Modernism Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
This article focuses on the cultural movement labeled 'modernism' or 'the modern movement'. See also: Modernism (Roman Catholicism) or Modernist Christianity; Modernismo for specific art movement(s) in Spain and Catalonia.
- "Just as the ancients drew the inspiration for their arts from the world of nature...so we should draw ours from the mechanized environment we have created."
- —Antonio Sant'Elia's Manifesto of Futurist Architecture (1914)
- "Just as the ancients drew the inspiration for their arts from the world of nature...so we should draw ours from the mechanized environment we have created."
The modern movement was rooted in the idea that "traditional" forms of art, literature, social organization and daily life had become outdated, and that it was therefore essential to sweep them aside and reinvent culture. It encouraged the idea of 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, and therefore better, ways of reaching the same end. In essence, the Modern Movement argued that the new realities of the 20th century were permanent and immament, and that people should adapt to their world view to accept that what was new was also good and beautiful.
Modernism in the cultural historical sense is generally defined as the new artistic and literary styles that emerged in the decades before 1914 as artists rebelled against the late 19th century norms of depiction and literary form, in an attempt to present what they regarded as a more emotionally true picture of how people really feel and think.
The first half of the 19th century for Europe was marked by a series of turbulent wars and revolutions, which gradually formed into a series of ideas and doctrines now identified as Romanticism, which focused on individual subjective experience, the supremacy of "Nature" as the standard subject for art, revolutionary or radical extensions of expression, and individual liberty. By mid-century, however, a synthesis of these ideas, and stable governing forms had emerged. Called by various names, this synthesis was rooted in the idea that what was "real" dominated over what was subjective. Exemplified by Otto von Bismarck's realpolitik, philosophical ideas such as positivism and cultural norms now described by the word Victorian.
Core to this synthesis, however, was the importance of institutions, common assumptions and frames of reference. These drew their support from religious norms found in Christianity, scientific norms found in classical physics and doctrines which asserted that depiction of the basic external reality from an objective standpoint was possible. Cultural critics and historians label this set of doctrines Realism, though this term is not universal. In philosophy, the rationalist and positivist movements established a primacy of reason and system.
Against this current were a series of ideas. Some were direct continuations of Romantic schools of thought. Notable were the agrarian and revivalist movements in plastic arts and poetry (e.g. the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the philosopher John Ruskin). Rationalism also drew responses from the anti-rationalists in philosophy. In particular, Hegel's dialectic view of civilization and history drew responses from Friedrich Nietzsche and Søren Kierkegaard, who was a major precursor to Existentialism. Additionally, Sigmund Freud offered a view of subjective states that involved a subconscious mind full of primal impulses and counterbalancing restrictions, and Carl Jung would combine Freud's doctrine of the subconscious with a belief in natural essence to stipulate a collective unconscious that was full of basic typologies that the conscious mind fought or embraced. All of these separate reactions together, however, offered a challenge to any comfortable ideas of certainty derived by civilization, history, or pure reason.
Two schools originating in France would have particular impact. The first was Impressionism, a school of painting which was initially focused on work done, not in studios, but in the "plain air". They argued that human beings do not see objects, but instead see light itself. The school gathered adherents, and despite deep internal divisions among its leading practitioners, became increasingly influential. Initially rejected from the most important commercial show of the time - the government sponsored Paris Salon (Emperor Napoleon III created the "Salon des rejects," which displayed 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 school was Symbolism, marked by a belief that language is expressly symbolic in its nature, and that poetry and writing should follow whichever connection the sheer sound and texture of the words create. The poet Stéphane Mallarmé would be of particular importance to what would occur afterward.
At the same time social, political, and economic forces were at work which would eventually be used as the basis to argue for a radically different kind of art and thinking.
Chief among these was industrialization, which produced buildings such as the Eiffel Tower that broke all previous limitations on how tall man-made objects could be, and at the same time offered a radically different environment in urban life. The miseries of industrial urbanity, and the possibilities created by scientific examination of subjects would be crucial in the series of changes which would shake European civilization, which, at that point, regarded itself as having a continuous and progressive line of development from the Renaissance.
