Modernism

For other uses of the word, see Modernism (disambiguation). For the period in sociology beginning with the industrialization, see Modernity.

Hans Hofmann, "The Gate", 1959–1960, collection: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Hofmann was renowned not only as an artist but also as a teacher of art, and a modernist theorist both in his native Germany and later in the U.S. During the 1930s in New York and California he introduced modernism and modernist theories to a new generation of American artists. Through his teaching and his lectures at his art schools in Greenwich Village and Provincetown, Massachusetts, he widened the scope of modernism in the United States.^[1]

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.^[2][3][4] Arguably the most paradigmatic motive (motif) of modernism is the rejection of tradition and its reprise, incorporation, rewriting, recapitulation, revision and parody in new forms.^[5][6][7] Modernism rejected the lingering certainty of Enlightenment thinking and also rejected the existence of a compassionate, all-powerful Creator God^[8][9] in favor of the abstract, unconventional, largely uncertain ethic brought on by modernity, initiated around the turn of century by rapidly changing technology and further catalyzed by the horrific consequences of World War I on the cultural psyche of artists.^[10]

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"traditional" forms of art, architecture, literature, religious faith, social organization and daily life were becoming outdated in the new economic, social, and political conditions of an emerging fully industrialized world.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.^[11] A salient characteristic of modernism is self-consciousness. This self-consciousness often led to experiments with form and work that draws attention to the processes and materials used (and to the further tendency of abstraction).^[12]

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).^[13] Surrealism gained fame among the public as being the most extreme form of modernism, or "the avant-garde of modernism".^[14]

Present-day perspectives

Some commentators approach Modernism as an overall socially progressive trend of thought that affirms the power of human beings to create, improve and reshape their environment with the aid of practical experimentation, scientific knowledge or technology.^[15]

From this perspective, Modernism encouraged the re-examination of every aspect of existence, from commerce to philosophy, with the goal of finding that which was 'holding back' progress, and replacing it with new ways of reaching the same end. Others focus on Modernism as an aesthetic introspection. This facilitates consideration of specific reactions to the use of technology in the First World War, and anti-technological and nihilistic aspects of the works of diverse thinkers and artists spanning the period from Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) to Samuel Beckett (1906-1989).^[16]

History

Beginnings

Eugène Delacroix'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.^{[citation needed]} Romanticism had been a revolt against the values of the Industrial Revolution and bourgeois conservative values,^[2][4][3] 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.

A Realist portrait of Otto von Bismarck

By mid-century, however, a synthesis of the ideas of Romanticism with stable governing forms had emerged,^{[citation needed]} 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.^{[citation needed]} 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.^{[citation needed]}

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.

Odilon Redon, 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.^{[citation needed]} 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.^{[citation needed]}

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",^[17] 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)."^[18] 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;^[13] the term remained to describe movements which identify themselves as attempting to overthrow some aspect of tradition or the status quo.^{[citation needed]} Surrealism gained the fame among the public of being the most extreme form of modernism, or "the avant-garde of modernism".^[14]

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

Henri Matisse, Le bonheur de vivre, 1905-6, Barnes Foundation, Merion, PA. An early Fauvist masterpiece

In the 1880s 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 Albert Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity (1905) 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.

Pablo Picasso, 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 (1856-1939) and Ernst Mach (1838-1916), who argued, beginning in the 1880s in Mach's case and later for Freud, that the mind had a fundamental structure, and that subjective experience was based on the interplay of the parts of the mind.^{[citation needed]} 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.^{[citation needed]}

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:

• Anna Akhmatova
• Gabriele d'Annunzio
• Guillaume Apollinaire
• Andrei Bely
• Gottfried Benn
• Ivan Cankar
• Constantine P. Cavafy
• Joseph Conrad
• T. S. Eliot
• E. M. Forster
• H.D.
• Ernest Hemingway
• Hugo von Hofmannsthal
• Max Jacob
• James Joyce^[19]
• Franz Kafka
• D. H. Lawrence
• Robert Musil
• Eugene O'Neill
• Fernando Pessoa
• Luigi Pirandello
• Ezra Pound
• Marcel Proust
• Dorothy Richardson
• Rainer Maria Rilke
• Gertrude Stein
• Wallace Stevens
• Italo Svevo
• Ernst Toller
• Paul Valéry
• Robert Walser
• William Carlos Williams
• Virginia Woolf
• William Butler Yeats

Explosion, 1910–1930

Pablo Picasso, 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, already 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 more 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 (1929). 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.

