proved: Lubezki’s light in Terrence Malick’s The New World and The Tree of Life, his floating continuous camera in Children of Men and Gravity, the sustained takes of Iñárritu’s own Birdman. The story is the frontier tale of endurance and revenge, told of Glass before in Man in the Wilderness (1971). The turn is in the degree of immersion more than in kind.
Muqi · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
The inheritance: Southern Song academy and Chan painting, the abbreviated brush of Liang Kai and the Chan monk painters, and a long Chinese tradition of fruit and flower painting, usually coloured and finely made, often with a branch or a setting. The departure: a still life reduced to ink tone alone, without branch, ground, shadow or colour, the fruits set on nothing and the whole argument carried by gradation and interval. That is a real turn, radical in its plainness. The stake is harder to weigh. Plain Chan subjects in ink already existed, and the manner was proper to a monk painter outside the academy; Chinese critics after him disparaged it, which shows the cost of the manner more than of this sheet.
Chuck Palahniuk · Literature
7.7 · Tier III
The inheritance is plain: the minimalism of Amy Hempel; the transgressive novel of the decade, Bret Easton Ellis above all; the underground man and the double of the nineteenth century; the confessional voice of the self-help group. The turn is in the joining. A minimalist, deadpan, list-driven prose is used for a satirical thriller with a twist, so that the twist is carried by the style’s own blankness, and the factual riff and the refrain become the means of a plot rather than of a mood. The stake was real for a first novel by an unknown mechanic and technical writer, on a subject, men who beat one another for meaning and terror against financial buildings, unappealing to the publishers of its time. Held well below the top because each component was available, the transgressive novel was already a market, and the twist is a genre device.
Damien Hirst · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
Two inheritances: the monochrome and the Minimalist painting as a pure surface, and the vanitas still life with its insects and its reminders. The departure is to put a living organism on the painting and let the painting be its birthplace and habitat, to fix the dead of the same kind in the paint of a second set, and to run the show as a life cycle in real time. That is a real turn on the monochrome. It is not a new turn on art with living things: Kounellis put horses in a gallery in 1969, Haacke made living systems in the late 1960s, Beuys lived with a coyote in 1974, and Hirst’s own A Thousand Years of 1990 had already run a life cycle in a vitrine with greater force. Risked, and partly paid.
The Beatles · Music
7.7 · Tier III
The inheritance is American: the Brill Building songwriters, Motown, the Everly Brothers’ harmony, Buddy Holly’s group that wrote its own songs, and the band’s own first two albums, half of them covers. The turn is an album by a performing group written entirely by itself, with a harmonic vocabulary wider than the beat group’s, and a new sound in Harrison’s twelve-string guitar. That is a real departure in form. What holds the figure is the stake: the record was made at the height of the band’s commercial power, as the songs of a film designed to extend it, and its sound develops the band’s established manner rather than turning from it.
Robert Altman · Film
7.7 · Tier III
The inheritance is the Hollywood film about Hollywood, from Sunset Boulevard (1950) through The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) to The Last Tycoon (1976), and Altman’s own practice of taking a genre apart from inside, The Long Goodbye (1973) above all, with the overlapping sound and roving camera he had used since M*A*S*H (1970). The turns are real: a thriller whose machinery is bought and sold inside its own story, so that its happy ending is at once delivered and indicted; stars by the dozen as themselves, the industry made its own chorus; an opening shot that discusses the opening shots it quotes. The stake was real, a return to the studio world after a decade of small and theatrical projects, on a modest budget. What holds it: reflexive genre play was in the air of its decade, and the film delivers the pleasures it mocks.
Sidney Lumet · Film
7.7 · Tier III
The inheritance is the heist film, whose pleasure is the plan and the score, and the New York realist crime film in which Lumet had already worked, Serpico (1973) above all, with the same star and producer. The turns are real. The robbery fails in its first minutes and the film is about what follows; it keeps the facts and the outcome of an event three years old; it puts at the centre of a studio picture a motive, money for a lover’s sex-reassignment surgery, and a leading star of the day playing a married bisexual man without caricature; and no score tells the audience how to feel. What holds it well below the bar: the method was Lumet’s proven path, the New Hollywood had made the sympathetic outlaw its own, and the construction is classical.
Jasper Johns · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
The inheritance is double: New York painting’s large field and worked surface, from which Johns had already turned in the flags and targets a decade before; and Duchamp, the readymade and the canvas that records its objects as shadows. The departure here is in degree and in gathering: a painting enlarged into a field where each mode of standing for a thing is set beside the others, real objects and the body admitted beside the painted word, and the conversation with Duchamp made overt. The stake was low. In 1964 the painter was established, the readymade had been taken up again, Rauschenberg’s combines had already joined object and canvas, and the devices were his own and proved. A wager placed on a proven path is not a swerve; this widens one, with authority.
Yorgos Lanthimos · Film
7.7 · Tier III
The departure is real and partly inherited from the director’s own work. Lanthimos had made the flat, recited delivery and the closed family as a system his signature in Dogtooth (2009), and carried them into English with The Lobster (2015). Here he wagers the manner on a genre it had not yet met: a domestic horror film with stars of the size of Farrell and Kidman, set in an American city, where the deadpan must carry terror and not only satire. The stake is that the audience is denied the genre’s releases, no explanation of Martin’s power, no investigation, no rescue, no catharsis in the killing, and the film holds that denial. The turn from the horror film is wide; the turn from the director’s own path is narrow, and the Kubrickian corridors are a borrowed grammar, openly so.
Soundgarden · Music
7.7 · Tier III
The inheritance is heavy metal from Black Sabbath, hard rock from Led Zeppelin and American punk, which the band had already joined on two records. The departures: riffs set in odd and uneven metres and carried as songs, not as display; deeper tunings used for weight in an alternative frame; a modal, droning lead guitar that refuses the metal solo’s virtuosic arc; horns and saxophone on a heavy record. The stake was moderate. The band had a major-label contract and a sound already proved on Louder Than Love (1989), and this record is that sound sharpened and darkened, not a wager against it.
Anish Kapoor · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
The inheritance is double. Chicago’s civic sculpture, the Picasso of 1967, Calder’s Flamingo, Miró and Dubuffet, is the monument as a signed modern image in a plaza; Kapoor’s own work since the 1990s already had the concave and convex mirror, the void, and the sky brought down in Sky Mirror. The departure is to make the monument have no image of its own at all: its face is the city and the people looking at it, and its form is defined by the absence of joints. The stake was real and partly paid: an object fabricated without seams at a scale not achieved before, a two-year delay, a work shown unfinished at the park’s opening. Held below the eights because the idiom was the artist’s and proved: a large wager on a known device, with engineering the main risk.
Tame Impala · Music
7.7 · Tier III
The inheritance is late 1960s psychedelic pop, the Beatles of 1966 and 1967 heard most strongly, the voice especially; Todd Rundgren’s one-man studio records; and the Flaming Lips line that Fridmann carried into the 2000s. The swerve from the band’s first album is real: synthesisers replace guitars as the lead voice, heavy psychedelic rock becomes pop melody, and the mix is pushed to saturation so that the old sound is heard through a modern loudness. The stake was some: a band admired for guitar psychedelia changed its instruments on its second record. What holds it below the bar is that the wager was placed on a proven path: a revived idiom, a long line of one-man auteurs, and a fusion already in Fridmann’s own catalogue.
Olafur Eliasson · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
The inheritance is the perceptual art of the 1960s and after: Light and Space in California, Turrell and Irwin; the phenomenology of Minimal sculpture; the horizon of Land art; and Eliasson’s own earlier work with mist, light and artificial nature through the 1990s. The departure is in scale and address. It took the perceptual chamber, made for one viewer at a time in silence, and made it a public square for thousands, and it exposed its mechanism where the Light and Space rooms hid theirs. The stake was real: a very large commission in a hall that had defeated sculpture by its size, with the risk of a theme-park effect. But the means were proven, and the turn is of degree and social register more than of kind.
Louisa May Alcott · Literature
7.7 · Tier III
The inheritance is the moral domestic tale and the Sunday-school story: Bunyan as the frame, the American domestic novel, and Dickens as a household presence, in the sisters’ Pickwick Club. The departure is real, and it was noticed: girls who quarrel, use slang and want things; a heroine who whistles, burns her dress at a party and refuses the handsome rich neighbour whom every reader wanted her to marry, and marries instead a poor, older, foreign professor, a turn made against the book’s own readers. The cost was bounded. The form is the proven episodic family chronicle, the moral frame is kept, the publisher asked for exactly this book, and Jo’s departure is at last domesticated. A swerve within the genre, with a stake taken on one ending.
Steven Spielberg · Film
7.7 · Tier III
The inheritance is the science fiction film of the 1950s, in which the visitor from the sky is invasion, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers and The War of the Worlds, with The Day the Earth Stood Still the rare benign exception; and 2001: A Space Odyssey, the precedent for effects in the service of awe. The departure is real: a large studio picture that makes contact a communion, refuses combat, makes its climax a piece of music, and gives the central role in the science to a French film director speaking French through an interpreter. What holds it at 7.6 is how much of the turn rests on proven paths: Trumbull’s grammar of effects came from 2001, the benign visitor had precedent, and Spielberg, coming off the largest success of his time, placed the wager on his own strength.
Alphonse Mucha · Visual art
7.6 · Tier III
The inheritance is the Paris illustrated poster: Chéret’s bright primaries, swirling figures and broad formats; Lautrec’s flat silhouette from Japanese prints, his caricature and his night world; Grasset’s medieval outline and tall format, already used for Bernhardt. Against Chéret the turn is large: a still figure for a moving one, muted gold for primaries, a sacred register for a festive one, a life-size column for a broad sheet. Against Grasset it is smaller. The stake was real: a little-known illustrator making the poster of the most famous actress in Paris in a manner close to an icon. What the swerve invented, a repeatable style of contour, halo and ornament, is also its limit: it became a manner.
Robert Eggers · Film
7.6 · Tier III
The inheritance is the epic of swords and vengeance, from the Viking films of the 1950s to Gladiator and Braveheart, and on the other side Eggers’s own art-horror in The Witch and The Lighthouse. The turn is to put a studio-scale action film wholly into the worldview of its period: no modern psychology for the hero, ritual and magic without irony, archaic dialogue, raids shown as atrocities committed by the protagonist. The stake was real: a large budget given to the director of two small films, for a story that refuses a sympathetic hero. But the departure stays within the genre’s spine, a novelty of texture and fidelity more than of form.
Federico Fellini · Film
7.6 · Tier III
The inheritance is neorealism, which Fellini had written for Rossellini, and the Italian comedy of manners. The film turns neorealist means, real streets and an episodic, plotless shape, from poverty to the idle provincial middle class, and from a social subject to an existential one: no hunger and no war, only men waiting for what will not come. It makes a group its protagonist and gives the group a voice, and it mixes farce and melancholy without settling which governs. The stake was real, since The White Sheik had failed. Held well below the bar because the swerve is of subject and tone more than of form: the grammar of the film is classical, the episodic picture had precedents, and the sharper break from neorealism came with La strada the next year.
Indus Valley (Mohenjo-daro) · Visual art
7.6 · Tier III
The inheritance, so far as it can be known, is the Indus figurine tradition: terracotta figures, frontal and symmetrical, built up by pinching and appliqué, heavy with ornament, stiff in the limbs. The departure is large in kind: a free-standing figure in cast metal, asymmetrical, the weight shifted onto one leg, the limbs drawn out beyond nature, the arm opened away from the torso so that air passes through the figure. Relaxed asymmetry in a standing figure is a turn most traditions reached late. The stake was real in material and labour, since metal was costly and casting at this scale difficult. Nothing is known of the maker or the reception, and the tradition it is measured against is known only in part.
Alex Garland · Film
7.5 · Tier III
The inheritance is the war film of foreign theatres, Vietnam, Iraq and the Balkans, with the journalism film, Under Fire, The Killing Fields, Salvador, and the American dystopia. The turn sets the forms of foreign war, as press photographers saw them, on American soil, makes journalists rather than soldiers or politicians the protagonists, and refuses the audience its sides: Texas and California allied, the causes unspoken. The stake was real. It was A24’s largest production to that date, released wide in an election year, on a premise that invited a partisan reading the film declined to supply, at the risk of the charge of evasion, which came. The swerve in form is smaller: the stills, the songs and the road each have precedents.
Renzo Piano · Architecture
7.5 · Tier III
The inheritance: the American and Asian supertall office tower, a shaft or a stepped prism; London’s tall buildings of the period, gathered in the City cluster east of St Paul’s and given distinct figures after the Gherkin of 2004; the protected views and the low south bank of Southwark; and Piano’s own work, which had built towers before but none of this height. The departure: a mixed-use tower stacked in a tapering pyramid, faceted and left open at the corners and the tip, set alone outside the cluster on a railway site. The stake was real: a public inquiry, opposition from English Heritage and others over the setting of the Tower of London, and a project that nearly failed in the crisis of 2008. Held lower because the tapering mixed-use supertall was not new in the world: the swerve is in London’s skyline more than in the art of the tall building.
Moshe Safdie · Architecture
7.3 · Tier III
The inheritance: the hotel slab and the casino resort of Las Vegas; the tower city of Hong Kong and Kuala Lumpur; the bridge between the Petronas Towers; Hiroshi Hara’s Umeda Sky Building in Osaka (1993), two towers joined at the top by a floating platform; and Safdie’s own line from Habitat 67, gardens on roofs and the stacked city. The departure: three slabs on leaning legs joined at the crown by a continuous public plane of trees and water, cantilevered far past its last support, so that the roof becomes the building’s chief space and its signature. The stake was real in engineering and in money, but carried by a developer and a state who could afford to lose it. The linked crown had precedent, and the spectacle resort was the proven path of its decade.
Deafheaven · Music
7.3 · Tier III
The inheritance is the band’s own: a language that joined black metal’s tremolo picking, blast beats and screamed voice to the major-key swell of shoegaze and post-rock, and on which its following depended. The turn is large within the band. Blast beats, tremolo picking and the scream are cut away for eight tracks, and what is left is shoegaze and dream pop with a post-rock sense of build. The stake was real and openly taken: the audience that came for Sunbather was asked to follow a modest clean voice. What holds the figure is the path. Shoegaze was long proven, the clean turn had been prepared by Ordinary Corrupt Human Love, and Alcest’s Shelter had made the same move in 2014.
Roman · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The inheritance: Hellenistic megalographia, large figures painted on walls, known from texts and from other Campanian rooms of the time; the Dionysiac thiasos, long established as a decorative and religious subject in Greek and Italian art; and the Second Style’s painted architecture holding figures. The departure is real: a continuous programme at life size wrapping one room, figures that address one another across its corners, and mortals given the same scale and stage as the god. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the stake. This was a private commission in a rich villa, in an idiom the workshop shared with others, perhaps adapting a known model, though that is unproved; the composition across the corners and its fit to this room argue for adaptation at the least. A strong realisation of a current practice, not a wager against it.
