Modernist literature

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For modern literature, see History of modern literature.

Literary modernism, or modernist literature, has its origins in the late 19th and early

20th centuries, mainly in Europe and North America. Modernism is characterized by a

self-conscious break with traditional styles of poetry and verse. Modernists

experimented with literary form and expression, adhering to Ezra Pound's maxim to

"Make it new".[1] The modernist literary movement was driven by a conscious desire to

overturn traditional modes of representation and express the new sensibilities of their

time.[2] The horrors of the First World War saw the prevailing assumptions about society

reassessed.[3] Thinkers such as Sigmund Freud questioned the rationality of mankind.[3]

Contents

1 Introduction

2 Early modernist writers

3 Continuation: 1920s and 1930s

4 Modernist literature after 1939

o 4.1 Late Modernism

o 4.2 Theatre of the Absurd

5 Modernist writers

6 See also

Introduction[edit]

In the 1880s, increased attention was given to the idea that it was necessary to push

aside previous norms entirely, instead of merely revising past knowledge in light of

contemporary techniques. The theories of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), and Ernst

Mach (1838–1916) influenced early Modernist literature. Mach argued that the mind

had a fundamental structure, and that subjective experience was based on the interplay

of parts of the mind in The Science of Mechanics (1883). Freud's first major work

was Studies on Hysteria (with Josef Breuer) (1895). According to Freud, all subjective

reality was based on the play of basic drives and instincts, through which the outside

world was perceived. As a philosopher of science, Ernst Mach was a major influence

on logical positivism, and through his criticism of Isaac Newton, a forerunner of

Einstein's theory of relativity.

Previously, some believed that external and absolute reality could impress itself, as it

were, on an individual, as, for example, in John Locke's (1632–1704) empiricism, which

saw the mind beginning as a tabula rasa, a blank slate (An Essay Concerning Human

Understanding, 1690). Freud's description of subjective states, involving an

unconscious mind full of primal impulses, and counterbalancing self-imposed

restrictions, was combined by Carl Jung (1875–1961) with the idea of the collective

unconscious, with which the conscious mind fought or embraced. While Charles

Darwin's work remade the Aristotelian concept of "man, the animal" in the public mind,

Jung suggested that human impulses toward breaking social norms were not the product

of childishness, or ignorance, but rather derived from the essential nature of the human

animal.[citation needed]

Friedrich Nietzsche was another major precursor of modernism,[4] with a philosophy in

which psychological drives, specifically the 'Will to power', were more important than

facts, or things. Henri Bergson (1859–1941), on the other hand, emphasized the

difference between scientific, clock time and the direct, subjective, human experience of

time[5] His work on time and consciousness "had a great influence on twentieth-century

novelists," especially those modernists who used the stream of consciousness technique,

such as Dorothy Richardson, Pointed Roofs (1915), James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)

and Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927).[6] Also important in Bergson's philosophy was the idea of élan vital, the life force,

which "brings about the creative evolution of everything"[7] His philosophy also placed a

high value on intuition, though without rejecting the importance of the intellect.[7] These

various thinkers were united by a distrust of Victorian positivism and certainty.[citation

needed] Modernism as a literary movement can be seen also, as a reaction to

industrialization, urbanization and new technologies.

Important literary precursors of Modernism were: Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–81)

(Crime and Punishment (1866), The Brothers Karamazov (1880)); Walt

Whitman (1819–92) (Leaves of Grass) (1855–91); Charles Baudelaire (1821–67) (Les

Fleurs du mal), Rimbaud (1854–91) (Illuminations, 1874); August Strindberg (1849–

1912), especially his later plays, including, the trilogy To Damascus 1898–1901, A

Dream Play (1902), The Ghost Sonata (1907).

Modernist literature scholar David Thorburn saw connections between literary style and

impressionist painters such as Claude Monet. Modernist writers, like Monet's paintings

of water lilies, suggested an awareness of art as art, rejected realistic interpretations of

the world and dramatized "a drive towards the abstract".[8]

Initially, some modernists fostered a utopian spirit, stimulated by innovations

in anthropology, psychology, philosophy,political theory, physics and psychoanalysis.

