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Modernism

From Wikipedia, in a visual modern way
Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907). This proto-cubist work is considered a seminal influence on subsequent trends in modernist painting.
Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907). This proto-cubist work is considered a seminal influence on subsequent trends in modernist painting.

Modernism is both a philosophical and arts movement that arose from broad transformations in Western society during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The movement reflected a desire for the creation of new forms of art, philosophy, and social organization which reflected the newly emerging industrial world, including features such as urbanization, architecture, new technologies, and war. Artists attempted to depart from traditional forms of art, which they considered outdated or obsolete. The poet Ezra Pound's 1934 injunction to "Make it New" was the touchstone of the movement's approach.

Modernist innovations included abstract art, the stream-of-consciousness novel, montage cinema, atonal and twelve-tone music, divisionist painting and modern architecture. Modernism explicitly rejected the ideology of realism[a][2][3] and made use of the works of the past by the employment of reprise, incorporation, rewriting, recapitulation, revision and parody.[b][c][4] Modernism also rejected the certainty of Enlightenment thinking, and many modernists also rejected religious belief.[5][d] A notable characteristic of modernism is self-consciousness concerning artistic and social traditions, which often led to experimentation with form, along with the use of techniques that drew attention to the processes and materials used in creating works of art.[7]

While some scholars see modernism continuing into the 21st century, others see it evolving into late modernism or high modernism.[8] Postmodernism is a departure from modernism and rejects its basic assumptions.[9][10][11]

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Philosophy

Philosophy

Philosophy is the systematized study of general and fundamental questions, such as those about existence, reason, knowledge, values, mind, and language. Some sources claim the term was coined by Pythagoras, although this theory is disputed by some. Philosophical methods include questioning, critical discussion, rational argument, and systematic presentation.

Industrial society

Industrial society

In sociology, industrial society is a society driven by the use of technology and machinery to enable mass production, supporting a large population with a high capacity for division of labour. Such a structure developed in the Western world in the period of time following the Industrial Revolution, and replaced the agrarian societies of the pre-modern, pre-industrial age. Industrial societies are generally mass societies, and may be succeeded by an information society. They are often contrasted with traditional societies.

Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an expatriate American poet and critic, a major figure in the early modernist poetry movement, and a fascist collaborator in Italy during World War II. His works include Ripostes (1912), Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), and his 800-page epic poem, The Cantos (c. 1917–1962).

Abstract art

Abstract art

Abstract art uses visual language of shape, form, color and line to create a composition which may exist with a degree of independence from visual references in the world.

Montage (filmmaking)

Montage (filmmaking)

Montage is a film editing technique in which a series of short shots are sequenced to condense space, time, and information.

Modern architecture

Modern architecture

Modern architecture, or modernist architecture, was an architectural movement or architectural style based upon new and innovative technologies of construction, particularly the use of glass, steel, and reinforced concrete; the idea that form should follow function (functionalism); an embrace of minimalism; and a rejection of ornament. It emerged in the first half of the 20th century and became dominant after World War II until the 1980s, when it was gradually replaced as the principal style for institutional and corporate buildings by postmodern architecture. According to Le Corbusier the roots of the mouvement were to be found in the works of Eugène Viollet le duc.

Incorporation (linguistics)

Incorporation (linguistics)

In linguistics, incorporation is a phenomenon by which a grammatical category, such as a verb, forms a compound with its direct object or adverbial modifier, while retaining its original syntactic function. The inclusion of a noun qualifies the verb, narrowing its scope rather than making reference to a specific entity.

Parody

Parody

A parody, also known as a spoof, a satire, a send-up, a take-off, a lampoon, a play on (something), or a caricature, is a creative work designed to imitate, comment on, and/or mock its subject by means of satiric or ironic imitation. Often its subject is an original work or some aspect of it, but a parody can also be about a real-life person, event, or movement. Literary scholar Professor Simon Dentith defines parody as "any cultural practice which provides a relatively polemical allusive imitation of another cultural production or practice". The literary theorist Linda Hutcheon said "parody ... is imitation, not always at the expense of the parodied text." Parody may be found in art or culture, including literature, music, theater, television and film, animation, and gaming. Some parody is practiced in theater.

Age of Enlightenment

Age of Enlightenment

The Age of Enlightenment or the Enlightenment was an intellectual and philosophical movement that dominated Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries with global influences and effects. The Enlightenment included a range of ideas centered on the value of human happiness, the pursuit of knowledge obtained by means of reason and the evidence of the senses, and ideals such as natural law, liberty, progress, toleration, fraternity, constitutional government, and separation of church and state.

Late modernism

Late modernism

In the visual arts, late modernism encompasses the overall production of most recent art made between the aftermath of World War II and the early years of the 21st century. The terminology often points to similarities between late modernism and post-modernism although there are differences. The predominant term for art produced since the 1950s is contemporary art. Not all art labelled as contemporary art is modernist or post-modern, and the broader term encompasses both artists who continue to work in modern and late modernist traditions, as well as artists who reject modernism for post-modernism or other reasons. Arthur Danto argues explicitly in After the End of Art that contemporaneity was the broader term, and that postmodern objects represent a subsector of the contemporary movement which replaced modernity and modernism, while other notable critics: Hilton Kramer, Robert C. Morgan, Kirk Varnedoe, Jean-François Lyotard and others have argued that postmodern objects are at best relative to modernist works.

High modernism

High modernism

High modernism is a form of modernity, characterized by an unfaltering confidence in science and technology as means to reorder the social and natural world. The high modernist movement was particularly prevalent during the Cold War, especially in the late 1950s and 1960s.

Postmodernism

Postmodernism

Postmodernism is an intellectual stance or mode of discourse characterized by skepticism toward the "grand narratives" of modernism, rejection of epistemic certainty or the stability of meaning, and sensitivity to the role of ideology in maintaining political power. Claims to objectivity are dismissed as naïve realism, with attention drawn to the conditional nature of knowledge claims within particular historical, political, and cultural discourses. The postmodern outlook is characterized by self-referentiality, epistemological relativism, moral relativism, pluralism, irony, irreverence, and eclecticism; it rejects the "universal validity" of binary oppositions, stable identity, hierarchy, and categorization.

Definition

Some commentators define modernism as a mode of thinking—one or more philosophically defined characteristics, like self-consciousness or self-reference, that run across all the novelties in the arts and the disciplines.[12] More common, especially in the West, are those who see it as a socially progressive trend of thought that affirms the power of human beings to create, improve, and reshape their environment with the aid of practical experimentation, scientific knowledge, or technology.[e] From this perspective, modernism encouraged the re-examination of every aspect of existence, from commerce to philosophy, with the goal of finding that which was holding back progress, and replacing it with new ways of reaching the same end.

According to Roger Griffin, modernism can be defined as a broad cultural, social, or political initiative, sustained by the ethos of "the temporality of the new". Modernism sought to restore, Griffin writes, a "sense of sublime order and purpose to the contemporary world, thereby counteracting the (perceived) erosion of an overarching 'nomos', or 'sacred canopy', under the fragmenting and secularizing impact of modernity." Therefore, phenomena apparently unrelated to each other such as "Expressionism, Futurism, vitalism, Theosophy, psychoanalysis, nudism, eugenics, utopian town planning and architecture, modern dance, Bolshevism, organic nationalism – and even the cult of self-sacrifice that sustained the hecatomb of the First World War – disclose a common cause and psychological matrix in the fight against (perceived) decadence." All of them embody bids to access a "supra-personal experience of reality", in which individuals believed they could transcend their own mortality, and eventually that they had ceased to be victims of history to become instead its creators.[14]

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Progress

Progress

Progress is the movement towards a refined, improved, or otherwise desired state. In the context of progressivism, it refers to the proposition that advancements in technology, science, and social organization have resulted, and by extension will continue to result, in an improved human condition; the latter may happen as a result of direct human action, as in social enterprise or through activism, or as a natural part of sociocultural evolution.

Roger Griffin

Roger Griffin

Roger David Griffin is a British professor of modern history and political theorist at Oxford Brookes University, England. His principal interest is the socio-historical and ideological dynamics of fascism, as well as various forms of political or religious fanaticism.

Nomos (sociology)

Nomos (sociology)

In sociology, nomos is a habit or custom of social and political behavior that is socially constructed and historically specific. It refers not only to explicit laws but to all of the normal rules and forms people take for granted in their daily activities. Because it represents order that is validated by and binding on those who fall under its jurisdiction, it is a social construct with ethical dimensions.

Expressionism

Expressionism

Expressionism is a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Northern Europe around the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas. Expressionist artists have sought to express the meaning of emotional experience rather than physical reality.

Futurism

Futurism

Futurism was an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy, and to a lesser extent in other countries, in the early 20th century. It emphasized dynamism, speed, technology, youth, violence, and objects such as the car, the airplane, and the industrial city. Its key figures included the Italians Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Fortunato Depero, Gino Severini, Giacomo Balla, and Luigi Russolo. Italian Futurism glorified modernity and according to its doctrine, aimed to liberate Italy from the weight of its past. Important Futurist works included Marinetti's 1909 Manifesto of Futurism, Boccioni's 1913 sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, Balla's 1913–1914 painting Abstract Speed + Sound, and Russolo's The Art of Noises (1913).

Theosophy

Theosophy

Theosophy is a religion established in the United States during the late 19th century. It was founded primarily by the Ukrainian Helena Blavatsky and draws its teachings predominantly from Blavatsky's writings. Categorized by scholars of religion as both a new religious movement and as part of the occultist stream of Western esotericism, it draws upon both older European philosophies such as Neoplatonism and Asian religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism.

Psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis is a set of theories and therapeutic techniques that deal in part with the unconscious mind, and which together form a method of treatment for mental disorders. The discipline was established in the early 1890s by Sigmund Freud, whose work stemmed partly from the clinical work of Josef Breuer and others. Freud developed and refined the theory and practice of psychoanalysis until his death in 1939. In an encyclopedia article, he identified the cornerstones of psychoanalysis as – "the assumption that there are unconscious mental processes, the recognition of the theory of repression and resistance, the appreciation of the importance of sexuality and of the Oedipus complex." Freud's students Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav Jung developed offshoots of psychoanalysis which they called individual psychology (Adler) and Analytical Psychology (Jung), although Freud himself wrote a number of criticisms of them and emphatically denied that they were forms of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis was later developed in different directions by neo-Freudian thinkers, such as Erich Fromm, Karen Horney, and Harry Stack Sullivan.

Eugenics

Eugenics

Eugenics is a fringe set of beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population. Historically, eugenicists have attempted to alter human gene pools by excluding people and groups judged to be inferior or promoting those judged to be superior. In recent years, the term has seen a revival in bioethical discussions on the usage of new technologies such as CRISPR and genetic screening, with a heated debate on whether these technologies should be called eugenics or not.

Modern dance

Modern dance

Modern dance is a broad genre of western concert or theatrical dance which included dance styles such as ballet, folk, ethnic, religious, and social dancing; and primarily arose out of Europe and the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It was considered to have been developed as a rejection of, or rebellion against, classical ballet, and also a way to express social concerns like socioeconomic and cultural factors.

Bolsheviks

Bolsheviks

The Bolsheviks, also known in English as the Bolshevists, were a far-left, revolutionary Marxist faction founded by Vladimir Lenin that split with the Mensheviks from the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP), a revolutionary socialist political party formed in 1898, at its Second Party Congress in 1903.

Romantic nationalism

Romantic nationalism

Romantic nationalism is the form of nationalism in which the state claims its political legitimacy as an organic consequence of the unity of those it governs. This includes such factors as language, race, ethnicity, culture, religion, and customs of the nation in its primal sense of those who were born within its culture. It can be applied to ethnic nationalism as well as civic nationalism. Romantic nationalism arose in reaction to dynastic or imperial hegemony, which assessed the legitimacy of the state from the top down, emanating from a monarch or other authority, which justified its existence. Such downward-radiating power might ultimately derive from a god or gods (see the divine right of kings and the Mandate of Heaven).

Hecatomb

Hecatomb

In ancient Greece, a hecatomb was a sacrifice of 100 cattle to the Greek gods. In practice, as few as 12 could make up a hecatomb.

Early history

Origins

According to one critic, modernism developed out of Romanticism's revolt against the effects of the Industrial Revolution and bourgeois values: "The ground motive of modernism, Graff asserts, was criticism of the nineteenth-century bourgeois social order and its world view [...] the modernists, carrying the torch of romanticism."[a][2][3] While J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851), one of the greatest landscape painters of the 19th century, was a member of the Romantic movement, as "a pioneer in the study of light, colour, and atmosphere", he "anticipated the French Impressionists" and therefore modernism "in breaking down conventional formulas of representation; [though] unlike them, he believed that his works should always express significant historical, mythological, literary, or other narrative themes."[16]

A Realist portrait of Otto von Bismarck. Modernist artists largely rejected realism.
A Realist portrait of Otto von Bismarck. Modernist artists largely rejected realism.

