Modernism
For Christian theological modernism see: Liberal Christianity and Modernism (Roman Catholicism).
Modernism is a term which covers a variety of political, cultural and artistic movements rooted in the changes in Western society at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century. The term's use is extremely broad and varies with the context, from the highly specific to the sweepingly general. Modernism has been used to describe a series of
cultural movements that including the progressive art and
architecture,
music,
literature and
design which emerged in the decades before
1914. It is generally used to describe movements of artists, thinkers, writers and designers who rebelled against late
19th century academic and historicist
traditions, and embraced the new economic, social and political aspects of the emerging
modern world. It is often applied to ideas or artifacts which are seen as embodying the rejection of the past and the assertion of a new era. Modern writing sought simplicfication in gramatical structures, shortening of sentences, abandonment of traditional prosody in poetry, and other reforms in order to promote clear communication and concise expression.
Modernism is, in general, defined by a rejection of some or all of previous traditions in art and society, and affirms the importance of embracing change and the present. At the same time many modern movements sought to root their
epistemology in logical and eternal principles derived from, or analogized to
science. Modernism most consistent tendencies are the search for continual improvement. Individual modern movements often disclaim the authenticity of other modern movements, particularly over issues such as the relatively importance of
objectivity and
subjectivity, as well as
simplicity versus
complexity, high versus low and other perceived dichotomies. Modernism also encompasses movements and ideas which attempt to reconcile apperant opposites.
Some divide the 20th century into
modern and
postmodern periods, whereas others see them as two parts of the same larger period. This article will focus on the movement that grew out of the late 19th and early 20th century, while
Postmodernism has its own article.
The modernism as a tendency emerged in the mid-
19th century, particularly in
Paris,
France, and was rooted in the idea that "traditional" forms of art, literature, social organization and daily life had become outdated, and that it was therefore essential to sweep them aside. In this it drew on previous
revolutionary movements, including liberalism and communism. 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, and therefore better, ways of reaching the same end. In essence, the modernist movement argued that the new realities of the industrial and mechanized age were permanent and imminent, and that people should adapt their world view to accept that what was new was also good and beautiful.
Precursors to modernism
The first half of the
19th century for
Europe was marked by a series of turbulent wars and revolutions, which reveal the rise of the ideas and doctrines now identified as
Romanticism: Emphasis on individual subjective experience, 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
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 what was real dominated over what was
subjective.
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 in fact possible. Cultural critics and historians label this set of doctrines
Realism, though this term is not universal. In
philosophy, the
rationalist and
positivist movements established a primacy of reason and system.
Against 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 like
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 norms and isolated from their fellow men. The argument arose not merely that the values of the artist and those of society were 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 disruptive thinkers of the period were, in biology,
Charles Darwin and, in political science,
Karl Marx. Darwin's theory of
evolution by natural selection undermined 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 seemed to present a political version of the same proposition: that problems with the economic order were not transient, the result of specific wrong doers or temporary conditions, but were fundamentally contradictions within the "
capitalist" system. Both thinkers would spawn defenders and schools of thought that would become decisive in establishing 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 art was shown at 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 that poetry and writing should follow whichever connection the sheer sound and texture of the words create. The poet
Stéphane Mallarmé would be of particular importance to what would occur 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 urbanity, 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 instantaneity at a distance, the experience of time itself was altered.
The breadth of the changes can be seen in how many disciplines are described, in their pre-
20th century form, as being "classical", including
physics,
economics, and arts such as
ballet.
The beginning of modernism 1890–1910
Clement Greenberg 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)."
[Clement Greenberg: Modernism and Postmodernism, seventh paragraph of the essay. URL accessed on June 15, 2006] The "
avant-garde" was what Modernism was called at first, and the term remained to describe movements which identify themselves as attempting to overthrow some aspect of tradition or the status quo.
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 rise of
social sciences in public policy. In the first fifteen years of the twentieth century a series of writers, thinkers, and artists made the break with traditional means of organizing literature, painting, and music - again, in parallel to the change in organizational methods in other fields. The argument was that if the nature of reality itself was in question, and if the restrictions which had been in place around human activity were falling, then art too, would have to radically change.