The National · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is plain: the baritone gloom of Leonard Cohen, Nick Cave and the Tindersticks, the post-punk drive of Joy Division as it reached New York through Interpol’s generation, and the band’s own Alligator, a record of rising tension that broke into shouting. The turn is inward, against the loud, rising indie rock of its years: the shout withdrawn, the climaxes withheld, the guitars set back so the drums carry the songs. The stake was real. Alligator had found the band its first audience, and the follow-up was quieter and slower where a louder record was the obvious move. What holds it below the bar is the ground it turned on: the register had been cleared by Cohen and the Tindersticks, and no convention is broken.
Maqsud Kashani (named in the inscription) · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the court medallion carpet, a system of central medallion, pendants and quartered corners in which court designers drew the cartoons and weavers carried them out. The Ardabil carpet is a culmination of that system, not a departure from it. Its departure lies in two things: the hanging lamps, which put a sacred interior into the design, and the scale and the density together. The stake was low. This was a commission inside a proven court practice, and the wager of the making was labour and expense, not risk. That a device so distinctive, carried by a culmination rather than a turn, and staked on nothing but cost, earns no more is what holds this axis lowest of the eleven.
Nick Ut · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the war photography of the century: Capa’s Spain and Normandy, the Korean War, and in Vietnam itself Larry Burrows, Horst Faas and Eddie Adams’s photograph of a street execution in Saigon in February 1968, which had already put one shocking instant on every front page. This picture swerves on one point: it puts the war’s victim, a child, frontal and naked, at the centre, where the earlier icons put soldiers, combatants or an execution. The stake was real and editorial: the agency’s rule against frontal nudity, and the risk of refusal. But the form inherits everything: the 35 mm frame, the decisive instant, the figure running at the lens. The departure belongs to the decision to publish as much as to the picture, and holds this axis, after The Encompassed, lowest of the twelve.
Hadhrami builders · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The departure is real in degree and hard to locate in kind. The mud tower house belongs to a southern Arabian tradition across the Hadramawt and highland Yemen, and Shibam did not invent it. What Shibam did was push it to a density and a height, and a unity within one wall, that no neighbouring town reaches: a whole city of towers packed shoulder to shoulder, the logic of the single keep made the logic of a town. The cost was paid in fabric and upkeep, since mud towers at that height demand endless renewal and fail in floods and rains. What holds the axis lowest: the turn was made by many hands over generations, under the pressure of the site, not risked by a maker against a known path, and the turn and the stake are scored together.
The Velvet Underground · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is twofold: the band’s own first three records, which placed the great wager on drone, noise and the city’s underside, and the American pop song of radio, doo-wop and girl-group. The record turns from the first toward the second, and inside the band’s history the turn is large: a group known for viola drone and seventeen-minute feedback made a record of three-minute songs meant for the radio, on a new label, by report at the label’s request for hits. The writing makes it more than an accent: an avant-garde band’s eye turned on the radio song from inside. What holds the axis is the direction of the turn, back toward a proven path, with the risk falling on the band’s identity and not on the form.
Ustad Ahmad Lahori (attributed), under Shah Jahan · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Mughal fort-palace: Akbar’s forts at Agra and Lahore, Fatehpur Sikri, and Shah Jahan’s own remaking of Agra and Lahore in the 1630s. The departure is real but measured: a fort and a city laid out together on a regular plan as one new capital; the pavilions set in one continuous river terrace bound by one channel; the full Shahjahani idiom of baluster column, cusped arch, bangla roof and inlaid marble applied as one system from the start, not inserted into older fabric; the European pietra dura and Orpheus taken into the throne wall. The stake was a dynasty’s move of its seat. What holds the axis lowest on the page is that the forms were proved at Agra and Lahore in the decade before: the fort perfects rather than turns, a swerve of planning more than of form.
Gu Kaizhi (attributed) · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the illustration of exemplary women, known from the Lienü zhuan tradition, from tomb painting, and from such objects as the lacquered screen from the tomb of Sima Jinlong, where similar subjects are set out in registers with labels. The departure is in what the figure does: these figures turn, hesitate, step forward and refuse; they stand in a room or before a bed with some depth, and the line gives them weight and motion where the tradition gave them place. The alternation of text and scene along one scroll, read in sequence, is itself an achievement of the form. The stake cannot be stated: maker, date and commission are unknown, and the painting of the period is so largely lost that the measure of the departure rests on what happens to survive.
Pablo Picasso · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance: Spanish devotional painting, El Greco above all, whom the young painters of Barcelona had just rediscovered; Symbolist melancholy; the painters of the poor, Steinlen in Paris and Nonell in Barcelona; the mood of Catalan modernisme. The departure: a near-monochrome made the emotional key of a whole picture, anatomy bent by feeling rather than by observation, the figure pressed by its frame. The monochrome is the most consistent such campaign in painting to that date. The stake was real: these pictures did not sell, and the painter was poor. But the swerve is partial. The modelling, the single centred figure and the story of the pitiable outcast are inherited whole, and the break of 1907 shows how much of this was still a proven road.
Paula Rego · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The inheritance is double: Rego’s own work to the mid 1980s, cut-out and collaged, crowded and cartoon-fed, and the large figurative painting of the London scene around her. The turn of 1986 to 1988 to monumental, solidly modelled figures in a lucid, almost academic space was a real departure for her, taken late, past fifty, against the grain of her established manner, and The Dance is among its fullest statements. It cost her the energy and the protection of collage for a plainer figuration that could look illustrative or old-fashioned. But the wider field had already returned to the figure, and the dance of life is a proven path. The departure is real in her work and moderate in the field.
Arnold Böcklin · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The inheritance is the Romantic landscape of mood, above all Friedrich’s funerary landscapes with their boats, shores and figures from behind; the classical landscape of Claude and Poussin with its tombs in Arcadia; and Böcklin’s own idealised Italianate landscapes of the 1860s and 1870s, peopled with mythological figures. The departure is the landscape stripped of story and of mythological cast, reduced to a few masses and one unexplained event, offered as a state of mind, its subject left unnamed: a real step toward Symbolism and the metaphysical painting that followed. The stake was modest. It was made for a private buyer, repeated at buyers’ request, and its means were conservative. The turn is in what the picture is for, not in how it is made.
Akira Kurosawa · Film
7.8 · Tier III
The inheritance is the American police procedural, Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct, and the Japanese crime film of the late 1950s, with Kurosawa’s own Stray Dog (1949) as his proven path in the form and The Bad Sleep Well (1960) as his corporate drama. The turns are real: a crime film split in two, the first part a chamber play of conscience in the wide frame, the second a procedural in which the protagonist recedes; the hero’s moral problem resolved before the investigation begins; a single colour in black and white, used as evidence; an ending that gives the criminal the last word. What holds the axis far below the bar is the form and the stake together. The split rebalances the procedural rather than remaking it, colour inserts in black and white films had precedents, the source was a popular genre novel, and Kurosawa made it at his commercial height, after Yojimbo (1961) and Sanjuro (1962): a wager placed on a proven path.
Ingmar Bergman · Film
7.8 · Tier III
The inheritance is Bergman’s own: the chamber films of the 1960s, Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, The Silence and Persona, with faces in close-up and few people in a closed place, and behind them Strindberg’s chamber plays, which Bergman staged. Two turns are real. Colour, which he had used before, becomes the structure: red walls, carpets and hangings, and fades to red between sequences. And the dead speak in a period chamber drama otherwise played as realism, with a woman’s self-wounding shown inside manor-house decorum. But the grammar, faces and silence and women in extremity, was by 1972 the maker’s proven path, and the film keeps it whole. A turn of palette and a return of the dead, made on ground already won, risked little in art; that is what holds the axis here.
Sumerian · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
The inheritance, so far as it survives, is the register procession of the art of Uruk: the Warka Vase, where offerings and animals rise in bands toward a goddess, the friezes of figures and beasts on cylinder seals, the inlaid friezes and plaques of the Early Dynastic period. The departure is real. The bands are turned from cult toward the state, the procession is given two subjects set against each other, and war is told as a sequence, charge, combat, capture and presentation, rather than shown as an emblem, the chariots’ gait changing across one strip. The stake cannot be known, and much of the tradition it departs from is lost, so some of what reads as swerve may be survival’s accident.
Lucian Freud · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
The inheritance: the reclining nude of the European tradition; Courbet’s insistence on the body as matter; the figurative painting of the School of London, held against abstraction and then against conceptual art; and the painter’s own turn, from the 1960s, from fine sable to hog-hair brushes and loaded paint. The departure here is the choice of body and the scale at which it is held: a very large woman, at life size, asleep, with no ennobling and no satire. The stake was real in the 1990s, when the London art world’s attention was on the installation and the shock object, and a monumental painted nude looked out of its time. But the turn had been made before this canvas, in the Bowery nudes of 1990 to 1992 and decades of studio nudes, and this is the fullest statement of a proven path more than a new wager.
Andrew Haigh · Film
7.8 · Tier III
The inheritance is double: Yamada’s novel of 1987 and its film of 1988, a ghost story in which a divorced screenwriter meets his dead parents and a woman in his building who is a ghost; and the British and American queer chamber drama of the 2010s, to which Haigh’s own earlier work belongs. The turn makes the lover a man and the ghost story a reckoning with the 1980s, with the fear of AIDS and with coming out to parents who never had the chance to hear it; and it removes the source’s horror of the dead draining the son’s life, keeping the parents benign. That is a real reorientation of the source. The stake was modest: a studio-backed art film with two known actors, in a form, the dead returned for one conversation, long worked. A swerve of subject and feeling more than of form.
Marina Abramović · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
The inheritance is her own above all. With Ulay she had sat in silence across a table, motionless, for whole days in Nightsea Crossing, from 1981 to 1987, and her endurance works of the 1970s had set the body’s limit as the material. The turn in 2010 is in three things: alone, for the whole run of a museum’s exhibition, and open to any member of the public as the other half. The last is the real departure, making the audience the second performer. The stake was real in body, months of sitting without rising through the opening hours, and in standing, since the museum could turn performance into a celebrity attraction, as many critics said it did. But the form was proved by her own earlier work: a wager on her own path, enlarged.
The Walkmen · Music
7.7 · Tier III
The inheritance is the band’s own: the clattering, organ-heavy New York rock of its early records, and the turn toward space, older rock and roll and the voice as the central instrument already made on You & Me two years before. Lisbon carries that turn further and holds it without a lapse: an echo-laden guitar recalling the late 1950s and early 1960s, brass, and a dryer, sparer room, so that the new manner becomes the band’s whole sound rather than one colour among several. That commitment is the record’s own. What holds the axis is the stake. The vintage sound was the band’s already and in wide use in American independent rock of the period, and the audience had been won by the album before. A refinement carried through, not a departure.
Lal Chand Ustad · Architecture
7.6 · Tier III
The inheritance is the Rajput and Mughal palace of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: its jharokhas, jali screens, curved bangla roofs and chhatris, and the zenana with its screened galleries at Amber, at Fatehpur Sikri and in the forts of Rajasthan. Every element of the Hawa Mahal is inherited. The departure is in proportion and role. The screen, which had been one part of a palace wall, becomes a whole building, five storeys of bays with almost nothing behind them, and the zenana’s private apparatus becomes the city’s public front. That is a real turn. The stake was modest: the forms were proven, the craftsmen trained in them, the cost within a court’s reach. A tradition, unconfirmed, names a model in the Khetri Mahal at Jhunjhunu; if it holds, the turn is one of scale and setting more than of kind. A swerve of emphasis, carried far, without great risk.
The Smiths · Music
7.6 · Tier III
The inheritance is the band’s own debut of 1984 and the guitar pop of the British independent labels, and the turn is real and moderate. The record is harder and wider in sound than the debut, and it brings genres the band had not used: the rockabilly of “Rusholme Ruffians” and “Nowhere Fast”, the funk of “Barbarism Begins at Home”, the musique concrète of the slaughterhouse. The larger swerve is of address: an independent band at the height of its first fame makes a second record framed as a polemic, under a title that is an accusation. The stake was real, a title that turned away part of the audience, and it was paid. Held below the bar because the band’s manner is carried over whole, and the departures in genre are borrowings, not inventions.
Damien Hirst · Visual art
7.5 · Tier III
The inheritance is plain: Duchamp’s readymade; the shelves and display of Minimalism and its commercial heirs, Koons’s appliances in vitrines and Steinbach’s shelves; and the shop as artwork, from Oldenburg’s The Store to Kienholz’s walk-in tableaux. Hirst’s own medicine cabinets of 1988 to 1989 had already put pharmaceutical display in the gallery. The turn is to enlarge the cabinet into a room, so that the viewer stands inside the system of belief, and to add a living and dying element to an aesthetic of sterile order. That is a real step, and the joining of Minimal order to a vanitas mechanism is Hirst’s own. The stake was moderate: a young artist already backed after Freeze, working in a format his own earlier pieces had proved. The departure is from a near path, not from the tradition’s centre.
Damien Hirst · Visual art
7.5 · Tier III
The inheritance is wide and old: the memento mori and the vanitas, the jewelled reliquary, the Mesoamerican mosaic skull; in its own decade the fabricated luxury object of Jeff Koons; and Hirst’s own earlier death in vitrines and cabinets. The departure is to make the cost of the materials, and the price, the content of a sculpture, at a scale no artist had staked: real platinum and real stones, the price announced with the work. The stake was real and partly paid: the money was at risk, the sale was doubted from the day it was announced, and much of the reception was derision. Held at 7.5 because the form is the reliquary’s, precious stuff around bone, a pattern seven centuries old; the turn is in context and economics, not in the object.
Jeff Koons · Visual art
7.5 · Tier III
The inheritance: Pop, above all Oldenburg’s monumental everyday objects and Warhol’s commodity as subject; the readymade line from Duchamp; and Koons’s own Rabbit of 1986, which had already cast an inflatable toy in mirrored stainless steel. The departure is in scale, colour and finish: the throwaway object brought to the size and permanence of a public monument, with a transparent coloured surface over polished steel that the fabrication of the time made very hard to achieve. The stake was real: years of making at the edge of what steel could be brought to do. Held at 7.5 because the turn itself was taken by Rabbit fourteen years earlier, and a wager on a proven path is partly an enlargement, not a swerve.
Dorothea Lange · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the social documentary photograph of Riis and Hine; the studio portrait trade in which Lange had worked for fifteen years; the mother and child of Western painting. The departure is small. The close, frontal, grave portrait of a poor sitter was Hine’s; the composition was centuries old; the government file of rural poverty was Stryker’s design; and Lange’s own turn from studio to street had come three years before, in White Angel Breadline (1933). This frame perfects a way of seeing rather than turning from one, and the stake was a commission, a file and a newspaper. What raises the axis at all is the frankness of bringing the studio portraitist’s intimacy and finish to a destitute sitter in a field. Being definitive is reach, scored under Pressure on Tradition; the turn itself holds this axis, with The Encompassed, lowest of the twelve.
Greek colonists of Poseidonia · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Measured against its tradition, the temple is a consummation, not a departure. The mature Doric peripteros of the mid fifth century, six columns by fourteen, is the standard of its moment, and the mainland had stated it a few years earlier. What departs is an accent: a deliberate archaism, heavier proportions and tighter spacing than the mainland had moved toward, perhaps a western choice; and a two-storey inner colonnade, not new, but here kept and handled with assurance. Beside the older “Basilica” on the same site, with its odd number of front columns and its swelling capitals, this temple is a return to orthodoxy. What holds the axis below 7.5 is the stake: the wager is placed on a proven path, an accent of severity at small risk.