The poets of the Imagist movement, founded by Ezra Pound in 1912 as a new poetic

style, gave Modernism its early start in the 20th century,[9] and were characterized by a

poetry that favoured a precision of imagery, brevity and Free verse.[9] This idealism,

however, ended, with the outbreak of World War I, and writers created more cynical

works that reflected a prevailing sense of disillusionment. Many modernist writers also

shared a mistrust of institutions of power such as government and religion, and rejected

the notion of absolute truths. Modernist works such as T. S. Eliot's The Waste

Land (1922), were increasingly self-aware, introspective, and explored the darker

aspects of human nature.[10]

The term modernism covers a number of related, and overlapping, artistic and literary

movements,

including Imagism,Symbolism, Futurism, Vorticism, Cubism, Surrealism, Expressionis

m, and Dada.

Early modernist writers[edit]

Early modernist writers, especially those writing after World War I and the

disillusionment that followed, broke the implicit contract with the general public that

artists were the reliable interpreters and representatives of mainstream ("bourgeois")

culture and ideas, and, instead, developed unreliable narrators, exposing the

"irrationality at the roots of a supposedly rational world".[11]

They also attempted to take into account changing ideas about reality developed

by Darwin, Mach, Freud, Einstein,Nietzsche, Bergson and others. From this developed

innovative literary techniques such as stream-of-consciousness,interior monologue, as

well as the use of multiple points-of-view. This can reflect doubts about the

philosophical basis of realism, or alternatively an expansion of our understanding of

what is meant by realism. So that, for example the use of stream-of-consciousness, or

interior monologue reflects the need for greater psychological realism.

It is debatable when the modernist literary movement began, though some have chosen

1910 as roughly marking the beginning and quote novelist Virginia Woolf, who

declared that human nature underwent a fundamental change "on or about December

1910."[12] But modernism was already stirring by 1902, with works such as Joseph

Conrad's (1857–1924)Heart of Darkness, while Alfred Jarry's (1873–

1907) absurdist play, Ubu Roi appeared even earlier, in 1896.

Among early modernist non-literary landmarks is the atonal ending of Arnold

Schoenberg's Second String Quartet in 1908, the Expressionist paintings of Wassily

Kandinskystarting in 1903 and culminating with his first abstract painting and the

founding of the Expressionist Blue Rider group in Munich in 1911, the rise of fauvism,

and the introduction ofcubism from the studios of Henri Matisse, Pablo

Picasso, Georges Braque and others between 1900 and 1910.

Early modernist writers and selected works include:

Marcel Proust  (1871–1922): Du Cote de chez Swann (1913), the first volume

of Remembrance of Things Past (1913–27);

Franz Kafka  (1883–1924): The Metamorphosis (1915), The Trial (1925), The

Castle (1926);

Dorothy Richardson  (1873–1957): Pointed Roofs (1915), the first volume

of Pilgrimage (1915–38; post. 1967);

Andrei Bely  (1880–1934): Petersburg (1913);

Guillaume Apollinaire  (1880–1918): Alcools (1913);

Georg Trakl  (1887–1914): Poems (1913);

Rainer Maria Rilke  (1875–1926): The Notebooks of Malte Laurids

Brigge (1910), Sonnets to Orpheus (1922), Duino Elegies (1922);

Gottfried Benn  (1886–1956): Morgue and other Poems (1912);

Luigi Pirandello  (1867–1936): The Late Mattia Pascal (1904), Six Characters in

Search of an Author (1921);

D. H. Lawrence  (1885–1930): Sons and Lovers (1913), The Rainbow (1915);

Wyndham Lewis  (1882–1957): Tarr (1918);

W. B. Yeats  (1865–1939): The Green Helmet (1910), Wild Swans at

Coole (1917);

Eugene O'Neill  (1888–1953): Anna Christie (1920), The Emperor Jones (1920);

Karel Čapek  (1890–1938): R.U.R. (1920);

T. S. Eliot  (1888–1965): "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1916), The

Waste Land (1922), Four Quartets (1935–42);

Ezra Pound  (1885–1972): Ripostes (1912), The Cantos, published variously over

the period 1917–64, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920);

Italo Svevo  (1861–1928): Zeno's Conscience (1923)

James Joyce  (1882–1941), Portrait of the Artist as a Young

Man (1916), Ulysses (1922).