Sigmund Freud offered a view of subjective states involving an
unconscious mind full of primal impulses and counterbalancing restrictions, a view that
Carl Jung would combine with a belief in natural essence to stipulate a
collective unconscious that was full of basic typologies that the conscious mind fought or embraced. This suggested that people's impulses towards breaking social norms were not the product of being childish or ignorant, but were instead essential to the nature of the human animal, the ideas of Darwin having already introduced the concept of "man, the animal" to the public mind.
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. What united all these writers was a
romantic distrust of the 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 terms of holistic ideas, 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 that artists were the interpreters and representatives of bourgeois culture and ideas. These "modernist" landmarks include
Arnold Schoenberg's
atonal ending to his Second String Quartet in
1906, the abstract
expressionist paintings of
Wassily Kandinsky starting in
1903 and culminating with the founding of the
Blue Rider group in
Munich, and the rise of
cubism from the work of
Picasso and
Georges Braque in
1908.
Powerfully influential in this wave of modernity were the theories of Freud, who argued that the mind had a basic and fundamental structure, and that subjective experience was based on the interplay of the parts of the mind. All subjective reality was based, according to Freud's ideas, on the play of basic drives and instincts, through which the outside world was perceived. This represented a break with the past, in that previously it was believed that external and absolute reality could impress itself on an individual, as, for example, in
John Locke's
tabula rasa doctrine.
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:
*
Rafael Alberti*
Gabriele D'Annunzio*
Guillaume Apollinaire*
Louis Aragon*
Djuna Barnes*
Basil Bunting*
Jean Cocteau*
Joseph Conrad*
H.D.*
T.S. Eliot*
Paul Eluard*
William Faulkner*
Max Jacob*
James Joyce*
Franz Kafka*
D.H. Lawrence*
Wyndham Lewis*
Federico García Lorca*
Marianne Moore*
Ezra Pound*
Marcel Proust*
Pierre Reverdy*
Gertrude Stein*
Wallace Stevens*
Tristan Tzara*
Paul Valery*
Robert Walser*
William Carlos Williams*
Virginia Woolf*
W.B. YeatsComposers such as
Schoenberg,
Stravinsky,
Poulenc and
George Antheil represent modernism in
music. Artists such as
Gustav Klimt,
Picasso,
Matisse,
Mondrian, and the movements
Les Fauves,
Cubism and the
Surrealists 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. Several figures outside of artistic modernism were influenced by artistic ideas; for example,
John Maynard Keynes was friends with Woolf and other writers of the
Bloomsbury group.
The explosion of modernism 1910–1930
On the eve of
World War I, a growing tension and unease with the social order began to break through - seen in the
Russian Revolution of 1905, the increasing agitation of "radical" parties, and an increasing number of works which either radically simplified or rejected previous practice. In
1913, famed
Russian
composer Igor Stravinsky, working for
Sergei Diaghilev and the
Ballets Russes, composed
Rite of Spring for a ballet, choreographed by
Vaslav Nijinsky that depicted
human sacrifice, and young painters such as
Pablo Picasso and
Henri Matisse had only recently begun 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.
This development began to give a new meaning to what was termed 'Modernism'. At its core was the embracing of disruption, and a rejection of, or movement beyond, simple
Realism in
literature and
art, and the rejection of, or dramatic alteration of, tonality in
music. In the 19th century, artists had tended to believe in 'progress', though what that word entailed varied dramatically, and the importance of the artist's contributing positively to the values of society. So, for example, writers like
Dickens and
Tolstoy, painters like
Turner, and musicians like
Brahms were not 'radicals' or 'Bohemians', but were instead valued members of society who produced art that added to society, even if it was, at times, critiquing less desirable aspects of it. Modernism, while it was still "progressive" increasingly saw traditional forms and traditional social arrangements as hindering progress, and therefore the artist was recast as a revolutionary, overthrowing rather than enlightening.
An example of this trend was to be found in
Futurism. In
1909, F.T. Marinetti's first manifesto was published in the Parisian newspaper
Le Figaro, and rapidly a group of painters (
Giacomo Balla,
Umberto Boccioni,
Carlo Carrà,
Luigi Russolo, and
Gino Severini) co-signed
The Manifesto of Futurist Painting. Such manifestos were modelled on the famous "
Communist Manifesto" of the previous century, and were meant to provoke and gather followers while they put forward principles and ideas. However, Futurism was strongly influenced by Bergson and Nietzsche, and it should be seen as part of the general trend of Modernist rationalization of disruption.
