Modernism
please note:
- the text and code below is from The Pseudopedia
- it has been imported raw for GetWiki
{{For|Catholic theological modernism|Modernism (Roman Catholicism)}}{{For|other uses of the word|Modernism (disambiguation)}}{{For|the period in sociology beginning with the industrialization|Modernity}}
missing image!
- Hans Hofmann's painting 'The Gate', 1959–60.jpg -
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, MassachusettsProvincetown, MassachusettsModernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes both a set of cultural tendencies and an array of associated
cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to
Western society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The term 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"traditional" forms of art, architecture, literature, religious faith, social organization and daily life were becoming outdated in the new economic, social and political conditions of an emerging fully industrialized world.Modernism rejected the lingering certainty of
Enlightenment thinking, and also that of the existence of a compassionate, all-powerful Creator.
(2)(3) 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.A salient characteristic of modernism is self-consciousness. This often led to experiments with form, and work that draws attention to the processes and materials used (and to the further tendency of abstraction).
(4) The poet
Ezra Pound's paradigmatic injunction was to "Make it new!" Whether or not the "making new" of the modernists constituted a new historical epoch is up for debate. Philosopher and composer
Theodor Adorno warns us:
"Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category. Just as it cannot be reduced to abstract form, with equal necessity it must turn its back on conventional surface coherence, the appearance of harmony, the order corroborated merely by replication."
(5)
Adorno would have us understand modernity as the rejection of the false rationality, harmony, and coherence of Enlightenment thinking, art, and music. But the past proves sticky. Pound's general imperative to make new, and Adorno's exhortation to challenge false coherence and harmony, faces
T.S. Eliot's emphasis on the relation of the artist to tradition. Eliot wrote:
"[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."[Tradition and the individual talent" (1919), in Selected Essays''. Paperback Edition. (Faber & Faber, 1999).]
Literary scholar Peter Childs sums up the complexity:
"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."
(6)
These oppositions are inherent to modernism: it is in its broadest cultural sense the assessment of the past
as different to the modern age, the recognition that the world was becoming more complex, and that the old "final authorities" (God, government, science, and reason) were subject to intense critical scrutiny. Current interpretations of modernism vary. Some divide 20th century reaction into modernism and
postmodernism, whereas others see them as two aspects of the same movement.
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.
(7) 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.
(8)History of Modernism
Beginnings
The first half of the nineteenth 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: 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. By mid-century, however, a synthesis of these ideas 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. Called by various names—in Great Britain it is designated the "
Victorian era"—this stabilizing synthesis 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
Søren 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 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.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",
(9) 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)."
(10) At first, modernism was called the "
avant-garde," and the term remained to describe movements which identify themselves as attempting to overthrow some aspect of tradition or the status quo.
(11)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 Refusés, created by
Emperor Napoleon III to display all of the paintings rejected by the Paris Salon. While most were in standard styles, but by inferior artists, the work of
Manet attracted tremendous attention, and opened commercial doors to the movement.
The second 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
Stéphane Mallarmé 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
Eiffel Tower, 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. 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, the experience of time itself was altered.Many modern disciplines (for example,
physics,
economics, and arts such as
ballet and
architecture) denote their pre-twentieth 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.
Turn of the century
File:Bonheur Matisse.jpg|thumb|left|
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 twentieth 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 conscious mind fought or embraced. Darwin's work had introduced the concept of "man, the animal" to 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 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 century-long trend to thinking in holistic terms, which would include an increased interest in the occult, and "the vital force".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 twentieth century, and tried to redefine various artforms in a radical manner. Leading lights within
the literary wing of this movement (or, rather, these movements) include:
Composers such as
Schoenberg,
Stravinsky, and
George Antheil represent modernism in music. Artists such as
Gustav Klimt,
Henri Rousseau,
Wassily Kandinsky,
Pablo Picasso,
Henri Matisse,
Georges Braque,
Marcel Duchamp,
Giorgio De Chirico,
Juan Gris,
Piet Mondrian, and the movements
Les Fauves,
Cubism,
Dada and
Surrealism represent various strains of Modernism in 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. Artistic modernism also influenced figures outside the movement; for example,
John Maynard Keynes was friends with Woolf and other writers of the
Bloomsbury group.