André Masson, Pedestal Table in the Studio 1922, early example of Surrealism

Thus modernism, which had been a minority taste before the war, came to define the 1920s. It appeared in Europe in such critical movements as Dada and then in constructive movements such as surrealism, as well as in smaller movements such as the Bloomsbury Group. 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.^{[citation needed]} Whether or not the "making new" of the modernists constituted a new historical epoch is up for debate.^{[citation needed]}

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.

Modernism: 1930–1945

Piet Mondrian, Composition No. 10, 1939–42, oil on canvas, 80 x 73 cm, private collection

By 1930, Modernism had entered popular culture. With the increasing urbanization of populations, it was beginning to be looked to as the source for ideas to deal with the challenges of the day. As modernism gained traction in academia, it was developing a self-conscious theory of its own importance. Popular culture, which was not derived from high culture but instead from its own realities (particularly mass production) fueled much modernist innovation. By 1930 The New Yorker magazine began publishing new and modern ideas by young writers and humorists like Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, E.B. White, S.J. Perelman, and James Thurber, amongst others. Modern ideas in art appeared in commercials and logos, the famous London Underground logo, designed by Edward Johnston in 1919, being an early example of the need for clear, easily recognizable and memorable visual symbols.

Another strong influence at this time was Marxism. After the generally primitivistic/irrationalist aspect of pre-World War I Modernism, which for many modernists precluded any attachment to merely political solutions, and the neoclassicism of the 1920s, as represented most famously by T. S. Eliot and Igor Stravinsky—which rejected popular solutions to modern problems—the rise of Fascism, the Great Depression, and the march to war helped to radicalise a generation. The Russian Revolution catalyzed the fusion of political radicalism and utopianism, with more expressly political stances. Bertolt Brecht, W. H. Auden, André Breton, Louis Aragon and the philosophers Antonio Gramsci and Walter Benjamin are perhaps the most famous exemplars of this modernist Marxism. This move to the radical left, however, was neither universal, nor definitional, and there is no particular reason to associate modernism, fundamentally, with 'the left'. Modernists explicitly of 'the right' include Salvador Dalí, Wyndham Lewis, 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)

Jackson Pollock, 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 considered by some scholars to be relevant only up to the early 1930s^{[citation needed]}, and "modernist" is less frequently used to describe authors prominent after 1945. For example, The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature sees modernism ending by c.1939. ^[20] This is somewhat true for all areas of culture, with the exception of the visual and performing arts, ^[21] though, with regard to music, Paul Griffiths notes that, while modernism "seemed to be a spent force" by the late 1920s, after World War II, "a new generation of composers - Boulez, Barraqué, Babbitt, Nono, Stockhausen, Xenakis" revived modernism. ^[22]

All the same, with regard to British and American literature, "When (if) modernism petered out and postmodernism began has been contested almost as hotly as when the transition from Victorianism to modernism occurred". ^[23]

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.

Barnett Newman, Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue?, 1966. Typical of Newman's later work, with the use of pure and vibrant color

The other abstract expressionists followed Pollock's breakthrough with new breakthroughs of their own. In a sense the innovations of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, Philip Guston, Hans Hofmann, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, Robert Motherwell, Peter Voulkos and others opened the floodgates to the diversity and scope of all the art that followed them. Rereadings into abstract art by art historians such as Linda Nochlin,^[24] Griselda Pollock^[25] and Catherine de Zegher^[26] 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

Main articles: Post-painterly abstraction, Color field painting, Lyrical abstraction, Arte Povera, Process art, and Western painting

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^[27] emerged as radical new directions.