It must be stressed that Modernist philosophy and art were still viewed as being part, and only a part, of the larger social movement. Artists such as
Klimt,
Paul Cezanne and
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 was controversial but was not seen as representative of the Edwardian mainstream, which was more inclined towards a Victorian faith in progress and liberal optimism.
However,
World War I and its subsequent events were the cataclysmic disruptions that late 19th century artists such as Brahms had worried about, and avant-gardists had embraced.
First, the fantastic 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 introduction of a machine age into life seemed obvious - machine warfare became a touchstone of the ultimate reality. Finally, the immensely traumatic nature of the experience made both critical and subjective strands of the modern movement basic assumptions: Realism seemed to be bankrupt when faced with the fundamentally fantastic nature of trench warfare - as exemplified by books such as
Erich Maria Remarque's
All Quiet on the Western Front. Moreover, the view that Mankind was making slow and steady moral progress came to seem ridiculous in the face of the senseless slaughter of the
Great War. The First World War, at once, fused the harshly mechanical geometric rationality of technology with the nightmarish irrationality of myth.
Thus in the
1920s, and increasingly after, modernism, which had been such a minority taste before the war, came to define the age. There was a subtle, but important, shift from the earlier phase: in the beginning the movement was undertaken by individuals who were part of the establishment, or wished to join the establishment. However, increasingly, the mood began to shift towards a replacement of the older hierarchy with one based on new ideas, norms, and methods. Modernism was seen 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 original geographic base.
Exhibitions, theatre, cinema, books and buildings all served to cement in the public view the perception that the world was changing - and this often met with hostile resistance. Paintings were spat upon, riots organized at the opening of works, and some political figures even denounced modernism as being connected with immorality. At the same time, the 1920s were known as the "
Jazz Age", and there was a public embrace of the advancements of mechanization:
cars,
air travel and the
telephone. The assertion of Modernists was that these advances required people to change, not merely their habits, but their fundamental aesthetic sense.
By
1930, modernism had won a place in the establishment, including the political and artistic establishment.
Ironically, by the time it was being accepted, Modernism itself had changed. There was a general reaction in the 1920s against the pre-1918 Modernism, which emphasized its continuity with a past even as it rebelled 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.
Since both rationality and irrationality are present to varying degrees in all large movements, some writers attacked the madness of the new Modernism, while, at the same time, others described it as soulless and mechanistic. Modernists, in turn, attacked the madness of hurling millions of young men into the hell of war, and the falseness of artistic norms that could not depict the emotional reality of life in the 20th century.
However, it must be remembered that these concepts and movements were often in competition with each other, and even in direct conflict. Within modernity there were disputes about the importance of the public, the relationship of art to audience, and the role of art in society. Rather than a lockstep, organized unity, it is better to see modernism as taking a series of responses to the situation as it was understood, and the attempt to wrestle universal principles from it. 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 poles, no matter how seemingly incompatible, modernists began to fashion a complete
worldview that could encompass every aspect of life, and express "everything from a scream to a chuckle".
Modernism's second generation (1930-1945)
By
1930, Modernism had entered popular culture with "
The Jazz Age" and the increasing urbanization of populations, it had begun making systematic challenges to previous art and ideas, and was beginning to be looked to as the source for ideas to deal with the host of challenges faced in that particular historical moment. Modernism was, by this point, increasingly, represented in
academia and was developing a self-conscious theory of its own importance. The Modernism of the 1930s then increasingly begins to focus on the realities of there being a
popular culture which was not derived from
high culture, but instead from its own realities, particularly of
mass production. Modern ideas in art were also increasingly used in
commercials and logos. The famous
London Underground logo is an early example of the need for clear, easily recognizable and memorable visual symbols.
Another strong influence at this time was
Marxism. After the generally primitivistic/irrationalist aspect of pre-World War One Modernism, which 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 was the catalyst to fuse political radicalism and utopianism, with more expressly political stances.