Cormac McCarthy · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Western, the cowboy romance, the boys’ adventure across the border, and McCarthy’s own manner: the unpunctuated dialogue, the long sentence joined by “and”, the untranslated Spanish, all formed in his earlier books, which had taken from the Western its hero, its love and its redemption. This book turns back toward the proven path and restores all three: a hero with a code, a love story, a coming of age, a return. The stake was its author’s standing with the readers of his harder books, and the wager on accessibility paid at once, in prizes and in sales. The real departure is the use of that hard style for tenderness, and the Spanish left to stand so that the reader stands where the boy does. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve is that a wager placed on a proven path is not a swerve, and the genre’s forms are taken largely as found.
Tulunid, under Ahmad ibn Tulun · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance is plain. Ibn Tulun was raised in Samarra, and the mosque carries the Samarran congregational mosque to Egypt: brick piers, ziyadas, a spiral minaret, bevelled stucco. Against the Egyptian inheritance it departs, for the Mosque of Amr at Fustat stood on reused columns, and here are piers of brick and pointed arches in a systematic rhythm, a metropolitan idiom planted in a province. The stake was political: a governor building on the caliph’s model at the caliph’s scale asserted a sovereignty the caliph ended in 905. What holds it lowest is that as architecture it followed a proven path: arch, pier and spiral were all in hand, nothing in the structure risked failure, and the turn is of place more than of form.
Court of Benin · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the royal art of Benin: ivory and brass made under guild control for the Oba, with the mudfish, the coral regalia and the idealised royal face already established. The departure lies in two things. The subject: a woman’s face at the centre of a royal object, tied by tradition to a title newly made for her. And the Portuguese: foreigners entered into the crown of royal iconography within a generation of their arrival, a fresh fact absorbed without hesitation. The stake was low in this axis’s sense: a commission inside a guild system whose purpose was continuity, made by artists whose wager was fidelity to the court’s forms, not a turn against them. How much of the type this mask originated, against its London twin and lost predecessors, is not settled.
Ansel Adams · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance: the straight photography of Stieglitz, Strand and Weston, and Group f/64, which Adams co-founded in 1932, set against the soft-focus pictorialism before it; behind both, the Romantic landscape of the nineteenth century and the survey photography of the American West, O’Sullivan, Watkins and Jackson. The departure: the straight image taken into the openly interpretive print, the tonal scale controlled from exposure to print to state a feeling, the sky darkened far past what the eye saw. The stake was modest. The picture sits on a path Adams and his peers had proved, and its turn is one of degree within straight photography, not a break with it. With The Encompassed, this axis holds the work lowest.
Roman, under Caracalla · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
This is the lowest axis, and the reason is plain. The inheritance is the imperial thermae: the Baths of Titus and above all the Baths of Trajan, dedicated in 109, which had already set the symmetrical block on its axis inside a walled precinct with exedrae and libraries, and turned the caldarium to the sun. Caracalla’s builders took that type and perfected it: tighter symmetry, a block standing free of the precinct wall, a circular caldarium of great span, a platform with every service beneath it, all at unprecedented scale and in about five years for the block. The stake was real, vaults and a dome of this span over a heated, wet building, but it was placed on a proven path. A proven type made larger and cleaner is not a swerve.
The Cure · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the band’s own language, chosen whole: the long instrumental opening, the slow tempo, the six-string bass, the massed keyboards and guitars, the late-entering voice, the mode laid down by its records of 1982 and 1989 and returned to in 2000. The turn is in the subject. The band had sung the romance of death; here it sings the deaths of actual persons, in the voice of a man in his sixties, at full scale. The low end is heavier and darker than in the band’s earlier records in the mode, and Drone:Nodrone and Warsong push toward a harsher, noisier rock. The stake was sixteen years of expectation. What holds it below 7.5 is that the wager was placed on the most proven path the band had, and a late return to strength in a known manner turns less than it risks.
Built for Vimal Shah and Vastupala and Tejapala · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Maru-Gurjara temple of Gujarat and Rajasthan, with its sanctum, halls, corbelled domes and carved ceilings, already mature in the same decades in a sun temple of Gujarat and in marble Jain temples of the region. The departures are the whole interior carried into white marble at this density, the carving pressed to the point where stone is cut as lace, and the dome refined from structure to pendant. They are departures in degree, not in kind. The plan is the type’s and the structure is the type’s; nothing in the section risks failure or breaks a convention. The stake was cost and labour, which the donors could bear, not an untried form. The later temples swerve less. A culmination, not a turn: this is the lowest of the twelve.
Tokugawa builders · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance was the shoin reception palace of the sixteenth century in its Momoyama form, in the castles and palaces of Nobunaga and Hideyoshi at Azuchi, Osaka, Fushimi and Jurakudai, almost all lost; and the Kanō manner of Eitoku, large figures on gold. The departures are of degree and within the line: the formal shoin at its largest surviving scale and in its most systematic gradation of rank; in painting, Tan’yū’s turn of 1626 from Eitoku’s crowding force toward space and restraint. The stake was the regime’s, a display before the emperor that could not fail, laid on a proven path. That holds the axis lowest with The Encompassed: a synthesis, not a turn.
Hans Holbein the Younger · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is wide and plain: the Netherlandish half-length portrait of Van Eyck, Massys and the masters of Bruges and Antwerp; the Italianate gravity Holbein had absorbed by 1527; Dürer’s portraits of humanists and Holbein’s own Basel portraits, of Erasmus above all; and in England a thin native practice. The curtain, the half length behind a ledge and the attribute in the hand are all inherited. The departure is in degree and in place: a living English statesman given a physical presence and an exactness of surface that English painting had not seen. The stake was real but modest, a foreign painter’s first major English commission. The swerve sharpens a known path and carries it to a new field.
David Mackenzie · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the western and the heist film, and more narrowly the contemporary western of the Coens’ No Country for Old Men, with its laconic old lawman, empty Texas and dry humour. The turn is real: the genre is set in the economy after 2008, the outlaws rob a bank to save a ranch from that bank, and the film will not make the crime simple greed or simple justice. Giving the Comanche dispossession as the frame of the present is a real step. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the stake and the form: a mid-budget film with stars, in a proven genre and in the register of its writer’s Sicario (2015), whose storytelling never leaves the classical grammar. A swerve of subject and setting more than of form.
Billie Holiday · Music
7.9 · Tier III
The inheritance is twofold: Holiday’s own small-group records for Verve in the 1950s, with players such as Ben Webster and Harry Edison, and the orchestral ballad album of the decade, Sinatra’s with Nelson Riddle above all. The turn is from the combo to strings and chorus, chosen by Holiday herself, with an arranger from the easy-listening side of the business. The stake was real: a voice at its end placed inside the most polished setting on offer, where every flaw would show. What holds the axis lowest of the eleven is the path. Holiday’s own Decca sides with strings in the 1940s, Charlie Parker with Strings and Sinatra had proven it, and the decisive novelty, the state of the voice, was circumstance more than wager.
A. M. Cassandre · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The turn is real in the field of the advertising poster: no picture of the ship at sea, no deck scene, no passengers, no luxury, only the hull as an abstract wedge, seen from an angle drawn from the photography and the cinema of the period and from the geometry of the avant-garde. But the stake was largely placed earlier. The maker had made the liner a monumental hull four years before in L’Atlantique, and had made the poster a field of geometric planes, graded tone and integrated lettering across the 1920s; by 1935 he was the leading poster designer in France, and this was a commission from a client who had chosen him. The low frontal view of a ship had currency in the photography of the decade. This is the fullest statement of a manner, not its departure.
Ancestral Puebloan builders · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The inheritance is the Pueblo village of masonry room blocks and kivas, on the mesa tops of the region for centuries, and before it the planned great houses of Chaco. The departure is the move of a whole community into the cliff, with daily costs: water carried up from seeps and springs, fields on the mesa above reached by hand-and-toe trails, building on a sloping and cramped floor. The stake was large, and it is credited. But the turn was regional and collective, made in the same decades at hundreds of alcoves across the Mesa Verde country and in the Kayenta region to the west. This village is its largest instance, not its author, and against Chaco it is in some respects a retreat.
Duke Ellington · Music
7.8 · Tier III
The record departs little from what it inherited. Its material is a piece of 1937, a feature for Johnny Hodges and a festival suite in the band’s established manner. Live jazz records were already established on the long-playing record: Benny Goodman’s Carnegie Hall concert of 1938, issued in 1950, Norman Granz’s Jazz at the Philharmonic, the Massey Hall concert of 1953. What was staked was the night: a band with its standing in doubt closing a festival at a late hour with a long open interval in an unrehearsed shape, and then the decision to issue the night as an album built round it. The wager was made on stage; the studio took the safe course and repaired the record.
David Lynch · Film
7.8 · Tier III
The inheritance is the prestige period biography and the medical melodrama, with Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932) behind the fairground. The departures are real, and they lie in the texture: black and white in a wide frame for a studio release in 1980; a soundscape of steam, hissing machinery and industrial drone carried over from Eraserhead (1977) into a Victorian drama; a dream prologue and epilogue around a linear film; the face withheld through the first part. The stake was a midnight-film director with one feature handed a costly period picture and a British cast of the first rank. What holds the axis down is the path beneath the texture: the narrative form is classical and the moral arc the most conventional in Lynch’s work. The swerve is laid over a proven road.
Arcade Fire · Music
7.8 · Tier III
The inheritance is the band’s own first record, Funeral (2004), and behind it heartland rock and the gothic of the pipe organ. The turn is from the private grief of a first record to public dread, and from a homemade sound to a larger, darker, more produced one: the church as studio, the organ as an instrument of the band, the voice addressing the nation rather than the neighbourhood. The stake was real: a second record after a debut hailed as a landmark, and a political one at a time when indie rock seldom risked statement. What holds it is the path. Keep the Car Running owes Springsteen openly, the gothic organ belongs to older rock, and the crescendo method is the band’s own, carried over and enlarged. The departure is in scale and subject more than in language.
Interpol · Music
7.8 · Tier III
The record departs from two inheritances. From the British post-punk the band was charged with copying, Joy Division, the Chameleons, the Comsat Angels, Echo and the Bunnymen, it turns toward clarity, tempo and the single: the bass leads, the songs are shorter, the mix is brighter. From its own first record it turns away from the long, smeared nocturnes toward hooks. That second turn is the stake. A band heard as imitators risked the manner that had made its name, and the dark pop single that resulted is its own accent. What holds it is that a second record which tightens and brightens a first is a known path, and the turn brings no new form and no new sound: the same parts are set in sharper focus.
Radiohead · Music
7.8 · Tier III
The inheritance is the band’s own: twenty years of guitar records turned electronic, the hushed string-led songs made before, How to Disappear Completely on Kid A the nearest ancestor, and Jonny Greenwood’s concert and film scoring, which by 2016 had its own public. The turn is the integration. The orchestra comes from the margins of the band’s sound to its centre, choir and strings written as part of the songs, the electronics kept low; and the alphabetical sequence is a small refusal of design. The stake was low: a band at settled height made a record in a manner its listeners already knew, more refined than new, in a decade whose departures were elsewhere.
Francesco Bartolomeo Rastrelli · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
The inheritance: the European royal palace on a court plan; the Roman and Central European late Baroque Rastrelli learned; and his own Russian work, the Catherine Palace at Tsarskoye Selo of 1752 to 1756, the Grand Palace at Peterhof, the Smolny convent and the Stroganov Palace. The departure: Baroque massing carried to a length no Russian building had, under one unbroken order; Russian polychromy and the gilded church cupola brought into a court palace of Western type; four fronts set to their sites. The stake was real: an empress’s treasury in the Seven Years’ War, begun in 1756, and a building that raced her life and lost. Held below the gate because the turn was made at Tsarskoye Selo, and this is the same wager placed larger.
Paul Klee · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
The inheritance is the angel of Christian art from the Annunciation to the Baroque putto; German Expressionism, beside which Klee had stood with the Blaue Reiter; and the avant-garde turn toward child art, the art of the insane and the “primitive”. The departure is a sacred figure rebuilt from the means of a child’s drawing and the accident of a reproductive process, so that the hand stands at one remove from its own line. That is a real swerve. What holds it is that by 1920 the idiom was Klee’s settled one, the transfer method a year or so old in his practice and used across many sheets; the stake had been laid earlier, in the drawings of the war years and the Tunisian watercolours of 1914.
Tang, under Emperor Gaozong · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
The turn that stands is a consolidation. The first pagoda of 652 is lost, and nothing is credited to it. The tower of 704 takes the native road: the storeyed pavilion tower of Chinese timber building, translated into brick. That translation was not new in the early eighth century. Brick pagodas had stood for nearly two centuries, the Songyue pagoda of 523 among them, and the timber storeyed tower was the native model. What the rebuilding did was settle the square, storeyed brick tower at monumental scale in the capital. It is a consolidation more than a departure, and that holds the axis level with The Bottomless Well, below every other but The Encompassed.
Mike Leigh · Film
7.7 · Tier III
The inheritance is double: British social realism, from the kitchen-sink films to Ken Loach and Leigh’s own High Hopes (1988), Life Is Sweet (1990) and Naked (1993), and the adoption melodrama of the lost child found. The turn is to play the melodrama inside the realist method, so that its big scenes arrive as embarrassment and duration rather than as climax, and to cast the returning child as a Black professional and the mother as white and working poor, declining race as the problem the plot expects. The stake is limited. Naked had won Leigh the director’s prize at Cannes three years before: the swerve is real, on a path its maker had already cleared.
Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
The inheritance is the French society portrait of the Academy and the sentimental family pictures of Greuze, with the Raphaelesque Holy Family behind them; the neo-antique gown and the plain ground belong to the turn toward the antique around David. The departure is in who sits for the Madonna: the painter herself, a professional woman, offering her own motherhood in the Madonna’s place and omitting every sign of her trade. The stake was real and bounded. A woman academician showing herself to the public had a standing to lose; but maternal feeling was the most approved sentiment of the moment, and the manner is her proven manner. It is a swerve in the casting more than in the art, credited for the casting and held where a risk the painting did not run would begin.
Alfred Hitchcock · Film
7.7 · Tier III
The inheritance is the espionage thriller, Hitchcock’s own above all (The 39 Steps, Foreign Correspondent, Saboteur), and the romantic melodrama of the Selznick studio. The turns are real: the spy plot reduced to a pretext and the love story made the action; a cold, even cruel hero, played by the star most identified with charm; the most sympathetic man in the film as its villain, his ruin staged as a loss; the heroine’s past as premise. But the axis scores turn and stake together, and the stake was small: a star package with two of the most bankable leads in Hollywood, a proven genre in its master’s hands, a commercial success. It is a wager placed on a proven path, made inside the classical studio form.
Minoan · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
The inheritance is Minoan and Aegean palace painting and its neighbours, Egypt above all. Against Egypt the departure is large: diagonals and curves for horizontal registers, a body in mid-air and upside down, an animal shown at a speed the convention of stable profile forbids, a ground left empty so that motion carries the field. But much of that departure belongs to Minoan art as a whole, not to this panel. The bull-leaping subject was already established on seals and in ivory, and the flying gallop and the leaping figure are Aegean conventions the panel uses at their fullest rather than founds. The stake cannot be weighed, and the image reads as the confident statement of a mature workshop rather than a wager.