The dominant trends of industrial Victorian England were opposed, from about 1850, by the English poets and painters that constituted the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, because of their "opposition to technical skill without inspiration."[17]: 815  They were influenced by the writings of the art critic John Ruskin (1819–1900), who had strong feelings about the role of art in helping to improve the lives of the urban working classes, in the rapidly expanding industrial cities of Britain.[17]: 816  Art critic Clement Greenberg describes the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood as proto-Modernists: "There the proto-Modernists were, of all people, the pre-Raphaelites (and even before them, as proto-proto-Modernists, the German Nazarenes). The Pre-Raphaelites actually foreshadowed Manet (1832–1883), with whom Modernist painting most definitely begins. They acted on a dissatisfaction with painting as practiced in their time, holding that its realism wasn't truthful enough."[18] Rationalism has also had opponents in the philosophers Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855)[19] and later Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), both of whom had significant influence on existentialism and nihilism.[20]: 120 

However, the Industrial Revolution continued. Influential innovations included steam-powered industrialization, and especially the development of railways, starting in Britain in the 1830s,[21] and the subsequent advancements in physics, engineering, and architecture associated with this. A major 19th-century engineering achievement was The Crystal Palace, the huge cast-iron and plate glass exhibition hall built for the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London. Glass and iron were used in a similar monumental style in the construction of major railway terminals in London, such as Paddington Station (1854)[22] and King's Cross station (1852).[23] These technological advances led to the building of later structures like the Brooklyn Bridge (1883) and the Eiffel Tower (1889). The latter broke all previous limitations on how tall man-made objects could be. These engineering marvels radically altered the 19th-century urban environment and the daily lives of people. The human experience of time itself was altered, with the development of the electric telegraph from 1837,[24] and the adoption of standard time by British railway companies from 1845, and in the rest of the world over the next fifty years.[25]

Despite continuing technological advances, the idea that history and civilization were inherently progressive, and that progress was always good, came under increasing attack in the nineteenth century. Arguments arose that the values of the artist and those of society were not merely different, but that Society was antithetical to Progress, and could not move forward in its present form. Early in the century, the philosopher Schopenhauer (1788–1860) (The World as Will and Representation, 1819) had called into question the previous optimism, and his ideas had an important influence on later thinkers, including Nietzsche.[19] Two of the most significant thinkers of the mid nineteenth century were biologist Charles Darwin (1809–1882), author of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859), and political scientist Karl Marx (1818–1883), author of Das Kapital (1867). Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection undermined religious certainty and the idea of human uniqueness. In particular, the notion that human beings were driven by the same impulses as "lower animals" proved to be difficult to reconcile with the idea of an ennobling spirituality.[26] Karl Marx argued that there were fundamental contradictions within the capitalist system, and that the workers were anything but free.[27]

Odilon Redon, Guardian Spirit of the Waters, 1878, charcoal on paper, Art Institute of Chicago
Odilon Redon, Guardian Spirit of the Waters, 1878, charcoal on paper, Art Institute of Chicago

The beginnings in the late nineteenth century

Historians, and writers in different disciplines, have suggested various dates as starting points for modernism. Historian William Everdell, for example, has argued that modernism began in the 1870s, when metaphorical (or ontological) continuity began to yield to the discrete with mathematician Richard Dedekind's (1831–1916) Dedekind cut, and Ludwig Boltzmann's (1844–1906) statistical thermodynamics.[12] Everdell also thinks modernism in painting began in 1885–1886 with Seurat's Divisionism, the "dots" used to paint A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. On the other hand, visual art critic Clement Greenberg called Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) "the first real Modernist",[28] though he also wrote, "What can be safely called Modernism emerged in the middle of the last century—and rather locally, in France, with Baudelaire in literature and Manet in painting, and perhaps with Flaubert, too, in prose fiction. (It was a while later, and not so locally, that Modernism appeared in music and architecture)."[18] The poet Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), and Flaubert's novel Madame Bovary were both published in 1857.

In the arts and letters, two important approaches developed separately in France, beginning in the 1860s. The first was Impressionism, a school of painting that initially focused on work done, not in studios, but outdoors (en plein air). Impressionist paintings demonstrated that human beings do not see objects, but instead see light itself. The school gathered adherents despite internal divisions among its leading practitioners, and became increasingly influential. Initially rejected from the most important commercial show of the time, the government-sponsored Paris Salon, the Impressionists organized yearly group exhibitions in commercial venues during the 1870s and 1880s, timing them to coincide with the official Salon. A significant event of 1863 was the Salon des Refusés, created by Emperor Napoleon III to display all of the paintings rejected by the Paris Salon. While most were in standard styles, but by inferior artists, the work of Manet attracted tremendous attention, and opened commercial doors to the movement. The second French school was Symbolism, which literary historians see beginning with Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867), and including the later poets, Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) Une Saison en Enfer (A Season in Hell, 1873), Paul Verlaine (1844–1896), Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898), and Paul Valéry (1871–1945). The symbolists "stressed the priority of suggestion and evocation over direct description and explicit analogy," and were especially interested in "the musical properties of language."[29]

Cabaret, which gave birth to so many of the arts of modernism, including the immediate precursors of film, may be said to have begun in France in 1881 with the opening of the Black Cat in Montmartre, the beginning of the ironic monologue, and the founding of the Society of Incoherent Arts.[30]

Influential in the early days of modernism were the theories of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939). Freud's first major work was Studies on Hysteria (with Josef Breuer, 1895). Central to Freud's thinking is the idea "of the primacy of the unconscious mind in mental life," so that all subjective reality was based on the play of basic drives and instincts, through which the outside world was perceived. Freud's description of subjective states involved an unconscious mind full of primal impulses, and counterbalancing self-imposed restrictions derived from social values.[17]: 538 

Henri Matisse, The Dance, 1910, Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia. At the beginning of the 20th century Henri Matisse and several other young artists including the pre-cubist Georges Braque, André Derain, Raoul Dufy and Maurice de Vlaminck revolutionized the Paris art world with "wild", multi-colored, expressive landscapes and figure paintings that the critics called Fauvism. Henri Matisse's second version of The Dance signifies a key point in his career and in the development of modern painting.[31]
Henri Matisse, The Dance, 1910, Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia. At the beginning of the 20th century Henri Matisse and several other young artists including the pre-cubist Georges Braque, André Derain, Raoul Dufy and Maurice de Vlaminck revolutionized the Paris art world with "wild", multi-colored, expressive landscapes and figure paintings that the critics called Fauvism. Henri Matisse's second version of The Dance signifies a key point in his career and in the development of modern painting.[31]

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) was another major precursor of modernism,[32] with a philosophy in which psychological drives, specifically the "will to power" (Wille zur Macht), was of central importance: "Nietzsche often identified life itself with 'will to power', that is, with an instinct for growth and durability."[33][34] Henri Bergson (1859–1941), on the other hand, emphasized the difference between scientific, clock time and the direct, subjective, human experience of time.[20]: 131  His work on time and consciousness "had a great influence on twentieth-century novelists," especially those modernists who used the stream of consciousness technique, such as Dorothy Richardson, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf (1882–1941).[35] Also important in Bergson's philosophy was the idea of élan vital, the life force, which "brings about the creative evolution of everything."[20]: 132  His philosophy also placed a high value on intuition, though without rejecting the importance of the intellect.[20]: 132 

Important literary precursors of modernism were Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881), who wrote the novels Crime and Punishment (1866) and The Brothers Karamazov (1880);[36] Walt Whitman (1819–1892), who published the poetry collection Leaves of Grass (1855–1891); and August Strindberg (1849–1912), especially his later plays, including the trilogy To Damascus 1898–1901, A Dream Play (1902) and The Ghost Sonata (1907). Henry James has also been suggested as a significant precursor, in a work as early as The Portrait of a Lady (1881).[37]

Out of the collision of ideals derived from Romanticism, and an attempt to find a way for knowledge to explain that which was as yet unknown, came the first wave of works in the first decade of the 20th century, which, while their authors considered them extensions of existing trends in art, broke the implicit contract with the general public that artists were the interpreters and representatives of bourgeois culture and ideas. These "Modernist" landmarks include the atonal ending of Arnold Schoenberg's Second String Quartet in 1908, the expressionist paintings of Wassily Kandinsky starting in 1903, and culminating with his first abstract painting and the founding of the Blue Rider group in Munich in 1911, and the rise of fauvism and the inventions of cubism from the studios of Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and others, in the years between 1900 and 1910.

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Eugène Delacroix

Eugène Delacroix

Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix was a French Romantic artist regarded from the outset of his career as the leader of the French Romantic school.

Liberty Leading the People

Liberty Leading the People

Liberty Leading the People is a painting by Eugène Delacroix commemorating the July Revolution of 1830, which toppled King Charles X. A woman of the people with a Phrygian cap personifying the concept of Liberty leads a varied group of people forward over a barricade and the bodies of the fallen, holding the flag of the French Revolution – the tricolour, which again became France's national flag after these events – in one hand and brandishing a bayonetted musket with the other. The figure of Liberty is also viewed as a symbol of France and the French Republic known as Marianne. The painting is sometimes wrongly thought to depict the French Revolution of 1789.

Romanticism

Romanticism

Romanticism was an artistic, literary, musical and intellectual movement that originated in Europe towards the end of the 18th century; in most areas it was at its peak in the approximate period from 1800 to 1850. Romanticism was characterized by its emphasis on emotion and individualism, clandestine literature, paganism, idealization of nature, suspicion of science and industrialization, as well as glorification of the past with a strong preference for the medieval rather than the classical. It was partly a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, the social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment, but also the scientific rationalization of nature. It was embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music and literature; it had a major impact on historiography, education, chess, social sciences and the natural sciences. It had a significant and complex effect on politics, with romantic thinkers influencing conservatism, liberalism, radicalism and nationalism.

Industrial Revolution

Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution was the transition to new manufacturing processes in Great Britain, continental Europe, and the United States, that occurred during the period from around 1760 to about 1820–1840. This transition included going from hand production methods to machines; new chemical manufacturing and iron production processes; the increasing use of water power and steam power; the development of machine tools; and the rise of the mechanized factory system. Output greatly increased, and a result was an unprecedented rise in population and in the rate of population growth. The textile industry was the first to use modern production methods, and textiles became the dominant industry in terms of employment, value of output, and capital invested.

Gerald Graff

Gerald Graff

Gerald Graff is a professor of English and Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He received his B.A. in English from the University of Chicago in 1959 and his Ph.D. in English and American Literature from Stanford University in 1963. He has taught at the University of New Mexico, Northwestern University, the University of California at Irvine and at Berkeley, as well as Ohio State University, Washington University in St. Louis, and the University of Chicago. He has been teaching at the University of Illinois at Chicago since 2000.

J. M. W. Turner

J. M. W. Turner

Joseph Mallord William Turner, known in his time as William Turner, was an English Romantic painter, printmaker and watercolourist. He is known for his expressive colouring, imaginative landscapes and turbulent, often violent marine paintings. He left behind more than 550 oil paintings, 2,000 watercolours, and 30,000 works on paper. He was championed by the leading English art critic John Ruskin from 1840, and is today regarded as having elevated landscape painting to an eminence rivalling history painting.

Realism (arts)

Realism (arts)

Realism in the arts is generally the attempt to represent subject matter truthfully, without artificiality and avoiding speculative and supernatural elements. The term is often used interchangeably with naturalism, although these terms are not synonymous. Naturalism, as an idea relating to visual representation in Western art, seeks to depict objects with the least possible amount of distortion and is tied to the development of linear perspective and illusionism in Renaissance Europe. Realism, while predicated upon naturalistic representation and a departure from the idealization of earlier academic art, often refers to a specific art historical movement that originated in France in the aftermath of the French Revolution of 1848. With artists like Gustave Courbet capitalizing on the mundane, ugly or sordid, realism was motivated by the renewed interest in the common man and the rise of leftist politics. The Realist painters rejected Romanticism, which had come to dominate French literature and art, with roots in the late 18th century.

Otto von Bismarck

Otto von Bismarck

Otto, Prince of Bismarck, Count of Bismarck-Schönhausen, Duke of Lauenburg, born Otto Eduard Leopold von Bismarck, was a Prussian and later German statesman and diplomat. From his origins in the upper class of Junker landowners, Bismarck rose rapidly in Prussian politics, and from 1862 to 1890 he was the minister president and foreign minister of Prussia. Before his rise to the executive, he was the Prussian ambassador to Russia and France and served in both houses of the Prussian parliament. He masterminded the unification of Germany in 1871 and served as the first chancellor of the German Empire until 1890, in which capacity he dominated European affairs. He had served as chancellor of the North German Confederation from 1867 to 1871, alongside his responsibilities in the Kingdom of Prussia. He cooperated with King Wilhelm I of Prussia to unify the various German states, a partnership that would last for the rest of Wilhelm's life. The King granted Bismarck the titles of Count of Bismarck-Schönhausen in 1865 and Prince of Bismarck in 1871. Bismarck provoked three short, decisive wars against Denmark, Austria, and France. Following the victory against Austria, he abolished the supranational German Confederation and instead formed the North German Confederation as the first German national state, aligning the smaller North German states behind Prussia, while excluding Austria. Receiving the support of the independent South German states in the Confederation's defeat of France, he formed the German Empire – which also excluded Austria – and united Germany.

John Ruskin

John Ruskin

John Ruskin was an English writer, philosopher, art critic and polymath of the Victorian era. He wrote on subjects as varied as geology, architecture, myth, ornithology, literature, education, botany and political economy.

Clement Greenberg

Clement Greenberg

Clement Greenberg, occasionally writing under the pseudonym K. Hardesh, was an American essayist known mainly as an art critic closely associated with American modern art of the mid-20th century and a formalist aesthetician. He is best remembered for his association with the art movement abstract expressionism and the painter Jackson Pollock.

Nazarene movement

Nazarene movement

The epithet Nazarene was adopted by a group of early 19th-century German Romantic painters who aimed to revive spirituality in art. The name Nazarene came from a term of derision used against them for their affectation of a biblical manner of clothing and hair style.

Rationalism

Rationalism

In philosophy, rationalism is the epistemological view that "regards reason as the chief source and test of knowledge" or "any view appealing to reason as a source of knowledge or justification". More formally, rationalism is defined as a methodology or a theory "in which the criterion of truth is not sensory but intellectual and deductive".

Main period

Frank Lloyd Wright, Fallingwater, Mill Run, Pennsylvania (1937). Fallingwater was one of Wright's most famous private residences (completed 1937).
Frank Lloyd Wright, Fallingwater, Mill Run, Pennsylvania (1937). Fallingwater was one of Wright's most famous private residences (completed 1937).