By the late 1960s however, postminimalism, process art and Arte Povera^[28] 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.^[28] Process art as inspired by Pollock enabled artists to experiment with and make use of a diverse encyclopedia of style, content, material, placement, sense of time, and plastic and real space. Nancy Graves, Ronald Davis, Howard Hodgkin, Larry Poons, Jannis Kounellis, Brice Marden, Bruce Nauman, Richard Tuttle, Alan Saret, Walter Darby Bannard, Lynda Benglis, Dan Christensen, Larry Zox, Ronnie Landfield, Eva Hesse, Keith Sonnier, Richard Serra, Sam Gilliam, Mario Merz and Peter Reginato were some of the younger artists who emerged during the era of late modernism that spawned the heyday of the art of the late 1960s.^[29]

Pop art

Main articles: Pop art and Western painting

Roy Lichtenstein, 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

Main articles: Minimalism, Postminimalism, and Western painting

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,^[30] examines the extent to which Donald Judd and Robert Morris both acknowledge and exceed Greenbergian modernism in their published definitions of minimalism.^[30] He argues that minimalism is not a "dead end" of modernism, but a "paradigm shift toward postmodern practices that continue to be elaborated today."^[30]

Postminimalism

Smithson's "Spiral Jetty" from atop Rozel Point, in mid-April 2005. Created in 1970, it still exists although it has often been submerged by the fluctuating lake level. It consists of some 6500 tons of basalt, earth and salt.

In the late 1960s Robert Pincus-Witten^[28] coined the term postminimalism to describe minimalist-derived art which had content and contextual overtones that minimalism rejected. The term was applied by Pincus-Whitten to the work of Eva Hesse, Keith Sonnier, Richard Serra and new work by former minimalists Robert Smithson, Robert Morris, and Sol LeWitt, and Barry Le Va, and others. Other minimalists including Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Carl Andre, Agnes Martin, John McCracken and others continued to produce late modernist paintings and sculpture for the remainders of their careers.

In the 1960s the work of the avant-garde minimalist composers La Monte Young, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and Terry Riley also achieved prominence in the New York art world.

Since then, many artists have embraced minimal or postminimal styles and the label "postmodern" has been attached to them.

Collage, assemblage, installations

Main articles: Collage, Assemblage (art), and Installation art

Robert Rauschenberg Untitled Combine, 1963

Related to abstract expressionism was the emergence of combining manufactured items with artist materials, moving away from previous conventions of painting and sculpture. The work of Robert Rauschenberg exemplifies this trend. His "combines" of the 1950s were forerunners of pop art and installation art, and used assemblages of large physical objects, including stuffed animals, birds and commercial photographs. Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Larry Rivers, John Chamberlain, Claes Oldenburg, George Segal, Jim Dine, and Edward Kienholz were among important pioneers of both abstraction and pop art. Creating new conventions of art-making, they made acceptable in serious contemporary art circles the radical inclusion in their works of unlikely materials. Another pioneer of collage was Joseph Cornell, whose more intimately scaled works were seen as radical because of both his personal iconography and his use of found objects.

Neo-Dada

Main article: Neo-Dada

In the early 20th century Marcel Duchamp exhibited a urinal as a sculpture. He professed his intent that people look at the urinal as if it were a work of art because he said it was a work of art. He referred to his work as "readymades". Fountain was a urinal signed with the pseudonym R. Mutt, the exhibition of which shocked the art world in 1917. This and Duchamp's other works are generally labelled as Dada. Duchamp can be seen as a precursor to conceptual art, other famous examples being John Cage's 4'33", which is four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence, and Rauschenberg's Erased de Kooning. Many conceptual works take the position that art is the result of the viewer viewing an object or act as art, not of the intrinsic qualites of the work itself. Thus, because Fountain was exhibited, it was a sculpture.