Sahelian builders · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
The departure is in scale more than in kind. The type is the region’s before it is Agadez’s: the earthen tower set with timbers belongs to the Sahelian tradition of tombs and mosques of which Gao and Timbuktu are part, and how much of it stood before 1515 is not settled. Agadez takes that form and drives it higher than any earthen minaret, at the edge of the Sahara, where rain is rare and timber scarce. The stake is real: a mud tower of this height stands at the limit of its material, and the rebuilding of 1844 keeps in the record what such a wager can cost. But it extends a proven path rather than turning from one, and a wager placed on a proven path is not credited at the top.
David Fincher · Film
7.7 · Tier III
The inheritance is the erotic and domestic thriller of the 1980s and 1990s, Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct, Hitchcock’s suspected husbands behind them in Suspicion and Rebecca, and the studio adaptation of a bestseller. The turns are real: a studio picture that changes protagonist and genre at its midpoint; flashbacks the camera shows as true and later disowns; a satire of television justice inside a thriller; an ending in which the killer wins and the marriage goes on. What holds the axis among the lowest is the stake, and it is weighed heavily. The midpoint and the ending belonged to a novel already read by millions, and the film was a major-studio release with a star and an established director at the height of his command. The swerve is the source’s, made filmic with skill; the film wagered nothing of its own on it.
My Bloody Valentine · Music
7.7 · Tier III
The inheritance is the band’s own language: the glide guitar, bent continuously with the tremolo arm, the voice laid inside the mix, the wall of layered tone. The departures are two, and each is real. The last third joins that guitar to the fast breakbeats of drum and bass, so that a sound built for stasis is made to run, and in Wonder 2 the joining yields a sound of real invention, a circling roar; the middle third strips the language to keyboard and voice, and to plain song. The stake was the expectation of two decades, and the unannounced, self-made release risked it openly. What holds it below the bar is that the wager was placed on a proven path: the language was the band’s own, drum and bass was twenty years old by 2013, and the fusion fills one third of the record.
Horace Jones and John Wolfe Barry · Architecture
7.6 · Tier III
The inheritance: the masonry bridges of the Thames, the iron and steel girder bridges of the railways, the suspension bridge, and the small bascule and swing bridges of docks and canals. The departure: a lifting span of large scale in the heart of a capital, joined with suspension side spans and high walkways into one composite structure, worked by water power, with the river kept open through the building. The stake was real: a novel structure across a crowded Pool, a large public sum, and a design adopted after long controversy over how to cross the river at all. What holds the axis below the gate is the other side of the ledger: the combination answered a site rather than opening a path, each of its parts was known, and the dress was a step back, a Gothic costume chosen in the decade in which the Forth Bridge (8.6) stood bare. The swerve is in the structure; the face does not turn.
Norse · Visual art
7.6 · Tier III
The inheritance is the chess set as it came into Europe from the Islamic world, whose pieces were abstract: a king a block with a cleft, a knight a stub with a projection. The European turn to figurative chessmen was under way in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and these are among its fullest and earliest surviving instances. The departure is real: abstract counters made into a population of persons, each with a face, and the church given its place on the board in Christian form. The stake was modest. These were workshop products made in numbers for a wealthy market, in a carving tradition of walrus ivory already practised and already figural, and the turn belonged to a broad European movement, not to this workshop’s wager.
Andreas Gursky · Visual art
7.5 · Tier III
The inheritance is double: the objective, serial photography of the Düsseldorf school under the Bechers, and the large colour tableau photograph that Gursky, Struth, Ruff and Jeff Wall had brought to the scale of painting in the 1980s and 1990s. Behind both stand German landscape painting and, in the bands, the colour field of Newman and Rothko. The departure is to take the documentary photograph and make it a fiction in the name of truth: a straight view of a real place, digitally emptied into an abstraction, with no sign of the intervention. The stake was low. Gursky had been altering his pictures digitally since the early 1990s, the large format was common ground, and Rhein I had made the composition three years before.
M83 · Music
7.5 · Tier III
The inheritance is twofold: the guitar walls of British shoegaze, My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive and Ride, and the synthesiser pop and film music of the 1980s, with the French electronic music of the late 1990s as the immediate setting. The turn was to build the shoegaze wall chiefly from synthesisers, to let a drum machine drive it, and to aim the whole at the grand emotional scale of film scores rather than at the introversion of the indie record. That is a real departure from both sources, audible from Unrecorded onward. The stake was modest. The duo had made one quiet album on a small label and had no public to lose, and the move was not lonely, since others in the same years were making shoegaze from electronics. A turn of real distance on paths already open.
Pearl Jam · Music
7.5 · Tier III
The inheritance is the band’s own manner, the big, layered hard rock of Ten (1991), already roughened on Vs. (1993), and behind it the Seattle sound and the classic rock it drew on. The turn is real: songs cut short and fast in a punk manner, an accordion monologue, a chant groove, a collage of found voices, a book in place of a booklet, and a release on vinyl first at the height of the CD. The stake was real too: a band among the best-selling in the world made a harder, stranger record while refusing videos and fighting its ticketing agency. What holds the figure: the experiments sit beside conventional songs rather than changing them, collage and fragment were long inherited, and the best of the album is the band’s proven mode refined.
The Cure · Music
7.4 · Tier III
The inheritance is twofold: post-punk, and the band’s own manner, above all the dense, despairing records that ended with Pornography (1982). This record turns from that toward a bright eclecticism: acoustic pop, a Spanish guitar, a Japanese scale, a waltz, a saxophone, handclaps and breath. The turn is real, and the record is its fullest statement, a band able to do anything in four minutes and keep its unease. What holds the figure is stake and precedent. The turn had already been taken in public, by the singles of 1982 and 1983 gathered as Japanese Whispers and by the psychedelic clutter of The Top (1984). This record consolidates and clarifies it, a wager on a path proven a year or two before.
Jun Xia (Gensler) · Architecture
7.4 · Tier III
The inheritance: the American supertall carried from Chicago to Dubai, where the setbacks of the Burj Khalifa were shaped to confuse the wind; the twisting tower, already built at Malmö in the Turning Torso of 2005 and in Dubai in the Cayan Tower; the sky garden held in a tower’s section, built at Frankfurt by Foster in the Commerzbank of 1997; the double-skin facade of European office buildings; and the two neighbours on the same ground. The departure is to join these at the largest scale: a full second skin standing free of the tower round its whole height, twisting and hung, with atria in the gap, and the wind’s answer made the figure. The stake was real, in engineering and money on soft ground at 632 m. Each element was proven elsewhere: the turn is of scale and synthesis, not of kind.
Paul Thomas Anderson · Film
7.3 · Tier III
The inheritance is double. The romantic comedy, from screwball to the musical: the film borrows from Popeye (1980), and its movement and music are choreographed as a musical’s. And the comic persona Adam Sandler had built through the 1990s, the man-child whose rage erupts for laughs. The turn takes that persona whole and plays it straight: the outbursts become symptoms, the comedy anxiety, the romance scored as panic, with abstract art and a percussive score set inside a love story. The stake was real: after Magnolia (1999), three hours long, a film of 95 minutes with a mainstream comic star. Held well below the gate because the turn is taken inside a form that stays a romance and resolves happily, on a path the art-film romance had already opened in its decade.
Kehinde Wiley · Visual art
7.3 · Tier III
The inheritance is American presidential portraiture: Gilbert Stuart’s Lansdowne Washington with its column and curtain, Healy’s seated Lincoln, the grave three-quarter likeness in a dark room that runs through the twentieth century, and the few swerves within it, of which Elaine de Kooning’s Kennedy, a loose-brushed figure on a bright ground, is the nearest precedent. The departure is a ground with no architecture and no depth, saturated decorative colour the genre had not admitted, the office indicated by nothing and the sitter’s origins carried by botany. The stake was real and public, met with ridicule and political hostility as well as praise. Held at 7.4 because within the painter’s own practice, figure before ornamental ground, it is a proven formula used with more restraint than usual.
Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza · Film
7.3 · Tier III
The departure from the war film is real: no score, no hero, no arc of character, no meaning offered at the close, a running time that follows the event, a script gathered from collective testimony rather than composed. The stake was real too. A war film without catharsis or explanation risked being found monotonous or celebratory, and it was charged with both. What holds the figure is that the swerve is from a tradition already turning this way. The immersive and procedural line runs through Black Hawk Down, The Hurt Locker, Lebanon, Son of Saul, Dunkirk and 1917, and documentary combat footage had made the method familiar. The film carries the turn further, chiefly by removing music and character, along a path already taken.
Talk Talk · Music
7.3 · Tier III
The inheritance is the band’s own first album, The Party’s Over (1982), synthesiser pop in the manner of its year, and the New Romantic chart music around it. The turn is real. The keyboard player is gone, Tim Friese-Greene enters as producer and co-writer, and the songs open up: fretless bass and space in Renée, a jazz-touched restraint in Tomorrow Started, a voice that strains against the polish. That direction is credited, and the partnership begun here would take it much further. The stake was a contract with EMI that wanted hits, and the record met that demand with Such a Shame and It’s My Life rather than refusing it. So the turn is placed inside a proven path, synth pop with a darker and more spacious interior rather than a departure from it, and this record only begins it.
Henry Bacon · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Greek Doric temple as American civic dress, the Beaux-Arts memorial of the City Beautiful (Bacon worked in the office of McKim, Mead and White) and the temple memorials of Europe. The departures are real and small: no pediment, an attic set back in its place; entry on the long side, the flank made a screen and a stage; the cella split in three; the column count read as a census. The stake was political more than architectural, a site on filled ground opposed in Congress. A Greek temple for a national hero in 1914 was the expected choice: the building sums a tradition at its end rather than turning from it.
Byzantine, under Justinian · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the timber-roofed basilica and the Roman frontier fort, and the monastery joins them more than it departs from either. The church is a conventional three-aisled basilica of the sixth-century Levant; the circuit is a fort’s wall with towers. The departure lies in their union and their placing: an imperial fortress built to house monks, set in a desert valley at a pilgrimage site rather than on a road or a frontier line, its church against the holy bush. The stake was real in cost and distance: granite cut and raised far from any city, timber brought from afar, a garrison kept. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that the turn is a programme more than a form, and that much of what makes the place distinct came by time, not by the builders’ wager.
Mughal, under Shah Jahan · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The building consolidates more than it departs. The type, a great court with cloisters and gated entries and a prayer hall under three domes with a tall central arch, is inherited from the Jama Masjid of Fatehpur Sikri and from the Jama Masjid at Agra, finished in 1648. Its turns are three: the whole mosque raised on a high platform over a city, as the counterweight of the palace in the plan; two tall striped minarets set at the front of the hall, giving the Mughal mosque a vertical silhouette it had largely lacked; and the bold red and white striping of domes and towers. These were taken up after. What holds the axis lowest on the page is that none of them risked much: they are refinements on a proven path, underwritten by an empire.
Eddie Adams · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is war photojournalism from Capa onward: the photographer at the front, the hand-held camera, the instant of death attempted, as in Capa’s The Falling Soldier of 1936, whose staging is disputed. The departure here is real in its content: a killing by one’s own side, recorded at the instant of the shot and put on the front pages of the countries fighting the war, where earlier photographs of the dead had been censored, delayed or shown at a distance. As a departure in the medium it is small. Adams made a straight news photograph by the methods of his trade; the turn was the event’s, and the stake was physical courage and a reflex, not an artistic wager against a tradition. Malcolm Browne’s burning monk of 1963 had already put a death in Vietnam on the world’s front pages.
Byzantine, under Archbishop Ursicinus · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Early Christian basilica of Rome and Ravenna, two centuries old when this one was begun, and the building takes it nearly whole. The departures are of detail: columns and capitals imported from the East, the polygonal outer apse of the Eastern habit, side chambers by the apse. In the mosaic the turn is real: a symbolic Transfiguration, the theophany abstracted to a cross among stars, and a local saint at the centre of the conch where Christ would stand. These lift the axis above 7.0. But the stake placed on the building was small: no new structure, no new space, no risk in the making, a proven plan built well. Beside San Vitale, finished in the same years in the same city and staked on an Eastern centralised form, this is the conservative work. This is the lowest axis, and that is what holds it.
Athenian (architect unrecorded) · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The tradition is the mature Doric temple of the mid fifth century, and the departures from it are small. The east porch is set back to align with the third flank column. The continuous Ionic frieze over the porches, an Athenian habit, is here carried out across the walk to the outer entablature, a distinctive joining of porch and colonnade. The carved metopes turn the corner to make the east end a frontal composition. These are refinements of an accepted type, and nothing in them wagered on an unproven path; in the same years the Parthenon was reorganising the order this building keeps. A careful, accomplished variant within a canon: an accent, and that is what holds the axis below the Universal Minimum.
Steven Spielberg · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the adventure serial and the B picture of the 1930s and 1940s, Republic’s chapter plays and the jungle and treasure films, the Bond film’s chain of set pieces, and above all Star Wars (1977), which had already proved that the serial, made with a studio picture’s scale and craft, could command the largest audience in the world. The turns are real and are the film’s own: the serial’s cliffhanger made the rhythm of a whole feature; an action hero who is a scholar, fallible, often beaten and afraid; real Old Testament power at the climax of a pulp adventure; a heroine who drinks, punches and runs her own bar. What holds the axis lowest of the eleven the Universal Minimum covers: the wager was placed on a path its producer had proved four years before, and its stake was in money and reputation, not in form.
Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly · Film
7.9 · Tier III
The inheritance is the backstage musical from 42nd Street (1933) on; the catalogue musical, built around a songwriter’s old songs, which An American in Paris (1951) had done for Gershwin with the same unit; and the Freed unit’s integrated musical, which Kelly and Donen had advanced in On the Town (1949). The turns are real: a musical whose subject is the coming of sound, so that the history of the medium becomes its plot; pastiche of 1929 numbers and of silent swashbuckling inside a 1952 musical; a heroine who wins by dubbing; a joke about the film’s own apparatus. What holds the axis below 7.5 is the stake. This was an MGM musical from the studio’s surest unit, with stars at their height and a writing team and songs already proven, a departure of subject and tone on a path its makers had paved.
Beach House · Music
7.9 · Tier III
The inheritance is the band’s own: the organ, the slide guitar and the drum machine of its first two records, and above all Teen Dream (2010), which had already moved the sound toward fuller production and live drums. Behind both lies the dream pop of Cocteau Twins and Mazzy Star. Bloom’s turn is a turn of scale, made with conviction: the drums fuller, the builds longer, the climaxes louder, the production more spacious, until the swell itself becomes the form. That enlargement is credited as a real deepening of the manner. Held back, and the lowest of the counted axes, because the stake was small: the record placed its wager on the proven path, and no element of its language is new to the band or the genre.
