- Modernist project
The modernist project is a term for the artistic and cultural innovations by
avant-garde artists, writers and religious thinkers beginning in the 19th century inEurope . Seemodernism .In painting,
Gustave Courbet began to paint scenes of modern life and autobiography rather than historical narratives. In music Debussy, Ravel andFauré created Impressionistic, expressive melodies that reflected basic forces of nature and urban life. Several later innovations included such phases asImpressionism andPost-Impressionism ,Fauvism , andCubism , in painting, Serial music, the highly symbolicModern dance ofMartha Graham , and the theatrical spectacles staged by Stravinsky,Diaghilev andNijinsky . Many of these art works were subversive quasi-political rebellions against thebourgeoisie . Intellectuals took recourse to the burgeoning field of psychology into such movements asDada andSurrealism , commenting on the insanity ofWorld War I among other crises.American fine art culture was relatively quiet between World War I and
World War II , but with the rise of the Nazis many European modernists fled to the United States, bringing the ideas of theBauhaus and a dedication to Formalism andabstraction to American campuses and artists. Economic pressures and aspirations also fueled this shift of the art world center fromParis toNew York , leading to the American dominance of the field for some decades. However, even as America produced its first generation of art world stars, the increasingly formal and universal aspirations of the modernist avant-garde were showing exhaustion. Pop andMinimal Art critiqued and repudiated certain modernist ideals with an assertion of a new and different aesthetic.References
*cite book
last = Honour
first = Hugh
authorlink =
coauthors = Fleming, John
title = The Visual Arts: A History
publisher = H. N. Abrams
date= 2002
location =
pages = 960 p.
url =
doi =
id = ISBN 0-8109-3593-7*cite book
last = Adams
first = Laurie Schneider
authorlink =
coauthors =
title = Art Across Time
publisher = McGraw-Hill College
date= 2006
location =
pages =
url =
doi =
id = ISBN 0-07-322208-9
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