Marcel Duchamp famously gave up "art" in favor of chess. Avant-garde composer David Tudor created a piece, Reunion (1968), written jointly with Lowell Cross, that features a chess game in which each move triggers a lighting effect or projection. Duchamp and Cage played the game at the work's premier.^[31]

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.^[32]

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

Main articles: Performance art and Happenings

Carolee Schneemann, performing her piece Interior Scroll

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 and in Germany Joseph Beuys, Wolf Vostell and Nam June Paik 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,^[33] Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, Red Grooms, and Robert Whitman.^[34]

Intermedia, Multi-media

Main article: Intermedia

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.^[35] 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

Main article: 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."^[36] 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."^[37]

Late period

Main article: Late modernism

Brice Marden, 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.^[38][39][40]

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 earlier. In music postmodernism is described in one reference work, as a "term introduced in the 1970s". ^[41] while in British literature, The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature sees modernism "ceding its predominance to postmodernism" as early as 1939.^[42] However dates are highly debatable, especially as according to Andreas Huyssen: "one critic's postmodernism is another critic's modernism". ^[43] This includes those who are critical of the division between the two and see them as two aspects of the same movement, and believe that late modernism continues.^[44]

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.^[45][46][47]

Postmodern theory asserts that the attempt to canonise modernism "after the fact" is doomed to undisambiguable contradictions.^[48]

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.^[49]

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.^{[citation needed]} 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.^[5][6]

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."^[50]

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."^[7]

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.^{[citation needed]}

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:^[11]

"Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category. Just as it cannot be reduced to abstract form, with equal necessity it must turn its back on conventional surface coherence, the appearance of harmony, the order corroborated merely by replication."^[11]

Adorno would have us understand modernity as the rejection of the false rationality, harmony, and coherence of Enlightenment thinking, art, and music.^{[citation needed]} But the past proves sticky.^{[citation needed]} 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

Main article: International style (architecture)

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building 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.

The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (MNCARS) is the official name of Spain's national museum of 20th century art,located in Madrid(informally shortened to the Museo Reina Sofía, Queen Sofia Museum. The photo shows the old building with the addition of the Elevator to the exterior of the structure with the close up of the modern art tower

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.^[51] 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^[51] even argue that modernism in literature and art functioned to sustain an elite culture which excluded the majority of the population.

Criticism and hostility

Franz Marc, The fate of the animals, 1913, oil on canvas. The work was displayed at the exhibition of "Entartete Kunst" in Munich, Nazi Germany, 1937.

The most controversial aspect of the modern movement was, and remains, its rejection of tradition.^{[citation needed]} Modernism's stress on freedom of expression, experimentation, radicalism, and primitivism disregards conventional expectations. In many art forms this often meant startling and alienating audiences with bizarre and unpredictable effects, as in the strange and disturbing combinations of motifs in surrealism or the use of extreme dissonance and atonality in modernist music. In literature this often involved the rejection of intelligible plots or characterization in novels, or the creation of poetry that defied clear interpretation.

After the rise of Joseph Stalin, the Soviet Communist government rejected modernism on the grounds of alleged elitism, although it had previously endorsed futurism and constructivism. The Nazi government of Germany deemed modernism narcissistic and nonsensical, as well as "Jewish" and "Negro" (see Anti-semitism). The Nazis exhibited modernist paintings alongside works by the mentally ill in an exhibition entitled Degenerate Art. Accusations of "formalism" could lead to the end of a career, or worse. For this reason many modernists of the post-war generation felt that they were the most important bulwark against totalitarianism, the "canary in the coal mine", whose repression by a government or other group with supposed authority represented a warning that individual liberties were being threatened. Louis A. Sass compared madness, specifically schizophrenia, and modernism in a less fascist manner by noting their shared disjunctive narratives, surreal images, and incoherence.^[52]

In fact, modernism flourished mainly in consumer/capitalist societies, despite the fact that its proponents often rejected consumerism itself. However, high modernism began to merge with consumer culture after World War II, especially during the 1960s. In Britain, a youth sub-culture emerged calling itself "modernist" (usually shortened to Mod), following such representative music groups as The Who and The Kinks. The likes of Bob Dylan, Serge Gainsbourg and The Rolling Stones combined popular musical traditions with modernist verse, adopting literary devices derived from James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, James Thurber, T. S. Eliot, Guillaume Apollinaire, Allen Ginsberg, and others. The Beatles developed along similar lines, creating various modernist musical effects on several albums, while musicians such as Frank Zappa, Syd Barrett and Captain Beefheart proved even more experimental. Modernist devices also started to appear in popular cinema, and later on in music videos. Modernist design also began to enter the mainstream of popular culture, as simplified and stylized forms became popular, often associated with dreams of a space age high-tech future.

