Modernism

Modernism is a philosophical, religious, and art 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 Artists attempted to depart from traditional forms of art, which they considered outdated or obsolete.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]

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]

Modernism, Romanticism, Philosophy and Symbol

Literary modernism is often summed up in a line from W. B. Yeats: "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold" (in 'The Second Coming').^[15] Modernists often search for a metaphysical 'centre' but experience its collapse.^[16] (Postmodernism, by way of contrast, celebrates that collapse, exposing the failure of metaphysics, for instance in Jacques Derrida's deconstruction of metaphysical claims.)^[17]

Philosophically, the collapse of metaphysics can be traced back to the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–1776), who argued that we never actually perceive one event causing another. We only experience the 'constant conjunction' of events, and do not perceive a metaphysical 'cause'. Similarly, Hume argues (without using the actual terms) that we never know the self as object, only the self as subject, and we are thus blind to our true natures.^[18] More generally, if we only 'know' through sensory experience (seeing, touching, etc.), then we cannot 'know' or make metaphysical claims.

Modernism is thus often driven emotionally by the desire for metaphysical truths, while understanding their impossibility. Modernist novels, for instance, feature characters like Marlow in Heart of Darkness or Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby who believe that they have encountered some great truth about nature or character, truths that the novels themselves treat ironically, offering more mundane explanations.^[19] Similarly, many poems of Wallace Stevens struggle with the sense of nature's significance, falling under two headings: poems in which the speaker denies that nature has meaning, only for nature to loom up by the end of the poem; and poems in which the speaker claims nature has meaning, only for that meaning to collapse by the end of the poem.

Modernism often rejects nineteenth century realism, if the latter is understood as focusing on the embodiment of meaning within a naturalistic representation. At the same time, some modernists aim at a more 'real' realism, one that is decentred. Picasso's proto-cubist painting, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon of 1907 (see picture above) does not present its subjects from a single point of view (that of a single viewer), but instead presents a flat, two-dimensional picture plane. 'The Poet' of 1911 is similarly decentred, presenting the body from every point of view. As the Peggy Guggenheim Collections website puts it, 'Picasso presents multiple views of each object, as if he had moved around it, and synthesizes them into a single compound image'.^[20]

Modernism, with its sense that 'things fall apart,' can be seen as the apotheosis of romanticism, if romanticism is the (often frustrated) quest for metaphysical truths about character, nature, God and meaning in the world.^[21] Modernism often yearns for a romantic or metaphysical centre, but finds only its collapse.

This distinction between modernism and romanticism extends to their respective treatments of 'symbol'. The romantics at times see an essential relation (the 'ground') between the symbol (the 'vehicle', in

For these reasons, modernist metaphors are often unnatural, as for instance in T.S. Eliot's description of an evening 'spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table'.[26] Similarly, in many later modernist poets nature is unnaturalised and at times mechanised, as for example in Stephen Oliver's image of the moon busily 'hoisting' itself into consciousness.^[27]

Early history

Origins

According to a critic, modernism developed out of

The dominant trends of industrial

The beginnings in the late nineteenth century

Historians, and writers in different disciplines, have suggested various dates as starting points for modernism. Historian

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.^[43]

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.^[30]: 538

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) was another major precursor of modernism,^[45] 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."^[46][47] Henri Bergson (1859–1941), on the other hand, emphasized the difference between scientific, clock time and the direct, subjective, human experience of time.^[33]: 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).^[48] Also important in Bergson's philosophy was the idea of élan vital, the life force, which "brings about the creative evolution of everything."^[33]: 132 His philosophy also placed a high value on intuition, though without rejecting the importance of the intellect.^[33]: 132

Important literary precursors of modernism were Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881), who wrote the novels Crime and Punishment (1866) and The Brothers Karamazov (1880);^[49] 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).^[50]

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.

Main period

Early 20th century to 1930

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]

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."^[53] 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,^[54] Richard Wagner, Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss and Max Reger.^[55][56] 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

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."^[66] 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.^[67]: 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."^[67]: 43 More explicitly: that the expressionists rejected the ideology of realism.^{[67]: 43–48 [68]} 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.^[69] 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.^[70]

In 1913—which was the year of philosopher

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.^[86] 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.^[86]

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.^[95]

Significant Modernist literary works continued to be created in the 1920s and 1930s, including further novels by

The Modernist movement continued during this period in

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

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.^[103] 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.