Lev Rudnev · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The inheritance: the American setback skyscraper of the 1920s and 1930s, known through Soviet visits and publications; Iofan’s Palace of Soviets project, a tower stepped up to a statue; the tent-roofed towers of the Kremlin and of Russian church building; the classical ensemble of courts and axes. The departure: to fuse these into a university as a vertical city, the whole institution in one stepped mass, set back on the hill as the crown of the city plan. The fusion is real, and its scale had no precedent for a university. What holds the axis at 7.3, the foot of the twelve with one other, is the stake. The wager was not the architects’ own: the type was decreed and the language prescribed, and the turn from Iofan’s design was a move back from the cliff toward the canonical ensemble, not a risk on a new path. The cost was political, and Iofan bore it; the building walked a proven path at greater size.
Nas · Music
7.8 · Tier III
The inheritance is the New York rap of 1987 to 1993: Rakim’s interior rhyme and composure, Kool G Rap’s crowded narrative, the jazz-sample production of Pete Rock and of A Tribe Called Quest, the hard drums of the Juice Crew and Gang Starr. The turn is real but small, smaller than its fame. The record joins the densest rhyming of its day to first-person reportage of one place, in a voice level and observant rather than boastful or militant, while the West Coast’s gangsta records held the commercial centre. Its method was a wager in one respect, a debut spread across five of the city’s leading producers, and even that wager was placed with proven hands. What holds it well below the bar: every element was proven before, the producers brought their own established sounds, and the stake was a debut’s, not a standing risked. A wager placed on a proven path is not a swerve, and the record perfects a path more than it leaves one.
Nick Cave and Warren Ellis · Music
7.8 · Tier III
The inheritance is the pair’s own. Push the Sky Away (2013), Skeleton Tree (2016) and Ghosteen (2019) had already led Cave from the Bad Seeds’ rock to Ellis’s loops, pads and choirs, and the two had scored films together since The Proposition (2005). This record turns that language back toward the song with rhythm and violence: harder pulses, abrupt changes inside a track, spoken menace beside hymn. The turn from Ghosteen’s suspended drift is real, and the credit to the two of them marks a stake, a record made without the band. But the path was proven by the pair themselves, the audience was secure, and the departure is within a manner rather than from one: a turn of degree, made safely.
Martin Scorsese · Film
7.8 · Tier III
The inheritance is the American gangster film and, nearest, Scorsese’s own Goodfellas (1990), also from Pileggi: memoir in voice-over, a compilation score of popular records, freeze frames and whip pans, a crew’s rise and fall told from inside. Casino is in large part that form extended. The turns are real and modest: two narrators instead of one, and one cut off at his death; an hour of essayistic exposition that explains an economy, more like a documentary than a crime film; an epic length given to a system rather than a hero; a marriage at the centre of a gangster film. The stake was smaller than the scale suggests: a major studio picture from a director, a writer and two stars returning to a proven success. A wager placed on a proven path is not a swerve, and much of this one is the path itself.
Federico Fellini · Film
7.7 · Tier III
The inheritance is Italian neorealism, which Fellini knew from inside as a writer on Rossellini’s Roma città aperta (1945) and Paisà (1946), and the silent clown, Chaplin above all. The departures are real: a prostitute as heroine without moral or sociology; episodes held together only by one consciousness; a miracle shot as farce and devotion together; a stage hypnosis as the film’s confession; an ending handed to the viewer through a look at the lens. The subject drew the Church’s objection. But the larger turn had been made in La strada (1954): the same actress, the same waif, the same composer, the same road from neorealism toward fable. By 1957 the path was Fellini’s own and proven, and a wager on a proven path is charged as such.
Fleet Foxes · Music
7.7 · Tier III
The inheritance is wide and plain: the close harmonies of the Beach Boys and of Crosby, Stills and Nash; the British folk of the late 1960s; Appalachian and gospel singing, and something of shape-note hymnody in the rounds; the baroque pop of the Zombies and the Left Banke; and, nearer, the reverberant indie rock of the decade, My Morning Jacket above all, and the folk turn of Midlake. The turn was to bring communal singing from before rock, rounds and songs in several sections into indie rock in 2008, harmonies at the centre, with almost no irony: a real swerve from the indie rock around it. The stake was a debut’s, and every idiom was proven: a new combination and weighting of inherited parts, not a break with any of them.
Beach House · Music
7.7 · Tier III
The inheritance is the band’s own dream pop, settled across seven albums from 2006: slow tempos, organ and drum machine, slide and arpeggiated guitar, a voice in reverb. The turns are real and several. The band produced itself for the first time; live strings enter on several tracks; synthesisers and programmed drums come forward on some songs, toward synth-pop; and the record is twice the usual length, released in four chapters. The stake is the length, a wager that listeners would stay with eighty-four minutes of one sound. Held back because none of it leaves the manner, the chapter release hedged the wager, and the band refined its own proven path with no risk to its identity or its audience.
Eduard Riedel and Christian Jank, under Ludwig II · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
The inheritance is the Romantic revival of the medieval castle, a German tradition by 1869: Hohenschwangau itself, rebuilt for Ludwig’s father in the 1830s; Stolzenfels on the Rhine for the Prussian crown; Lichtenstein in Württemberg; the restored Wartburg; and in France Viollet-le-Duc’s Pierrefonds, under way since 1857. The departures are real: a castle conceived by a theatre painter as a stage set rather than by an architect or an antiquarian; a ruin not restored but replaced by a castle larger than any that had stood there; a building ordered by the dramas of a living composer; medieval form wrapped round the services of a modern house. The stake was the king’s fortune and then his debts. But the turn is one of intensity along a well travelled path, and the wager was a king’s, not architecture’s.
Alfred Hitchcock · Film
7.6 · Tier III
The inheritance is double: the American small-town picture, family comedy and the Americana that Thornton Wilder brought from Our Town; and Hitchcock’s own thriller, which had already set a possible killer inside a marriage in Suspicion (1941). The turns are real. The murderer is the most charming figure in the film and the heroine’s double; his guilt is given early, so that the suspense is of a girl’s knowledge rather than of identity; the nightmare is set in a real town by daylight, in location work unusual for a studio thriller of 1942; and the law never catches him. What holds the figure low is the stake: a mid-budget picture for Universal, made on its director’s proven path of suspicion within the home, a year after the film that tried the same wager and flinched.
Stuart Rosenberg · Film
7.6 · Tier III
The inheritance is the American prison picture, with I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) behind it, and the rebel hero of the 1950s that Paul Newman had himself played. The turns are real. The hero has no cause: he is in for a drunk’s act of vandalism and will not say why he did it; the prison is not unjust in any way a reform could mend; the film refuses the escape picture’s payoff and kills its star; and it lays a religious figure across a star vehicle for Warner Bros. What holds the figure is the stake. This is a studio picture built on a star at the height of his draw, from a novel, classical in form throughout, and it places the antihero of its moment on a proven path.
Alex Proyas · Film
7.6 · Tier III
The inheritance is near and known: the drowned future city of Blade Runner (1982), the grand gothic decor of Burton’s Batman (1989), the revenge western, the Hong Kong gunfight and the music video. The turn is in tone, and it is real. Where the comic-book film of its moment built gothic sets around a hero, The Crow turned the form to mourning: a dead man whose power is grief, a love story told in flashback, and an alternative-rock soundtrack as the voice of a subculture rather than of a studio, paid for at the price of a mid-budget independent production. What holds the figure: the film assembles proven paths into a new mood more than it wagers on an untried form, and the catastrophe on set was not a wager.
Stephen King · Literature
7.6 · Tier III
The inheritance is the haunted-house novel, Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House above all, with Poe and the Gothic behind it, and the popular horror novel of the early 1970s. The turn is real. King put a modern working family at the centre of the haunted house, with its drinking, its money troubles and its marriage, and made the haunting and the addiction one thing, so that the ghost story becomes a novel of domestic violence. He wrote it in a plain American vernacular with brand names and inner speech, which brought the genre’s register down to the kitchen. The stake was modest. King was a commercial novelist working the path that Carrie and ’Salem’s Lot had opened for him, and the form, the plot’s shape and the set pieces are the genre’s own. It is a strong accent on a proven path, not a wager.
Terry Pratchett · Literature
7.6 · Tier III
The inheritance is comic fantasy as Pratchett and his field practised it, the parody of fantasy’s furniture. The turn is into a sustained satire on theology and the institution of religion, with a moral argument carried through to the end and a serious death in its coda. Within the Discworld it is a real turn: the earlier books parodied genres, and this one argues. It risked something, a mass-market comic series turning on its readers’ assumptions about belief in a book that kept the jokes. The stake was bounded. The turn was made within a long tradition, Swift, Voltaire’s Candide, the conte philosophique, Chesterton’s comedies of faith, and the comic theology of Good Omens (1990), written with Neil Gaiman; and the footnoted comic novel of the Discworld was a proven path by 1992.
Michel Pinseau · Architecture
7.6 · Tier III
The inheritance: the Maghrebi mosque from Kairouan and Córdoba to the Almohad and Marinid buildings, the square minaret of the Koutoubia and the unfinished Hassan Tower at Rabat, the crafts of the Alaouite palaces; and, in the twentieth century, mosques built either in revival dress or in modernist forms. The departure: a mosque carried out over the sea, a sliding roof that makes the hall a courtyard on command, a minaret raised to a world record, and modern engineering placed under traditional craft at a scale without precedent. The stake was real in money and in politics, a cost borne by a poorer nation and a site taken from the ocean. What holds the axis: the swerve is of site, size and machinery, not of the architectural language, which is a chosen return and a wager on the proven path; and the risk was the patron’s, and largely financial.
Danny Boyle · Film
7.5 · Tier III
The inheritance is double: the Hindi popular cinema of brothers on opposite sides of the law, with its melodrama, its songs and its destined love; and Boyle’s own British cinema of kinetic style. The turn is to take the Bollywood story whole, shoot it with small digital cameras in the real slums and stations of Mumbai, braid it with a game show and an interrogation, and send it into Western cinemas as an English-language film. The stake was real: a British production with no stars, a largely Indian cast, a city its makers did not know. What holds the figure is that the swerve is one of transfer and texture. The melodrama is inherited, not questioned, and the frame of question and flashback was already in Swarup’s novel.
Harold Ramis · Film
7.4 · Tier III
The inheritance is the Hollywood comedy of redemption, with It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) and A Christmas Carol behind it; the studio star vehicle; and Bill Murray’s persona, the sardonic outsider. The turn is real. Repetition, the gag’s oldest engine, becomes the whole narrative form; the mechanism is never explained and no rule for escape is given; a mainstream comedy holds repeated suicide and a death it cannot prevent; the star’s sneer becomes the sin to be worked off. What holds the axis low is the stake and the landing. The turn is made inside a studio star vehicle, released as a February comedy, and it resolves in a romance that ends happily, on the genre’s most proven path, so that the swerve comes back to the road it left.
William Friedkin · Film
7.4 · Tier III
The inheritance is close and named: the Satanic cycle that Rosemary’s Baby (1968) had already brought into a modern city, a prestige studio and a realist manner; Blatty’s bestselling novel, which supplied the story and much of the argument; and Friedkin’s own documentary method from The French Connection (1971). The turns are real: horror played with the realism of a medical and police film, violation from a child’s mouth and body at a length no studio film had shown, sound that treats the voice as the monster, a theology taken seriously. The stake was a long, troubled production over budget and schedule. The debt holds it well short of the gate: the first wager had been placed five years before.
Luca Guadagnino · Film
7.3 · Tier III
The inheritance is the sports film, whose spine is the underdog’s training and the final match that redeems him, and the romantic triangle. The turn is real: the sports film’s climax is made the frame of the whole, so that the match is not a reward at the end but the present tense the past keeps entering; the game is read throughout as an erotic and economic exchange; and a studio film is scored with club music and cut to it. The stake was moderate: a star vehicle backed by a studio, by a director with an established manner for desire among beautiful people (Call Me by Your Name, 2017), on a clever arrangement of known parts rather than a new grammar. The risk was to reception more than to form.
Keith Haring · Visual art
7.3 · Tier III
The turn and the stake are one judgment. The stake was real: Haring, by 1986 a painter of international market standing, painted an unsanctioned wall in Harlem and was arrested for it, risking the law and the charge of slumming. The turn is smaller. Within his own work it carries the subway chalk drawings of the early 1980s to an urban wall at billboard scale with an explicit civic message. Within the traditions it inherits, the Mexican and community mural movements, the public health poster and the graffiti writing of New York, it fuses the writer’s illicit wall with the public service announcement, and that fusion is its swerve. But the idiom is Haring’s established one, and the community mural with a message was an existing kind. A real wager on a modest turn, well below Fountain, whose turn was of the whole field.
Mon and Burmese builders · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The turn is small, and that is what holds the axis lowest. The Shwedagon is a stupa of the Mon and Burmese type, its profile developed in the tradition and here enlarged and refined. Its campaigns were wagers of scale and gold, not of form: Shin Sawbu raised it, and after the earthquake of 1768 Hsinbyushin raised it higher and gave it its present profile. The one claim to a swerve is that profile: the seamless passage from the octagonal tiers into bell, bowl and bud, read as one continuous curve rather than stacked parts. How far it departs from earlier zedis of Lower Burma cannot be measured here. A building that grew by accumulation within its tradition risked scale and fortune, not its form.
Qing builders, under the Qianlong Emperor; rebuilt under Cixi · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Chinese imperial garden: the lake of one pond and three hills, the Jiangnan scholar’s garden, and, next door and before it, the Yuanmingyuan and the other gardens of the western hills. The departures are real but small. Qianlong took an actual lake and hill and reshaped them at the scale of a district into one composition, joining a reservoir to a pleasure ground; Cixi departed further only in incident, the Marble Boat’s Western dress, the theatre, the electric light. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the programme itself: imitation was the design, and the garden quotes West Lake, Wuxi, Suzhou and Tibet on purpose. The stake was money and labour, not risk of form; the wager was placed on the proven path.
Tang builders · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Tang official manner of the timber hall: column grid, bracket sets, hipped roof and trough plan, all developed in the capital and on palace halls. The East Hall does not depart from it. As far as the record shows, it is a full and careful statement of that manner, built in a province by a monastery restoring itself after a persecution. There was a stake, and a real one: to raise a large hall of the highest rank so soon after 845 was an act of patronage and faith, by a woman donor, at cost. But the stake was in the building’s existence, not its form. A wager on a proven path is not a swerve, and with The Encompassed this is the lowest of the hall’s figures.
Anonymous · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the female figure of the Upper Palaeolithic, a type already some ten thousand years old when this one was carved, as the ivory figure of Hohle Fels shows, and spread across Europe from the Pyrenees to the Don within the Gravettian. Its conventions are this figure’s: the emphasis on breasts, belly and hips, the diminished arms, the reduced or absent face, the tapering legs. Against that, the departures are real but local: the head given wholly to carved rows, its most distinctive invention, though other figures carry headdresses too; a stone brought from elsewhere rather than ivory or local stone; colour. The stake cannot be read across the millennia, and what the type risked is unknowable. A strong instance of an established type, not a turn from it. The lowest of the five gated axes.
Peter of Illyria, under Pope Celestine I · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The inheritance is the Constantinian basilica and its fourth-century successors, among them San Paolo fuori le Mura, which in the 380s already set arches on columns. Santa Sabina’s departures are of degree: a classicizing purity, a matched colonnade, a clerestory opened very wide, a lean wall with almost nothing on it. The stake was small: a titular church built on a proven model by a priest of the city. The arcaded colonnade is the inheritance, not the turn, and the building’s choices refine the Late Antique church rather than turning away from it. A refinement is not a swerve. It is the lowest of the eleven axes the Universal Minimum covers, and the only one of them below it.