Early 20th century to 1930

Palais Stoclet (1905-1911) by modernist architect Josef Hoffmann
Palais Stoclet (1905-1911) by modernist architect Josef Hoffmann
Pablo Picasso, Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, 1910, Art Institute of Chicago
Pablo Picasso, Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, 1910, Art Institute of Chicago

An important aspect of modernism is how it relates to tradition through its adoption of techniques like reprise, incorporation, rewriting, recapitulation, revision and parody in new forms.[b][c]

Piet Mondrian, View from the Dunes with Beach and Piers, Domburg, 1909, oil and pencil on cardboard, Museum of Modern Art, New York City
Piet Mondrian, View from the Dunes with Beach and Piers, Domburg, 1909, oil and pencil on cardboard, Museum of Modern Art, New York City
The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (MNCARS) is Spain's national museum of 20th-century art, located in Madrid. The photo shows the old building with the addition of one of the contemporary glass towers to the exterior by Ian Ritchie Architects with the closeup of the modern art tower.
The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (MNCARS) is Spain's national museum of 20th-century art, located in Madrid. The photo shows the old building with the addition of one of the contemporary glass towers to the exterior by Ian Ritchie Architects with the closeup of the modern art tower.

T. S. Eliot made significant comments on the relation of the artist to tradition, including: "[W]e shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of [a poet's] work, may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously."[40] However, the relationship of Modernism with tradition was complex, as literary scholar Peter Childs indicates: "There were paradoxical if not opposed trends towards revolutionary and reactionary positions, fear of the new and delight at the disappearance of the old, nihilism and fanatical enthusiasm, creativity and despair."[4]

An example of how Modernist art can be both revolutionary and yet be related to past tradition, is the music of the composer Arnold Schoenberg. On the one hand Schoenberg rejected traditional tonal harmony, the hierarchical system of organizing works of music that had guided music making for at least a century and a half. He believed he had discovered a wholly new way of organizing sound, based in the use of twelve-note rows. Yet while this was indeed wholly new, its origins can be traced back in the work of earlier composers, such as Franz Liszt,[41] Richard Wagner, Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss and Max Reger.[42][43] Schoenberg also wrote tonal music throughout his career.

In the world of art, in the first decade of the 20th century, young painters such as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse were causing a shock with their rejection of traditional perspective as the means of structuring paintings,[44][45] though the impressionist Monet had already been innovative in his use of perspective.[46] In 1907, as Picasso was painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Oskar Kokoschka was writing Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen (Murderer, Hope of Women), the first Expressionist play (produced with scandal in 1909), and Arnold Schoenberg was composing his String Quartet No.2 in F sharp minor (1908), his first composition without a tonal centre.

A primary influence that led to Cubism was the representation of three-dimensional form in the late works of Paul Cézanne, which were displayed in a retrospective at the 1907 Salon d'Automne.[47] In Cubist artwork, objects are analyzed, broken up and reassembled in an abstracted form; instead of depicting objects from one viewpoint, the artist depicts the subject from a multitude of viewpoints to represent the subject in a greater context.[48] Cubism was brought to the attention of the general public for the first time in 1911 at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris (held 21 April – 13 June). Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Henri Le Fauconnier, Robert Delaunay, Fernand Léger and Roger de La Fresnaye were shown together in Room 41, provoking a 'scandal' out of which Cubism emerged and spread throughout Paris and beyond. Also in 1911, Kandinsky painted Bild mit Kreis (Picture with a Circle), which he later called the first abstract painting.[49]: 167  In 1912, Metzinger and Gleizes wrote the first (and only) major Cubist manifesto, Du "Cubisme", published in time for the Salon de la Section d'Or, the largest Cubist exhibition to date. In 1912 Metzinger painted and exhibited his enchanting La Femme au Cheval (Woman with a Horse) and Danseuse au Café (Dancer in a Café). Albert Gleizes painted and exhibited his Les Baigneuses (The Bathers) and his monumental Le Dépiquage des Moissons (Harvest Threshing). This work, along with La Ville de Paris (City of Paris) by Robert Delaunay, was the largest and most ambitious Cubist painting undertaken during the pre-War Cubist period.[50]

In 1905, a group of four German artists, led by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, formed Die Brücke (the Bridge) in the city of Dresden. This was arguably the founding organization for the German Expressionist movement, though they did not use the word itself. A few years later, in 1911, a like-minded group of young artists formed Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) in Munich. The name came from Wassily Kandinsky's Der Blaue Reiter painting of 1903. Among their members were Kandinsky, Franz Marc, Paul Klee, and August Macke. However, the term "Expressionism" did not firmly establish itself until 1913.[49]: 274  Though initially mainly a German artistic movement,[f] most predominant in painting, poetry and the theatre between 1910 and 1930, most precursors of the movement were not German. Furthermore, there have been expressionist writers of prose fiction, as well as non-German speaking expressionist writers, and, while the movement had declined in Germany with the rise of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s, there were subsequent expressionist works.

Portrait of Eduard Kosmack (1910) by Egon Schiele
Portrait of Eduard Kosmack (1910) by Egon Schiele
Le Corbusier, The Villa Savoye in Poissy (1928–1931)
Le Corbusier, The Villa Savoye in Poissy (1928–1931)

Expressionism is notoriously difficult to define, in part because it "overlapped with other major 'isms' of the modernist period: with Futurism, Vorticism, Cubism, Surrealism and Dada."[53] Richard Murphy also comments: "the search for an all-inclusive definition is problematic to the extent that the most challenging expressionists" such as the novelist Franz Kafka, poet Gottfried Benn, and novelist Alfred Döblin were simultaneously the most vociferous anti-expressionists.[54]: 43  What, however, can be said, is that it was a movement that developed in the early 20th century mainly in Germany in reaction to the dehumanizing effect of industrialization and the growth of cities, and that "one of the central means by which expressionism identifies itself as an avant-garde movement, and by which it marks its distance to traditions and the cultural institution as a whole is through its relationship to realism and the dominant conventions of representation."[54]: 43  More explicitly: that the expressionists rejected the ideology of realism.[54]: 43–48 [55] There was a concentrated Expressionist movement in early 20th century German theatre, of which Georg Kaiser and Ernst Toller were the most famous playwrights. Other notable Expressionist dramatists included Reinhard Sorge, Walter Hasenclever, Hans Henny Jahnn, and Arnolt Bronnen. They looked back to Swedish playwright August Strindberg and German actor and dramatist Frank Wedekind as precursors of their dramaturgical experiments. Oskar Kokoschka's Murderer, the Hope of Women was the first fully Expressionist work for the theatre, which opened on 4 July 1909 in Vienna.[56] The extreme simplification of characters to mythic types, choral effects, declamatory dialogue and heightened intensity would become characteristic of later Expressionist plays. The first full-length Expressionist play was The Son by Walter Hasenclever, which was published in 1914 and first performed in 1916.[57]

Futurism is yet another modernist movement.[58] In 1909, the Parisian newspaper Le Figaro published F. T. Marinetti's first manifesto. Soon afterwards a group of painters (Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, and Gino Severini) co-signed the Futurist Manifesto. Modeled on Marx and Engels' famous "Communist Manifesto" (1848), such manifestoes put forward ideas that were meant to provoke and to gather followers. However, arguments in favor of geometric or purely abstract painting were, at this time, largely confined to "little magazines" which had only tiny circulations. Modernist primitivism and pessimism were controversial, and the mainstream in the first decade of the 20th century was still inclined towards a faith in progress and liberal optimism.

Jean Metzinger, 1913, En Canot (Im Boot), oil on canvas, 146 x 114 cm (57.5 in × 44.9 in), exhibited at Moderni Umeni, S.V.U. Mánes, Prague, 1914, acquired in 1916 by Georg Muche at the Galerie Der Sturm, confiscated by the Nazis circa 1936–1937, displayed at the Degenerate Art show in Munich, and missing ever since.[59]
Jean Metzinger, 1913, En Canot (Im Boot), oil on canvas, 146 x 114 cm (57.5 in × 44.9 in), exhibited at Moderni Umeni, S.V.U. Mánes, Prague, 1914, acquired in 1916 by Georg Muche at the Galerie Der Sturm, confiscated by the Nazis circa 1936–1937, displayed at the Degenerate Art show in Munich, and missing ever since.[59]

Abstract artists, taking as their examples the impressionists, as well as Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) and Edvard Munch (1863–1944), began with the assumption that color and shape, not the depiction of the natural world, formed the essential characteristics of art.[60] Western art had been, from the Renaissance up to the middle of the 19th century, underpinned by the logic of perspective and an attempt to reproduce an illusion of visible reality. The arts of cultures other than the European had become accessible and showed alternative ways of describing visual experience to the artist. By the end of the 19th century many artists felt a need to create a new kind of art which would encompass the fundamental changes taking place in technology, science and philosophy. The sources from which individual artists drew their theoretical arguments were diverse, and reflected the social and intellectual preoccupations in all areas of Western culture at that time.[61] Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, and Kazimir Malevich all believed in redefining art as the arrangement of pure color. The use of photography, which had rendered much of the representational function of visual art obsolete, strongly affected this aspect of modernism.[62]

Modernist architects and designers, such as Frank Lloyd Wright[63] and Le Corbusier,[64] believed that new technology rendered old styles of building obsolete. Le Corbusier thought that buildings should function as "machines for living in", analogous to cars, which he saw as machines for traveling in.[65] Just as cars had replaced the horse, so modernist design should reject the old styles and structures inherited from Ancient Greece or from the Middle Ages. Following this machine aesthetic, modernist designers typically rejected decorative motifs in design, preferring to emphasize the materials used and pure geometrical forms.[66] The skyscraper is the archetypal modernist building, and the Wainwright Building, a 10-story office building built 1890–91, in St. Louis, Missouri, United States, is among the first skyscrapers in the world.[67] Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building in New York (1956–1958) is often regarded as the pinnacle of this modernist high-rise architecture.[68] Many aspects of modernist design still persist within the mainstream of contemporary architecture, though previous dogmatism has given way to a more playful use of decoration, historical quotation, and spatial drama.

André Masson, Pedestal Table in the Studio 1922, early example of Surrealism
André Masson, Pedestal Table in the Studio 1922, early example of Surrealism

In 1913—which was the year of philosopher Edmund Husserl's Ideas, physicist Niels Bohr's quantized atom, Ezra Pound's founding of imagism, the Armory Show in New York, and in Saint Petersburg the "first futurist opera", Mikhail Matyushin's Victory over the Sun—another Russian composer, Igor Stravinsky, composed The Rite of Spring, a ballet that depicts human sacrifice, and has a musical score full of dissonance and primitive rhythm. This caused uproar on its first performance in Paris. At this time though modernism was still "progressive", increasingly it saw traditional forms and traditional social arrangements as hindering progress, and was recasting the artist as a revolutionary, engaged in overthrowing rather than enlightening society. Also in 1913 a less violent event occurred in France with the publication of the first volume of Marcel Proust's important novel sequence À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–1927) (In Search of Lost Time). This is often presented as an early example of a writer using the stream-of-consciousness technique, but Robert Humphrey comments that Proust "is concerned only with the reminiscent aspect of consciousness" and that he "was deliberately recapturing the past for the purpose of communicating; hence he did not write a stream-of-consciousness novel."[69]

Stream of consciousness was an important modernist literary innovation, and it has been suggested that Arthur Schnitzler (1862–1931) was the first to make full use of it in his short story "Leutnant Gustl" ("None but the Brave") (1900).[70] Dorothy Richardson was the first English writer to use it, in the early volumes of her novel sequence Pilgrimage (1915–1967).[g] The other modernist novelists that are associated with the use of this narrative technique include James Joyce in Ulysses (1922) and Italo Svevo in La coscienza di Zeno (1923).[72]

However, with the coming of the Great War of 1914–1918 and the Russian Revolution of 1917, the world was drastically changed and doubt cast on the beliefs and institutions of the past. The failure of the previous status quo seemed self-evident to a generation that had seen millions die fighting over scraps of earth: prior to 1914 it had been argued that no one would fight such a war, since the cost was too high. The birth of a machine age which had made major changes in the conditions of daily life in the 19th century now had radically changed the nature of warfare. The traumatic nature of recent experience altered basic assumptions, and realistic depiction of life in the arts seemed inadequate when faced with the fantastically surreal nature of trench warfare. The view that mankind was making steady moral progress now seemed ridiculous in the face of the senseless slaughter, described in works such as Erich Maria Remarque's novel All Quiet on the Western Front (1929). Therefore, modernism's view of reality, which had been a minority taste before the war, became more generally accepted in the 1920s.

In literature and visual art some modernists sought to defy expectations mainly in order to make their art more vivid, or to force the audience to take the trouble to question their own preconceptions. This aspect of modernism has often seemed a reaction to consumer culture, which developed in Europe and North America in the late 19th century. Whereas most manufacturers try to make products that will be marketable by appealing to preferences and prejudices, high modernists rejected such consumerist attitudes in order to undermine conventional thinking. The art critic Clement Greenberg expounded this theory of modernism in his essay Avant-Garde and Kitsch.[73] Greenberg labeled the products of consumer culture "kitsch", because their design aimed simply to have maximum appeal, with any difficult features removed. For Greenberg, modernism thus formed a reaction against the development of such examples of modern consumer culture as commercial popular music, Hollywood, and advertising. Greenberg associated this with the revolutionary rejection of capitalism.

Some modernists saw themselves as part of a revolutionary culture that included political revolution. In Russia after the 1917 Revolution there was indeed initially a burgeoning of avant-garde cultural activity, which included Russian Futurism. However others rejected conventional politics as well as artistic conventions, believing that a revolution of political consciousness had greater importance than a change in political structures. But many modernists saw themselves as apolitical. Others, such as T. S. Eliot, rejected mass popular culture from a conservative position. Some even argue that modernism in literature and art functioned to sustain an elite culture which excluded the majority of the population.[73]

Surrealism, which originated in the early 1920s, came to be regarded by the public as the most extreme form of modernism, or "the avant-garde of Modernism".[74] The word "surrealist" was coined by Guillaume Apollinaire and first appeared in the preface to his play Les Mamelles de Tirésias, which was written in 1903 and first performed in 1917. Major surrealists include Paul Éluard, Robert Desnos,[75] Max Ernst, Hans Arp, Antonin Artaud, Raymond Queneau, Joan Miró, and Marcel Duchamp.[76]

By 1930, Modernism had won a place in the establishment, including the political and artistic establishment, although by this time Modernism itself had changed.