This merging of consumer and high versions of modernist culture led to a radical transformation of the meaning of "modernism". First, it implied that a movement based on the rejection of tradition had become a tradition of its own. Second, it demonstrated that the distinction between elite modernist and mass consumerist culture had lost its precision. Some writers^[who?] declared that modernism had become so institutionalized that it was now "post avant-garde", indicating that it had lost its power as a revolutionary movement. Many have interpreted this transformation as the beginning of the phase that became known as postmodernism. For others, such as art critic Robert Hughes, postmodernism represents an extension of modernism.

"Anti-modern" or "counter-modern" movements seek to emphasize holism, connection and spirituality as remedies or antidotes to modernism. Such movements see modernism as reductionist, and therefore subject to an inability to see systemic and emergent effects. Many modernists came to this viewpoint, for example Paul Hindemith in his late turn towards mysticism. Writers such as Paul H. Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson, in The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World (2000), Fredrick Turner in A Culture of Hope and Lester Brown in Plan B, have articulated a critique of the basic idea of modernism itself – that individual creative expression should conform to the realities of technology. Instead, they argue, individual creativity should make everyday life more emotionally acceptable.

Neoclassical artists like Alexander Stoddart reject modernism generally as the product of "an epoch of false money allied with false culture".^[53]

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

1. ^ Hans Hofmann biography, retrieved 30 January 2009
2. ^ ^{a b} Barth (1979)
3. ^ ^{a b} Graff (1973)
4. ^ ^{a b} Graff (1975)
5. ^ ^{a b} Eco (1990) p.95 quote:

   Each of the types of repetition that we have examined is not limited to the mass media but belongs by right to the entire history of artistic creativity; plagiarism, quotation, parody, the ironic retake are typical of the entire artistic-literary tradition.
   Much art has been and is repetitive. The concept of absolute originality is a contemporary one, born with Romanticism; classical art was in vast measure serial, and the "modern" avant-garde (at the beginning of this century) challenged the Romantic idea of "creation from nothingness," with its techniques of collage, mustachios on the Mona Lisa, art about art, and so on.

6. ^ ^{a b} Steiner (1998) pp.489–90 quote:

   (pp.489–90) The modernist movement which dominated art, music, letters during the first half of the century was, at critical points, a strategy of conservation, of custodianship. Stravinsky's genius developed through phases of recapitulation. He took from Machaut, Gesualdo, Monteverdi. He mimed Tchaikovsky and Gounod, the Beethoven piano sonatas, the symphonies of Haydn, the operas of Pergolesi and Glinks. He incorporated Debussy and Webern into his own idiom. In each instance the listener was meant to recognize the source, to grasp the intent of a transformation which left salient aspects of the original intact. The history of Picasso is marked by retrospection. The explicit variations on classical pastoral themes, the citations from and pastiches of Rembrandt, Goya, Velazquez, Manet, are external products of a constant revision, a 'seeing again' in the light of technical and cultural shifts. Had we only Picasso's sculptures, graphics, and paintings, we could reconstruct a fair portion of the development of the arts from the Minoan to Cezanne. In twentieth-century literature, the elements of reprise have been obsessive, and they have organized precisely those texts which at first seemed most revolutionary. 'The Waste Land', Ulysses, Pound's Cantos are deliberate assemblages, in-gatherings of a cultural past felt to be in danger of dissolution. The long sequence of imitations, translations, masked quotations, and explicit historical paintings in Robert Lowell's History has carried the same technique into the 1970s. [...] In modernism collage has been the representative device. The new, even at its most scandalous, has been set against an informing background and framework of tradition. Stravinsky, Picasso, Braque, Eliot, Joyce, Pound—the 'makers of the new'-- have been neo-classics, often as observant of canonic precedent as their seventeenth-century forbears.