The breadth of the changes can be seen in how many disciplines are described, in their pre-20th century form, as being "classical", including physics, economics, and arts such as ballet.
Beginning in the 1890s and with increasing force afterwards, a strand of thinking began to assert that it was necessary to push aside previous norms entirely, and instead of merely revising past knowledge in light of current techniques, it would be necessary to make more thorough changes. The movement in art paralleled such developments as the Theory of Relativity in physics; the increasing integration of internal combustion and industrialization; and the rise of social sciences in public policy. In the first fifteen years of the twentieth century a series of writers, thinkers, and artists made the break with traditional means of organizing literature, painting, and music - again, in parallel to the change in organizational methods in other fields. The argument was that if the nature of reality itself was in question, and the restrictions which, it was felt, had been in place around human activity were falling, then art too, would have to radically change.
The landmarks include Arnold Schoenberg's atonal ending to his Second String Quartet in 1906, the abstract paintings of Wassily Kandinsky starting in 1903 and culminating with the founding of the Blue Rider group in Munich, and the rise of cubism from the work of Picasso and Georges Braque in 1908.
Powerfully influential in this wave of modernity were the theories of Freud, who argued that the mind had a basic and fundamental structure, and that subjective experience was based on the interplay of the parts of the mind. All subjective reality was based, according to Freud's ideas, on the play of basic drives and instincts, through which the outside world was perceived. This represented a break with the past, in that previously it was believed that external and absolute reality could impress itself on an individual, as, for example, in John Locke's tabula rasa doctrine.
However, the modern movement was not merely defined by its avant garde but also by a reforming trend within previous artistic norms. This search for simplification of diction was found in the work of Joseph Conrad. The pressures of communication, transportation and more rapid scientific development began placing a premium on architectural styles which were cheaper to build and less ornamented, and on writing which was shorter, clearer, and easier to read. The rise of cinema and "moving pictures" in the first decade of the twentieth century gave the modern movement an artform which was uniquely its own, and again, created a direct connection between the perceived need to extend the "progressive" tradition of the late nineteenth century, even if this conflicted with then established norms.
This wave of the modern movement broke with the past in the first decade of the twentieth century, and tried to redefine various artforms in a radical manner. Leading lights within the literary wing of this movement include Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Guillaume Apollinaire, Joseph Conrad, Marcel Proust, Gertrude Stein, Wyndham Lewis, H.D, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, and Franz Kafka. Composers such as Schoenberg and Stravinsky represent modernism in music. Artists such as Gustav Klimt, Picasso, Matisse, Mondrian, and the Surrealists represent the visual arts, while architects and designers such as Le Corbusier Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe brought modernist ideas into everyday urban life. Several figures outside of artistic modernism were influenced by artistic ideas, for example John Maynard Keynes was friends with Woolf and other writers of the Bloomsbury group.
On the eve of World War I, a growing tension and unease with the social order began to break through - seen in the Russian Revolution of 1905, the increasing agitation of "radical" parties, and an increasing number of works which either radically simplified or rejected previous practice. In 1913, Igor Stravinsky, working for Sergei Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, composed Rite of Spring for a ballet that depicted human sacrifice.
However, from the 1870s onwards, this view was increasingly called into question. Writers like Wagner and Ibsen had been reviled for their own critiques of contemporary civilisation. Increasingly it began to be seen that the values of the artist and those of society were different, or even antithetical. Moreover, there were new views of philosophy which called into question the previous (perhaps slightly complacent) optimism. Nietzsche championed a process philosophy, in which processes and forces (specifically the 'will to power') were more important than facts or things. Similarly the writings of Henri Bergson became increasingly influential, who also championed the vital 'life force' over static conceptions of reality. Again, the writings of Freud (although his works were not at all well known until after World War One) discussed the importance of unconscious forces on cognition. What united all these writers was a Neo-Romantic distrust of Enlightenment Rationality. Instead they championed (or, in case of Freud, attempted to explain) irrational thought processes. Uncoincidentally, this also coincided with a new wave of interest in the occult, spiritualism and a general rejection of the scientific worldview.