Modernism continues: 1930–1945

Modernism continued to evolve during the 1930s. Between 1930 and 1932 composer Arnold Schoenberg worked on Moses und Aron, one of the first operas to make use of the twelve-tone technique,[77] Pablo Picasso painted in 1937 Guernica, his cubist condemnation of fascism, while in 1939 James Joyce pushed the boundaries of the modern novel further with Finnegans Wake. Also by 1930 Modernism began to influence mainstream culture, so that, for example, The New Yorker magazine began publishing work, influenced by Modernism, by young writers and humorists like Dorothy Parker,[78] Robert Benchley, E. B. White, S. J. Perelman, and James Thurber, amongst others.[79] Perelman is highly regarded for his humorous short stories that he published in magazines in the 1930s and 1940s, most often in The New Yorker, which are considered to be the first examples of surrealist humor in America.[80] Modern ideas in art also began to appear more frequently in commercials and logos, an early example of which, from 1916, is the famous London Underground logo designed by Edward Johnston.[81]

One of the most visible changes of this period was the adoption of new technologies into daily life of ordinary people in Western Europe and North America. Electricity, the telephone, the radio, the automobile—and the need to work with them, repair them and live with them—created social change. The kind of disruptive moment that only a few knew in the 1880s became a common occurrence. For example, the speed of communication reserved for the stock brokers of 1890 became part of family life, at least in middle class North America. Associated with urbanization and changing social mores also came smaller families and changed relationships between parents and their children.

London Underground logo designed by Edward Johnston. This is the modern version (with minor modifications) of one that was first used in 1916.
London Underground logo designed by Edward Johnston. This is the modern version (with minor modifications) of one that was first used in 1916.

Another strong influence at this time was Marxism. After the generally primitivistic/irrationalist aspect of pre-World War I Modernism (which for many modernists precluded any attachment to merely political solutions) and the neoclassicism of the 1920s (as represented most famously by T. S. Eliot and Igor Stravinsky—which rejected popular solutions to modern problems), the rise of fascism, the Great Depression, and the march to war helped to radicalise a generation. Bertolt Brecht, W. H. Auden, André Breton, Louis Aragon and the philosophers Antonio Gramsci and Walter Benjamin are perhaps the most famous exemplars of this Modernist form of Marxism. There were, however, also modernists explicitly of 'the right', including Salvador Dalí, Wyndham Lewis, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, the Dutch author Menno ter Braak and others.[82]

Significant Modernist literary works continued to be created in the 1920s and 1930s, including further novels by Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Robert Musil, and Dorothy Richardson. The American Modernist dramatist Eugene O'Neill's career began in 1914, but his major works appeared in the 1920s, 1930s and early 1940s. Two other significant Modernist dramatists writing in the 1920s and 1930s were Bertolt Brecht and Federico García Lorca. D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover was privately published in 1928, while another important landmark for the history of the modern novel came with the publication of William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury in 1929. In the 1930s, in addition to further major works by Faulkner, Samuel Beckett published his first major work, the novel Murphy (1938). Then in 1939 James Joyce's Finnegans Wake appeared. This is written in a largely idiosyncratic language, consisting of a mixture of standard English lexical items and neologistic multilingual puns and portmanteau words, which attempts to recreate the experience of sleep and dreams.[83] In poetry T. S. Eliot, E. E. Cummings, and Wallace Stevens were writing from the 1920s until the 1950s. While Modernist poetry in English is often viewed as an American phenomenon, with leading exponents including Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, H.D., and Louis Zukofsky, there were important British Modernist poets, including David Jones, Hugh MacDiarmid, Basil Bunting, and W. H. Auden. European Modernist poets include Federico García Lorca, Anna Akhmatova, Constantine Cavafy, and Paul Valéry.

James Joyce statue on North Earl Street, Dublin, by Marjorie FitzGibbon
James Joyce statue on North Earl Street, Dublin, by Marjorie FitzGibbon

The Modernist movement continued during this period in Soviet Russia. In 1930 composer Dimitri Shostakovich's (1906–1975) opera The Nose was premiered, in which he uses a montage of different styles, including folk music, popular song and atonality. Amongst his influences was Alban Berg's (1985–1935) opera Wozzeck (1925), which "had made a tremendous impression on Shostakovich when it was staged in Leningrad."[84] However, from 1932 Socialist realism began to oust Modernism in the Soviet Union,[85] and in 1936 Shostakovich was attacked and forced to withdraw his 4th Symphony.[86] Alban Berg wrote another significant, though incomplete, Modernist opera, Lulu, which premiered in 1937. Berg's Violin Concerto was first performed in 1935. Like Shostakovich, other composers faced difficulties in this period.

In Germany Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) was forced to flee to the U.S. when Hitler came to power in 1933, because of his Modernist atonal style as well as his Jewish ancestry.[87] His major works from this period are a Violin Concerto, Op. 36 (1934/36), and a Piano Concerto, Op. 42 (1942). Schoenberg also wrote tonal music in this period with the Suite for Strings in G major (1935) and the Chamber Symphony No. 2 in E minor, Op. 38 (begun in 1906, completed in 1939).[87] During this time Hungarian Modernist Béla Bartók (1881–1945) produced a number of major works, including Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta (1936) and the Divertimento for String Orchestra (1939), String Quartet No. 5 (1934), and No. 6 (his last, 1939). But he too left for the US in 1940, because of the rise of fascism in Hungary.[87] Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) continued writing in his neoclassical style during the 1930s and 1940s, writing works like the Symphony of Psalms (1930), Symphony in C (1940) and Symphony in Three Movements (1945). He also emigrated to the US because of World War II. Olivier Messiaen (1908–1992), however, served in the French army during the war and was imprisoned at Stalag VIII-A by the Germans, where he composed his famous Quatuor pour la fin du temps ("Quartet for the End of Time"). The quartet was first performed in January 1941 to an audience of prisoners and prison guards.[88]

In painting, during the 1920s and the 1930s and the Great Depression, modernism was defined by Surrealism, late Cubism, Bauhaus, De Stijl, Dada, German Expressionism, and Modernist and masterful color painters like Henri Matisse and Pierre Bonnard as well as the abstractions of artists like Piet Mondrian and Wassily Kandinsky which characterized the European art scene. In Germany, Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, George Grosz and others politicized their paintings, foreshadowing the coming of World War II, while in America, modernism is seen in the form of American Scene painting and the social realism and regionalism movements that contained both political and social commentary dominated the art world. Artists like Ben Shahn, Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood, George Tooker, John Steuart Curry, Reginald Marsh, and others became prominent. Modernism is defined in Latin America by painters Joaquín Torres-García from Uruguay and Rufino Tamayo from Mexico, while the muralist movement with Diego Rivera, David Siqueiros, José Clemente Orozco, Pedro Nel Gómez and Santiago Martínez Delgado, and Symbolist paintings by Frida Kahlo, began a renaissance of the arts for the region, characterized by a freer use of color and an emphasis on political messages.

Diego Rivera is perhaps best known by the public world for his 1933 mural, Man at the Crossroads, in the lobby of the RCA Building at Rockefeller Center. When his patron Nelson Rockefeller discovered that the mural included a portrait of Vladimir Lenin and other communist imagery, he fired Rivera, and the unfinished work was eventually destroyed by Rockefeller's staff. Frida Kahlo's works are often characterized by their stark portrayals of pain. Kahlo was deeply influenced by indigenous Mexican culture, which is apparent in her paintings' bright colors and dramatic symbolism. Christian and Jewish themes are often depicted in her work as well; she combined elements of the classic religious Mexican tradition, which were often bloody and violent. Frida Kahlo's Symbolist works relate strongly to Surrealism and to the magic realism movement in literature.

Political activism was an important piece of David Siqueiros' life, and frequently inspired him to set aside his artistic career. His art was deeply rooted in the Mexican Revolution. The period from the 1920s to the 1950s is known as the Mexican Renaissance, and Siqueiros was active in the attempt to create an art that was at once Mexican and universal. The young Jackson Pollock attended the workshop and helped build floats for the parade.

During the 1930s radical leftist politics characterized many of the artists connected to Surrealism, including Pablo Picasso.[89] On 26 April 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, the Basque town of Gernika was bombed by Nazi Germany's Luftwaffe. The Germans were attacking to support the efforts of Francisco Franco to overthrow the Basque government and the Spanish Republican government. Pablo Picasso painted his mural-sized Guernica to commemorate the horrors of the bombing.

During the Great Depression of the 1930s and through the years of World War II, American art was characterized by social realism and American Scene painting, in the work of Grant Wood, Edward Hopper, Ben Shahn, Thomas Hart Benton, and several others. Nighthawks (1942) is a painting by Edward Hopper that portrays people sitting in a downtown diner late at night. It is not only Hopper's most famous painting, but one of the most recognizable in American art. The scene was inspired by a diner in Greenwich Village. Hopper began painting it immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor. After this event there was a large feeling of gloominess over the country, a feeling that is portrayed in the painting. The urban street is empty outside the diner, and inside none of the three patrons is apparently looking or talking to the others but instead is lost in their own thoughts. This portrayal of modern urban life as empty or lonely is a common theme throughout Hopper's work.

American Gothic is a painting by Grant Wood from 1930. Portraying a pitchfork-holding farmer and a younger woman in front of a house of Carpenter Gothic style, it is one of the most familiar images in 20th-century American art. Art critics had favorable opinions about the painting; like Gertrude Stein and Christopher Morley, they assumed the painting was meant to be a satire of rural small-town life. It was thus seen as part of the trend towards increasingly critical depictions of rural America, along the lines of Sherwood Anderson's 1919 Winesburg, Ohio, Sinclair Lewis's 1920 Main Street, and Carl Van Vechten's The Tattooed Countess in literature.[90] However, with the onset of the Great Depression, the painting came to be seen as a depiction of steadfast American pioneer spirit.

The situation for artists in Europe during the 1930s deteriorated rapidly as the Nazis' power in Germany and across Eastern Europe increased. Degenerate art was a term adopted by the Nazi regime in Germany for virtually all modern art. Such art was banned on the grounds that it was un-German or Jewish Bolshevist in nature, and those identified as degenerate artists were subjected to sanctions. These included being dismissed from teaching positions, being forbidden to exhibit or to sell their art, and in some cases being forbidden to produce art entirely. Degenerate Art was also the title of an exhibition, mounted by the Nazis in Munich in 1937. The climate became so hostile for artists and art associated with modernism and abstraction that many left for the Americas. German artist Max Beckmann and scores of others fled Europe for New York. In New York City a new generation of young and exciting Modernist painters led by Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, and others were just beginning to come of age.

Arshile Gorky's portrait of someone who might be Willem de Kooning is an example of the evolution of abstract expressionism from the context of figure painting, cubism and surrealism. Along with his friends de Kooning and John D. Graham, Gorky created biomorphically shaped and abstracted figurative compositions that by the 1940s evolved into totally abstract paintings. Gorky's work seems to be a careful analysis of memory, emotion and shape, using line and color to express feeling and nature.

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Gustav Mahler was an Austro-Bohemian Romantic composer, and one of the leading conductors of his generation. As a composer he acted as a bridge between the 19th-century Austro-German tradition and the modernism of the early 20th century. While in his lifetime his status as a conductor was established beyond question, his own music gained wide popularity only after periods of relative neglect, which included a ban on its performance in much of Europe during the Nazi era. After 1945 his compositions were rediscovered by a new generation of listeners; Mahler then became one of the most frequently performed and recorded of all composers, a position he has sustained into the 21st century.

After World War II

While The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature states that modernism ended by c. 1939[91] with regard to British and American literature, "When (if) Modernism petered out and postmodernism began has been contested almost as hotly as when the transition from Victorianism to Modernism occurred."[92] Clement Greenberg sees modernism ending in the 1930s, with the exception of the visual and performing arts,[18] but with regard to music, Paul Griffiths notes that, while Modernism "seemed to be a spent force" by the late 1920s, after World War II, "a new generation of composers—Boulez, Barraqué, Babbitt, Nono, Stockhausen, Xenakis" revived modernism".[93] In fact many literary modernists lived into the 1950s and 1960s, though generally they were no longer producing major works. The term "late modernism" is also sometimes applied to Modernist works published after 1930.[94][95] Among modernists (or late modernists) still publishing after 1945 were Wallace Stevens, Gottfried Benn, T. S. Eliot, Anna Akhmatova, William Faulkner, Dorothy Richardson, John Cowper Powys, and Ezra Pound. Basil Bunting, born in 1901, published his most important Modernist poem Briggflatts in 1965. In addition, Hermann Broch's The Death of Virgil was published in 1945 and Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus in 1947. Samuel Beckett, who died in 1989, has been described as a "later Modernist".[96] Beckett is a writer with roots in the expressionist tradition of Modernism, who produced works from the 1930s until the 1980s, including Molloy (1951), Waiting for Godot (1953), Happy Days (1961), and Rockaby (1981). The terms "minimalist" and "post-Modernist" have also been applied to his later works.[97] The poets Charles Olson (1910–1970) and J. H. Prynne (born 1936) are among the writers in the second half of the 20th century who have been described as late modernists.[98]

More recently the term "late modernism" has been redefined by at least one critic and used to refer to works written after 1945, rather than 1930. With this usage goes the idea that the ideology of modernism was significantly re-shaped by the events of World War II, especially the Holocaust and the dropping of the atom bomb.[99]

The postwar period left the capitals of Europe in upheaval with an urgency to economically and physically rebuild and to politically regroup. In Paris (the former center of European culture and the former capital of the art world) the climate for art was a disaster. Important collectors, dealers, and Modernist artists, writers, and poets had fled Europe for New York and America. The surrealists and modern artists from every cultural center of Europe had fled the onslaught of the Nazis for safe haven in the United States. Many of those who didn't flee perished. A few artists, notably Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Pierre Bonnard, remained in France and survived.