7. ^ ^{a b} Childs, Peter Modernism (Routledge, 2000). ISBN 0-415-19647-7. p. 17. Accessed on 8 February 2009.
8. ^ Pericles Lewis, Modernism, Nationalism, and the Novel (Cambridge University Press, 2000). pp 38–39.
9. ^ "[James] Joyce's Ulysses is a comedy not divine, ending, like Dante's, in the vision of a God whose will is our peace, but human all-too-human...." Peter Faulkner, Modernism (Taylor & Francis, 1990). p 60.
10. ^ [1]
11. ^ ^{a b c} Adorno, Theodor. Minima Moralia. Verso 2005, p. 218.
12. ^ Gardner, Helen, Horst De la Croix, Richard G. Tansey, and Diane Kirkpatrick. Gardner's Art Through the Ages (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991). ISBN 0-15-503770-6. p. 953.
13. ^ ^{a b} Orton and Pollock (1996) p.141 quote:

    The term avant-garde had a shorter provenance in the language and literature of art. It was not until the twentieth century that its military or naval meaning (the foremost division or detachment of an advancing force) or the political usage (an elite party to lead the masses) was appropriated by art criticism. Modernist art history has evacuated the term's historical meanings, using it to signify an idea about the way in which art develops and artists function in relation to society.