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.^[113]

Theatre of the Absurd

The term "

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.^[115] 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

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.

In the 1950s, Moore began to receive increasingly significant commissions, including a reclining figure for the UNESCO building in Paris in 1958.^[119] 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.^[120][121] 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.^[122]

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.^[123]

Francis Bacon was an Irish-born British figurative painter known for his bold, graphic and emotionally raw imagery.^[124] 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.^[125] 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.^[126]

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.^{[127][128][129][130]} His works are noted for their psychological penetration, and for their often discomforting examination of the relationship between artist and model.^[131] 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),^[132] 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."^[127]

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^[133] emerged as radical new directions.

By the late 1960s however, postminimalism, process art and Arte Povera^[134] 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.^[134] 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.^[135]

Pop art

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In 1962 the

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

Hal Foster, in his essay The Crux of Minimalism,^[138] examines the extent to which Donald Judd and Robert Morris both acknowledge and exceed Greenbergian Modernism in their published definitions of minimalism.^[138] He argues that minimalism is not a "dead end" of Modernism, but a "paradigm shift toward postmodern practices that continue to be elaborated today."^[138]

Minimal music

The terms have expanded to encompass a movement in music that features such repetition and iteration as those of the compositions of

In the late 1960s Robert Pincus-Witten^[134] 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.^[140] 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.^[141]

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.^[142]

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.^[143]

Performance and happenings

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,^[144] Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, Red Grooms, and Robert Whitman.^[145]

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.

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."^[147] 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."^[147]

Avant-garde popular music

Modernism had an uneasy relationship with popular forms of music (both in form and aesthetic) while rejecting

The continuation of

Peter Kalliney suggests that "Modernist concepts, especially aesthetic autonomy, were fundamental to the literature of decolonization in anglophone Africa."^[156] 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".^[157]

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

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

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.^{[163][164][165]}

Postmodern theory asserts that the attempt to canonise Modernism "after the fact" is doomed to undisambiguable contradictions.^[166]

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.^[167]

Modernist reactions against postmodernism include remodernism, which rejects the cynicism and deconstruction of postmodern art in favor of reviving early modernist aesthetic currents.^[168][169]

Attack on early modernism

Modernism's stress on

In 2008, Janet Bennett published Modernity and Its Critics through The Oxford Handbook of Political Theory.[175] 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

Some traditionalist artists like Alexander Stoddart reject modernism generally as the product of "an epoch of false money allied with false culture".^[176]

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.

See also

Footnotes

References

Sources

• The Literature of Replenishment
  , later republished in The Friday Book (1984).
• Eco, Umberto (1990) Interpreting Serials in The limits of interpretation, pp. 83–100, excerpt Archived 21 July 2011 at the Wayback Machine
• Everdell, William R. (1997) The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth Century Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
• Orton, Fred and Pollock, Griselda (1996) Avant-Gardes and Partisans Reviewed, Manchester University.
• Steiner, George (1998) After Babel, ch.6 Topologies of culture, 3rd revised edition
• Art Berman (1994) Preface to Modernism, University of Illinois Press.