Miroslav Krleža  (1893–1981), Ballads of Petrica Kerempuh (1936)

James Joyce was a major modernist writer whose strategies in his novel Ulysses (1922)

for depicting the events in the life of his protagonist, Leopold Bloom, have come to

epitomize modernism's approach to fiction. The poet T.S. Eliot described these qualities

in 1923, noting that Joyce's technique is "a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a

shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is

contemporary history.... Instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythical

method. It is, I seriously believe, a step toward making the modern world possible for

art."[13] Eliot's own modernist poem The Waste Land (1922) mirrors "the futility and

anarchy" in its own way, in its fragmented structure, and the absence of an obvious

central, unifying narrative. This is in fact a rhetorical technique to convey the poem's

theme: "The decay and fragmentation of Western Culture".[14] The poem, despite the

absence of a linear narrative, does have a structure: this is provided by both fertility

symbolism derived from anthropology, and other elements such as the use of quotations

and juxtaposition.[14]

Modernist literature addressed similar aesthetic problems as contemporary Modernist

art. Gertrude Stein's abstract writings, for example, have been compared to the

fragmentary and multi-perspective Cubist paintings of her friend Pablo Picasso.[15] The

questioning spirit of modernism, as part of a necessary search for ways to make sense of

a broken world, can also be seen in a different form in the Scottish poet Hugh

MacDiarmid's A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926). In this poem, MacDiarmid

applies Eliot's techniques to respond to the question of nationalism, using comedic

parody, in an optimistic (though no less hopeless) form of modernism in which the artist

as "hero" seeks to embrace complexity and locate new meanings.[citation needed]

Continuation: 1920s and 1930s[edit]

Significant modernist works continued to be created in the 1920s and 1930s, including

further novels by Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Robert Musil, and Dorothy

Richardson. The American modernist dramatist Eugene O'Neill's career began in 1914,

but his major works appeared in the 1920s and 1930s and early 1940s. Two other

significant modernist dramatists writing in the 1920s and 1930s were Bertolt

Brecht and Federico García Lorca. D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover was

published in 1928, while another important landmark for the history of the modern

novel came with the publication of William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury in 1929.

In the 1930s, in addition to further major works by Faulkner, Samuel Beckett published

his first major work, the novel Murphy (1938), while in 1932 John Cowper

Powys published A Glastonbury Romance, the same year asHermann Broch's The

Sleepwalker. One of greatest achievement in modernist poetry is than followed

by Miroslav Krleža's Ballads of Petrica Kerempuh in 1936. Then in 1939 James

Joyce's Finnegans Wake appeared. It was in this year that another Irish modernist, W.

B. Yeats, died. In poetry T. S. Eliot, e.e. cummings, and Wallace Stevens continued

writing from the 1920s until the 1950s. While modernist poetry in English is often

viewed as an American phenomenon, with leading exponents including Ezra Pound, T.

S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, H.D., and Louis Zukofsky, there

were important British modernist poets, including David Jones, Hugh

MacDiarmid, Basil Bunting, and W. H. Auden. European modernist poets

include Federico García Lorca, Anna Akhmatova, Constantine Cavafy, and Paul Valéry.

Modernist literature after 1939[edit]

Though The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature sees Modernism ending by

c.1939,[16] 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".[17] Clement Greenberg sees Modernism

ending in the 1930s, with the exception of the visual and performing arts.[18] In fact,

many literary modernists lived into the 1950s and 1960s, though generally speaking

they were no longer producing major works.