14. ^ ^{a b} Guy Debord, 18 November 1958, as quoted in Supreme Height of the Defenders of Surrealism in Paris and the Revelation of their Real Value, Situationist International #2
15. ^ "In the twentieth century, the social processes that bring this maelstrom into being, and keep it in a state of perpetual becoming, have come to be called 'modernization'. These world-historical processes have nourished an amazing variety of visions and ideas that aim to make men and women the subjects as well as the objects of modernization, to give them the power to change the world that is changing them, to make their way through the maelstrom and make it their own. Over the past century, these visions and values have come to be loosely grouped together under the name of 'modernism'" (Berman 1988, 16)
16. ^ Lee Oser, The Ethics of Modernism: Moral ideas in Yeats, Eliot, Joyce, Woolf and Beckett (Cambridge University Press, 2007); F.J. Marker & C.D. Innes, Modernism in European Drama: Ibsen, Stringdberg, Pirandello, Beckett; Morag Shiach, "Situating Samuel Beckett" pp234-247 in The Cambridge Companion to the Modernist Novel, (Cambridge University Press, 2007); Kathryne V. Lindberg, Reading Pound Reading: Modernism After Nietzsche (Oxford University Press, 1987); Pericles Lewis, The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism (Cambridge University Press, 2007). pp21
17. ^ Frascina and Harrison 1982, p. 5.
18. ^ Clement Greenberg: Modernism and Postmodernism, seventh paragraph of the essay. Accessed on 15 June 2006
19. ^ Ulysses, has been called "a demonstration and summation of the entire [Modernist] movement". Beebe, Maurice (Fall 1972). "Ulysses and the Age of Modernism". James Joyce Quarterly (University of Tulsa) 10 (1): p. 176.
20. ^ Kevin J. H. Dettmar "Modernism". David Scott Kastan. Oxford University Press 2005. <http://www.oxfordreference.com 27 October 2011
21. ^ Clement Greenberg: Modernism and Postmodernism, William Dobell Memorial Lecture, Sydney, Australia, Oct 31, 1979, Arts 54, No.6 (February 1980). His final essay on modernism] Retrieved October 26, 2011
22. ^ Paul Griffiths "modernism" The Oxford Companion to Music. Ed. Alison Latham. Oxford University Press, 2002. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. <http://www.oxfordreference.com> 27 October 2011
23. ^ "modernism", The Oxford Companion to English Literature. Edited by Dinah Birch. Oxford University Press Inc. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. <http://www.oxfordreference.com> 27 October 2011
24. ^ Nochlin, Linda, Ch.1 in: Women Artists at the Millennium (edited by C. Armstrong and C. de Zegher) MIT Press, 2006.
25. ^ Pollock, Griselda, Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum: Time, Space and the Archive. Routledge, 2007.
26. ^ De Zegher, Catherine, and Teicher, Hendel (eds.), 3 X Abstraction. New Haven: Yale University Press. 2005.
27. ^ Aldrich, Larry. Young Lyrical Painters, Art in America, v.57, n6, November–December 1969, pp.104–113.
28. ^ ^{a b c} Movers and Shakers, New York, "Leaving C&M", by Sarah Douglas, Art+Auction, March 2007, V.XXXNo7.
29. ^ Martin, Ann Ray, and Howard Junker. The New Art: It's Way, Way Out, Newsweek 29 July 1968: pp.3,55–63.
30. ^ ^{a b c} Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-garde at the End of the Century, MIT Press, 1996, pp44-53. ISBN 0-262-56107-7
31. ^ Craig Owens, Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture, London and Berkeley: University of California Press (1992), pp74-75.
32. ^ Steven Best, Douglas Kellner, The Postmodern Turn, Guilford Press, 1997, p174. ISBN 1-57230-221-6
33. ^ "Fluxus & Happening – Allan Kaprow". http://members.chello.nl/j.seegers1/flux_files/kaprow_chronology.html. Retrieved 4 May 2010. 
34. ^ Finkel, Jori (13 April 2008). "Happenings Are Happening Again". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/13/arts/design/13fink.html. Retrieved 23 April 2010. 
35. ^ Ihab Hassan in Lawrence E. Cahoone, From Modernism to Postmodernism: An Anthology, Blackwell Publishing, 2003. p13. ISBN 0-631-23213-3
36. ^ Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia, Routledge, 1995. p192. ISBN 0-415-90934-1
37. ^ Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia, Routledge, 1995. p196. ISBN 0-415-90934-1
38. ^ Ratcliff, Carter. The New Informalists, Art News, v. 68, n. 8, December 1969, p.72.
39. ^ Barbara Rose. American Painting. Part Two: The Twentieth Century. Published by Skira – Rizzoli, New York, 1969
40. ^ Walter Darby Bannard. "Notes on American Painting of the Sixties." Artforum, January 1970, vol. 8, no. 5, pp.40–45.
41. ^ "postmodernism", The Penguin Companion to Classical Music, ed. Paul Griffiths. London: Penguin, 2004.
42. ^ J. H. Dettmar "Modernism", The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature. David Scott Kastan. Oxford University Press 2005. <http://www.oxfordreference.com> 27 October 2011.
43. ^ After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture and Postmodernism. London: Macmillan, 1988, p.59. Quoted in Hawthorn, Studying the Novel, p.63; Simon Malpas, Postmodern Debates, [2]
44. ^ Simon Malpas, Postmodern Debates, [3]
45. ^ Askoxford.com
46. ^ Merriam-Webster's definition of postmodernism
47. ^ Ruth Reichl, Cook's November 1989; American Heritage Dictionary's definition of the postmodern
48. ^ Postmodernism. Georgetown university
49. ^ Wagner, British, Irish and American Literature, Trier 2002, p. 210-2
50. ^ T. S. Eliot Tradition and the individual talent" (1919), in Selected Essays. Paperback Edition. (Faber & Faber, 1999).
51. ^ ^{a b} Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture, Beacon Press, 1961
52. ^ 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.
53. ^ Jack, Ian (6 June 2009), "Set In Stone", Guardian, http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/jun/06/alexander-stoddart-interview 

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)
• Potter, Rachael (January 2009). "Obscene Modernism and the Trade in Salacious Books". Modernism/modernity (The Johns Hopkins University Press) 16 (1). ISSN 1071-6068. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/modernism-modernity/v016/16.1.potter.html. 
• 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".