A seeming exception to this trend was to be found in Futurism. In 1909, a manifesto was published in the Le Figaro, and rapidly a group of painters: Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, and Gino Severini co-signed The Manifesto of Futurist Painting. Such manifestos were modeled on the famous "Communist Manifesto" of the previous century, and were meant to provoke and gather followers, even as they put forward principles and ideas. However, Futurism was strongly influenced by Bergson and Nietzsche, and it should be seen as part of the general trend of Modernist irrationalism, even while using the jargon and rhetoric of technology.
It must be stressed that until 1914 Modernist philosopy and art was to the taste of only a tiny minority of the intelligentsia, and that, before the invention of modern electronics, it was extremely difficult for most people to even access Modernist Art. Modernist polemics (etc.) were largely confined to 'little magazines' (like The New Age in the UK) with tiny circulations. Modernist primitivism and pessimism was not representative of the Edwardian Weltschmerz, which was more inclined towards a neo-Victorian faith in progress and liberal optimism.
However, World War One changed all that. First, the fantastic failure of the previous status quo seemed self-evident to a generation which had seen millions die fighting over scraps of earth - prior to the war, it had been argued that no one would fight such a war, since the cost was too high. Second, the introduction of a machine age into life seemed obvious - machine warfare became a touchstone of the ultimate reality. Finally, the immensely traumatic nature of the experience made both critical and subjective strands of the modern movement basic assumptions: Realism seemed to be bankrupt when faced with the fundamentally fantastic nature of trench warfare - as exemplified by books such as Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front. Moreover, the view that Mankind was making slow and steady moral progress came to seem ridiculous in the face of the senseless slaughter of the Great War.
Thus in the 1920s and increasingly after, modernism, which had been such a minority taste before the war, increasingly came to define the age. There was a subtle, but important, shift from the earlier phase: in the beginning the movement was by individuals who were part of the establishment, or wished to join the establishment. However, increasingly, the tone became one of individuals who were trying to replace the older hierarchy with one based on new ideas, norms, and methods. By 1930, modernism had won a place in the establishment, including the political and artistic establishment.
Ironically, by the time it was being accepted, Modernism itself had changed. There was a general reaction in the 1920s against the pre-1918 Modernism (which one might term 'Ultra-Modernism') which emphasised extreme revolt against all previous styles, and had, as perhaps its most paradigmatic movement, Dada. Some writers felt that this revolt against Rationality had helped to lead to the Great War. Therefore there was a move back towards control, self-restraint, and an urge to re-engage with society. Examples of this approach include Stravinsky's neoclassical style of composition, the "International style" of Bauhaus, Schoenberg's Serialism, the New Objectivity in German painting, and so on.
However, it must be remembered that these concepts and movements were often in competition with each other, and even in direct conflict. Within modernity there were disputes about the importance of the public, the relationship of art to audience, and the role of art in society. Rather than a lockstep organization, it is better to see modernism as taking a series of responses to the situation as it was understood, and the attempt to wrestle universal principles from it.
By 1930, modernism had entered popular culture with "The Jazz Age" and the increasing urbanization of populations, it had begun making systematic challenges to previous art and ideas, and was beginning to be looked to as the source for ideas to deal with the host of challenges faced in that particular historical moment. Modernism was, by this point, increasingly, represented in academia and was developing a self-conscious theory of its own importance. The Modernism of the 1930's then increasingly begins to focus on the realities of there being a popular culture which was not derrived from high culture, but instead from its own realities, particularly of mass production. Modern ideas in art were also increasingly used in commercials and logos. The famous London Underground logo is an early example of the need for clear, easily recognizable and memorable visual symbols.