Late Modernism[edit]

The term late modernism is sometimes applied to modernist works published after 1930.[19][20] Among modernists (or late modernists) still publishing after 1945 were Wallace

Stevens, Gottfried Benn, T. S. Eliot, Anna Akhmatova, William Faulkner, Dorothy

Richardson, John Cowper Powys, and Ezra Pound. Basil Bunting, born in 1901,

published his most important modernist poem Briggflatts in 1965. In addition Hermann

Broch's The Death of Virgil was published in 1945 and Thomas Mann's Doctor

Faustus in 1947. Samuel Beckett, who died in 1989, has been described as a "later

modernist".[21] Beckett is a writer with roots in the expressionist tradition of modernism,

who produced works from the 1930s until the 1980s, including Molloy (1951), En

attendant Godot (1953), Happy Days (1961) and Rockaby (1981). The

terms minimalist and post-modernist have also been applied to his later works.[22] The

poets Charles Olson (1910–1970) and J. H. Prynne (b. 1936) have been described as late

modernists.[23]

More recently the term late modernism has been redefined by at least one critic and

used to refer to works written after 1945, rather than 1930. With this usage goes the idea

that the ideology of modernism was significantly re-shaped by the events of World War

II, especially the Holocaust and the dropping of the atom bomb.[23]

Theatre of the Absurd[edit]

The term Theatre of the Absurd is applied to plays written by primarily

European playwrights, that express the belief that human existence has no meaning or

purpose and therefore all communication breaks down. Logical construction and

argument gives way to irrational and illogical speech and to its ultimate conclusion,

silence.[24] While there are significant precursors, including Alfred Jarry (1873–1907),

the Theatre of the Absurd is generally seen as beginning in the 1950s with the plays

of Samuel Beckett.

Critic Martin Esslin coined the term in his 1960 essay, "Theatre of the Absurd." He

related these plays based on a broad theme of the Absurd, similar to the way Albert

Camususes the term in his 1942 essay, "The Myth of Sisyphus".[25] The Absurd in these

plays takes the form of man’s reaction to a world apparently without meaning, and/or

man as a puppet controlled or menaced by invisible outside forces. Though the term is

applied to a wide range of plays, some characteristics coincide in many of the plays:

broad comedy, often similar to Vaudeville, mixed with horrific or tragic images;

characters caught in hopeless situations forced to do repetitive or meaningless actions;

dialogue full of clichés, wordplay, and nonsense; plots that are cyclical or absurdly

expansive; either a parody or dismissal of realism and the concept of the "well-made

play".

Playwrights commonly associated with the Theatre of the Absurd include Samuel

Beckett (1906–1989), Eugène Ionesco (1909–1994), Jean Genet (1910–1986), Harold

Pinter(1930–2008), Tom Stoppard (b. 1937), Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–

1990), Alejandro Jodorowsky (b. 1929), Fernando Arrabal (b. 1932), Václav

Havel (1936–2011) and Edward Albee(b. 1928).

Modernist writers[edit]

Anna Akhmatova  (1889–1966)

Gabriele d'Annunzio  (1863–1938)

Guillaume Apollinaire  (1880–1918)

W. H. Auden  (1907–73)

Djuna Barnes  (1892–1982)

Samuel Beckett  (1906–89)

Gottfried Benn  (1886–1956)

Bertolt Brecht  (1898–1956)

Alexander Blok  (1880–1921)

Menno ter Braak  (1902–40)

Hermann Broch  (1886–1951)

Jorge Luis Borges  (1899–1986)

Basil Bunting  (1900–85)

Ivan Cankar  (1876–1918)

Mário de Sá-Carneiro  (1890–1916)

Constantine P. Cavafy  (1863–1933)

Joseph Conrad  (1857–1924)

Hart Crane  (1899–1932)

E. E. Cummings  (1894–1962)

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis  (1839–1908)

Alfred Döblin  (1878–1957)

H.D.  (Hilda Doolittle) (1886–1961)

T. S. Eliot  (1888–1965)

Ralph W. Ellison  (1914–1994)

William Faulkner  (1897–1962)

E. M. Forster  (1879–1971)

F. Scott Fitzgerald  (1896–1940)

Robert Frost  (1874–1963)

Carlo Emilio Gadda  (1893–1973)

Knut Hamsun  (1859–1952)

Jaroslav Hašek  (1883–1923)