Fleetwood Mac · Music
7.9 · Tier III
The inheritance is the band’s own Fleetwood Mac (1975), which had already turned the group, with Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks newly arrived, from British blues to Californian pop rock, and behind it the soft rock and country rock of Los Angeles in the earlier 1970s. This record does not turn from that path; it refines it, with tighter songs, cleaner sound and a sharper division among three writers. The departure is in what the songs are about and who sings them: a working band singing its members’ accusations against one another, the accused in the harmony, a turn in degree. The personal stake was high. The artistic stake, a wager on a proven path, was small, and that holds the swerve lowest of the eleven.
Roman · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The inheritance is the Roman aqueduct bridge, already mature in Italy and in Gaul, where the Pont du Gard (8.4) stands, and the Roman habit of building bridges and arcades in squared stone without mortar. The departure is real but narrow: the arcade is built in granite; its two tiers are of strongly unequal height, the lower arches tall and slender to a degree that makes the stretch over the square its own; and the piers taper in stepped courses rather than standing straight. These are refinements within a type, each placed on a proven path. The stake was structural, since a slender dry granite pier near thirty metres high is a real wager, and it was won; but every builder of a tall arcade made it. A work at the front of its type, not one that left it, and the lowest axis but one.
John Bradfield and Ralph Freeman (Dorman Long) · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
The turn is small and the stake was large, and the axis scores them together. Bradfield moved from a cantilever scheme to the arch after seeing the Hell Gate Bridge in New York (1916), and Dorman Long’s design develops that type at greater span and much greater width; the Bayonne Bridge (1931), built at the same time, reached almost exactly the same span independently. The stake was real: the heaviest and widest long-span steel arch, erected without falsework over a working harbour, its two halves held on cables until they met in the air. But a wager of scale on a proven type is a wager on a proven path, and the pylons dress the steel in a conservative stripped classical masonry. The boldness is in execution, not departure: the lowest axis but one.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
The inheritance: Manet’s large groups of modern life; the Impressionist subject of leisure on the Seine, which Monet and Renoir had painted side by side at La Grenouillère in 1869; and Renoir’s own Bal du moulin de la Galette of 1876, which had already set a crowd of friends in dappled light at the scale of a Salon picture. The departure here is one of degree. The crowd is drawn closer, the figures are firmer, the still life is set as an anchor at the front, and the contour begins to reassert itself in the near heads, the first sign of the turn that took the painter to Italy and to Ingres. That turn is real, but the pictures after this one make it. The canvas was large and costly in sittings, but its subject and manner were proven. A wager on a proven path is not a swerve.
P. G. Wodehouse · Literature
7.7 · Tier III
The great swerve of the Wooster books, a first-person narration by the fool that turned a stock comic servant plot into a sustained voice, was made in the stories of 1917 to 1930, not here. This novel takes a proven instrument and extends it to the length of a novel, with more threads and a larger cast than the stories carry, and its handling of four interlocking plots at once is a real advance on them. But the stake is small. The form, the country-house farce and the musical-comedy plot Wodehouse knew from his years writing lyrics and books for the stage, is inherited; the voice was already made; and the book wagers nothing it had not won before. It is a deviation within a tradition its author had himself already turned.
Takashi Yamazaki · Film
7.7 · Tier III
The inheritance is seventy years of Toho’s Godzilla films: above all Ishirō Honda’s Gojira of 1954, and Shin Godzilla (2016), which made the creature a satire of bureaucracy. The turn is double: back to the first film’s meaning, the creature as the war, by setting the story before 1954 in the ruins; and away from the bureaucratic and spectacle traditions toward the drama of one survivor, with the state removed from the solution. That is a real turn. What holds the axis lowest is the stake and the kind: the film was made for a fraction of a Hollywood budget, by a director practised in popular drama and effects, inside a franchise whose audience was guaranteed; it is a restoration more than a departure, and its melodrama is the domestic register of Japanese popular cinema of its decade, not a new one.
Martin McDonagh · Film
7.7 · Tier III
The tradition is long, and its maker had worked it for a quarter of a century: the western Irish island as a stage for black comedy and violence, from Synge’s Aran and The Playboy of the Western World to McDonagh’s own The Cripple of Inishmaan and The Lieutenant of Inishmore. What the film does newly is slow that mode, strip it of plot, with no crime, no gun and no outsider’s intrigue, and rest a feature on the end of a friendship: a comedy with nothing at stake but liking. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve, with Pressure on Tradition, is that the wager was placed on the maker’s proven path, with a cast, register and setting he had mastered.
Dolly Parton · Music
7.6 · Tier III
The inheritance is the Nashville country album of 1971: a strong title song, a set of songs around it, the production of the label’s roster, and for Parton the partnership with Porter Wagoner, whose two songs sit on the record. The turn is of degree and real: a woman writing most of the record from her own life and region, the title song an autobiography told with no irony and no apology, when Nashville’s women more often sang others’ songs. What holds the axis among the lowest of the eleven is the stake and the precedent. Loretta Lynn’s “Coal Miner’s Daughter” (1970) had made the autobiographical song of Appalachian poverty a hit a year before, and the record risked nothing in its manner.
Frans Hals · Visual art
7.6 · Tier III
The inheritance is the formal portrait of the Netherlands, and of Antwerp and Italy beyond: the sitter upright and composed, usually with props, the expression neutral and the finish smooth. The departure is in address and moment: the low viewpoint that sets the man above us, the elbow projected out of the picture plane, the head turned to meet us, a fleeting expression against a bare ground. But the akimbo elbow was an old sign of male assurance, and Hals had been developing his lively address since the militia banquet of 1616, so the canvas sharpens a proven path. The stake was small, a private commission. The open, broken brush of the later decades is not here: this is among his most finished pictures.
Robertson Davies · Literature
7.6 · Tier III
The inheritance is the English novel of memoir and confession, the first-person lives of Dickens, the comic novel of manners Davies had written in his Salterton books, and the Canadian realist novel of the small town. In 1970 the form was conservative: a well-made retrospective narrative, told in order, in a decade in which the novel in English was being broken open. The turn is in what Davies brought into that form and that country: sainthood, miracle, magic and the Jungian unconscious, admitted as real into the most rationalist of Canadian settings, and a narrator who claims the minor part as the essential one. Within Canadian fiction that was a real departure from the documentary realism that had dominated it. The stake was bounded: Davies was a known journalist, playwright and comic novelist, and the book wagered his reputation on a graver register in a proven form.
Jeff Nichols · Film
7.5 · Tier III
The lineage is open: Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and the road and chase film of the 1970s. The departure is one of register. The film plays that inheritance with the withheld information, the procedural flatness and the Southern working-class textures of Nichols’s earlier films, so that wonder arrives among motels, safe houses and two-lane roads, and the genre’s explanatory scenes are cut away. That is a real turn with a real cost, since it denies the audience the orientation the genre promises. What holds the axis: the wager was placed on a proven path, and the last movement returns to the inherited form, the full reveal and the luminous other world.
David Fincher · Film
7.5 · Tier III
The departures are real: a hired-killer film narrated from inside a mind whose talk of precision is shown to be false, played as dry comedy, with its climax withheld and a device of sound that puts the audience in the killer’s earphones. But the path was proven. Le Samouraï set the procedural silence; the 1990s and 2000s gave the ironic killer many forms; Anton Corbijn’s The American (2010) and the narrated professional of many films had cut the ground. Fincher’s own manner, the procedural, the obsessive, the clean frame, is carried on rather than turned. The stake was small: a well-funded streaming production by an established director, with a star, in a familiar genre, and the anticlimax risked only part of its audience. An accent intelligently placed on a proven path, at small cost.
Arcade Fire · Music
7.5 · Tier III
The inheritance is the band’s own language: the communal anthem, the cumulative build, the chorus of many voices, the apocalyptic frame set against domestic tenderness, all established on its first records. The previous album, of 2017, had turned from that language into disco and irony and was poorly received; this record turns back. Its turns within the return are real: the suite form with numbered parts, the shortest and most concentrated record the band had made, a sparer production, and a stately piano writing in End of the Empire that is new in emphasis. The stake was real too: a band trying to regain its audience. What holds the figure is that the wager runs toward a proven path, a correction more than a swerve.
Guðjón Samúelsson · Architecture
7.5 · Tier III
The inheritance is the Scandinavian church and the national romantic architecture in which Guðjón trained, in Copenhagen, where P. V. Jensen-Klint’s Grundtvig’s Church (1921 to 1940) had already made a church front of stepped, organ-pipe verticals rising to a central gable; Guðjón’s own church at Akureyri (1940) and his basalt motifs in Reykjavík came first too. The departure: the stepped vertical front carried to a tall tower and a landmark scale, in concrete, and read through Icelandic geology rather than Danish brick. A model already built, turned into another material and another national myth: a real turn, and a modest one. The stake was large for a small country, but a design of 1937 completed in 1986 had become a wager on a path the century had left, which counts as delay, not as risk.
Luca Guadagnino · Film
7.1 · Tier III
The inheritance is triple: the Burroughs adaptation, where David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch (1991) had already fused the writer’s life and hallucinations with body horror; the queer romance of art cinema, including Guadagnino’s own Call Me by Your Name (2017), which this film turns inside out, the beloved youth now the unreachable one and the lover old, abject and addicted; and the period picture. The turns are real: a Mexico City built as visible artifice, songs of later decades laid over 1950, sex staged explicitly with an actor known worldwide as James Bond, a last act that leaves realism for vision and then for an imagined death. The stake was real for a production of its scale. What holds it: the hallucinatory turn follows Cronenberg’s map, the artifice belongs to a familiar manner of studio pastiche, and the departure is one of temperament more than of form.
Quentin Tarantino · Film
7.0 · Tier III
The inheritance is the heist film and the American crime picture, The Killing (1956) above all, with its broken chronology of a robbery; Ringo Lam’s City on Fire (1987), from which the undercover policeman and the closing standoff are taken; and The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974) for the colour names. The turns are real: the robbery is never shown, so the heist film is played as its own aftermath; the crime film is filled with talk about pop songs, tipping and comic books at a length and ease it had not used; chronology is broken into named chapters. The stake was a first feature on a small budget. But each turn has a source in plain view, the borrowing was close enough to draw a charge of lifting, and the departure is in manner and arrangement more than in what a crime film can know.
Thomas Heatherwick · Architecture
6.8 · Tier II
The inheritance is the public monument and civic centrepiece, the obelisk, the fountain, the observation tower, and the object that is half building and half sculpture. The departure is to make a monument of nothing but stair, entered and climbed throughout, its structure its route, at the scale of a tower and with no interior: neither sculpture nor building nor observation deck. The turn is real and wide enough to be recognised at once. The stake is low. It was commissioned by a developer as an attraction, on the proven path of the destination landmark that draws visitors to a commercial district, and its novelty was the product being sold. The cost of the wager, when it came, came in lives and closure, a risk not knowingly placed but borne by the work.
Francis Ford Coppola · Film
6.7 · Tier II
The inheritance is the juvenile-delinquency film of the 1950s, Rebel Without a Cause (1955) above all, and Hinton’s own teen fiction, which The Outsiders had just adapted in a classical, sunlit manner. The turn is wide: a teenage picture made as an expressionist film in black and white, with spot colour, time-lapse skies, a percussion score in place of pop songs and a story pared to an elegy. The stake was real: it was made as Zoetrope failed after One from the Heart (1982), and it found neither its audience nor wide support at release. What holds it is borrowing. Expressionist light, spot colour and the doomed youth all had long precedents, and the turn combines them rather than finding a new grammar.
Harper Lee · Literature
7.9 · Tier III
The inheritance is plain. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn gave the child narrator and the moral education beside a black man’s danger; Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust (1948) a white boy, a black man accused and a lawyer; McCullers and Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948) the Southern novel of childhood. Lee’s turn is to set the courtroom novel inside the comic memoir of childhood and let the double voice carry the trial: a real fusion, and credited. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is turn and stake together. Form, syntax and structure are conventional, and the real risk of the subject for an Alabama author in 1960 is lessened by the safety of the frame, the righteous white lawyer and the verdict read as a tragedy for the town’s conscience. A wager placed largely on a proven path.
Radiohead · Music
7.8 · Tier III
The inheritance is the band’s own: the guitar records of the 1990s, OK Computer among them, and the electronic records that began with Kid A. The turn is modest and was meant to be. The record joins the two idioms, guitar and laptop in one room, made quickly and nearer to live than before. Myxomatosis and Backdrifts carry the electronic language into band songs; There There makes a rock song of massed drums. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the stake: each device had been proven, mostly by this band, and a group at the height of its standing returned to a path its audience knew. A wager on a proven path is not a swerve.
Jeff Nichols · Film
7.7 · Tier III
The inheritance is plain: the American river novel, the coming-of-age film of children on the water, the Southern regional drama. The film’s departures are in emphasis, and they are real. It tells the outlaw’s romance as a boy’s education in failed love, so that the fugitive picture is turned inside out and its hero becomes the thing the boy must see through; and it shows a working river and its people without condescension, as a life rather than a backdrop. After a film that bent genre toward the dread of a mind, Nichols came back toward the classical: a well-shaped narrative with a star, a romance and a shootout. What holds the axis is the stake: a larger budget and cast than before, made on a proven path, so that the turn is an accent rather than a wager.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude · Visual art
7.4 · Tier III
The inheritance by 2005 was the partnership’s own: temporary works at the scale of landscape, self-financed, made through years of permits and public hearings and removed, from Wrapped Coast (1968 to 1969) through Valley Curtain, Running Fence, Surrounded Islands, The Pont Neuf Wrapped and Wrapped Reichstag; behind it, Land Art and the old festive decoration of cities. The departure is in place and in kind of encounter: such a work in the most visited urban park in the United States, walked through rather than looked at, in thousands of identical units. The stake was real and paid: twenty-six years, a refusal, the artists’ own money. But it was a wager on a proven path, and a gate with a curtain extends Running Fence and Valley Curtain rather than turning from them.
U2 · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is twofold: the band’s own sound of the 1980s, chiming guitar, anthemic chorus and sacred longing, and its turn away from it in the 1990s into irony, electronics and spectacle. This record turns back, and against the 1990s the reversal is real: earnest where its predecessor was ironic. Against the field of 2000, with guitar bands moving toward electronics (Kid A came out the same month) or toward nu-metal, an unironic, hymnal rock record was a minority bet, and Eno and Lanois keep texture in the drum loop of Beautiful Day and the treated sounds under Kite. What holds it lowest is the path: the return was to the band’s own proven idiom, after a commercial disappointment, and a wager on a proven path is not a swerve.
Sedefkâr Mehmed Agha · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The lowest of the twelve, and the plan is why. Sinan had moved beyond the four semidomes of the Şehzade to the two of the Süleymaniye and then to the octagon of the Selimiye, which made the dome the room. Mehmed Agha went back to the Şehzade’s four semidomes and four piers, on a larger scale. The departures are of degree and display: six minarets where four had been the sultanic maximum, a forecourt as large as the hall, a quantity of Iznik tile not seen before in one interior, a royal pavilion grown into a building of its own. The stake was political and financial rather than architectural. The architectural wager was placed on a proven path: a real accent and a real scale, not a turn.
