Modernism - Saylor Academy

[Pages:22]Modernism

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Modernism

Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Modernism was a revolt against the conservative values of realism.[2] [3] [4] Arguably the most paradigmatic motive of modernism is the rejection of tradition and its reprise, incorporation, rewriting, recapitulation, revision and parody in new forms.[5] [6] [7] Modernism rejected the lingering certainty of Enlightenment thinking and also rejected the existence of a compassionate, all-powerful Creator God.[8]

[9]

In general, the term modernism encompasses the activities and output of those who felt the "traditional" forms of art, architecture, literature, religious faith, social organization and daily life were becoming outdated in the new economic, social, and political conditions of an emerging fully industrialized world. The poet Ezra Pound's 1934 injunction to "Make it new!" was paradigmatic of the movement's approach towards the obsolete. Another paradigmatic exhortation was articulated by philosopher and composer Theodor Adorno, who, in the 1940s, challenged conventional surface coherence and appearance of harmony typical of the rationality of Enlightenment thinking.[10] A salient characteristic of modernism is self-consciousness. This self-consciousness often led to experiments with form and work that draws attention to the processes and materials used (and to the further tendency of abstraction).[11]

Hans Hofmann, "The Gate", 1959?1960, collection: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Hofmann was renowned not only as an artist but also as a teacher of art, and a modernist theorist both in his native Germany and later in the U.S. During the 1930s in New York and California he introduced modernism and modernist theories to a new generation of American artists. Through his teaching and his lectures at his art schools in

Greenwich Village and Provincetown, Massachusetts, he widened the scope of

modernism in America.[1]

The modernist movement, at the beginning of the 20th century, marked the first time that the term "avant-garde",

with which the movement was labeled until the word "modernism" prevailed, was used for the arts (rather than in its original military and political context).[12] Surrealism gained fame among the public as being the most extreme form of modernism, or "the avant-garde of modernism".[13]

Present-day perspectives

Some commentators approach Modernism as an overall 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.[14]

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. Others focus on Modernism as an aesthetic introspection. This facilitates consideration of specific reactions to the use of technology in The First World War, and anti-technological and nihilistic aspects of the works of diverse thinkers and artists spanning the period from Nietzsche to Samuel Beckett.[15]

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History

Beginnings

The first half of the 19th century for Europe was marked by a number of wars and revolutions, which contributed to an aesthetic "turning away" from the realities of political and social fragmentation, and so facilitated a trend towards Romanticism. Romanticism had been a revolt against the values of the Industrial Revolution and bourgeois conservative values,[2] [4] [3] putting emphasis on individual subjective experience, the sublime, the supremacy of "Nature" as a subject for art, revolutionary or radical extensions of expression, and individual liberty.

Eug?ne Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People, 1830, a Romantic work of art

A Realist portrait of Otto von Bismarck

By mid-century, however, a synthesis of the ideas of Romanticism with stable governing forms had emerged, partly in reaction to the failed Romantic and democratic Revolutions of 1848. It was exemplified by Otto von Bismarck's Realpolitik and by "practical" philosophical ideas such as positivism. This stabilizing synthesis, the Realist political and aesthetic ideology, was called by various names--in Great Britain it is designated the "Victorian era" -- and was rooted in the idea that reality dominates over subjective impressions. Central to this synthesis were common assumptions and institutional frames of reference, including the religious norms found in Christianity, scientific norms found in classical physics and doctrines that asserted that the depiction of external reality from an objective standpoint was not only possible but desirable. Cultural critics and historians label this set of doctrines realism, though this term is not universal. In philosophy, the rationalist, materialist and positivist movements established a primacy of reason and system.

Against the current ran a series of ideas, some of them 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 S?ren Kierkegaard, who were major influences on existentialism. All of these separate reactions together began to be seen as offering a challenge to any comfortable ideas of certainty derived by civilization, history, or pure reason.

From the 1870s onward, the ideas that history and civilization were inherently progressive and that progress was always good came under increasing attack. Writers Wagner and Ibsen had been reviled for their own critiques of contemporary civilization and for their warnings that accelerating "progress" would lead to the creation of individuals detached from social values and isolated from their fellow men. 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. Philosophers called into question the previous optimism. The work of Schopenhauer was labelled "pessimistic" for its idea of the "negation of the will", an idea that would be both rejected

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and incorporated by later thinkers such as Nietzsche.