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. 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 by
Alexey Kruchenykh,
Velimir Khlebnikov and
Kasimir Malevich—another Russian
composer Igor Stravinsky, 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. Meanwhile, 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
Cézanne, had taken. 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 Carrà,
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
Cézanne, 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.
missing image!
- Spirit of St. Louis.jpg -
Illustration of the Spirit of St. Louis
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 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.
missing image!
- Pedestal Table in the Studio.jpg -
André Masson, Pedestal Table in the Studio 1922, early example of Surrealism
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. Each of these "modernisms," as some observers labelled them at the time, stressed new methods to produce new results. 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.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.
Second generation, 1930–1945
missing image!
- Mondrian Comp10.jpg -
Piet Mondrian, Composition No. 10, 1939-42, oil on canvas, 80 x 73 cm, private collection.
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. 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,
André 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 Céline,
Salvador Dalí,
Wyndham Lewis,
William Butler Yeats,
T. S. Eliot,
Ezra Pound, the Dutch author
Menno ter Braak and many others.(File:1921EncycAmericanAd.jpg|thumb|left|Must be modern to keep up)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.
Modernism after World War II (The visual and performing arts)
, oil on
fiberboardfiberboardIn Britain and America, modernism as a literary movement is generally considered to be relevant up to the early 1930s, and "modernist" is rarely used to describe authors prominent after 1945. This is somewhat true for all areas of culture, with the exception of the visual and performing arts.The post-war period left the capitals of Europe in upheaval with an urgency to economically and physically rebuild and to politically regroup. In Paris (the former center of European culture and the former capital of the art world) the climate for art was a disaster. Important collectors, dealers, and modernist artists, writers, and poets had fled Europe for
New York and America. The
surrealists and modern artists from every cultural center of Europe had fled the onslaught of the Nazis for safe haven in the United States. Many of those who didn't flee perished. A few artists, notably
Pablo Picasso,
Henri Matisse, and
Pierre Bonnard, remained in France and survived. The 1940s in New York City heralded the triumph of American
abstract expressionism, a modernist movement that combined lessons learned from
Henri Matisse,
Pablo Picasso,
surrealism,
Joan Miró,
cubism,
Fauvism, and early modernism via great teachers in America like
Hans Hofmann and
John D. Graham. American artists benefited from the presence of
Piet Mondrian,
Fernand Léger,
Max Ernst and the
André Breton group,
Pierre Matisse's gallery, and
Peggy Guggenheim's gallery
The Art of This Century, as well as other factors.
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 near the turn of the century via
cubism and constructed sculpture, Pollock redefined the way art gets 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 non-imagery—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.
missing image!
- Newman-Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue.jpg -
Barnett Newman, Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue?, 1966. Typical of Newman's later work, with the use of pure and vibrant color.
The other
abstract expressionists followed Pollock's breakthrough with new breakthroughs of their own. In a sense the innovations of Jackson Pollock,
Willem de Kooning,
Franz Kline,
Mark Rothko,
Philip Guston,
Hans Hofmann,
Clyfford Still,
Barnett Newman,
Ad Reinhardt,
Robert Motherwell,
Peter Voulkos and others opened the floodgates to the diversity and scope of all the art that followed them. Rereadings into abstract art by art historians such as
Linda Nochlin,
(14) Griselda Pollock (15) and Catherine de Zegher
(16) critically show, however, that pioneering women artists who produced major innovations in modern art had been ignored by official accounts of its history.
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(17) emerged as radical new directions.By the late 1960s however,
postminimalism,
process art and
Arte Povera(18) 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.