The 1940s in New York City heralded the triumph of American abstract expressionism, a Modernist movement that combined lessons learned from Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, surrealism, Joan Miró, cubism, Fauvism, and early modernism via great teachers in America like Hans Hofmann and John D. Graham. American artists benefited from the presence of Piet Mondrian, Fernand Léger, Max Ernst and the André Breton group, Pierre Matisse's gallery, and Peggy Guggenheim's gallery The Art of This Century, as well as other factors.

Paris, moreover, recaptured much of its luster in the 1950s and 60s as the center of a machine art florescence, with both of the leading machine art sculptors Jean Tinguely and Nicolas Schöffer having moved there to launch their careers—and which florescence, in light of the technocentric character of modern life, may well have a particularly long lasting influence.[100]

Theatre of the Absurd

Samuel Beckett's En attendant Godot, (Waiting for Godot) Festival d'Avignon, 1978
Samuel Beckett's En attendant Godot, (Waiting for Godot) Festival d'Avignon, 1978

The term "Theatre of the Absurd" is applied to plays, written primarily by Europeans, that express the belief that human existence has no meaning or purpose and therefore all communication breaks down. Logical construction and argument gives way to irrational and illogical speech and to its ultimate conclusion, silence.[101] While there are significant precursors, including Alfred Jarry (1873–1907), the Theatre of the Absurd is generally seen as beginning in the 1950s with the plays of Samuel Beckett.

Critic Martin Esslin coined the term in his 1960 essay "Theatre of the Absurd". He related these plays based on a broad theme of the Absurd, similar to the way Albert Camus uses the term in his 1942 essay, The Myth of Sisyphus.[102] The Absurd in these plays takes the form of man's reaction to a world apparently without meaning, and/or man as a puppet controlled or menaced by invisible outside forces. Though the term is applied to a wide range of plays, some characteristics coincide in many of the plays: broad comedy, often similar to vaudeville, mixed with horrific or tragic images; characters caught in hopeless situations forced to do repetitive or meaningless actions; dialogue full of clichés, wordplay, and nonsense; plots that are cyclical or absurdly expansive; either a parody or dismissal of realism and the concept of the "well-made play".

Playwrights commonly associated with the Theatre of the Absurd include Samuel Beckett (1906–1989), Eugène Ionesco (1909–1994), Jean Genet (1910–1986), Harold Pinter (1930–2008), Tom Stoppard (born 1937), Alexander Vvedensky (1904–1941), Daniil Kharms (1905–1942), Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–1990), Alejandro Jodorowsky (born 1929), Fernando Arrabal (born 1932), Václav Havel (1936–2011) and Edward Albee (1928–2016).

Pollock and abstract influences

During the late 1940s Jackson Pollock's radical approach to painting revolutionized the potential for all contemporary art that followed him. To some extent Pollock realized that the journey toward making a work of art was as important as the work of art itself. Like Pablo Picasso's innovative reinventions of painting and sculpture in the early 20th century via Cubism and constructed sculpture, Pollock redefined the way art is made. His move away from easel painting and conventionality was a liberating signal to the artists of his era and to all who came after. Artists realized that Jackson Pollock's process—placing unstretched raw canvas on the floor where it could be attacked from all four sides using artistic and industrial materials; dripping and throwing linear skeins of paint; drawing, staining, and brushing; using imagery and nonimagery—essentially blasted artmaking beyond any prior boundary. Abstract expressionism generally expanded and developed the definitions and possibilities available to artists for the creation of new works of art. The other abstract expressionists followed Pollock's breakthrough with new breakthroughs of their own. In a sense the innovations of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, Philip Guston, Hans Hofmann, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, Robert Motherwell, Peter Voulkos and others opened the floodgates to the diversity and scope of all the art that followed them. Rereadings into abstract art by art historians such as Linda Nochlin,[103] Griselda Pollock[104] and Catherine de Zegher[105] critically show, however, that pioneering women artists who produced major innovations in modern art had been ignored by official accounts of its history.

International figures from British art

Henry Moore (1898–1986) emerged after World War II as Britain's leading sculptor. He was best known for his semi-abstract monumental bronze sculptures which are located around the world as public works of art. His forms are usually abstractions of the human figure, typically depicting mother-and-child or reclining figures, usually suggestive of the female body, apart from a phase in the 1950s when he sculpted family groups. His forms are generally pierced or contain hollow spaces.

Henry Moore, Reclining Figure (1957). In front of the Kunsthaus Zürich, Switzerland.
Henry Moore, Reclining Figure (1957). In front of the Kunsthaus Zürich, Switzerland.

In the 1950s, Moore began to receive increasingly significant commissions, including a reclining figure for the UNESCO building in Paris in 1958.[106] With many more public works of art, the scale of Moore's sculptures grew significantly. The last three decades of Moore's life continued in a similar vein, with several major retrospectives taking place around the world, notably a prominent exhibition in the summer of 1972 in the grounds of the Forte di Belvedere overlooking Florence. By the end of the 1970s, there were some 40 exhibitions a year featuring his work. On the campus of the University of Chicago in December 1967, 25 years to the minute after the team of physicists led by Enrico Fermi achieved the first controlled, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction, Moore's Nuclear Energy was unveiled.[107][108] Also in Chicago, Moore commemorated science with a large bronze sundial, locally named Man Enters the Cosmos (1980), which was commissioned to recognise the space exploration program.[109]

The "London School" of figurative painters, including Francis Bacon (1909–1992), Lucian Freud (1922–2011), Frank Auerbach (born 1931), Leon Kossoff (born 1926), and Michael Andrews (1928–1995), have received widespread international recognition.[110]

Francis Bacon was an Irish-born British figurative painter known for his bold, graphic and emotionally raw imagery.[111] His painterly but abstracted figures typically appear isolated in glass or steel geometrical cages set against flat, nondescript backgrounds. Bacon began painting during his early 20s but worked only sporadically until his mid-30s. His breakthrough came with the 1944 triptych Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion which sealed his reputation as a uniquely bleak chronicler of the human condition.[112] His output can be crudely described as consisting of sequences or variations on a single motif; beginning with the 1940s male heads isolated in rooms, the early 1950s screaming popes, and mid to late 1950s animals and lone figures suspended in geometric structures. These were followed by his early 1960s modern variations of the crucifixion in the triptych format. From the mid-1960s to early 1970s, Bacon mainly produced strikingly compassionate portraits of friends. Following the suicide of his lover George Dyer in 1971, his art became more personal, inward-looking, and preoccupied with themes and motifs of death. During his lifetime, Bacon was equally reviled and acclaimed.[113]

Lucian Freud was a German-born British painter, known chiefly for his thickly impastoed portrait and figure paintings, who was widely considered the pre-eminent British artist of his time.[114][115][116][117] His works are noted for their psychological penetration, and for their often discomforting examination of the relationship between artist and model.[118] According to William Grimes of The New York Times, "Lucien Freud and his contemporaries transformed figure painting in the 20th century. In paintings like Girl with a White Dog (1951–1952),[119] Freud put the pictorial language of traditional European painting in the service of an anti-romantic, confrontational style of portraiture that stripped bare the sitter's social facade. Ordinary people—many of them his friends—stared wide-eyed from the canvas, vulnerable to the artist's ruthless inspection."[114]

In the 1960s after abstract expressionism

In abstract painting during the 1950s and 1960s several new directions like hard-edge painting and other forms of geometric abstraction began to appear in artist studios and in radical avant-garde circles as a reaction against the subjectivism of abstract expressionism. Clement Greenberg became the voice of post-painterly abstraction when he curated an influential exhibition of new painting that toured important art museums throughout the United States in 1964. color field painting, hard-edge painting and lyrical abstraction[120] emerged as radical new directions.

By the late 1960s however, postminimalism, process art and Arte Povera[121] also emerged as revolutionary concepts and movements that encompassed both painting and sculpture, via lyrical abstraction and the postminimalist movement, and in early conceptual art.[121] Process art as inspired by Pollock enabled artists to experiment with and make use of a diverse encyclopedia of style, content, material, placement, sense of time, and plastic and real space. Nancy Graves, Ronald Davis, Howard Hodgkin, Larry Poons, Jannis Kounellis, Brice Marden, Colin McCahon, Bruce Nauman, Richard Tuttle, Alan Saret, Walter Darby Bannard, Lynda Benglis, Dan Christensen, Larry Zox, Ronnie Landfield, Eva Hesse, Keith Sonnier, Richard Serra, Pat Lipsky, Sam Gilliam, Mario Merz and Peter Reginato were some of the younger artists who emerged during the era of late modernism that spawned the heyday of the art of the late 1960s.[122]

Pop art

Eduardo Paolozzi. I was a Rich Man's Plaything (1947) is considered the initial standard bearer of "pop art" and first to display the word "pop".
Eduardo Paolozzi. I was a Rich Man's Plaything (1947) is considered the initial standard bearer of "pop art" and first to display the word "pop".

In 1962 the Sidney Janis Gallery mounted The New Realists, the first major pop art group exhibition in an uptown art gallery in New York City. Janis mounted the exhibition in a 57th Street storefront near his gallery. The show sent shockwaves through the New York School and reverberated worldwide. Earlier in England in 1958 the term "Pop Art" was used by Lawrence Alloway to describe paintings that celebrated the consumerism of the post World War II era. This movement rejected abstract expressionism and its focus on the hermeneutic and psychological interior in favor of art that depicted and often celebrated material consumer culture, advertising, and the iconography of the mass production age. The early works of David Hockney and the works of Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi (who created the groundbreaking I was a Rich Man's Plaything, 1947) are considered seminal examples in the movement. Meanwhile, in the downtown scene in New York's East Village 10th Street galleries, artists were formulating an American version of pop art. Claes Oldenburg had his storefront, and the Green Gallery on 57th Street began to show the works of Tom Wesselmann and James Rosenquist. Later Leo Castelli exhibited the works of other American artists, including those of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein for most of their careers. There is a connection between the radical works of Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, the rebellious Dadaists with a sense of humor, and pop artists like Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, and Roy Lichtenstein, whose paintings reproduce the look of Ben-Day dots, a technique used in commercial reproduction.

Minimalism

Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, wherein artists intend to expose the essence or identity of a subject through eliminating all nonessential forms, features, or concepts. Minimalism is any design or style wherein the simplest and fewest elements are used to create the maximum effect.

As a specific movement in the arts it is identified with developments in post–World War II Western art, most strongly with American visual arts in the 1960s and early 1970s. Prominent artists associated with this movement include Donald Judd, John McCracken, Agnes Martin, Dan Flavin, Robert Morris, Ronald Bladen, Anne Truitt, and Frank Stella.[123] It derives from the reductive aspects of modernism and is often interpreted as a reaction against Abstract expressionism and a bridge to Postminimal art practices. By the early 1960s minimalism emerged as an abstract movement in art (with roots in the geometric abstraction of Kazimir Malevich,[124] the Bauhaus and Piet Mondrian) that rejected the idea of relational and subjective painting, the complexity of abstract expressionist surfaces, and the emotional zeitgeist and polemics present in the arena of action painting. Minimalism argued that extreme simplicity could capture all of the sublime representation needed in art. Minimalism is variously construed either as a precursor to postmodernism, or as a postmodern movement itself. In the latter perspective, early minimalism yielded advanced Modernist works, but the movement partially abandoned this direction when some artists like Robert Morris changed direction in favor of the anti-form movement.

Hal Foster, in his essay The Crux of Minimalism,[125] examines the extent to which Donald Judd and Robert Morris both acknowledge and exceed Greenbergian Modernism in their published definitions of minimalism.[125] He argues that minimalism is not a "dead end" of Modernism, but a "paradigm shift toward postmodern practices that continue to be elaborated today."[125]

Minimal music

The terms have expanded to encompass a movement in music that features such repetition and iteration as those of the compositions of La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and John Adams. Minimalist compositions are sometimes known as systems music. The term 'minimal music' is generally used to describe a style of music that developed in America in the late 1960s and 1970s; and that was initially connected with the composers.[126] The minimalism movement originally involved some composers, and other lesser known pioneers included Pauline Oliveros, Phill Niblock, and Richard Maxfield. In Europe, the music of Louis Andriessen, Karel Goeyvaerts, Michael Nyman, Howard Skempton, Eliane Radigue, Gavin Bryars, Steve Martland, Henryk Górecki, Arvo Pärt and John Tavener.

Postminimalism

Smithson's Spiral Jetty from atop Rozel Point, Utah, US, in mid-April 2005. Created in 1970, it still exists although it has often been submerged by the fluctuating lake level. It consists of some 6500 tons of basalt, earth and salt.
Smithson's Spiral Jetty from atop Rozel Point, Utah, US, in mid-April 2005. Created in 1970, it still exists although it has often been submerged by the fluctuating lake level. It consists of some 6500 tons of basalt, earth and salt.

In the late 1960s Robert Pincus-Witten[121] coined the term "postminimalism" to describe minimalist-derived art which had content and contextual overtones that minimalism rejected. The term was applied by Pincus-Whitten to the work of Eva Hesse, Keith Sonnier, Richard Serra and new work by former minimalists Robert Smithson, Robert Morris, Sol LeWitt, Barry Le Va, and others. Other minimalists including Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Carl Andre, Agnes Martin, John McCracken and others continued to produce late Modernist paintings and sculpture for the remainders of their careers.

Since then, many artists have embraced minimal or postminimal styles, and the label "Postmodern" has been attached to them.

Collage, assemblage, installations

Related to abstract expressionism was the emergence of combining manufactured items with artist materials, moving away from previous conventions of painting and sculpture. The work of Robert Rauschenberg exemplifies this trend. His "combines" of the 1950s were forerunners of pop art and installation art, and used assemblages of large physical objects, including stuffed animals, birds and commercial photographs. Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Larry Rivers, John Chamberlain, Claes Oldenburg, George Segal, Jim Dine, and Edward Kienholz were among important pioneers of both abstraction and pop art. Creating new conventions of art-making, they made acceptable in serious contemporary art circles the radical inclusion in their works of unlikely materials. Another pioneer of collage was Joseph Cornell, whose more intimately scaled works were seen as radical because of both his personal iconography and his use of found objects.