Two of the most significant thinkers of the period were, in biology, Charles Darwin, and in political science, Karl Marx. Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection undermined the religious certainty of the general public, and the sense of human uniqueness of the intelligentsia. 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. Karl Marx argued there were fundamental contradictions within the capitalist system--and that the workers were anything but free. Both thinkers would spawn defenders and schools of thought that would become decisive in establishing modernism. This is not to say that all modernists or modernist movements rejected either religion or all aspects of Enlightenment thought, rather that modernism can be viewed as a questioning of the axioms of the previous age.

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

Chicago

Historians have suggested various dates as starting points for modernism. William Everdell has argued that modernism began with Richard Dedekind's division of the real number line in 1872 and

Boltzmann's statistical thermodynamics in 1874. Clement Greenberg called Immanuel Kant "the first real Modernist",[16] but 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)."[17] The modernist movement, at the beginning of the 20th century, marked marked the first

time that the term "avant-garde", with which the movement was called until the word "modernism" prevailed, was being used for the arts instead that in its original military and political context;[12] the term remained to describe

movements which identify themselves as attempting to overthrow some aspect of tradition or the status quo.

Surrealism gained the fame among the public of being the most extreme form of modernism, or "the avant-garde of modernism".[13]

Separately, in the arts and letters, two ideas originating in France would have particular impact. 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 Refus?s, 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 school was symbolism, marked by a belief that language is expressly symbolic in its nature and a portrayal of patriotism, and that poetry and writing should follow connections that the sheer sound and texture of the words create. The poet St?phane Mallarm? would be of particular importance to what would occur afterwards.

At the same time social, political, and economic forces were at work that would become the basis to argue for a radically different kind of art and thinking. Chief among these was steam-powered industrialization, which produced buildings that combined art and engineering in new industrial materials such as cast iron to produce railroad bridges and glass-and-iron train sheds--or the Brooklyn Bridge (1883) and the Eiffel Tower (1889), which 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.

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The miseries of industrial urbanism and the possibilities created by scientific examination of subjects brought changes that would shake a European civilization which had, until then, regarded itself as having a continuous and progressive line of development from the Renaissance. With the telegraph's harnessing of a new power, offering instant communication at a distance, and Standard Time, synchronizing clocks and railroad timetables, the experience of time itself was altered.

Many modern disciplines (for example, physics, economics, and arts such as ballet and architecture) denote their pre-20th century forms as "classical." This distinction indicates the scope of the changes that occurred across a wide range of scientific and cultural pursuits during the period.

Late 19th to early 20th century

Henri Matisse, Le bonheur de vivre, 1905-6, Barnes Foundation, Merion, PA. An early Fauvist

masterpiece

In the 1890s a strand of thinking began to assert that it was necessary to push aside previous norms entirely, instead of merely revising past knowledge in light of current techniques. The growing movement in art paralleled such developments as the Theory of Relativity in physics; the increasing integration of the internal combustion engine and industrialization; and the increased role of the social sciences in public policy. It was argued that, if the nature of reality itself was in question, and if restrictions which had been in place around human activity were falling, then art, too, would have to radically change. Thus, in the first fifteen years of the 20th century a series of writers, thinkers, and artists made the break with traditional means of organizing literature, painting, and music.

Powerfully influential in this wave of modernity were the theories of

Sigmund Freud and Ernst Mach, who argued, beginning in the 1880s,

that the mind had a 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. Ernst Mach developed a well-known philosophy of science,

often called "positivism", according to which the relations of objects in

nature were not guaranteed but only known through a sort of mental

shorthand. This represented a break with the past, in that previously it

was believed that external and absolute reality could impress itself, as

it was, on an individual, as, for example, in John Locke's empiricism, with the mind beginning as a tabula rasa. Freud's description of subjective states, involving an unconscious mind full of primal impulses and counterbalancing self-imposed restrictions, was combined by Carl Jung with a belief in natural essence to stipulate a collective unconscious that was full of basic typologies that the

Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), is considered to have re-invented the art of painting. Many of Picasso's friends and

colleagues, even fellow painters Henri Matisse and Georges Braque, were upset when they saw

this painting.

conscious mind fought or embraced. Darwin's work remade the

aristotelian concept of "man, the animal" in the public mind, and Jung's view suggested that people's impulses

toward breaking social norms were not the product of childishness or ignorance, but derived from the essential

nature of the human animal.