(19)Pop art
In 1962 the
Sidney Janis Gallery mounted
The New Realists, the first major
pop art group exhibition in an uptown art gallery in New York City. Janis mounted the exhibition in a 57th Street storefront near his gallery at 15 E. 57th Street. The show sent shockwaves through the
New York School and reverberated worldwide. Earlier in England in 1958 the term "Pop Art" was used by
Lawrence Alloway to describe paintings that celebrated consumerism of the post World War II era. This movement rejected abstract expressionism and its focus on the
hermeneutic and psychological interior in favor of art that depicted and often celebrated material consumer culture, advertising, and iconography of the mass production age. The early works of
David Hockney and the works of
Richard Hamilton and
Eduardo Paolozzi were considered seminal examples in the movement. Meanwhile in the downtown scene in
New York's
East Village 10th Street galleries artists were formulating an American version of pop art.
Claes Oldenburg had his storefront, and the
Green Gallery on 57th Street began to show the works of
Tom Wesselmann and
James Rosenquist. Later
Leo Castelli exhibited the works of other American artists, including those of
Andy Warhol and
Roy Lichtenstein for most of their careers. There is a connection between the radical works of
Marcel Duchamp and
Man Ray, the rebellious
Dadaists with a sense of humor, and pop artists like Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, and Roy Lichtenstein, whose paintings reproduce the look of
Benday dots, a technique used in commercial reproduction.
Minimalism
By the early 1960s minimalism emerged as an abstract movement in art (with roots in
geometric abstraction of
Kazimir Malevich,
the Bauhaus and
Piet Mondrian) that rejected the idea of relational and subjective painting, the complexity of
abstract expressionist surfaces, and the emotional
zeitgeist and polemics present in the arena of
action painting. Minimalism argued that extreme simplicity could capture all of the sublime representation needed in art. Associated with painters such as
Frank Stella, minimalism in painting, as opposed to other areas, is a modernist movement. Minimalism is variously construed either as a precursor to
postmodernism, or as a postmodern movement itself. In the latter perspective, early minimalism yielded advanced modernist works, but the movement partially abandoned this direction when some artists like
Robert Morris changed direction in favor of the
anti-form movement.
Postminimalism
missing image!
- Spiral-jetty-from-rozel-point.png -
Smithson's "Spiral Jetty" from atop Rozel Point, in mid-April 2005. It was created in 1970 and still exists although it has often been submerged by the fluctuating lake level. It consists of some 6500 tons of basalt, earth and salt.
In the late 1960s Robert Pincus-Witten
(20) 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 the revolutionary rejection of
capitalism.Some modernists did see themselves as part of a revolutionary culture—one that included political
revolution. 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. Many modernists saw themselves as apolitical. Others, such as
T. S. Eliot, rejected mass
popular culture from a
conservative position. Some
(21) even argue that modernism in literature and art functioned to sustain an
elite culture which excluded the majority of the population.
Criticisms of modernism
The most controversial aspect of the modern movement was, and remains, its rejection of tradition. Modernism's stress on
freedom of expression, experimentation,
radicalism, and
primitivism disregards conventional expectations. In many art forms this often meant startling and alienating audiences with bizarre and unpredictable effects, as in the strange and disturbing combinations of motifs in
surrealism or the use of extreme
dissonance and
atonality in modernist music. In literature this often involved the rejection of intelligible plots or characterization in novels, or the creation of poetry that defied clear interpretation.After the rise of
Stalin, the
Soviet Communist government rejected modernism on the grounds of alleged elitism, although it had previously endorsed
futurism and
constructivism. The
Nazi government of Germany deemed modernism
narcissistic and nonsensical, as well as "Jewish" and "Negro" (see
Anti-semitism). 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. Louis A. Sass compared madness, specifically schizophrenia, and modernism in a less fascist manner by noting their shared disjunctive narratives, surreal images, and incoherence.