Neo-Dada

In the early 20th century Marcel Duchamp submitted for exhibition a urinal as a sculpture.[127] He professed his intent that people look at the urinal as if it were a work of art because he said it was a work of art. He referred to his work as "readymades". Fountain was a urinal signed with the pseudonym "R. Mutt", the exhibition of which shocked the art world in 1917. This and Duchamp's other works are generally labelled as Dada. Duchamp can be seen as a precursor to conceptual art, other famous examples being John Cage's 4′33″, which is four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence, and Rauschenberg's Erased de Kooning Drawing. Many conceptual works take the position that art is the result of the viewer viewing an object or act as art, not of the intrinsic qualities of the work itself. In choosing "an ordinary article of life" and creating "a new thought for that object" Duchamp invited onlookers to view Fountain as a sculpture.[128]

Marcel Duchamp famously gave up "art" in favor of chess. Avant-garde composer David Tudor created a piece, Reunion (1968), written jointly with Lowell Cross, that features a chess game in which each move triggers a lighting effect or projection. Duchamp and Cage played the game at the work's premier.[129]

Steven Best and Douglas Kellner identify Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns as part of the transitional phase, influenced by Duchamp, between Modernism and Postmodernism. Both used images of ordinary objects, or the objects themselves, in their work, while retaining the abstraction and painterly gestures of high Modernism.[130]

Performance and happenings

Yves Klein in France, and Carolee Schneemann (pictured), Yayoi Kusama, Charlotte Moorman, and Yoko Ono in New York City were pioneers of performance based works of art, that often entailed nudity.[131]
Yves Klein in France, and Carolee Schneemann (pictured), Yayoi Kusama, Charlotte Moorman, and Yoko Ono in New York City were pioneers of performance based works of art, that often entailed nudity.[131]

During the late 1950s and 1960s artists with a wide range of interests began to push the boundaries of contemporary art. Yves Klein in France, Carolee Schneemann, Yayoi Kusama, Charlotte Moorman and Yoko Ono in New York City, and Joseph Beuys, Wolf Vostell and Nam June Paik in Germany were pioneers of performance-based works of art. Groups like The Living Theatre with Julian Beck and Judith Malina collaborated with sculptors and painters creating environments, radically changing the relationship between audience and performer, especially in their piece Paradise Now. The Judson Dance Theater, located at the Judson Memorial Church, New York; and the Judson dancers, notably Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, Elaine Summers, Sally Gross, Simonne Forti, Deborah Hay, Lucinda Childs, Steve Paxton and others; collaborated with artists Robert Morris, Robert Whitman, John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, and engineers like Billy Klüver. Park Place Gallery was a center for musical performances by electronic composers Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and other notable performance artists including Joan Jonas.

These performances were intended as works of a new art form combining sculpture, dance, and music or sound, often with audience participation. They were characterized by the reductive philosophies of minimalism and the spontaneous improvisation and expressivity of abstract expressionism. Images of Schneeman's performances of pieces meant to shock are occasionally used to illustrate these kinds of art, and she is often seen photographed while performing her piece Interior Scroll. However, according to modernist philosophy surrounding performance art, it is cross-purposes to publish images of her performing this piece, for performance artists reject publication entirely: the performance itself is the medium. Thus, other media cannot illustrate performance art; performance is momentary, evanescent, and personal, not for capturing; representations of performance art in other media, whether by image, video, narrative or otherwise, select certain points of view in space or time or otherwise involve the inherent limitations of each medium. The artists deny that recordings illustrate the medium of performance as art.

During the same period, various avant-garde artists created Happenings, mysterious and often spontaneous and unscripted gatherings of artists and their friends and relatives in various specified locations, often incorporating exercises in absurdity, physicality, costuming, spontaneous nudity, and various random or seemingly disconnected acts. Notable creators of happenings included Allan Kaprow—who first used the term in 1958,[132] Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, Red Grooms, and Robert Whitman.[133]

Intermedia, multi-media

Another trend in art which has been associated with the term postmodern is the use of a number of different media together. Intermedia is a term coined by Dick Higgins and meant to convey new art forms along the lines of Fluxus, concrete poetry, found objects, performance art, and computer art. Higgins was the publisher of the Something Else Press, a concrete poet married to artist Alison Knowles and an admirer of Marcel Duchamp. Ihab Hassan includes "Intermedia, the fusion of forms, the confusion of realms," in his list of the characteristics of postmodern art.[134] One of the most common forms of "multi-media art" is the use of video-tape and CRT monitors, termed video art. While the theory of combining multiple arts into one art is quite old, and has been revived periodically, the postmodern manifestation is often in combination with performance art, where the dramatic subtext is removed, and what is left is the specific statements of the artist in question or the conceptual statement of their action.

Fluxus

Fluxus was named and loosely organized in 1962 by George Maciunas (1931–1978), a Lithuanian-born American artist. Fluxus traces its beginnings to John Cage's 1957 to 1959 Experimental Composition classes at The New School for Social Research in New York City. Many of his students were artists working in other media with little or no background in music. Cage's students included Fluxus founding members Jackson Mac Low, Al Hansen, George Brecht and Dick Higgins.

Fluxus encouraged a do-it-yourself aesthetic and valued simplicity over complexity. Like Dada before it, Fluxus included a strong current of anti-commercialism and an anti-art sensibility, disparaging the conventional market-driven art world in favor of an artist-centered creative practice. Fluxus artists preferred to work with whatever materials were at hand, and either created their own work or collaborated in the creation process with their colleagues.

Andreas Huyssen criticises attempts to claim Fluxus for Postmodernism as "either the master-code of postmodernism or the ultimately unrepresentable art movement—as it were, postmodernism's sublime."[135] Instead he sees Fluxus as a major Neo-Dadaist phenomena within the avant-garde tradition. It did not represent a major advance in the development of artistic strategies, though it did express a rebellion against "the administered culture of the 1950s, in which a moderate, domesticated modernism served as ideological prop to the Cold War."[135]

Avant-garde popular music

Modernism had an uneasy relationship with popular forms of music (both in form and aesthetic) while rejecting popular culture.[136] Despite this, Stravinsky used jazz idioms on his pieces like "Ragtime" from his 1918 theatrical work Histoire du Soldat and 1945's Ebony Concerto.[137]

In the 1960s, as popular music began to gain cultural importance and question its status as commercial entertainment, musicians began to look to the post-war avant-garde for inspiration.[138] In 1959, music producer Joe Meek recorded I Hear a New World (1960), which Tiny Mix Tapes' Jonathan Patrick calls a "seminal moment in both electronic music and avant-pop history [...] a collection of dreamy pop vignettes, adorned with dubby echoes and tape-warped sonic tendrils" which would be largely ignored at the time.[139] Other early avant-pop productions included the Beatles's 1966 song "Tomorrow Never Knows", which incorporated techniques from musique concrète, avant-garde composition, Indian music, and electro-acoustic sound manipulation into a 3-minute pop format, and the Velvet Underground's integration of La Monte Young's minimalist and drone music ideas, beat poetry, and 1960s pop art.[138]

Late period

Brice Marden, Vine, 1992–93, oil on linen, .mw-parser-output .frac{white-space:nowrap}.mw-parser-output .frac .num,.mw-parser-output .frac .den{font-size:80%;line-height:0;vertical-align:super}.mw-parser-output .frac .den{vertical-align:sub}.mw-parser-output .sr-only{border:0;clip:rect(0,0,0,0);height:1px;margin:-1px;overflow:hidden;padding:0;position:absolute;width:1px}240 by 260 cm (8 by 8+1⁄2 ft), Museum of Modern Art, New York
Brice Marden, Vine, 1992–93, oil on linen, 240 by 260 cm (8 by 8+12 ft), Museum of Modern Art, New York

The continuation of abstract expressionism, color field painting, lyrical abstraction, geometric abstraction, minimalism, abstract illusionism, process art, pop art, postminimalism, and other late 20th-century Modernist movements in both painting and sculpture continued through the first decade of the 21st century and constitute radical new directions in those mediums.[140][141][142]

At the turn of the 21st century, well-established artists such as Sir Anthony Caro, Lucian Freud, Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Agnes Martin, Al Held, Ellsworth Kelly, Helen Frankenthaler, Frank Stella, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, James Rosenquist, Alex Katz, Philip Pearlstein, and younger artists including Brice Marden, Chuck Close, Sam Gilliam, Isaac Witkin, Sean Scully, Mahirwan Mamtani, Joseph Nechvatal, Elizabeth Murray, Larry Poons, Richard Serra, Walter Darby Bannard, Larry Zox, Ronnie Landfield, Ronald Davis, Dan Christensen, Pat Lipsky, Joel Shapiro, Tom Otterness, Joan Snyder, Ross Bleckner, Archie Rand, Susan Crile, and others continued to produce vital and influential paintings and sculpture.

Discover more about After World War II related topics

Late modernism

Late modernism

In the visual arts, late modernism encompasses the overall production of most recent art made between the aftermath of World War II and the early years of the 21st century. The terminology often points to similarities between late modernism and post-modernism although there are differences. The predominant term for art produced since the 1950s is contemporary art. Not all art labelled as contemporary art is modernist or post-modern, and the broader term encompasses both artists who continue to work in modern and late modernist traditions, as well as artists who reject modernism for post-modernism or other reasons. Arthur Danto argues explicitly in After the End of Art that contemporaneity was the broader term, and that postmodern objects represent a subsector of the contemporary movement which replaced modernity and modernism, while other notable critics: Hilton Kramer, Robert C. Morgan, Kirk Varnedoe, Jean-François Lyotard and others have argued that postmodern objects are at best relative to modernist works.

Jean Barraqué

Jean Barraqué

Jean-Henri-Alphonse Barraqué was a French composer and writer on music who developed an individual form of serialism which is displayed in a small output.

Luigi Nono

Luigi Nono

Luigi Nono was an Italian avant-garde composer of classical music.

Karlheinz Stockhausen

Karlheinz Stockhausen

Karlheinz Stockhausen was a German composer, widely acknowledged by critics as one of the most important but also controversial composers of the 20th and early 21st centuries. He is known for his groundbreaking work in electronic music, for introducing controlled chance into serial composition, and for musical spatialization.

Iannis Xenakis

Iannis Xenakis

Giannis Klearchou Xenakis was a Romanian-born Greek-French avant-garde composer, music theorist, architect, performance director and engineer.

Gottfried Benn

Gottfried Benn

Gottfried Benn was a German poet, essayist, and physician. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times. He was awarded the Georg Büchner Prize in 1951.

Anna Akhmatova

Anna Akhmatova

Anna Andreyevna Gorenko, better known by the pen name Anna Akhmatova, was one of the most significant Russian poets of 20th century. She was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in 1965 and received second-most (three) nominations for the award the following year.

Dorothy Richardson

Dorothy Richardson

Dorothy Miller Richardson was a British author and journalist. Author of Pilgrimage, a sequence of 13 semi-autobiographical novels published between 1915 and 1967—though Richardson saw them as chapters of one work—she was one of the earliest modernist novelists to use stream of consciousness as a narrative technique. Richardson also emphasises in Pilgrimage the importance and distinct nature of female experiences. The title Pilgrimage alludes not only to "the journey of the artist ... to self-realisation but, more practically, to the discovery of a unique creative form and expression".

John Cowper Powys

John Cowper Powys

John Cowper Powys was an English philosopher, lecturer, novelist, critic and poet born in Shirley, Derbyshire, where his father was vicar of the parish church in 1871–1879. Powys appeared with a volume of verse in 1896 and a first novel in 1915, but gained success only with his novel Wolf Solent in 1929. He has been seen as a successor to Thomas Hardy, and Wolf Solent, A Glastonbury Romance (1932), Weymouth Sands (1934), and Maiden Castle (1936) have been called his Wessex novels. As with Hardy, landscape is important to his works. So is elemental philosophy in his characters' lives. In 1934 he published an autobiography. His itinerant lectures were a success in England and in 1905–1930 in the United States, where he wrote many of his novels and had several first published. He moved to Dorset, England, in 1934 with a US partner, Phyllis Playter. In 1935 they moved to Corwen, Merionethshire, Wales, where he set two novels, and in 1955 to Blaenau Ffestiniog, where he died in 1963.

Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an expatriate American poet and critic, a major figure in the early modernist poetry movement, and a fascist collaborator in Italy during World War II. His works include Ripostes (1912), Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), and his 800-page epic poem, The Cantos (c. 1917–1962).

Basil Bunting

Basil Bunting

Basil Cheesman Bunting was a British modernist poet whose reputation was established with the publication of Briggflatts in 1966, generally regarded as one of the major achievements of the modernist tradition in English. He had a lifelong interest in music that led him to emphasise the sonic qualities of poetry, particularly the importance of reading poetry aloud: he was an accomplished reader of his own work.

Briggflatts

Briggflatts

Briggflatts is a long poem by Basil Bunting published in 1966. The work is subtitled "An Autobiography." The title "Briggflatts" comes from the name of Brigflatts Meeting House, a Quaker Friends meeting house near Sedbergh in Cumbria, England. Bunting visited Brigflatts as a schoolboy when the family of one of his schoolfriends lived there, and it was at this time that he developed a strong attachment to his friend's sister, Peggy Greenbank, to whom the poem is dedicated. It was first read in public on 22 December 1965 in the medieval Morden Tower, part of Newcastle town wall, and published in 1966 by Fulcrum Press. Bunting also wrote another poem with "Briggflatts" in its title, the short work "At Briggflatts meetinghouse" (1975).

