Modernism
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For other uses of the word, see Modernism (disambiguation). For the period in sociology beginning with industrialization, see Modernity.
Related terms are modern, modernist, contemporary, and postmodern.
Hans Hofmann, The Gate, 1959–60, 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 the United States.[1]
Modernism is a philosophical movement that, along with cultural trends and changes, arose from wide-scale and far-reaching transformations in Western society in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Among the factors that shaped Modernism were the development of modern industrial societies and the rapid growth of cities, followed then by the horror of World War I. Modernism also rejected the certainty of Enlightenment thinking, and many modernists rejected religious belief.[2][3]
Modernism, in general, includes the activities and creations of those who felt the traditional forms of art, architecture, literature, religious faith, philosophy, social organization, activities of daily life, and even the sciences, were becoming ill-fitted to their tasks and outdated in the new economic, social, and political environment of an emerging fully industrialized world. The poet Ezra Pound's 1934 injunction to "Make it new!" was the touchstone of the movement's approach towards what it saw as the now obsolete culture of the past. In this spirit, its innovations, like the stream-of-consciousness novel, atonal (or pantonal) and twelve-tone music, divisionist painting and abstract art, all had precursors in the 19th century.
A notable characteristic of Modernism is self-consciousness and irony concerning literary and social traditions, which often led to experiments with form, along with the use of techniques that drew attention to the processes and materials used in creating a painting, poem, building, etc.[4] Modernism explicitly rejected the ideology of realism[5][6][7] and makes use of the works of the past by the employment of reprise, incorporation, rewriting, recapitulation, revision and parody.[8][9][10]
Some commentators define Modernism as a mode of thinking—one or more philosophically defined characteristics, like self-consciousness or self-reference, that run across all the novelties in the arts and the disciplines.[11] More common, especially in the West, are those who see it as a socially progressive trend of thought that affirms the power of human beings to create, improve and reshape their environment with the aid of practical experimentation, scientific knowledge, or technology.[12] 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 Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) to Samuel Beckett (1906–1989).[13]
Contents [hide]
1 History
1.1 Beginnings: the 19th century
1.1.1 The beginnings of Modernism in France
1.2 Explosion, early 20th century to 1930
1.3 Modernism continues: 1930–1945
2 After World War II (mainly the visual and performing arts)
2.1 Introduction
2.2 Theatre of the Absurd
2.3 Pollock and abstract influences
2.4 International figures from British art
2.5 In the 1960s after abstract expressionism
2.6 Pop art
2.7 Minimalism
2.7.1 Postminimalism
2.7.2 Collage, assemblage, installations
2.7.3 Neo-Dada
2.7.4 Performance and happenings
2.7.5 Intermedia, multi-media
2.7.6 Fluxus
2.8 Late period
2.9 Differences between Modernism and Postmodernism
2.10 Criticism and hostility to Modernism
3 See also
4 Notes
5 References
6 Further reading
7 External links
History[edit]
Beginnings: the 19th century[edit]
Eugène Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People, 1830, a Romantic work of art
According to one critic, Modernism developed out of Romanticism's revolt against the effects of the Industrial Revolution and bourgeois values: "The ground motive of modernism, Graff asserts, was criticism of the nineteenth-century bourgeois social order and its world view [...] the modernists, carrying the torch of romanticism".[5][6][7] While J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851), one of the greatest landscape painters of the 19th century, was a member of the Romantic movement, as "a pioneer in the study of light, colour, and atmosphere", he "anticipated the French Impressionists" and therefore Modernism "in breaking down conventional formulas of representation; [though] unlike them, he believed that his works should always express significant historical, mythological, literary, or other narrative themes".[14]
A Realist portrait of Otto von Bismarck
The dominant trends of industrial Victorian England, were also opposed, from about 1850, by the English poets and painters that constituted the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, because of their "opposition to technical skill without inspiration".[15] They were influenced by the writings of the art critic John Ruskin (1819–1900), who had strong feelings about the role of art in helping to improve the lives of the urban working classes, in the rapidly expanding industrial cities of Britain.[16] Art critic Clement Greenberg describes the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood as proto-Modernists: "There the proto-Modernists were, of all people, the pre-Raphaelites (and even before them, as proto-proto-Modernists, the German Nazarenes. The Pre-Raphaelites actually foreshadowed Manet (1832–83), with whom Modernist painting most definitely begins. They acted on a dissatisfaction with painting as practiced in their time, holding that its realism wasn't truthful enough".[17] Rationalism has also had opponents in the philosophers Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55)[18] and later Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), both of whom had significant influence on existentialism.[19]
However, the Industrial Revolution continued. Influential innovations included steam-powered industrialization, and especially the development of railways, starting in Britain in the 1830s,[20] and the subsequent advancements in physics, engineering, and architecture associated with this. A major 19th-century engineering achievement was The Crystal Palace, the huge cast-iron and plate glass exhibition hall built for The Great Exhibition of 1851 in London. Glass and iron were used in a similar monumental style in the construction of major railway terminals in London, such as Paddington Station (1854)[21] and King's Cross Station (1852).[22] These technological advances led to the building of later structures like the Brooklyn Bridge (1883) and the Eiffel Tower (1889). The latter broke all previous limitations on how tall man-made objects could be. These engineering marvels radically altered the 19th-century urban environment and the daily lives of people. The human experience of time itself was altered, with the development of electric telegraph from 1837,[23] and the adoption of standard time by British railway companies from 1845, and in the rest of the world over the next fifty years.[24]
But despite continuing technological advances, from the 1870s onward, the idea that history and civilization were inherently progressive, and that progress was always good, came under increasing attack. 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. The philosopher Schopenhauer (1788–1860) (The World as Will and Idea, 1819) called into question the previous optimism, and his ideas had an important influence on later thinkers, including Nietzsche.[18] Two of the most significant thinkers of the period were biologist Charles Darwin (1809–82), author of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859), and political scientist Karl Marx (1818–83), author of Das Kapital (1867). Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection undermined religious certainty and the idea of human uniqueness. In particular, the notion that human beings were driven by the same impulses as "lower animals" proved to be difficult to reconcile with the idea of an ennobling spirituality.[25] Karl Marx argued that there were fundamental contradictions within the capitalist system, and that the workers were anything but free.[26]
Odilon Redon, Guardian Spirit of the Waters, 1878, charcoal on paper, The Art Institute of Chicago
The beginnings of Modernism in France[edit]
Historians, and writers in different disciplines, have suggested various dates as starting points for Modernism. Historian William Everdell, for example, has argued that Modernism began in the 1870s, when metaphorical (or ontological) continuity began to yield to the discrete with mathematician Richard Dedekind's (1831–1916) Dedekind cut, and Ludwig Boltzmann's (1844–1906) statistical thermodynamics.[27] Everdell also thinks Modernism in painting began in 1885–86 with Seurat's Divisionism, the "dots" used to paint A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte." On the other hand, visual art critic Clement Greenberg called Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) "the first real Modernist",[28] though he also wrote, "What can be safely called Modernism emerged in the middle of the last century—and rather locally, in France, with Baudelaire in literatu