The adjective "modern" or "modernist" is sometimes applied to the Martini, as by Max Rudin in a notable essay.*  Although these words are almost desperately vague, the importance of the Martini causes one to try to figure out what they might mean as a description of this drink.

    As applied to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, "modern" refers to various avant-garde movements: in literature, beginning with Baudelaire; in painting, with Impressionism; in music, on a generous view of the matter, with Elgar, R. Strauss, and Sibellius; in design and architecture, perhaps with Art Nouveau.  But "modern" is especially applied to the Bauhaus (Breuer; Gropius; Mies van der Rohe) and to Le Corbusier.  Their style, emerging in the period between the two World Wars, soon moved from declared revolutionary beginnings to world-wide acceptance as the "International Style."

    If the Martini is a modern or modernist drink, where does it fit into this picture?  First, let's distinguish between the cocktail itself and the glass in which it is served.  The cocktail was so firmly established everywhere in the United States by the 1890s that I do not see how it could ever have been perceived later as avant-garde.  Indeed, the Martini is thought of as belonging to the past (Simple Message 7 in M,SU and Past, Martini as Thing of).

    As for the glass, the cone-shaped bowl on a stem is the Martini's link with modernism.  Rudin says of this glass that it is "one of the few designs to make a seamless transition from moderne to modern."  By "moderne," he means Art Deco, which ends with the Second World War.  His formulation presupposes that this glass was already standard in the Art Deco period.  The evidence suggests, however, that it became standard for the Martini only in the 1940s, as I argued in "Appendix: The Martini Glass" in M,SU. On the other hand, as I said in that Appendix, various avant-garde movements in painting and design prepared the eye to perceive the now standard glass as modern or modernist, and certainly it was so perceived by eyes that were prepared.

    Rudin's larger claim concerning the Martini as a modernist drink ("American modernism in drinkable form") is more plausible, if it is applied to the period from the end of World War II to about 1960.  The same corporate executives who hired International Style architects drank Martinis. In their minds, whether or not they ever articulated it, the buildings and the drink might have expressed the same esthetic.  Advertising had welcomed modernism even earlier, as the career of Hans Schleger shows. He came to the United States in 1924.  Signing himself "Zero" in token of his allegiance to the minimalist principles of the Bauhaus, he introduced modernism into publicity.  In her memoir of her husband, Pat Schleger writes: "His success in New York was a matter of the modernist glamour he attached to the commodity in that age of skyscrapers and jazz."**

    The parallel between Martini and architecture as two expressions of modernism can be taken a step further.  Fareed Zakaria, writing in the Italian political magazine Liberal, sees the end of the 1940s as the apogee of the American century and holds that the Martini attained its perfection at this same time (Mar. 26, 1998, p. 25).  (For Zakaria, Dean Acheson, Secretary of State 1949-1953, personifies post-war America.  Acheson was of course a Martini drinker.)  Then, in the course of the 1950s, just as architecture moved in the direction of brutalism, so the Martini became excessively dry, flavorless vodka replaced gin, and the ritual of mixing was abandoned in favor of the Martini on the rocks.  In both cases, the esthetic impulse of modernism was carried to a self-defeating extreme.

*Max Rudin, "'There Is Something About A Martini'," American Heritage 48.4, July-August, 1997, 32-51.

**Pat Schleger,  Zero: Hans Schleger - A Life Of Design, with an introduction by Fiona MacCarthy (Aldershot: Lund Humphries, 2001).  Published in the U.S. by Princeton Architectural Press.  One of Schleger's posters for Martini and Rossi can be seen elsewhere on this web page.

© 2001, Lowell Edmunds