Modernism in Africa and Asia

Peter Kalliney suggests that "Modernist concepts, especially aesthetic autonomy, were fundamental to the literature of decolonization in anglophone Africa."[143] In his opinion, Rajat Neogy, Christopher Okigbo, and Wole Soyinka, were among the writers who "repurposed modernist versions of aesthetic autonomy to declare their freedom from colonial bondage, from systems of racial discrimination, and even from the new postcolonial state".[144]

The terms "modernism" and "modernist", according to scholar William J. Tyler, "have only recently become part of the standard discourse in English on modern Japanese literature and doubts concerning their authenticity vis-a-vis Western European modernism remain". Tyler finds this odd, given "the decidedly modern prose" of such "well-known Japanese writers as Kawabata Yasunari, Nagai Kafu, and Jun'ichirō Tanizaki". However, "scholars in the visual and fine arts, architecture, and poetry readily embraced "modanizumu" as a key concept for describing and analyzing Japanese culture in the 1920s and 1930s".[145] In 1924, various young Japanese writers, including Kawabata and Riichi Yokomitsu started a literary journal Bungei Jidai ("The Artistic Age"). This journal was "part of an 'art for art's sake' movement, influenced by European Cubism, Expressionism, Dada, and other modernist styles".[146]

Japanese modernist architect Kenzō Tange (1913–2005) was one of the most significant architects of the 20th century, combining traditional Japanese styles with modernism, and designing major buildings on five continents. Tange was also an influential patron of the Metabolist movement. He said: "It was, I believe, around 1959 or at the beginning of the sixties that I began to think about what I was later to call structuralism",[147] He was influenced from an early age by the Swiss modernist, Le Corbusier, Tange gained international recognition in 1949 when he won the competition for the design of Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park.

In China the "New Sensationists" (新感觉派, Xīn Gǎnjué Pài) were a group of writers based in Shanghai who in the 1930s and 1940s were influenced, to varying degrees, by Western and Japanese modernism. They wrote fiction that was more concerned with the unconscious and with aesthetics than with politics or social problems. Among these writers were Mu Shiying and Shi Zhecun.

In India, the Progressive Artists' Group was a group of modern artists, mainly based in Mumbai, India formed in 1947. Though it lacked any particular style, it synthesised Indian art with European and North America influences from the first half of the 20th century, including Post-Impressionism, Cubism and Expressionism.

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Hanshinkan Modernism

Hanshinkan Modernism

Hanshinkan Modernism (阪神間モダニズム) identifies the modernist arts, culture, and lifestyle that developed from the region of Japan centered primarily on the Hanshinkan conurbation between Osaka and Kobe, the ideally terrained area between the Rokkō Range and the sea from the 1900s through the 1930s, or the circumstances of that period.

Decolonization

Decolonization

Decolonization or decolonisation is the undoing of colonialism, the latter being the process whereby imperial nations establish and dominate foreign territories, often overseas. Some scholars of decolonization focus especially on independence movements in the colonies and the collapse of global colonial empires. Other scholars extend the meaning to include economic, cultural and psychological aspects of the colonial experience.

Christopher Okigbo

Christopher Okigbo

Christopher Ifekandu Okigbo was a Nigerian poet, teacher, and librarian, who died fighting for the independence of Biafra. He is today widely acknowledged as an outstanding postcolonial English-language African poet and one of the major modernist writers of the 20th century.

Jun'ichirō Tanizaki

Jun'ichirō Tanizaki

Jun'ichirō Tanizaki was a Japanese author who is considered to be one of the most prominent figures in modern Japanese literature. The tone and subject matter of his work ranges from shocking depictions of sexuality and destructive erotic obsessions to subtle portrayals of the dynamics of family life within the context of the rapid changes in 20th-century Japanese society. Frequently, his stories are narrated in the context of a search for cultural identity in which constructions of the West and Japanese tradition are juxtaposed.

Art for art's sake

Art for art's sake

Art for art's sake—the usual English rendering of l'art pour l'art, a French slogan from the latter half of the 19th century—is a phrase that expresses the philosophy that 'true' art is utterly independent of any and all social values and utilitarian function, be that didactic, moral, or political. Such works are sometimes described as autotelic, a concept that has been expanded to embrace "inner-directed" or "self-motivated" human beings.

Architect

Architect

An architect is a person who plans, designs and oversees the construction of buildings. To practice architecture means to provide services in connection with the design of buildings and the space within the site surrounding the buildings that have human occupancy or use as their principal purpose. Etymologically, the term architect derives from the Latin architectuscode: lat promoted to code: la , which derives from the Greek, i.e., chief builder.

Kenzō Tange

Kenzō Tange

Kenzō Tange was a Japanese architect, and winner of the 1987 Pritzker Prize for Architecture. He was one of the most significant architects of the 20th century, combining traditional Japanese styles with modernism, and designed major buildings on five continents. His career spanned the entire second half of the twentieth century, producing numerous distinctive buildings in Tokyo, other Japanese cities and cities around the world, as well as ambitious physical plans for Tokyo and its environs. Tange was also an influential patron of the Metabolist movement. He said: "It was, I believe, around 1959 or at the beginning of the sixties that I began to think about what I was later to call structuralism",, a reference to the architectural movement known as Dutch Structuralism.

Metabolism (architecture)

Metabolism (architecture)

Metabolism was a post-war Japanese architectural movement that fused ideas about architectural megastructures with those of organic biological growth. It had its first international exposure during CIAM's 1959 meeting and its ideas were tentatively tested by students from Kenzo Tange's MIT studio.

Le Corbusier

Le Corbusier

Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, known as Le Corbusier, was a Swiss-French architect, designer, painter, urban planner, writer, and one of the pioneers of what is now regarded as modern architecture. He was born in Switzerland and became a French citizen in 1930. His career spanned five decades, and he designed buildings in Europe, Japan, India, and North and South America. He considered that "the roots of modern architecture are to be found in Viollet-le-Duc".

Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park

Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park

Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park is a memorial park in the center of Hiroshima, Japan. It is dedicated to the legacy of Hiroshima as the first city in the world to suffer a nuclear attack at the end of World War II, and to the memories of the bomb's direct and indirect victims. The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park is visited by more than one million people each year. The park is there in memory of the victims of the nuclear attack on August 6, 1945, in which the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park was planned and designed by the Japanese Architect Kenzō Tange at Tange Lab.

New Sensationists

New Sensationists

The New Sensationists were a group of writers that emerged in the late 1920s in Shanghai, whose revolutionary use of language, structure, theme, and style is seen as the foundation of Chinese modernist literature. They wrote fiction that was more concerned with the unconscious and with aesthetics than with politics or social problems. Among these writers were Mu Shiying, Liu Na'ou, and Shi Zhecun.

Mu Shiying

Mu Shiying

Mu Shiying was a Chinese writer who is best known for his modernist short stories. He was active in Shanghai in the 1930s where he contributed to journals like Les Contemporains, edited by Shi Zhecun.

Differences between modernism and postmodernism

By the early 1980s the Postmodern movement in art and architecture began to establish its position through various conceptual and intermedia formats. Postmodernism in music and literature began to take hold earlier. In music, postmodernism is described in one reference work as a "term introduced in the 1970s",[148] while in British literature, The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature sees modernism "ceding its predominance to postmodernism" as early as 1939.[91] However, dates are highly debatable, especially as according to Andreas Huyssen: "one critic's postmodernism is another critic's modernism."[149] This includes those who are critical of the division between the two and see them as two aspects of the same movement, and believe that late Modernism continues.[149]

Modernism is an encompassing label for a wide variety of cultural movements. Postmodernism is essentially a centralized movement that named itself, based on sociopolitical theory, although the term is now used in a wider sense to refer to activities from the 20th century onwards which exhibit awareness of and reinterpret the modern.[150][151][152]

Postmodern theory asserts that the attempt to canonise Modernism "after the fact" is doomed to undisambiguable contradictions.[153]

In a narrower sense, what was Modernist was not necessarily also postmodern. Those elements of Modernism which accentuated the benefits of rationality and socio-technological progress were only Modernist.[154]

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Intermedia

Intermedia

Intermedia is an art theory term coined in the mid-1960s by Fluxus artist Dick Higgins to describe various interdisciplinarity art activities that occur between genres, beginning in the 1960s. It was also used by John Brockman to refer to works in expanded cinema that were associated with Jonas Mekas' Film-Makers’ Cinematheque. Gene Youngblood also described intermedia, beginning in his Intermedia column for the Los Angeles Free Press beginning in 1967 as a part of a global network of multiple media that was expanding consciousness. Youngblood gathered and expanded upon intermedia ideas from this series of columns in his 1970 book Expanded Cinema, with an introduction by Buckminster Fuller. Over the years, intermedia has been used almost interchangeably with multi-media and more recently with the categories of digital media, technoetics, electronic media and post-conceptualism.

Andreas Huyssen

Andreas Huyssen

Andreas Huyssen is the Villard Professor Emeritus of German and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he taught beginning in 1986. He is the founding director of the university's Institute for Comparative Literature and Society and one of the founding editors of the New German Critique.

Postmodernism

Postmodernism

Postmodernism is an intellectual stance or mode of discourse characterized by skepticism toward the "grand narratives" of modernism, rejection of epistemic certainty or the stability of meaning, and sensitivity to the role of ideology in maintaining political power. Claims to objectivity are dismissed as naïve realism, with attention drawn to the conditional nature of knowledge claims within particular historical, political, and cultural discourses. The postmodern outlook is characterized by self-referentiality, epistemological relativism, moral relativism, pluralism, irony, irreverence, and eclecticism; it rejects the "universal validity" of binary oppositions, stable identity, hierarchy, and categorization.

Attack on early modernism

Franz Marc, The fate of the animals, 1913, oil on canvas. The work was displayed at the exhibition of "Entartete Kunst" ("degenerate art") in Munich, Nazi Germany, 1937.
Franz Marc, The fate of the animals, 1913, oil on canvas. The work was displayed at the exhibition of "Entartete Kunst" ("degenerate art") in Munich, Nazi Germany, 1937.

Modernism's stress on freedom of expression, experimentation, radicalism, and primitivism disregards conventional expectations. In many art forms this often meant startling and alienating audiences with bizarre and unpredictable effects, as in the strange and disturbing combinations of motifs in Surrealism or the use of extreme dissonance and atonality in Modernist music. In literature this often involved the rejection of intelligible plots or characterization in novels, or the creation of poetry that defied clear interpretation.

From 1932, socialist realism began to oust Modernism in the Soviet Union;[85] it had previously endorsed Futurism and Constructivism. The Nazi government of Germany deemed modernism narcissistic and nonsensical, as well as "Jewish" (see Antisemitism) and "Negro".[155] The Nazis exhibited Modernist paintings alongside works by the mentally ill in an exhibition entitled "Degenerate Art". Accusations of "formalism" could lead to the end of a career, or worse. For this reason many modernists of the postwar generation felt that they were the most important bulwark against totalitarianism, the "canary in the coal mine", whose repression by a government or other group with supposed authority represented a warning that individual liberties were being threatened. Louis A. Sass compared madness, specifically schizophrenia, and modernism in a less fascist manner by noting their shared disjunctive narratives, surreal images, and incoherence.[156]

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Franz Marc

Franz Marc

Franz Moritz Wilhelm Marc was a German painter and printmaker, one of the key figures of German Expressionism. He was a founding member of Der Blaue Reiter, a journal whose name later became synonymous with the circle of artists collaborating in it.

Fate of the Animals

Fate of the Animals

Fate of the Animals is a painting by Franz Marc created in 1913. It is oil on canvas. This work contrasts most of Marc's other works by presenting animals in a brutal way rather than depicting them in a peaceful manner. Marc's strong ties with animals as his subjects remains uncertain, but it is predicted to stem from his childhood dog. Fate of the Animals remains one of Marc's most famous pieces and displays Der Blaue Reiter style that he co-founded with Wassily Kandinsky. The painting currently resides in the Kunstmuseum in Basel, Switzerland.

Degenerate art

Degenerate art

Degenerate art was a term adopted in the 1920s by the Nazi Party in Germany to describe modern art. During the dictatorship of Adolf Hitler, German modernist art, including many works of internationally renowned artists, was removed from state-owned museums and banned in Nazi Germany on the grounds that such art was an "insult to German feeling", un-German, Freemasonic, Jewish, or Communist in nature. Those identified as degenerate artists were subjected to sanctions that included being dismissed from teaching positions, being forbidden to exhibit or to sell their art, and in some cases being forbidden to produce art.

Munich

Munich

Munich is the capital and most populous city of the German state of Bavaria. With a population of 1,558,395 inhabitants as of 31 July 2020, it is the third-largest city in Germany, after Berlin and Hamburg, and thus the largest which does not constitute its own state, as well as the 11th-largest city in the European Union. The city's metropolitan region is home to 6 million people. Straddling the banks of the River Isar north of the Bavarian Alps, Munich is the seat of the Bavarian administrative region of Upper Bavaria, while being the most densely populated municipality in Germany with 4,500 people per km2. Munich is the second-largest city in the Bavarian dialect area, after the Austrian capital of Vienna.

Nazi Germany

Nazi Germany

Nazi Germany was the German state between 1933 and 1945, when Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party controlled the country, transforming it into a dictatorship. Under Hitler's rule, Germany quickly became a totalitarian state where nearly all aspects of life were controlled by the government. The Third Reich, meaning "Third Realm" or "Third Empire", alluded to the Nazi claim that Nazi Germany was the successor to the earlier Holy Roman Empire (800–1806) and German Empire (1871–1918). The Third Reich, which Hitler and the Nazis referred to as the Thousand-Year Reich, ended in May 1945 after just 12 years when the Allies defeated Germany, ending World War II in Europe.

Primitivism

Primitivism

In the arts of the Western World, Primitivism is a mode of aesthetic idealization that means to recreate the experience of the primitive time, place, and person, either by emulation or by re-creation. In Western philosophy, Primitivism proposes that the people of a primitive society possess a morality and an ethics that are superior to the urban value system of civilized people; thus, in art and in philosophy, primitivism is nostalgia for a non-existent golden age.

