Modernism

, "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 the United States.]] 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.

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"traditional" forms of art, architecture, literature, religious faith, social organization and daily life were becoming outdated in the new economic, social, and political conditions of an emerging fully industrialized world.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.

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).

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.

History

Beginnings

's Liberty Leading the People, 1830, a Romantic work of art]] 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, 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.

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 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. , Guardian Spirit of the Waters, 1878, charcoal on paper, The Art Institute of Chicago]] 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.

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", 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)." The modernist movement, at the beginning of the 20th century, 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; 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".

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 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.

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

, 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. , 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.]] 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 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 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:

Explosion, 1910–1930

, Le guitariste, 1910, oil on canvas, 100 x 73 cm, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris]]

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 Cézanne, had taken. In 1907, as Picasso was painting Demoiselles d'Avignon, Oskar Kokoschka was writing Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen (Murderer, Hope of Women), the first Expressionist play (produced with scandal in 1909), and Arnold Schoenberg was composing his String Quartet No.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, 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 filmmaking. 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.

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. , 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. 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.

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.

Second generation, 1930–1945

, 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.

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.

After World War II (The visual and performing arts)

, No. 5, 1948, oil on fiberboard, 244 x 122 cm. (96 x 48 in.), private collection ]] In 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 in the early 20th 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. , 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, Griselda Pollock and Catherine de Zegher 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 emerged as radical new directions.

By the late 1960s however, postminimalism, process art and Arte Povera 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.

Pop art

, Whaam! (1963)]] 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.

Hal Foster, in his essay The Crux of Minimalism, examines the extent to which Donald Judd and Robert Morris both acknowledge and exceed Greenbergian modernism in their published definitions of minimalism.

Steven Best and Douglas Kellner identify Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns as part of the transitional phase, influenced by Marcel Duchamp, between modernism and postmodernism. Both used images of ordinary objects, or the objects themselves, in their work, while retaining the abstraction and painterly gestures of high modernism.

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 art forms 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

, 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—who first used the term in 1958, Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, Red Grooms, and Robert Whitman.

Intermedia, Multi-media

Another trend in art which has been associated with the term postmodern is the use of a number of different media together. Intermedia, a term coined by Dick Higgins and meant to convey new art forms along the lines of Fluxus, concrete poetry, found objects, performance art, and computer art. Higgins was the publisher of the Something Else Press, a concrete poet married to artist Alison Knowles and an admirer of Marcel Duchamp. Ihab Hassan includes, "Intermedia, the fusion of forms, the confusion of realms," in his list of the characteristics of postmodern art. One of the most common forms of "multi-media art" is the use of video-tape and CRT monitors, termed video art. While the theory of combining multiple arts into one art is quite old, and has been revived periodically, the postmodern manifestation is often in combination with performance art, where the dramatic subtext is removed, and what is left is the specific statements of the artist in question or the conceptual statement of their action.

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.

Andreas Huyssen criticises attempts to claim Fluxus for postmodernism as, "either the master-code of postmodernism or the ultimately unrepresentable art movement – as it were, postmodernism's sublime." Instead he sees Fluxus as a major Neo-Dadaist phenomena within the avant-garde tradition. It did not represent a major advance in the development of artistic strategies, though it did express a rebellion against, "the administered culture of the 1950s, in which a moderate, domesticated modernism served as ideological prop to the Cold War."

Late period

, Vine, 1992–93, oil on linen, 8 x 8.5 feet, Museum of Modern Art, New York]] 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 and constitute radical new directions in those mediums.

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, Mahirwan Mamtani, 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.

Differences between modernism and postmodernism

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.

Current interpretations of the relationship between modernism and postmodernism vary. Some are critical of the division between the two, and see them as two aspects of the same movement. Many theorists and scholars contend that late modernism continues.

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.

Postmodern theory asserts that the attempt to canonise modernism "after the fact" is doomed to undisambiguable contradictions.

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.

Goals of the movement

Rejection and detournement of tradition

Many modernists believed that by rejecting tradition they could discover radically new ways of making art. Arguably the most paradigmatic motive of modernism is the rejection of the obsolescence of tradition and its reprise, incorporation, rewriting, recapitulation, revision and parody in new forms.