Another strong influence at this time was Marxism. After the generally primitivistic/irrationalist aspect of pre-world war one Modernism (which more or less precluded any serious political commitment) and the passively reactionary neoclassicism of the 1920s (as represented most famously by T.S. Eliot), the rise of Fascism, the Great Depression, and the march to war helped to radicalise a generation. Bertolt Brecht, Auden, and the philosophers Gramsci and Walter Benjamin are perhaps the most famous examplers of this Modernist Marxism.
It must be stressed that this move to the left only happened to certain artists in a highly specific political situation. There is no particular reason to associate Modernism with 'the left' and, in fact, many Modernists were explicitly right wing (for example, Wyndham Lewis, W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot and many others).
The most controversial aspect of the modern movement was, and remains, its rejection of tradition, both in organization, and in the immediate experience of the work. If there is a fundamental idea of modernism it is that spiritual existence should conform to outside pressures, and that art and human activity should, and could, be molded to do this. This dismissal of tradition also involved the rejection of conventional expectations: hence modernism often stresses freedom of expression, experimentation, radicalism, and primitivism. In many art forms this often meant startling and alienating audiences with bizarre and unpredictable effects. Hence the strange and disturbing combinations of motifs in Surrealism, or the use of extreme dissonance in modernist music. In literature this often involved the rejection of intelligible plots or characterisation in novels, or the creation of poetry that defied clear interpretation.
Many modernists believed that by rejecting tradition they could discover radically new ways of making art. Schoenberg believed that by ignoring traditional tonal harmony, the hierarchical system of organizing works of music which had guided music making for at least a century and a half, and perhaps long, he had discovered a wholly new way of organizing sound, based in the use of twelve-note rows (See Twelve-tone technique). This became known as serial music by the post-war period. Abstract artists, taking as their examples the Impressionists, as well as Paul Cézanne and Edvard Munch, began with the assumption that color and shape formed the essential characteristics of art, not the depiction of the natural world. Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, and Kazimir Malevich all believed in redefining art as the arrangement of pure colour. The use of photography, which had rendered much of the representational function of visual art obsolete, strongly affected this particular aspect of modernism. However, these artists also believed that by rejecting the depiction of material objects they helped art move from a materialist to a spiritualist phase of development.
Other modernists, especially those involved in design, had more pragmatic views. Modernist architects and designers believed that new technology rendered old styles of building obsolete. Le Corbusier (born Charles-Edouard Jeanneret) thought that buildings should function as "machines for living in", analogous to cars, which he saw as machines for travelling in. 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 reject decorative motifs in design, preferring to emphasise the materials used and pure geometrical forms. The skyscraper, such as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building in New York (1956 – 1958), became the archetypal modernist building. Modernist design of houses and furniture also typically emphasised simplicity and clarity of form, open-plan interiors, and the absence of clutter. Modernism reversed the 19th century relationship of public and private: in the 19th century, public buildings were horizontally expansive for a variety of technical reasons, and private buildings emphasized verticality - to fit more private space on more and more limited land. Where as in the 20th century, public buildings became vertically oriented, and private buildings became organized horizontally. Many aspects of modernist design still persist within the mainstream of contemporary architecture today, though its previous dogmatism has given way to a more playful use of decoration, historical quotation, and spatial drama.
In other arts such pragmatic considerations were less important. 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. Greenberg labelled 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 a revolutionary rejection of capitalism.
Many modernists did see themselves as part of a revolutionary culture - one that included political revolution. However, many rejected conventional politics as well as artistic conventions, believing that a revolution of consciousness had greater importance than a change in political structures. Many modernists saw themselves as apolitical, only concerned with revolutionizing their own field of endeavour. Others, such as T. S. Eliot, rejected mass popular culture from a conservative position. Indeed one can argue that modernism in literature and art functioned to sustain an elite culture which excluded the majority of the population.