Hakka builders (Jiang clan) · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The lowest axis, and what holds it is the type. The inheritance is the Fujian earth building, square and round, already standing in the region before this one was begun; the departure is in scale and in the multiplication of rings, a clan town folded into concentric bands. That is an enlargement within a proven type, not a turn from it. The stake was real and vernacular: by tradition decades of a clan’s labour and means, and an earth wall of four storeys at this width was a wager on craft and on the clan’s continuance. It risked no new principle; nothing in it departs from the type’s logic of blind wall, inward gallery and central hall. It is held from lower by the inner rings, a genuine elaboration of ranking within one building.
Andrew Wyeth · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The inheritance: American realist painting between the wars, the Regionalists and the magic realists, the egg tempera revived in the painter’s circle, and his father’s illustration. The departure is in composition, not in tradition: the very high horizon, the figure seen from behind and from above, cut off from the viewer and placed off centre, the main event a gap. These are real choices, and the picture would be ordinary without them. But in 1948, with New York painting turning to abstraction, the panel was a wager on a proven path: a meticulous figurative realism with a wide public, by an artist already established and selling. It cost him critical standing over the following decades, but that cost was paid by the career, not risked by this panel.
Alexandros of Antioch (attributed) · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The inheritance is the late classical Aphrodite: the Cnidian, and above all the half-draped Aphrodite of the Capua type, usually traced to a fourth-century original, with the mantle about the hips and one foot raised. The departure is real and moderate. The torsion is pushed further, so the axis becomes a spiral to be walked round; the drapery is deepened and loosened until it seems held only by the knee; a classicizing head of almost fifth-century severity is set on a body of Hellenistic movement. That eclectic mix is the manner of the late Hellenistic workshops, not a wager against it. The turn that matters most to the modern figure, the armless fragment shown as whole, was made by the museum’s decision not to restore.
Jean-Honoré Fragonard · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
The inheritance is the fête galante of Watteau and his followers, Lancret and Pater, and the gallant pastoral of Boucher, Fragonard’s master; the swing as a garden amusement was already a subject in that tradition. The departure is in compression and candour: the diffuse company of lovers drawn down to one intrigue, the gaze made the plot, the viewer installed in the lover’s place, the erotic made an event with a punchline rather than an atmosphere; and a brush carried further toward freedom than Boucher’s porcelain finish. The stake was low. It was a private commission for a private room, and the painter’s turn from history painting toward private patrons was the career’s wager, not this canvas’s. A sharpening of a proven path, and the axis stands at its lowest but one.
The National · Music
7.8 · Tier III
The inheritance is the band’s own: the hushed baritone chamber rock of Alligator (2005) and Boxer (2007), descended from Joy Division, Leonard Cohen, Nick Cave and the Tindersticks. The turn here is in density and scale. The guitars thicken into walls, the orchestration grows heavier and the drums drive harder. A sound built on intimacy was enlarged at the risk of losing it, and the intimacy was kept, in the voice and the words. But this is a change of weight more than of direction: the forms, the register and the subjects carry over, and the stake was a larger audience, not the loss of the one the band had.
Imre Steindl · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
The lowest of the twelve. The Palace of Westminster gave the type: a Gothic parliament on a river front, long and pinnacled. Steindl’s turn was to set a great dome of Renaissance outline at the centre of a Gothic body and to discipline the plan into strict symmetry about it, so that the parliament is centred as Westminster is not. That is a real move, and the mixture of Gothic skin, Renaissance dome and Baroque plan is his own. What holds the axis at 7.0 is the stake. The move was made in the 1880s, when the Gothic Revival was a proven official style across Europe, and it risked nothing: a wager placed on a proven path is not a swerve. The cost the building paid, in money and in decades, was the cost of its size, not of a departure.
Michael Mann · Film
7.7 · Tier III
The departure is real in manner and slight in stake. Mann turned a romance of the nineteenth century, filmed several times before, into a fast, physical, near-wordless action film, with a researched particularity of weapons, dress and fieldcraft (the long rifle loaded at a run, the tomahawk, the fighting in the woods) that the frontier picture had not had. He moved the romance from Uncas and Cora to Hawkeye and Cora, and gave Uncas and Alice a love conducted almost without words. That is a strong refashioning of a source. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the stake: the wager was placed on a proven path, a star, a famous book and a costume epic, two years after a revisionist frontier epic had triumphed with audiences and the Academy. The film swerves within the studio epic rather than from it, and the departure cost little.
Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach, Nikolaus Pacassi and Johann Ferdinand Hetzendorf von Hohenberg · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
The lowest of the twelve, and the reduction is why. The inheritance is the French royal residence on the model of Versailles, palace, cour d’honneur, parterre and axis. Fischer’s first project swerved hard: a palace on the summit, reached by terraces and ramps, an imperial architecture drawn from Rome and the antique world against Versailles. It was never built. What was built is the reduction, and Pacassi turned it further toward convention and comfort, so the swerve of the work as it stands is of inversion and restraint: the palace below and only a monument above, Rococo rooms of domestic scale in a state residence, a Neoclassical Gloriette at the head of a Baroque axis. These are accents within a proven type, on a path already walked.
Paul Abadie · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
The church turns from the neo-Gothic that dominated French church building in the mid nineteenth century, and from the classical of the Madeleine, to the Romano-Byzantine domed church. The choice was deliberate and meant something: not the cathedral of the Middle Ages but the older, eastern and Romanesque Church. But the path was proven. Abadie had rebuilt Saint-Front at Périgueux; Vaudoyer’s cathedral at Marseille, begun in 1852, Espérandieu’s Notre-Dame de la Garde and Bossan’s Fourvière at Lyon, begun in 1872, were already in the idiom. The stake was scale and site, not language. A revival chosen against another revival is a swerve of position, a wager on a proven path: the lowest of the twelve.
Robert Motherwell · Visual art
7.6 · Tier III
The swerve of the Elegies belongs to their beginning. Around 1948 to 1950, as New York painting turned to abstraction, the painter set a public, historical subject, a political defeat, inside a nearly emblematic abstract format and carried it in black, which was not yet the established manner. That turn was real and cost something. But this is No. 110, painted in 1971, twenty-three years into a format the painter had made famous and returned to again and again: a wager placed on a proven path. Its own departures from the earlier canvases, the scale, the visible drawing in graphite and charcoal, acrylic in place of the oil of the early canvases, are accents on the format, not turns from it. The canvas is scored, not the series, and the axis stands lowest but one.
Berthe Morisot · Visual art
7.6 · Tier III
The turn is in the vantage and the handling, not the subject. Mother and child was the oldest of painted subjects and a staple of the Salon’s sentimental genre. Morisot takes it out of anecdote and out of devotion and paints it as modern, private, unsentimental life, from inside the room, by a woman, which the field had rarely done at this ambition. The gauze, broad and transparent, sits between the Salon finish and the open stroke of her later work. The stake was real and bounded: she showed it in the first independent exhibition of 1874, a public wager on an unproven company, but the canvas is among the more finished and conventionally composed things in that show. A turn inside a living genre.
Yayoi Kusama · Visual art
7.6 · Tier III
The unit is the room of 2013, and its inheritance is chiefly its maker’s own. The series turned in 1965, when Infinity Mirror Room: Phalli’s Field enclosed a floor of stuffed, spotted forms in mirrors and made a painting’s repetition into a space the body entered; that turn is context, and is not scored here. By 2013 the form was forty-eight years old, and its version in LED light over water eleven years old, from Fireflies on the Water (2002) and Aftermath of Obliteration of Eternity (2009). This room departs in degree: a denser and more coloured field, a programmed change of light, a cooler and more cosmic register. Mirrored rooms by others, Lucas Samaras’s of 1966 among them, lie in the wider field. The stake was small, the maker established and the form proven. A wager on a proven path is not a swerve; this refines one.
Arctic Monkeys · Music
7.5 · Tier III
The inheritance is plain and near: the guitar-band revival of 2001 to 2005, the Strokes, the Libertines and Franz Ferdinand; behind it the Jam and post-punk; for the words the observational English song from Ray Davies through the Smiths and Pulp to the spoken vernacular of the Streets. The turn is in the voice: a teenager singing very fast in his own regional speech, with a density of local particular that the guitar records of the moment did not attempt, against the borrowed transatlantic cool that Fake Tales mocks. The stake was small. A proven form played very well, to a market hungry for it: the departure is in degree and diction.
Robert Zemeckis · Film
7.5 · Tier III
The inheritance is the time-travel story, from Wells to Pal’s The Time Machine (1960) and television’s anthology fiction; the teen comedy of the early 1980s; and the 1950s nostalgia of American Graffiti (1973) and television’s Happy Days. The turn is real and narrow: time travel made into a family comedy, causality into farce, the parents’ courtship the machine’s whole object. The stake was the recasting of the lead after weeks of shooting, at real cost. But the film was made inside the Spielberg production house for a major studio, in a formula of setup and payoff that it perfects rather than leaves. A synthesis of proven paths, brilliantly joined; the wager was commercial, not formal.
R.E.M. · Music
7.5 · Tier III
The inheritance is the band’s own Murmur of the year before, at 8.5 here, and behind it the folk rock of the Byrds, the guitar bands after punk and the Southern songbook. The turn from Murmur is real and small. The production is drier and nearer, the sound of a band in a room rather than a mist of overdubs; the voice comes slightly forward; and Rockville turns openly to country, a direction the band would take further. That is a change of emphasis on a proven path, not a departure. The stake was modest: a young band praised for a debut, making the follow-up quickly with the same producers, on the same label, for the same audience. The band’s whole manner, still unusual in American rock of 1984, is credited, but most of that swerve was placed by the first album, and this is the lowest of the record’s gated axes.
Shepard Fairey · Visual art
7.3 · Tier III
The inheritance is plain and the maker has never hidden it: the Constructivist and Soviet poster, the American poster of the WPA and the war, Fitzpatrick’s Che, Warhol’s silkscreened leaders, and Fairey’s own OBEY Giant, the street campaign of stickers and paste-ups he had run since 1989. The departure is to take the outlaw idiom of the street, with its debt to propaganda, and turn it to a mainstream presidential candidate, unofficially and without his leave, and to distribute it by the free multiple until the campaign adopted it. That is a real turn of use. The stake was modest: the style was the maker’s proven one, he had a following and a commercial practice, and the risk was being ignored. The legal stake was real, but it was taken unawares, not wagered.
Wes Anderson · Film
6.9 · Tier II
The inheritance in 1996 was the crime film as the American independents of the early 1990s had remade it, Reservoir Dogs (1992) above all, violent, verbal and cool. The film turns it inside out: a heist comedy with no violence that lands, criminals who are gentle and earnest, a plan written in a notebook as if for a school project, and deadpan affection where its neighbours had irony. The manner later called Anderson’s begins here, the planned life, the earnest boy-man, the pop song placed for its feeling, the composed group shot, in a looser and more naturalistic look. The stake was real, and the film failed on release. What holds the axis: the turn is one of tone more than of form.
Ptolemaic builders · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the New Kingdom plan of pylon, court, hypostyle and sanctuary on one axis, and the temple keeps it with deliberate fidelity: its builders sought to repeat the order of the first time, not to depart from it. The turns are real but small: screen walls between the front columns of the hypostyle, composite floral capitals in varied sets, the sanctuary standing free within its corridor of chapels, the enclosure wall hugging the temple. The largest is the decision to inscribe nearly every surface with the building’s own theology, making the temple a library of itself. The stake was political and economic, a vast native temple raised under a foreign dynasty and through a revolt. As a departure in architecture it risked little, and that holds this axis lowest of the twelve.
Michael Curtiz · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the studio melodrama and the wartime intrigue picture, with Algiers (1938) on the same North African ground, a stage play’s unity of place, and the house style of Warner Bros. at its height. The departures are small: lovers who part by the hero’s choice, a cynic converted without being punished or killed, a closing friendship in place of a marriage. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the stake, scored with the turn. This was an A picture from the most efficient studio in Hollywood, made by a contract director with contract and loan-out stars, on a path every element of which was proven, and its one wager, the ending, was a studio’s decision about a property. It is the system working at its best, which is credited elsewhere; it is not a swerve. Shadow of a Doubt, on a more personal wager, stands at 7.3.
Chris Sanders · Film
7.3 · Tier III
The tradition is the American studio animated feature and the children’s adventure of the foundling. The turn is visual: computer animation pushed toward the painted image, with brushwork in leaves, water and sky. But the road was already open. The Spider-Verse films opened it, and DreamWorks itself took it with Puss in Boots: The Last Wish in 2022, so the wager is on a path proven two years before. In story and structure the film does not depart: the adaptation of a popular novel, a cast of star voices, a coming-of-age arc, a climactic battle. Its one quiet risk is its frankness about death among the animals and the long cold of the winter, which it does not soften. A deviation of manner more than of form, with little staked.
Tiwa builders · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The village inherits the ancestral Puebloan tradition of terraced, cellular, multistorey houses round a plaza with kivas, worked out centuries earlier at Chaco Canyon and in the northern San Juan. Taos continues it in earth rather than coursed stone, and its most distinctive turn is the pair of houses split by the stream. Its distinction is persistence and the beauty of a type perfected, not departure; nothing in it is a wager against the proven path, and the axis scores the turn and the stake together. The later doors, windows, ovens and church are accommodations of the Spanish world, not a swerve made by the work. That is what holds the axis at the lowest of the twelve: a tradition kept, which describes the kind of work and is no charge on its quality.
Joe Rosenthal · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
The departure is small, and the stake was of a kind this axis does not score. As a press photograph the image worked inside a long tradition of the heroic war picture and the news picture, and inside the field’s established means: the press camera, the agency wire, the cropped vertical for the front page. It proposes no new way of seeing, framing or sequencing. The danger to the maker was real and grave, but danger to the body is not a wager on form. What swerve there is lies in the anonymity, a heroic image without a visible face, and in an instant that made a sculptural group of an unposed second; neither was a programme. That is what holds the axis, with The Encompassed, lowest of the twelve: a practice perfected, not turned.
Built for Tokugawa Iemitsu · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The 1633 hall is a rebuilding of a hall the temple already had, in a type long established: cliff-built halls stood in Japan from the Heian period on, at Hasedera, at Ishiyama-dera and, far more daringly, in the Nageire-dō of Sanbutsu-ji. The departures are of degree, in the scale of the stage, the breadth of the hall and the length of the posts. The stake in engineering was real, a great timber platform on posts over a ravine in an earthquake country, but it was placed on a proven path, and the patron’s purpose was restoration, not a turn. The axis scores the turn and the stake together, and the turn is small. That holds the lowest of the twelve; how much of the stage’s scale was new in 1633 cannot be verified.
Ptolemaic and Roman builders · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
The Ptolemaic temple was deliberately conservative: its builders sought to restate the old house of the god in its canonical form, and they did so with notable success. Philae’s departures are those of circumstance: the bent axis and the trapezoidal court that follow the island, the birth house set within the court, the free variety of composite floral capitals, and the Roman kiosk that turns an Egyptian columned pavilion into a waterside gate. They are real accents, and the irregular plan is the most original thing in the complex. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the stake: the departures risked nothing the tradition would not allow, and continuity was the aim. A wager placed on a proven path is not a swerve.