(22)In fact, modernism flourished mainly in consumer/capitalist societies, despite the fact that its proponents often rejected consumerism itself. However,
high modernism began to merge with consumer culture after World War II, especially during the 1960s. In Britain, a youth
sub-culture emerged calling itself "modernist" (usually shortened to
Mod), following such representative music groups as
The Who and
The Kinks. The likes of
Bob Dylan,
Serge Gainsbourg and
The Rolling Stones combined popular musical traditions with modernist verse, adopting literary devices derived from
James Joyce,
Samuel Beckett,
James Thurber,
T. S. Eliot,
Guillaume Apollinaire,
Allen Ginsberg, and others.
The Beatles developed along similar lines, creating various modernist musical effects on several albums, while musicians such as
Frank Zappa,
Syd Barrett 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 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. Some writers{{Who|date=September 2009}} 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 art critic
Robert Hughes, postmodernism represents an extension of modernism."Anti-modern" or "counter-modern" movements seek to emphasize
holism, connection and
spirituality as remedies or antidotes to modernism. Such movements see modernism as reductionist, and therefore subject to an inability to see systemic and
emergent effects. Many modernists came to this viewpoint, for example
Paul Hindemith in his late turn towards mysticism. Writers such as Paul H. Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson, in
(The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World) (2000), 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. Instead, they argue, individual creativity should make everyday 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 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'.
Differences between modernism and postmodernism
Modernism is an encompassing label for a wide variety of cultural movements.
Postmodernism is essentially a centralized movement that named itself, based on socio-political 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.
(23)(24)(25)Postmodern theory asserts that the attempt to canonise modernism "after the fact" is doomed to undisambiguable contradictions.
(26)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.
(27)See also
Notes and references
-
[Hans Hofmann biography, retrieved January 30, 2009]
-
[Pericles Lewis, Modernism, Nationalism, and the Novel (Cambridge University Press, 2000). pp 38-39.]
-
["[James] Joyce's Ulysses is a comedy not divine, ending, like Dante's, in the vision of a God whose will is our peace, but human all-too-human..."Peter Faulkner, Modernism (Taylor & Francis, 1990). p 60.]
-
[Gardner, Helen, Horst De la Croix, Richard G. Tansey, and Diane Kirkpatrick. Gardner's Art Through the Ages (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991). ISBN 0155037706. p. 953.]
-
[Adorno, Theodor. Minima Moralia. Verso 2005, p. 218.]
-
[Childs, Peter. Modernism (Routledge, 2000). ISBN 0415196477. p. 17. Accessed on 2009-02-08.]
-
["In the twentieth century, the social processes that bring this maelstrom into being, and keep it in a state of perpetual becoming, have come to be called 'modernization'. These world-historical processes have nourished an amazing variety of visions and ideas that aim to make men and women the subjects as well as the objects of modernization, to give them the power to change the world that is changing them, to make their way through the maelstrom and make it their own. Over the past century, these visions and values have come to be loosely grouped together under the name of 'modernism'" (Berman 1988, 16)]
-
[Lee Oser, The Ethics of Modernism: Moral ideas in Yeats, Eliot, Joyce, Woolf and Beckett (Cambridge University Press, 2007); F.J. Marker & C.D. Innes, Modernism in European Drama: Ibsen, Stringdberg, Pirandello, Beckett; Morag Shiach, "Situating Samuel Beckett" pp234-247 in The Cambridge Companion to the Modernist Novel, (Cambridge University Press, 2007); Kathryne V. Lindberg, Reading Pound Reading: Modernism After Nietzsche (Oxford University Press, 1987); Pericles Lewis, The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism (Cambridge University Press, 2007). pp21]
-
[Frascina and Harrison 1982, p. 5.]
-
[Clement Greenberg: Modernism and Postmodernism, seventh paragraph of the essay. URL accessed on 15 June 2006]
-
[Fred Orton and Griselda Pollock, Avant-Gardes and Partisans Reviewed. Manchester University, 1996.]
-
[Modernism eNotes.com]
-
[Ulysses, has been called "a demonstration and summation of the entire [Modernist] movement". Beebe, Maurice (Fall 1972). "Ulysses and the Age of Modernism". James Joyce Quarterly (University of Tulsa) 10 (1): p. 176.]