Further reading

• Robert Archambeau. "The Avant-Garde in Babel. Two or Three Notes on Four or Five Words", Action-Yes vol. 1, issue 8 Autumn 2008.
• Armstrong, Carol and de Zegher, Catherine (eds.), Women Artists as the Millennium, Cambridge, MA: October Books,
  ISBN 978-0-262-01226-3
  .
• Aspray, William & Philip Kitcher, eds., History and Philosophy of Modern Mathematics, Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science vol. XI, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988
• Bäckström, Per (ed.), Centre-Periphery. The Avant-Garde and the Other, Nordlit. University of Tromsø, no. 21, 2007.
• Bäckström, Per. "One Earth, Four or Five Words. The Peripheral Concept of 'Avant-Garde'", Action-Yes vol. 1, issue 12 Winter 2010
• Bäckström, Per & Bodil Børset (eds.), Norsk avantgarde (Norwegian Avant-Garde), Oslo: Novus, 2011.
• Bäckström, Per & Benedikt Hjartarson (eds.), Decentring the Avant-Garde, Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, Avantgarde Critical Studies, 2014.
• Bäckström, Per and Benedikt Hjartarson. "Rethinking the Topography of the International Avant-Garde", in Decentring the Avant-Garde, Per Bäckström & Benedikt Hjartarson (eds.), Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, Avantgarde Critical Studies, 2014.
• Baker, Houston A., Jr., Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987
• Berman, Marshall, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity. Second ed. London:
  ISBN 0-14-010962-5
  .
• Bradbury, Malcolm, & James McFarlane (eds.), Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890–1930 (
  ISBN 0-14-013832-3
  ).
• Brush, Stephen G., The History of Modern Science: A Guide to the Second Scientific Revolution, 1800–1950, Ames, IA: Iowa State University Press, 1988
• Centre Georges Pompidou, Face a l'Histoire, 1933–1996. Flammarion, 1996.
  ISBN 2-85850-898-4
  .
• Crouch, Christopher, Modernism in art design and architecture, New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000
• Eysteinsson, Astradur, The Concept of Modernism, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992
• Friedman, Julia. Beyond Symbolism and Surrealism: Alexei Remizov's Synthetic Art, Northwestern University Press, 2010.
  ISBN 0-8101-2617-6
  (Trade Cloth)
• Frascina, Francis, and Charles Harrison (eds.). Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology. Published in association with
  The Open University
  . London: Harper and Row, Ltd. Reprinted, London: Paul Chapman Publishing, Ltd., 1982.
• Gates, Henry Louis. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2004.
• Hughes, Robert, The Shock of the New: Art and the Century of Change (Gardners Books, 1991,
  ISBN 0-500-27582-3
  ).
• Kenner, Hugh, The Pound Era (1971), Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1973
• Kern, Stephen, The Culture of Time and Space, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983
• Klein, Jürgen, On Modernism", Berlin, Bruxelles, Lausanne, New York Oxford: Peter Lang, 2022. ISBN 978-3-631-87869-9.
• Kolocotroni, Vassiliki et al., ed.,Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998).
• Levenson, Michael, (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Modernism (Cambridge University Press, "Cambridge Companions to Literature" series, 1999,
  ISBN 0-521-49866-X
  ).
• Lewis, Pericles. The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
• Nicholls, Peter, Modernisms: A Literary Guide (Hampshire and London: Macmillan, 1995).
• ISBN 0-300-10571-1
  ).
• The Sources of Modern Architecture and Design (
  ISBN 0-500-20072-6
  ).
• Pollock, Griselda, Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts. (Routledge, London, 1996.
  ISBN 0-415-14128-1
  ).
• Pollock, Griselda, and Florence, Penny, Looking Back to the Future: Essays by Griselda Pollock from the 1990s. (New York: G&B New Arts Press, 2001.
  ISBN 90-5701-132-8
  )
• Potter, Rachael (January 2009). "Obscene Modernism and the Trade in Salacious Books". Modernism/Modernity. 16 (1).
  ISSN 1071-6068
  .
• Sass, Louis A. (1992). Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought. New York: Basic Books. Cited in Bauer, Amy (2004). "Cognition, Constraints, and Conceptual Blends in Modernist Music", in The Pleasure of Modernist Music.
  ISBN 1-58046-143-3
  .
• ISBN 978-0-394-74478-0
  .
• Schwartz, Sanford, The Matrix of Modernism: Pound, Eliot, and Early Twentieth Century Thought, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985
• Tyler, William J., ed. Modanizumu: Modernist Fiction from Japan, 1913–1938. University of Hawai'i Press, 2008.
• Van Loo, Sofie (ed.), Gorge(l).
  ISBN 978-90-76979-35-9
  .
• Weir, David, Decadence and the Making of Modernism, 1995, University of Massachusetts Press,
  ISBN 978-0-87023-992-2
  .
• Weston, Richard, Modernism (Phaidon Press, 2001,
  ISBN 0-7148-4099-8
  ).
• de Zegher, Catherine, Inside the Visible. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).

External links

Look up modernism in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Modernism.

Wikiquote has quotations related to Modernism.

• Ballard, J. G., on Modernism.
• Denzer, Anthony S., PhD, Masters of Modernism.
• Hoppé, E. O., photographer, Edwardian Modernists.
• Malady of Writing. Modernism you can dance to An online radio show that presents a humorous version of Modernism
• Modernism Lab @ Yale University
• Modernism/Modernity Archived 14 June 2010 at the Wayback Machine, official publication of the Modernist Studies Association
• Modernism vs. Postmodernism