T. S. Eliot's emphasis on the relation of the artist to tradition. Eliot wrote the following: :: "[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."

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."

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.

Challenge to false harmony and coherence

A paradigmatic modernist exhortation was articulated by philosopher and composer Theodor Adorno, which in the 1940s, invited to challenge conventional surface coherence and appearance of harmony: 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. 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.

Pragmatic modernist architecture

in New York City]] 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.

Counter consumerism and mass culture

In literature and visual art some modernists sought to defy expectations mainly in order to make their art more vivid, or to force the audience to take the trouble to question their own preconceptions. This aspect of modernism has often seemed a reaction to consumer culture, which developed in Europe and North America in the late 19th century. Whereas most manufacturers try to make products that will be marketable by appealing to preferences and prejudices, high modernists rejected such consumerist attitudes in order to undermine conventional thinking. The art critic Clement Greenberg expounded this theory of modernism in his essay Avant-Garde and Kitsch. Greenberg labelled the products of consumer culture "kitsch", because their design aimed simply to have maximum appeal, with any difficult features removed. For Greenberg, modernism thus formed a reaction against the development of such examples of modern consumer culture as commercial popular music, Hollywood, and advertising. Greenberg associated this with 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

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 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 (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'.

See also

Late Modernism

American modernism

Modernismo

Modernist poetry in English

Remodernism

Postmodern art

Notes

References

John Barth (1979) The Literature of Replenishment, later republished in ''The Friday Book'(1984)'.

Eco, Umberto (1990) Interpreting Serials in The limits of interpretation, pp.83–100, excerpt

Gerald Graff (1973) The Myth of the Postmodernist Breakthrough, TriQuarterly, 26 (Winter, 1973) 383–417; rept in The Novel Today: Contemporary Writers on Modern Fiction Malcolm Bradbury, ed., (London: Fontana, 1977); reprinted in Proza Nowa Amerykanska, ed., Szice Krytyczne (Warsaw, Poland, 1984); reprinted in Postmodernism in American Literature: A Critical Anthology, Manfred Putz and Peter Freese, eds., (Darmstadt: Thesen Verlag, 1984), 58–81.

Gerald Graff (1975) Babbitt at the Abyss: The Social Context of Postmodern. American Fiction, TriQuarterly, No. 33 (Spring 1975), pp. 307–37; reprinted in Putz and Freese, eds., Postmodernism and American Literature.

Orton, Fred and Pollock, Griselda (1996) Avant-Gardes and Partisans Reviewed, Manchester University.

Steiner, George (1998) After Babel, ch.6 Topologies of culture, 3rd revised edition

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 0-14-010962-5.

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

Friedman, Julia. Beyond Symbolism and Surrealism: Alexei Remizov's Synthetic Art, Northwestern University Press, 2010. ISBN 0-8101-2617-6 (Trade Cloth)

Frascina, Francis, and Charles Harrison (eds.). Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology. Published in association with The Open University. London: Harper and Row, Ltd. Reprinted, London: Paul Chapman Publishing, Ltd., 1982.

Gates, Henry Louis. "The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2004.

Hughes, Robert, The Shock of the New: Art and the Century of Change (Gardners Books, 1991, ISBN 0-500-27582-3).

Kenner, Hugh, The Pound Era (1971), Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1973

Kern, Stephen, The Culture of Time and Space, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983

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 90-76979-35-9; ISBN 978-90-76979-35-9.

Weston, Richard, Modernism (Phaidon Press, 2001, ISBN 0-7148-4099-8).

de Zegher, Catherine, Inside the Visible. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).

External links

Ballard, J.G., on Modernism.

Denzer, Anthony S., PhD, Masters of Modernism.

Hoppé, E.O., photographer, Edwardian Modernists.

Malady of Writing. Modernism you can dance to An online radio show that presents a humorous version of modernism

Modernism Lab @ Yale University

Modernism/Modernity, 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".

Category:Art movements Category:Architectural styles Modernism Category:Theories of aesthetics