Bertolt Brecht,
Auden,
Andre Breton,
Louis Aragon and the philosophers
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. There is no particular reason to associate Modernism, fundamentally, with 'the left' and, in fact, many Modernists were explicitly of 'the right' (for example,
Wyndham Lewis,
William Butler Yeats,
Arnold Schoenberg,
T.S. Eliot,
Ezra Pound, the Dutch author
Menno ter Braak and many others).
One of the most visible changes of this period is 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 which only a few knew in the 1880's, became a common occurrence. The kind of 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.
Many modernists believed that by rejecting tradition they could discover radically new ways of making art.
Arnold Schoenberg believed that by ignoring traditional
tonal harmony, the hierarchical system of organizing works of music which had guided music making for at least a century and a half, and perhaps longer, he had discovered a wholly new way of organizing sound, based in the use of twelve-note rows (See
Twelve-tone technique). This led to what is known as
serial music by the post-war period. Abstract artists, taking as their examples the Impressionists, as well as
Paul Cézanne and
Edvard Munch, began with the assumption that
color and
shape formed the essential characteristics of art, not the depiction of the natural world.
Wassily Kandinsky,
Piet Mondrian, and
Kazimir Malevich all believed in redefining art as the arrangement of pure colour. The use of
photography, which had rendered much of the representational function of visual art obsolete, strongly affected this particular aspect of modernism. However, these artists also believed that by rejecting the depiction of material objects they helped art move from a
materialist to a spiritualist phase of development.
Main article: International Style (architecture)
.Other modernists, especially those involved in design, had more pragmatic views. Modernist architects and designers believed that new technology rendered old styles of building obsolete.
Le Corbusier (born Charles-Edouard Jeanneret) thought that buildings should function as "
machines for living in", analogous to
cars, which he saw as machines for travelling in. Just as cars had replaced the
horse, so modernist design should reject the old styles and structures inherited from
Ancient Greece or from the
Middle Ages. Following this machine aesthetic, modernist designers typically reject decorative motifs in design, preferring to emphasise the materials used and pure geometrical forms. The
skyscraper, such as
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's
Seagram Building in
New York (
1956 –
1958), became the archetypal modernist building. Modernist design of houses and furniture also typically emphasised simplicity and clarity of form, open-plan interiors, and the absence of clutter. Modernism reversed the 19th century relationship of public and private: in the 19th century, public buildings were horizontally expansive for a variety of technical reasons, and private buildings emphasized verticality - to fit more private space on more and more limited land. Whereas in the 20th century, public buildings became vertically oriented, and private buildings became organized horizontally. Many aspects of modernist design still persist within the mainstream of contemporary architecture today, though its previous dogmatism has given way to a more playful use of decoration, historical quotation, and spatial drama.
In other arts such pragmatic considerations were less important. In literature and visual art some modernists sought to defy expectations mainly in order to make their art more vivid, or to force the audience to take the trouble to question their own preconceptions. This aspect of modernism has often seemed a reaction to
consumer culture, which developed in
Europe and
North America in the late 19th century. Whereas most manufacturers try to make products that will be marketable by appealing to preferences and prejudices,
high modernists rejected such consumerist attitudes in order to undermine conventional thinking. The art critic
Clement Greenberg expounded this theory of modernism in his essay
Avant-Garde and Kitsch. Greenberg labelled the products of consumer culture "
kitsch", because their design aimed simply to have maximum appeal, with any difficult features removed. For Greenberg, modernism thus formed a reaction
against the development of such examples of modern consumer culture as commercial
popular music,
Hollywood, and
advertising. Greenberg associated this with the revolutionary rejection of
capitalism.
Many modernists did see themselves as part of a revolutionary culture - one that included political
revolution. However, many rejected conventional
politics as well as artistic conventions, believing that a revolution of
consciousness had greater importance than a change in political structures. Many modernists saw themselves as apolitical, only concerned with revolutionizing their own field of endeavour. Others, such as
T. S. Eliot, rejected mass
popular culture from a
conservative position. Indeed one can argue that modernism in literature and art functioned to sustain an
elite culture which excluded the majority of the population.