Friedrich Nietzsche championed a philosophy in which forces, specifically the 'Will to power', were more important than facts or things. Similarly, the writings of Henri Bergson championed the vital 'life force' over static conceptions

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of reality. All these writers were united by a romantic distrust of Victorian positivism and certainty. Instead they championed, or, in the case of Freud, attempted to explain, irrational thought processes through the lens of rationality and holism. This was connected with the 19th-century trend to thinking in holistic and continuitarian terms, which would include an increased interest in the occult, and "the vital force," at the same time as contemporary biology was dismantling the idea.

Out of this 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, 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.

This wave of the modern movement broke with the past in the first decade of the 20th century, and tried to redefine various art forms in a radical manner. Leading lights within the literary wing of this movement (or, rather, these movements) include:

? Gabriele d'Annunzio ? Guillaume Apollinaire ? Ivan Cankar ? Anna Akhmatova ? M?rio de S?-Carneiro ? Constantine P. Cavafy ? Joseph Conrad ? E. M. Forster ? Hugo von Hofmannsthal ? Ernst Toller ? Max Jacob ? Robert Musil ? Fernando Pessoa ? Luigi Pirandello ? Ezra Pound ? Marcel Proust ? Rainer Maria Rilke ? Gertrude Stein ? Wallace Stevens ? Italo Svevo ? Paul Val?ry ? Robert Walser ? Virginia Woolf ? William Butler Yeats

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Explosion, 1910?1930

On the eve of the First World War a growing tension and unease with

the social order, seen in the Russian Revolution of 1905 and the

agitation of "radical" parties, also manifested itself in artistic works in

every medium which radically simplified or rejected previous practice.

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--a step that none of the impressionists, not even

C?zanne, had taken. In 1907, as Picasso was painting Demoiselles

d'Avignon, Oskar Kokoschka was writing M?rder, Hoffnung der

Frauen (Murderer, Hope of Women), the first Expressionist play

(produced with scandal in 1909), and Arnold Schoenberg was

composing his String Quartet #2 in F-sharp minor, his first

composition "without a tonal center." In 1911, Kandinsky painted Bild

mit Kreis (Picture With a Circle) which he later called the first abstract

painting. In 1913--the year of Edmund Husserl's Ideas, 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," Victory Over the Sun--another Russian composer Igor Stravinsky,

Pablo Picasso, Le guitariste, 1910, oil on canvas, 100 x 73 cm, Mus?e National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris

working in Paris for Sergei Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes,

composed The Rite of Spring for a ballet, choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky, that depicted human sacrifice.

These developments began to give a new meaning to what was termed 'modernism': It embraced discontinuity, rejecting smooth change in everything from biology to fictional character development and moviemaking. It approved disruption, rejecting or moving beyond simple realism in literature and art, and rejecting or dramatically altering tonality in music. This set modernists apart from 19th century artists, who had tended to believe not only in smooth change ('evolutionary' rather than 'revolutionary') but also in the progressiveness of such change--'progress.' 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 art that added to society, even sometimes while critiquing its less desirable aspects. Modernism, while still "progressive," increasingly saw traditional forms and traditional social arrangements as hindering progress, and therefore recast the artist as a revolutionary, overthrowing rather than enlightening.

Futurism exemplifies this trend. In 1909, the Parisian newspaper Le Figaro published F.T. Marinetti's first manifesto. Soon afterward a group of painters (Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carr?, Luigi Russolo, and Gino Severini) co-signed the Futurist Manifesto. Modeled on the famous "Communist Manifesto" of the previous century, such manifestoes put forward ideas that were meant to provoke and to gather followers. Strongly influenced by Bergson and Nietzsche, Futurism was part of the general trend of Modernist rationalization of disruption.

Modernist philosophy and art were still viewed as only a part of the larger social movement. Artists such as Klimt and C?zanne, and composers such as Mahler and Richard Strauss were "the terrible moderns"--those farther to the avant-garde were more heard of than heard. Polemics in favour of geometric or purely abstract painting were largely confined to 'little magazines' (like The New Age in the UK) with tiny circulations. Modernist primitivism and pessimism were controversial, but were not seen as representative of the Edwardian mainstream, which was more inclined towards a Victorian faith in progress and liberal optimism.