Buena Vista Social Club · Music
7.7 · Tier III
The record’s project is fidelity, and a turn toward the past is a small swerve. The inheritance is the son, bolero, danzón and trova of Cuba before 1960, and the record plays them in their own manner, with arrangements largely received. Its departure is from the present, not from the tradition: from the timba and salsa that Cuban popular music had become, and from the fusion the world-music market preferred, which the planned meeting with Malian musicians would itself have been. The stake was real and commercial: a small London label, elderly musicians, some of them retired, an unfashionable repertoire, a session put together in days. Ry Cooder’s slide guitar is an accent, not a turn. What holds this axis lowest of the twelve is that the turn is slight by design.
René Magritte · Visual art
7.6 · Tier III
The tradition this canvas inherits is first Magritte’s own. The bowler-hatted man had been his figure since the later 1920s, and the hovering apple belongs to his apple pictures of the 1950s. In 1964 the turn is to stake these devices on a portrait and its withheld face. Against the art of its year, Pop, Minimalism and the late New York School, the canvas swerves by refusing the new, but at no cost. It is a mature painter consolidating a proven manner, and that wager had been won some thirty years before. A wager placed on a proven path is not a swerve, and that holds the axis among the lowest of the twelve.
Robert Eggers · Film
7.5 · Tier III
The film is a remake of a film already remade, from a novel adapted many times. The swerves are real but measured. The centre moves to Ellen: her prologue, her call and her desire make the tale hers, where in Murnau the husband’s journey is the spine. Orlok is remade from the bald, rat-like figure of 1922 into a moustached, decaying Transylvanian noble, a folkloric reading that broke with nearly a century of the image. The period is rendered with antiquarian exactness. What holds the figure here, lowest of the twelve, is the stake: a proven title, a studio, a genre in favour, and a director continuing a manner his earlier films had established. More than an accent, less than a turn.
Thomas Gainsborough · Visual art
7.4 · Tier III
The inheritance is Van Dyck’s full-length portrait and the English taste for Van Dyck dress in portraiture, practised by Hudson, Reynolds and others well before this canvas. The picture works inside that convention: the pose, the costume and the low horizon are borrowed, openly. The departure is in colour and touch: a full length built on a dominant cool blue, against the studio practice that kept the masses of light warm, and a handling looser and more flickering than the convention asked. The story that the picture answered Reynolds is a legend the dates will not bear, and it is not credited. The stake was small: a colour scheme was risked, not a career. A bold accent on a proven path.
The National · Music
7.4 · Tier III
The inheritance is the band’s own: the baritone, the literate and oblique lyric, the drums as lead instrument, the brass and string colour of the Dessners’ arrangements, all proven on the two records before it. The turn is small and real. The record relaxes: tempos slow, the tension of the earlier records is let go, and uneven meters are hidden inside songs that sound plain. Humiliation and the long codas take a little from krautrock, and the record is warmer and more songful than anything the band had made. But the stake was low. A band at its commercial height made a record in its established language, more confident and less nervous. A wager placed on a proven path is not a swerve; the axis credits the hidden meters and the softened attack, and no more.
Mogwai · Music
7.3 · Tier III
The inheritance is the band’s own language, the quiet to loud dynamic of its first records, and the post-rock of Slint and its successors. The turn is compression: pieces cut to four and five minutes, the piano moved to the front, a sharper division between the record’s poles, a little more voice. That is a real change of scale, but it refines a proven path, and the band had begun it on its third and fourth albums, where piano, vocoder and shorter forms already appear. The stake was small: a band with an established audience made the record that audience could most readily hear, and nothing in it risks the language itself. A wager on a proven path is not a swerve; this is a consolidation with some freshness of address.
Roman, under Augustus · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The inheritance is the Italic and Hellenistic temple on a podium, frontal and pseudoperipteral, as the temples of Augustan Rome had just refined it. The departure is slight. The Maison Carrée is a faithful provincial realisation of the metropolitan manner, distinguished by its quality and its survival, not by any turn in the type. Some refinements of proportion and ornament may be the local workshop’s, and they are credited as accents, the sign of a mind adjusting rather than merely copying. Nothing was wagered: the type was proven and the structure a modest trabeated span. This is what holds the axis lowest of the twelve: the axis scores the turn and the stake, and both are small. It is not charged for being classical; the Pantheon, at 9.3, is classical too.
Frank Darabont · Film
7.8 · Tier III
The inheritance is the prison film, Birdman of Alcatraz, Cool Hand Luke, Escape from Alcatraz, and the Hollywood friendship picture, told in the classical form of studio narration. The turns are real. The film moves the prison picture from the escape thriller to a chronicle of time, nineteen years in a patient rhythm; it tells the innocent man’s story through the guilty one, so that the narrator’s rehabilitation becomes a subject; and it withholds the escape from the viewer as it was withheld from Red. The stake was a long, slow drama with no action until its end. What holds the axis lowest: the form is a proven path, the risk was commercial patience rather than formal, and the film perfects that path more than it turns from it.
Egyptian (New Kingdom) · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
The inheritance is the Book of the Dead as it stood in the New Kingdom: a fixed corpus of spells, a repertory of vignettes, workshop models, a style governed by the canon of proportion. The departure is small and real in two places. The judgment is composed with unusual clarity and breadth, the heart shown as a jar, Ammit given full presence, the presentation to Osiris extended into a second act; and the Opening of the Mouth is given a scale and a crowd that make it a scene rather than a sign. These are degrees within a proven path. The roll’s purpose was to be correct, and correctness is what its makers achieved; a wager on a proven path is not a swerve. That holds the lowest of the twelve, and it reports the kind of work, not a fault in it.
Samuel Barber · Music
7.8 · Tier III
The inheritance is the slow string movement of late Romanticism and its English and American successors: Mahler’s Adagietto, the string elegies of Elgar and others, the chorale-like adagio. The departure is small. The harmony is tonal and modestly chromatic, the line vocal, the form an arch, and no device in it would have struck a listener of 1900 as strange. Its own features, one line spun without a contrasting theme, phrases of irregular length, the cut at the summit and the open close, are accents within the tradition. There was a stake: to write this in the decade of Schoenberg, Stravinsky and the American modernists was to accept the charge of conservatism. But a wager on a proven path is not a swerve.
Steve McCurry · Visual art
7.4 · Tier III
The inheritance: the humanist documentary portrait, Lange’s Migrant Mother and the Farm Security Administration faces, the concerned photography of the postwar decades, the colour feature of the picture magazine, and behind them the frontal portrait of painting. The departure is small and mostly of degree: a documentary subject made in saturated colour with the finish of a studio or fashion portrait, the tight crop, the shallow focus, the complementary palette, so that the humanitarian photograph takes on the beauty of an advertisement. That fusion was already the house style of National Geographic and of McCurry’s colour work. No form was risked and no expectation broken; the image succeeded on terms its publisher already rewarded. A proven path sharpened, not a swerve.
Haddon Sundblom · Visual art
7.3 · Tier III
The turn is real but short. Before 1931 Santa was drawn in many manners, often small, elfin or cartoonish, though already commonly in red: the red is not Sundblom’s invention, and the paintings are not credited with it. Sundblom turned toward a life-size, warm-blooded Santa painted in the loaded, broad manner of the portrait tradition, and set him in an ordinary house. That move from emblem to portrait is the swerve. Its stake was low: a commercial commission, an approved idiom, a figure everyone loved, and then a proven formula repeated for three decades. A wager on a proven path is not a swerve, and most of this body is that path.
Maurizio Cattelan · Visual art
6.7 · Tier II
The inheritance: the readymade, from Duchamp; the instruction and the certificate as the work, from Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings; the replenished perishable, from Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s candy spills; and Cattelan’s own earlier works, a gallerist taped to a wall and a gold toilet. The departure is to put a perishable readymade with a replacement certificate into the most commercial setting there is, priced as a major object, and to let the joke be the market’s. The turn is in setting and tone more than in form, which was a century old in its premise and decades old in its mechanism. The stake was real and modest: ridicule, at a moment when ridicule was the artist’s currency and could only enlarge him. A wager placed partly on a proven path.
David Childs (Skidmore, Owings and Merrill) · Architecture
7.2 · Tier III
The inheritance: the tapered, chamfered glass supertall, a proven type by 2005, and a manner in which the architect’s own firm had built for decades. The departure is small, and the stake was not aesthetic. The swerve that was proposed, Libeskind’s asymmetric crystal with its spire set off centre and the twisting tower of 2004, was abandoned, and the security redesign of 2005 turned the scheme back toward the conservative. What was risked was civic and political, years of conflict among owner, leaseholder, state and city, and that cost was paid by the project, not wagered by the form. The concrete core is a sound engineering choice, not a turn in the art. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: a wager placed on a proven path is not a swerve.
David Mackenzie · Film
7.2 · Tier III
The inheritance is the historical war epic, and above all Braveheart (1995), whose story ends where this one begins and which shaped the popular picture of these years. The departures are real. The film ends at Loudoun Hill, a small battle, not at Bannockburn, and so refuses the triumph its genre expects; it plays the killing of Comyn as the founding crime it was; and it trades the epic’s colour and speeches for handheld naturalism, wet light and mud. What holds the figure: these turn within the genre, not out of it, and the stake was a studio’s, a large historical film from a streaming company, not an artist’s; the cut made after the premiere drew the film further toward the genre’s pace.
Banksy · Visual art
7.0 · Tier III
The inheritance is the stencil graffiti of Paris in the 1980s, above all Blek le Rat, whose debt Banksy has acknowledged, and the British graffiti and poster culture of the 1990s. The stencil as a fast, witty, legible public statement between graffiti and the gallery is the departure of Banksy’s body of work, not of this image. Within that body the image turns in tone: tenderness and sentiment where the register had been the rat, the joke and the political sting. The turn is real and modest, and the stake was the ordinary stake of illegal painting on a public wall, shared by every writer on the street. The larger swerve, putting a work’s destruction into its sale, is the act of 2018 and is weighed with Love Is in the Bin.
Egyptian (New Kingdom) · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The inheritance is long and exact. The face covering of the dead runs from Old Kingdom plaster masks through Middle Kingdom cartonnage; the royal image in the nemes, with uraeus and beard, was some fifteen centuries old; the gold and inlay of the royal workshops is already in the jewellery of the Middle Kingdom princesses. What the mask has of its own is the trace of Amarna in the face, a softness the restoration did not quite erase, and the extravagance of a full head in solid gold. Whether other kings had masks as fine cannot be known, because their burials were robbed. The stake was low: a commission within a programme, made to be buried, for a rite that set its form. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that it is a supreme instance of a canon, not a turn from one.
Alfred Eisenstaedt · Visual art
7.5 · Tier III
The inheritance is the candid 35 mm photograph of the 1920s and 1930s, of Salomon, Kertész and Eisenstaedt himself in the German illustrated press, carried to America in the picture magazine Life, which he had served from its first year. The image departs from none of it. It is a candid street photograph of a public event, taken on the run, chosen from a sequence and run full page, as Life ran hundreds. There is no new way of seeing in it: the means were the photographer’s ordinary means, and the event did the rest. The stake was nil; a press photographer’s risk at a celebration is to miss the picture, not to wager on form. A wager on a proven path is not a swerve, and the axis stands, with The Encompassed, lowest of the twelve.
Yousef Abdelky · Architecture
7.3 · Tier III
The lowest of the twelve. The inheritance is the whole tradition of the congregational mosque, chosen from at will: Mughal domes, minarets and inlay, Moorish arches, Persian and Arab ornament, the single great dome of the Ottomans as a distant echo. The departure is slight, and the building’s wager is the opposite of a swerve: to gather the tradition, not to turn from it. Its novelties are of means, the calligraphy lit from behind, the lunar lighting, the scale of carpet and chandeliers, a mosque on a national visitors’ route, and they accent rather than redirect. What holds it here is the stake. It was money and time, not form: nothing in it risked failing as architecture, and an eclectic classical idiom in 1996, after decades of modern mosques in the region, was the safer course for a founding monument.
James Montgomery Flagg · Visual art
7.2 · Tier III
The inheritance is direct: Alfred Leete’s Kitchener of 1914, pointing out of the picture at the viewer, and the American cartoon tradition of Uncle Sam. The departures are real. The general becomes a personification, so that the demand comes from the nation rather than a commander; the comic Uncle Sam is made grave; the demand is turned into the first person, which tightens the address. But the stake was small. The formula had proved itself in Britain, the poster was commissioned to recruit, and every choice in it is a wager placed on a proven path, which the rubric does not count as a swerve. It stands above pastiche because the transfer from a man to a nation is a real change of meaning.
Coldplay · Music
7.2 · Tier III
The inheritance is the band’s own first album, Parachutes (2000), quiet guitar songs in falsetto, and around it the British guitar rock of the late 1990s, Radiohead’s The Bends, Jeff Buckley and Travis, with U2’s anthem behind them all. The turn is real and small: the piano moves to the centre, the sound grows from the small room to the stadium, and Clocks and Politik drive harder than the first record did. The stake was a second album after a large success, pressure more than risk. Every device here, arpeggiated piano, chiming delayed guitar, falsetto lift, slow build to a wide chorus, was the common language of the rock ballad by 2002.
Oasis · Music
7.2 · Tier III
The inheritance is plain and avowed: the Beatles above all, the Stones, the Who, the Faces, T. Rex and Slade, the Jam and Weller, the Manchester of the Stone Roses; the piano opening of Don’t Look Back in Anger echoes Imagine. The record does not depart from this tradition; it consolidates it, and that is its aim. The turn credited is from the band’s own debut, the speed and sneer of Definitely Maybe (1994), toward ballads, acoustic guitar, strings, mid-tempo anthems and a second lead singer. That turn carried a stake, softer songs at the centre of the follow-up to a first summit, but it was placed on the most proven path in British popular music, and a turn from one’s own manner toward the canon is not a swerve from the tradition.
Francis Ford Coppola · Film
6.4 · Tier II
The inheritance is the saga’s own formula, the ceremony that opens and the intercut killings that close, which this film repeats at the opera. The turns are real and narrow. The gangster film becomes a drama of penitence; the killer is old, diabetic and seeking absolution; the crime moves into the Vatican’s finances; the antagonist is the respectable world. The stake was Coppola’s return, after the losses of the 1980s, to a saga he had long declined to continue, and the late casting of his daughter in the role on which the ending turns. What holds the axis low is that the form is a wager on his own proven path, and its boldest move, the Church, is a change of subject, not of form.
Jack Vettriano · Visual art
6.5 · Tier II
The inheritance is easy to name: the commercial illustration and fashion plate of the 1930s to 1950s, the film still, Hopper’s American realism at second hand, and the long British line of narrative genre painting. The departure from it is small. What the picture turns from is not a tradition but a contemporary art world: in Britain in 1992, painted narrative glamour of this kind stood outside every institution that mattered, and the canvas was painted as though that world did not exist. That is a stance, the stance of a self-taught outsider. But the turn and the stake are scored in the work, and the work wagers on the most proven path there is, an image the public already loved in other forms. A deviation that risked nothing formally is an accent.