The most controversial aspect of the modern movement was, and remains, its rejection of tradition, both in organization, and in the immediate experience of the work. This dismissal of tradition also involved the rejection of conventional expectations: hence modernism often stresses
freedom of expression, experimentation,
radicalism, and
primitivism. In many art forms this often meant startling and alienating audiences with bizarre and unpredictable effects. Hence the strange and disturbing combinations of motifs in
Surrealism, or the use of extreme
dissonance and
atonality in modernist music. In literature this often involved the rejection of intelligible plots or characterisation in novels, or the creation of poetry that defied clear interpretation.
The
Soviet Communist government rejected modernism after the rise of
Stalin on the grounds of alleged elitism, although it had previously endorsed
Futurism and
Constructivism; and the
Nazi government in
Germany deemed it
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 (Louis A. Sass (Bauer 2004) compares madness, specifically schizophrenia, and modernism in a less fascist manner by noting their shared disjunctive narratives, surreal images, and incoherence). Accusations of "formalism" could lead to the end of a career, or worse. For this reason many modernists of the post-war generation felt that they were the most important bulwark against totalitarianism, the "
canary in the coal mine", whose repression by a government or other group with supposed authority represented a warning that individual liberties were being threatened.
In fact, modernism flourished mainly in consumer/capitalist societies, despite the fact that its proponents often rejected consumerism itself. However, high modernism began to merge with consumer culture after
World War II, especially during the
1960s. In
Britain, a youth
sub-culture even called itself "moderns", though usually shortened to
Mods, 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 Eliot, Apollinaire 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" itself. Firstly, it implied that a movement based on the rejection of tradition had become a tradition of its own. Secondly, it demonstrated that the distinction between elite modernist and mass consumerist culture had lost its precision. Some writers declared that modernism had become so institutionalized that it was now "post avant-garde", indicating that it had lost its power as a revolutionary movement. Many have interpreted this transformation as the beginning of the phase that became known as
Postmodernism. For others, such as, for example, art critic
Robert Hughes, postmodernism represents an extension of modernism.
"Anti-modern" or "counter-modern" movements seek to emphasize
holism, connection and
spirituality as being remedies or antidotes to modernism. Such movements see Modernism as reductionist, and therefore subject to the failure to see systemic and
emergent effects. Many Modernists came to this viewpoint, for example
Paul Hindemith in his late turn towards mysticism. Writers such as Paul Ray and Sherry Ruth, in
Culture Creatives, Fredrick Turner in
A Culture of Hope and Lester Brown in
Plan B, have articulated a critique of the basic idea of modernism itself — that individual creative expression should conform to the realities of technology. Instead, they argue, individual creativity should make every day life more emotionally acceptable.
In some fields the effects of modernism have remained stronger and more persistent than in others. Visual art has made the most complete break with its past. Most major capital cities have museums devoted to 'Modern Art' as distinct from post-
Renaissance art (
circa 1400 to
circa 1900). Examples include the
Museum of Modern Art in
New York, the
Tate 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'.
*
Modern architecture*
International style (architecture)*
Art manifesto* 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
* Bradbury, Malcolm, & James McFarlane (eds.),
Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890–1930 (Penguin "Penguin Literary Criticism" series, 1978, ISBN 0140138323).
* Brush, Stephen G., The History of Modern Science: A Guide to the Second Scientific Revolution, 1800-1950,
Ames, IO: Iowa State U.P., 1988
* 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
* Hughes, Robert, The Shock of the New: Art and the Century of Change
(Gardners Books, 1991, ISBN 0500275823).
* Kenner, Hugh, The Pound Era
(1971), Berkeley, CA: U. of California Press, 1973
* Kern, Stephen, The Culture of Time and Space,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard U.P., 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 052149866X).
* Nicholls, Peter, Modernisms: A Literary Guide
(Hampshire and London: Macmillan, 1995).
* Pevsner, Nikolaus, Pioneers of Modern Design: From William Morris to Walter Gropius
(Yale University Press, 2005, ISBN 0300105711).
* —, The Sources of Modern Architecture and Design
(Thames & Hudson, "World of Art" series, 1985, ISBN 0500200726).
* 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 1580461433.
* Schwartz, Sanford, The Matrix of Modernism: Pound, Eliot, and Early Twentieth Century Thought,
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985
* Weston, Robert, Modernism'' (
Phaidon Press, 2001, ISBN 0714840998).
*
J.G. Ballard on Modernism