-
[Nochlin, Linda, Ch.1 in: Women Artists at the Millennium (edited by C. Armstrong and C. de Zegher) MIT Press, 2006.]
-
[Pollock, Griselda, Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum: Time, Space and the Archive. Routledge, 2007.]
-
[De Zegher, Catherine, and Teicher, Hendel (eds.), 3 X Abstraction. New Haven: Yale University Press. 2005.]
-
[Aldrich, Larry. Young Lyrical Painters, Art in America, v.57, n6, November-December 1969, pp.104-113.]
-
[Movers and Shakers, New York, "Leaving C&M", by Sarah Douglas, Art+Auction, March 2007, V.XXXNo7.]
-
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, Bruce Nauman, Richard Tuttle, Alan Saret, Walter Darby Bannard, Lynda Benglis, Dan Christensen, Larry Zox, Ronnie Landfield, Eva Hesse, Keith Sonnier, Richard Serra, 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.[Martin, Ann Ray, and Howard Junker. The New Art: It's Way, Way Out, Newsweek 29 July 1968: pp.3,55-63.]
-
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, and Sol LeWitt, and 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.In the 1960s the work of the avant-garde minimalist composers La Monte Young, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and Terry Riley also achieved prominence in the New York art world.Since then, many artists have embraced minimal or postminimal styles and the label "postmodern" has been attached to them.Collage, assemblage, installations
missing image!
- Robert Rauschenberg's untitled 'combine', 1963.jpg -
Robert Rauschenberg Untitled Combine, 1963
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 exhibited a urinal as a sculpture. His 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. 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 qualites of the work itself. Thus, because Fountain was exhibited, it was a sculpture.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.Another trend in art associated with neo-Dada is the use of a number of different media together. Intermedia, a term coined by Dick Higgins and meant to convey new artforms along the lines of Fluxus, concrete poetry, found objects, performance art, and computer art. Higgins was publisher of the Something Else Press, a concrete poet, husband of artist Alison Knowles and an admirer of Marcel Duchamp.Performance and happenings
missing image!
- Schneemann-Interior Scroll.gif -
Carolee Schneemann, performing her piece Interior Scroll |160px
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, and in New York City, Carolee Schneemann, Yayoi Kusama, Charlotte Moorman and Yoko Ono were pioneers of performance-based works of art. Groups like The Living Theater 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.During the same period, various avant-garde artists created Happenings. Happenings were 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, Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, Red Grooms, and Robert Whitman.Fluxus
Fluxus was named and loosely organized in 1962 by George Maciunas (1931-78), 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.Late period
Artists from many disciplines continue to work in modernist styles into the 21st century. The continuation of abstract expressionism, color field painting, lyrical abstraction, geometric abstraction, minimalism, abstract illusionism, process art, pop art, postminimalism, and other late 20th century modernist movements in both painting and sculpture continue through the first decade of the 21st century.At the turn of the 21st century, well-established artists such as Sir Anthony Caro, Lucian Freud, Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Agnes Martin, Al Held, Ellsworth Kelly, Helen Frankenthaler, Frank Stella, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, James Rosenquist, Alex Katz, Philip Pearlstein, and younger artists including Brice Marden, Chuck Close, Sam Gilliam, Isaac Witkin, Sean Scully, Joseph Nechvatal, Elizabeth Murray, Larry Poons, Richard Serra, Walter Darby Bannard, Larry Zox, Ronnie Landfield, Ronald Davis, Dan Christensen, Joel Shapiro, Tom Otterness, Joan Snyder, Ross Bleckner, Archie Rand, Susan Crile, and dozens of others continued to produce vital and influential paintings and sculpture. However, by the early 1980s the postmodern movement in art and architecture began to establish its position through various conceptual and intermedia formats. Postmodernism in music and literature began to take hold even earlier, some say by the 1950s. While postmodernism implies an end to modernism, many theorists and scholars contend that late modernism continues into the 21st century.Goals of the movement
missing image!