Because of its emphasis on individual freedom and expression, and its emphasis on the individual, many modern artists ran afoul of totalitarian governments, many of which saw traditionalism in the arts as an important prop to their political power. Two of the most famous examples are the Soviet Communist government rejected modernism on the grounds of alleged elitism; and the Nazi government in Germany deemed it narcissistic and nonsensical. 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 post-war 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.
In fact, modernism flourished mainly in consumer/capitalist societies, despite the fact that its proponents often rejected consumerism itself. However, modernism began to merge with consumer culture after World War II, especially during the 1960s. In Britain, a youth sub-culture even called itself "modernists", though usually shortened to Mods. In popular music, Bob Dylan combined folk music traditions with modernist verse, adopting literary devices derived from Eliot and others. The Beatles also developed along these lines, even creating atonal and other modernist musical effects in their later albums. Musicians such as Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart proved even more experimental. 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.
This merging of consumer and modernist culture led to a radical transformation of the meaning of "modernism" itself. Firstly, it implied that a movement based on the rejection of tradition had become a tradition of its own. Secondly, it demonstrated that the distinction between elite modernist and mass consumerist culture had lost its precision. Some writers declared that 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, for example, art critic Robert Hughes, postmodernism represents an extension of modernism.
One deep element of modernism has been alienation, either of the individual from self, or from society, or from the "natural" basis of existence. For this reason there have been repeated "anti-modern" or "counter-modern" movements, which seek to emphasize holism, connection and spirituality as being remedies or antidotes to modernism. Such movements see Modernism as reductionist, and therefore subject to the failure to see systematic and emergent effects. Many Modernists came to this viewpoint, for example Paul Hindemith in his late turn towards mysticism. Writers such as Paul Ray and Sherry Ruth, in Culture Creatives, Fredrick Turner in A Culture of Hope and Lester Brown in Plan B, have articulated a critique of the basic idea of modernism itself: that individual creative expression should conform to the realities of technology, and instead that individual creativity should make every day life more emotionally acceptable.
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 (circa 1400 to circa 1900). Examples include the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Such galleries (and popular attitudes) make no distinction between modernist and postmodernist phases, seeing both as developments within 'Modern Art'.
This is an Article on Modernism. Page Contains Information, Facts Details or Explanation Guide About Modernism Historical outline
Precursors to modernism
The beginning of modernism 1890–1910
Initially the movement can be described as a rejection of tradition, and a tendency to face problems from a fresh perspective based on current ideas and techniques. Thus Gustav Mahler considered himself a "modern" composer and Gustave Flaubert made his famous remark that "It is essential to be thoroughly modern in one's tastes." The rejection of tradition by the Impressionist movement makes it one of the first artistic movements to be seen, in retrospect, as a modern movement. In literature the symbolist movement would have a tremendous influence on the development of the Modernism, because of its focus on sensation. Philosophically, the break with tradition by Nietzsche and Freud provides a key underpinning of the movement going forward: to begin again from first principles, abandoning previous definitions and systems. This wave of the movement generally stayed within late 19th century norms of presentation; often its practitioners regarded themselves as reformers rather than revolutionaries. The explosion of modernism 1910–1930
This led to the development of what was (posthumously) termed 'Modernism' which is, simply the rejection of (or movement beyond) simple Realism in literature and art, and the rejection of (or alteration of) tonality in music. In the 19th century, artists had tended to believe in 'progress' (i.e. moral progress) (the so-called Whig view of History), and the importance of the artist's contributing positively to the values of society. So for example, writers like Dickens and Tolstoy, painters like Turner, and musicians like Brahms were not 'radicals' or 'Bohemians', but were instead valued members of society who produced social critiques of society (when they did) from a conventionally 'liberal' or 'socialist' viewpoint. Modernism's second generation (1930-1945)
Modernism's reception and controversy
Modernism outside the west
Many trends outside of western culture have been described as modern, modernist, or modernistic. Examples include Gamelan gong kebyar.See also
External links
Books