Consonance and dissonance

Consonance and dissonance

In music, consonance and dissonance are categorizations of simultaneous or successive sounds. Within the Western tradition, some listeners associate consonance with sweetness, pleasantness, and acceptability, and dissonance with harshness, unpleasantness, or unacceptability, although there is broad acknowledgement that this depends also on familiarity and musical expertise. The terms form a structural dichotomy in which they define each other by mutual exclusion: a consonance is what is not dissonant, and a dissonance is what is not consonant. However, a finer consideration shows that the distinction forms a gradation, from the most consonant to the most dissonant. In casual discourse, as German composer and music theorist Paul Hindemith stressed, "The two concepts have never been completely explained, and for a thousand years the definitions have varied". The term sonance has been proposed to encompass or refer indistinctly to the terms consonance and dissonance.

Atonality

Atonality

Atonality in its broadest sense is music that lacks a tonal center, or key. Atonality, in this sense, usually describes compositions written from about the early 20th-century to the present day, where a hierarchy of harmonies focusing on a single, central triad is not used, and the notes of the chromatic scale function independently of one another. More narrowly, the term atonality describes music that does not conform to the system of tonal hierarchies that characterized European classical music between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. "The repertory of atonal music is characterized by the occurrence of pitches in novel combinations, as well as by the occurrence of familiar pitch combinations in unfamiliar environments".

Constructivism (art)

Constructivism (art)

Constructivism is an early twentieth-century art movement founded in 1915 by Vladimir Tatlin and Alexander Rodchenko. Abstract and austere, constructivist art aimed to reflect modern industrial society and urban space. The movement rejected decorative stylization in favor of the industrial assemblage of materials. Constructivists were in favour of art for propaganda and social purposes, and were associated with Soviet socialism, the Bolsheviks and the Russian avant-garde.

Nazism

Nazism

Nazism, the common name in English for National Socialism, is the political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in Nazi Germany. During Hitler's rise to power in the 1930s in Europe, it was frequently referred to as Hitlerism. It is placed on the far-right of the political spectrum, and is extensively referred to as an example of totalitarianism. The later related term "neo-Nazism" is applied to other far-right groups with similar ideas which formed after the Second World War.

Narcissism

Narcissism

Narcissism is a self-centered personality style characterized as having an excessive preoccupation with oneself and one's own needs, often at the expense of others.

Antisemitism

Antisemitism

Antisemitism is hostility to, prejudice towards, or discrimination against Jews. A person who holds such positions is called an antisemite. Antisemitism is considered to be a form of racism.

Criticism of late modernity

In fact, modernism flourished mainly in consumer/capitalist societies, despite the fact that its proponents often rejected consumerism itself. However, high modernism began to merge with consumer culture after World War II, especially during the 1960s. Modernist devices also started to appear in popular cinema, and later on in music videos. Modernist design also began to enter the mainstream of popular culture, as simplified and stylized forms became popular, often associated with dreams of a space age high-tech future.[157][158]

In 2008, Janet Bennett published Modernity and Its Critics through The Oxford Handbook of Political Theory.[159] Merging of consumer and high versions of Modernist culture led to a radical transformation of the meaning of "Modernism". First, it implied that a movement based on the rejection of tradition had become a tradition of its own. Second, it demonstrated that the distinction between elite Modernist and mass consumerist culture had lost its precision. Modernism had become so institutionalized that it was now "post avant-garde", indicating that it had lost its power as a revolutionary movement. Many have interpreted this transformation as the beginning of the phase that became known as postmodernism. For others, such as art critic Robert Hughes, postmodernism represents an extension of modernism.

"Anti-modern" or "counter-modern" movements seek to emphasize holism, connection and spirituality as remedies or antidotes to modernism. Such movements see modernism as reductionist, and therefore subject to an inability to see systemic and emergent effects.

Some traditionalist artists like Alexander Stoddart reject modernism generally as the product of "an epoch of false money allied with false culture".[160]

In some fields, the effects of modernism have remained stronger and more persistent than in others. Visual art has made the most complete break with its past. Most major capital cities have museums devoted to modern art as distinct from post-Renaissance art (c. 1400 to c. 1900). Examples include the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Modern in London, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. These galleries make no distinction between modernist and Postmodernist phases, seeing both as developments within Modern Art.

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High modernism

High modernism

High modernism is a form of modernity, characterized by an unfaltering confidence in science and technology as means to reorder the social and natural world. The high modernist movement was particularly prevalent during the Cold War, especially in the late 1950s and 1960s.

Postmodernism

Postmodernism

Postmodernism is an intellectual stance or mode of discourse characterized by skepticism toward the "grand narratives" of modernism, rejection of epistemic certainty or the stability of meaning, and sensitivity to the role of ideology in maintaining political power. Claims to objectivity are dismissed as naïve realism, with attention drawn to the conditional nature of knowledge claims within particular historical, political, and cultural discourses. The postmodern outlook is characterized by self-referentiality, epistemological relativism, moral relativism, pluralism, irony, irreverence, and eclecticism; it rejects the "universal validity" of binary oppositions, stable identity, hierarchy, and categorization.

Robert Hughes (critic)

Robert Hughes (critic)

Robert Studley Forrest Hughes AO was an Australian-born art critic, writer, and producer of television documentaries. He was described in 1997 by Robert Boynton of The New York Times as "the most famous art critic in the world."

Holism

Holism

Holism is the idea that various systems should be viewed as wholes, not merely as a collection of parts. The term "holism" was coined by Jan Smuts in his 1926 book Holism and Evolution. While his ideas had racist connotations, the modern use of the word generally refers to treating a person as an integrated whole, rather than as a collection of separate systems. For example, well-being may be regarded as not merely physical health, but also psychological and spiritual well-being.

Spirituality

Spirituality

The meaning of spirituality has developed and expanded over time, and various meanings can be found alongside each other. Traditionally, spirituality referred to a religious process of re-formation which "aims to recover the original shape of man", oriented at "the image of God" as exemplified by the founders and sacred texts of the religions of the world. The term was used within early Christianity to refer to a life oriented toward the Holy Spirit and broadened during the Late Middle Ages to include mental aspects of life.

Emergence

Emergence

In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence occurs when an entity is observed to have properties its parts do not have on their own, properties or behaviors that emerge only when the parts interact in a wider whole.

Alexander Stoddart

Alexander Stoddart

Alexander "Sandy" Stoddart is a Scottish sculptor, who, since 2008, has been the Queen's Sculptor in Ordinary in Scotland. He works primarily on figurative sculpture in clay within the neoclassical tradition. Stoddart is best known for his civic monuments, including 10-foot (3.0 m) bronze statues of David Hume and Adam Smith, philosophers during the Scottish Enlightenment, on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, and others of James Clerk Maxwell, William Henry Playfair and John Witherspoon. Stoddart says of his own motivation, "My great ambition is to do sculpture for Scotland", primarily through large civic monuments to figures from the country's past.

Renaissance

Renaissance

The Renaissance is a period in European history marking the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity and covering the 15th and 16th centuries, characterized by an effort to revive and surpass ideas and achievements of classical antiquity. It occurred after the Crisis of the Late Middle Ages and was associated with great social change. In addition to the standard periodization, proponents of a "long Renaissance" may put its beginning in the 14th century and its end in the 17th century.

Museum of Modern Art

Museum of Modern Art

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues.

Tate Modern

Tate Modern

Tate Modern is an art gallery located in London. It houses the United Kingdom's national collection of international modern and contemporary art, and forms part of the Tate group together with Tate Britain, Tate Liverpool and Tate St Ives. It is located in the former Bankside Power Station, in the Bankside area of the London Borough of Southwark.

Centre Pompidou

Centre Pompidou

The Centre Pompidou, more fully the Centre national d'art et de culture Georges-Pompidou, also known as the Pompidou Centre in English, is a complex building in the Beaubourg area of the 4th arrondissement of Paris, near Les Halles, rue Montorgueil, and the Marais. It was designed in the style of high-tech architecture by the architectural team of Richard Rogers, Su Rogers, Renzo Piano, along with Gianfranco Franchini.

Source: "Modernism", Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, (2023, March 21st), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernism.

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Footnotes
  1. ^ a b The ground motive of modernism, Graff asserts, was criticism of the nineteenth-century bourgeois social order and its world view. Its artistic strategy was the self-conscious overturning of the conventions of bourgeois realism ... the antirationalist, antirealist, antibourgeois program of modernism ... the modernists, carrying the torch of romanticism, taught us that linearity, rationality, consciousness, cause and effect, naïve illusionism, transparent language, innocent anecdote, and middle-class moral conventions are not the whole story.[15]
  2. ^ a b Each of the types of repetition that we have examined is not limited to the mass media but belongs by right to the entire history of artistic creativity; plagiarism, quotation, parody, the ironic retake are typical of the entire artistic-literary tradition.
    Much art has been and is repetitive. The concept of absolute originality is a contemporary one, born with Romanticism; classical art was in vast measure serial, and the "modern" avant-garde (at the beginning of this century) challenged the Romantic idea of "creation from nothingness," with its techniques of collage, mustachios on the Mona Lisa, art about art, and so on.[38]
  3. ^ a b The Modernist movement which dominated art, music, letters during the first half of the century was, at critical points, a strategy of conservation, of custodianship. Stravinsky's genius developed through phases of recapitulation. He took from Machaut, Gesualdo, Monteverdi. He mimed Tchaikovsky and Gounod, the Beethoven piano sonatas, the symphonies of Haydn, the operas of Pergolesi and Glinka. He incorporated Debussy and Webern into his own idiom. In each instance the listener was meant to recognize the source, to grasp the intent of a transformation which left salient aspects of the original intact.
    The history of Picasso is marked by retrospection. The explicit variations on classical pastoral themes, the citations from and pastiches of Rembrandt, Goya, Velázquez, Manet, are external products of a constant revision, a 'seeing again' in the light of technical and cultural shifts. Had we only Picasso's sculptures, graphics, and paintings, we could reconstruct a fair portion of the development of the arts from the Minoan to Cézanne.
    In 20th-century literature, the elements of reprise have been obsessive, and they have organized precisely those texts which at first seemed most revolutionary. The Waste Land, Ulysses, Pound's Cantos are deliberate assemblages, in-gatherings of a cultural past felt to be in danger of dissolution. The long sequence of imitations, translations, masked quotations, and explicit historical paintings in Robert Lowell's History has carried the same technique into the 1970s. [...] In Modernism collage has been the representative device. The new, even at its most scandalous, has been set against an informing background and framework of tradition. Stravinsky, Picasso, Braque, Eliot, Joyce, Pound—the 'makers of the new'—have been neo-classics, often as observant of canonic precedent as their 17th-century forebears.[39]
  4. ^ [James] Joyce's Ulysses is a comedy not divine – ending, like Dante's, in the vision of a God whose will is our peace – but human all-too-human ... .[6]
  5. ^ In the twentieth century, the social processes that bring this maelstrom into being, and keep it in a state of perpetual becoming, have come to be called 'modernization'. These world-historical processes have nourished an amazing variety of visions and ideas that aim to make men and women the subjects as well as the objects of modernization, to give them the power to change the world that is changing them, to make their way through the maelstrom and make it their own. Over the past century, these visions and values have come to be loosely grouped together under the name of 'modernism'.[13]
  6. ^ Note the parallel French movement Fauvism and the English Vorticism: "The Fauvist movement has been compared to German Expressionism, both projecting brilliant colors and spontaneous brushwork, and indebted to the same late nineteenth-century sources, especially Van Gogh.[51][52]
  7. ^ May Sinclair first applied the term "stream of consciousness" in a literary context, in 1918 in her discussion of Richardson's stylistic innovations in a review of Leutnant Gustl and Pilgrimage.[71]
References
  1. ^ "Modernist architecture: 30 stunning examples". Trendir. 2 September 2016.
  2. ^ a b Graff, Gerald (Winter 1973). "The myth of the Postmodernist breakthrough". TriQuarterly. Vol. 26. pp. 383–417.
  3. ^ a b Graff, Gerald (Spring 1975). "Babbitt at the abyss: The social context of postmodern American fiction". TriQuarterly. Vol. 33. pp. 307–337.
  4. ^ a b Childs, Peter Modernism (Routledge, 2000). ISBN 0-415-19647-7. p. 17. Accessed on 8 February 2009.
  5. ^ Lewis, Pericles (2000). Modernism, Nationalism, and the Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 38–39. doi:10.1017/cbo9780511485145. ISBN 978-0-521-66111-9.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link)
  6. ^ Faulkner, Peter (1990). Modernism. London: Taylor & Francis Ltd. p. 60. ISBN 0415051452.
  7. ^ Gardner, Helen; de la Croix, Horst; Tansey, Richard G.; Kirkpatrick, Diane (1991). Gardner's Art through the Ages. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. p. 953. ISBN 0-15-503770-6.
  8. ^ Morris Dickstein, "An Outsider to His Own Life", Books, The New York Times, August 3, 1997; Anthony Mellors, Late modernist poetics: From Pound to Prynne.
  9. ^ "Postmodernism: definition of postmodernism". Oxford dictionary (American English) (US). Archived from the original on 4 May 2016. Retrieved 16 February 2018 – via oxforddictionaries.com.
  10. ^ Ruth Reichl, Cook's November 1989; American Heritage Dictionary's definition of "postmodern"
  11. ^ Mura, Andrea (2012). "The Symbolic Function of Transmodernity". Language and Psychoanalysis. 1 (1): 68–87. doi:10.7565/landp.2012.0005.
  12. ^ a b Everdell, William, The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth Century Thought, University of Chicago Press, 1997, ISBN 0-226-22480-5.
  13. ^ Berman 1988, p 16
  14. ^ Bar-On, Tamir (1 January 2007). Where have all the fascists gone?. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. ISBN 9780754671541 – via Google Books.
  15. ^ Barth (1979) quotation
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