- Glaspaleis front-west.jpg -
The 'Glass Palace' (1935) in the Netherlands - functional and open
Many modernists believed that by rejecting tradition they could discover radically new ways of making art. Arnold 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. Abstract artists, taking as their examples the impressionists, as well as Paul Cézanne and Edvard Munch, began with the assumption that color and shape, not the depiction of the natural world, formed the essential characteristics of art. Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, and Kazimir Malevich all believed in redefining art as the arrangement of pure color. The use of photography, which had rendered much of the representational function of visual art obsolete, strongly affected this aspect of modernism. 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.missing image!
- 2004-09-02 1580x2800 chicago IBM building.jpg -
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's 330 North Wabash (formerly IBM Plaza) in Chicago
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 thought that buildings should function as "machines for living in", analogous to cars, which he saw as machines for traveling 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. In some cases form superseded function. Following this machine aesthetic, modernist designers typically rejected decorative motifs in design, preferring to emphasize 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 emphasized 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 increasingly limited land. Conversely, 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.[Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture, Beacon Press, 1961]
-
[Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture, Beacon Press, 1961]
-
[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.]
-
[Askoxford.com]
-
[Merriam-Webster's definition of postmodernism]
-
[Ruth Reichl, Cook's November 1989; American Heritage Dictionary's definition of the postmodern]
-
[Postmodernism. Georgetown university]
-
[Wagner, British, Irish and American Literature, Trier 2002, p. 210-2]
Further reading
- Armstrong, Carol and de Zegher, Catherine (eds.), Women Artists as the Millennium, Cambridge, MA: October Books, MIT Press, 2006. 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
- 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: Penguin, 1988. ISBN 0140109625.
- Bradbury, Malcolm, & James McFarlane (eds.), ''Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890–1930 (Penguin "Penguin Literary Criticism" series, 1978, 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 George 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. Martins Press, 2000
- Everdell, William R., The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth Century Thought, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997
- Eysteinsson, Astradur, The Concept of Modernism, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992
- 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
- 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).
- Pevsner, Nikolaus, Pioneers of Modern Design: From William Morris to Walter Gropius (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005, ISBN 0-300-10571-1).
- —, The Sources of Modern Architecture and Design (Thames & Hudson, "World of Art" series, 1985, 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)
- 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.
- Schwartz, Sanford, The Matrix of Modernism: Pound, Eliot, and Early Twentieth Century Thought, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985
- Van Loo, Sofie (ed.), Gorge(l). Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp, 2006. ISBN 9076979359; ISBN 9789076979359.
- Weston, Richard, Modernism (Phaidon Press, 2001, ISBN 0-7148-4099-8).
- de Zegher, Catherine, Inside the Visible. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).
External links
{{Wiktionary}}
- Ballard, J.G., on Modernism.
- Denzer, Anthony S., Ph.D., Masters of Modernism.
- Haber, John, Modernism: back when it meant something.
- 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, official publication of the Modernist Studies Association
- Modernism vs. Postmodernism
- Pope St. Pius X's encyclical Pascendi, in which he defines Modernism as "the synthesis of all heresies".
{{Modernism}}{{Aesthetics navigation}}
ModernismeحداثةModernizm(zh-min-nan:Hiān-tāi-chú-gī)(be-x-old:Мадэрнізм)
ModernismeModernaModernismeModerneModernismΜοντερνισμόςModernismoنوگراییModernismeModernismoModernizamModernismeModernismoModernismo (letteratura)מודרניזםმოდერნიზმიModernismsModernizmasആധുനികതModenismeModernismeモダニズムModernismeModernismeModernizm (sztuka)ModernismoModernismМодернизмМодернизамModernismiModernismสมัยใหม่นิยมModernizmМодернізмChủ nghĩa hiện đại現代主義
- content above as imported from The Pseudopedia
- "Modernism" does not exist on GetWiki
- time: 5:58pm EST - Thu, Mar 11 2010