However, the Great War and its subsequent events were the cataclysmic upheavals that late 19th century artists such as Brahms had worried about, and avant-gardists had embraced. First, 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 the war, it had been

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argued that no one would fight such a war, since the cost was too high. Second, the birth of a machine age changed the conditions of life--machine warfare became a touchstone of the ultimate reality. Finally, the immensely traumatic nature of the experience dashed basic assumptions: realism seemed 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. The First World War fused the harshly mechanical geometric rationality of technology with the nightmarish irrationality of myth.

Thus modernism, which had been a minority taste before the war, came to define the 1920s. It appeared in Europe in such critical movements as Dada and then in constructive movements such as surrealism, as well as in smaller movements such as the Bloomsbury Group. Again, impressionism was a precursor: breaking with the idea of national schools, artists and writers adopted ideas of international movements. Surrealism, cubism, Bauhaus, and Leninism are all examples of movements that rapidly found adopters far beyond their geographic origins.

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

Each of these "modernisms," as some observers labelled them at the time, stressed new methods to produce new results. The poet Ezra

Pound's 1934 injunction to "Make it new!" was paradigmatic of the

movement's approach towards the obsolete. Whether or not the "making new" of the modernists constituted a new

historical epoch is up for debate.

Exhibitions, theatre, cinema, books and buildings all served to cement in the public view the perception that the world was changing. Hostile reaction often followed, as paintings were spat upon, riots organized at the opening of works, and political figures denounced modernism as unwholesome and immoral. At the same time, the 1920s were known as the "Jazz Age", and the public showed considerable enthusiasm for cars, air travel, the telephone and other technological advances.

By 1930, modernism had won a place in the establishment, including the political and artistic establishment, although by this time modernism itself had changed. There was a general reaction in the 1920s against the pre-1918 modernism, which emphasized its continuity with a past while rebelling against it, and against the aspects of that period which seemed excessively mannered, irrational, and emotionalistic. The post-World War period, at first, veered either to systematization or nihilism and had, as perhaps its most paradigmatic movement, Dada.

While some writers attacked the madness of the new modernism, others described it as soulless and mechanistic. Among modernists there were disputes about the importance of the public, the relationship of art to audience, and the role of art in society. Modernism comprised a series of sometimes contradictory responses to the situation as it was understood, and the attempt to wrestle universal principles from it. In the end science and scientific rationality, often taking models from the 18th-century Enlightenment, came to be seen as the source of logic and stability, while the basic primitive sexual and unconscious drives, along with the seemingly counter-intuitive workings of the new machine age, were taken as the basic emotional substance. From these two seemingly incompatible poles, modernists began to fashion a complete weltanschauung that could encompass every aspect of life.

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Second generation, 1930?1945

By 1930, Modernism had entered popular culture. With the

increasing urbanization of populations, it was beginning to be

looked to as the source for ideas to deal with the challenges of the

day. As modernism gained traction in academia, it was developing

a self-conscious theory of its own importance. Popular culture,

which was not derived from high culture but instead from its own

realities (particularly mass production) fueled much modernist

innovation. By 1930 The New Yorker magazine began publishing

new and modern ideas by young writers and humorists like

Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, E.B. White, S.J. Perelman, and

James Thurber, amongst others. Modern ideas in art appeared in

commercials and logos, the famous London Underground logo,

designed by Edward Johnston in 1919, being an early example of

the need for clear, easily recognizable and memorable visual

symbols.

Piet Mondrian, Composition No. 10, 1939-42, oil on canvas, 80 x 73 cm, private collection

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. The Russian Revolution catalyzed the fusion of

political radicalism and utopianism, with more expressly political stances. Bertolt Brecht, W. H. Auden, Andr?

Breton, Louis Aragon and the philosophers Antonio Gramsci and Walter Benjamin are perhaps the most famous

exemplars of this modernist Marxism. This move to the radical left, however, was neither universal, nor definitional,

and there is no particular reason to associate modernism, fundamentally, with 'the left'. Modernists explicitly of 'the

right' include Louis-Ferdinand C?line, Salvador Dal?, Wyndham Lewis, William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Ezra

Pound, the Dutch author Menno ter Braak and many others.

One of the most visible changes of this period was the adoption of objects of modern production into daily life. Electricity, the telephone, the automobile--and the need to work with them, repair them and live with them--created the need for new forms of manners and social life. 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.

Modernism as leading to social organization would produce inquiries into sex and the basic bondings of the nuclear, rather than extended, family. The Freudian tensions of infantile sexuality and the raising of children became more intense, because people had fewer children, and therefore a more specific relationship with each child: the theoretical, again, became the practical and even popular.

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