Ernest Hemingway  (1899–1961)

Hugo von Hofmannsthal  (1874–1929)

Max Jacob  (1876–1944)

David Jones  (1895–1974)

James Joyce  (1882–1941)

Franz Kafka  (1883–1924)

Georg Kaiser  (1878–1945)

Miroslav Krleža  (1893–1981)

Federico García Lorca  (1898–1936)

Clarice Lispector  (1920–1977)

Mina Loy  (1882–1966)

Leopoldo Lugones  (1874–1938)

Hugh MacDiarmid  (1892–1976)

Osip Mandelstam  (1891)–1938)

Thomas Mann  (1875–1955)

Katherine Mansfield  (1888–1923)

Robert Musil  (1880–1942)

Vladimir Nabokov  (1899–1977)

Pablo Neruda  (1904–1973)

Yone Noguchi  (1875–1947)

Aldo Palazzeschi  (1885–1974)

John Dos Passos  (1896–1970)

Boris Pasternak  (1890–1960)

Fernando Pessoa  (1888–1935)

Luigi Pirandello  (1867–1936)

Katherine Anne Porter  (1890–1980)

Ezra Pound  (1885–1972)

John Cowper Powys  (1872–1963)

Klaus Rifbjerg  (born 1931)

Victor Serge  (1890–1947)

Gertrude Stein  (1874–1946)

Wallace Stevens  (1875–1955)

Italo Svevo  (1861–1928)

Dylan Thomas  (1914–1953)

Ernst Toller  (1893–1939)

Federigo Tozzi  (1883–1920)

Paul Valéry  (1871–1945)

Robert Walser  (1878–1956)

Nathanael West  (1903–1940)

William Carlos Williams  (1883–1963)

Frank Wedekind  (1864–1918)

Virginia Woolf  (1882–1941)

Lu Xun  (1881–1936)

See also[edit]

List of English-language first- and second-generation modernist writers

History of modern literature

Postmodern literature

Late modernism

American modernism

Avant-garde

Expressionism

Contemporary French literature

20th century in literature

Experimental literature

Modernist poetry

Modernist poetry in English

History of theatre

Theatre of the Absurd

Postmodernism

Modernism

The Modernist Period in English Literature occupied the years from shortly after the

beginning of the twentieth century through roughly 1965. In broad terms, the period was

marked by sudden and unexpected breaks with traditional ways of viewing and

interacting with the world. Experimentation and individualism became virtues, where in

the past they were often heartily discouraged. Modernism was set in motion, in one

sense, through a series of cultural shocks. The first of these great shocks was the Great

War, which ravaged Europe from 1914 through 1918, known now as World War One.

At the time, this “War to End All Wars” was looked upon with such ghastly horror that

many people simply could not imagine what the world seemed to be plunging towards.

The first hints of that particular way of thinking called Modernism stretch back into the

nineteenth century. As literary periods go, Modernism displays a relatively strong sense

of cohesion and similarity across genres and locales. Furthermore, writers who adopted

the Modern point of view often did so quite deliberately and self-consciously. Indeed, a

central preoccupation of Modernism is with the inner self and consciousness. In contrast

to the Romantic world view, the Modernist cares rather little for Nature, Being, or the

overarching structures of history. Instead of progress and growth, the Modernist

intelligentsia sees decay and a growing alienation of the individual. The machinery of

modern society is perceived as impersonal, capitalist, and antagonistic to the artistic

impulse. War most certainly had a great deal of influence on such ways of approaching

the world. Two World Wars in the span of a generation effectively shell-shocked all of

Western civilization.

In its genesis, the Modernist Period in English literature was first and foremost a

visceral reaction against the Victorian culture and aesthetic, which had prevailed for

most of the nineteenth century. Indeed, a break with traditions is one of the fundamental

constants of the Modernist stance. Intellectuals and artists at the turn of the twentieth

century believed the previous generation’s way of doing things was a cultural dead end.

They could foresee that world events were spiraling into unknown territory. The

stability and quietude of Victorian civilization were rapidly becoming a thing of the

past. The assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria was essentially the triggering

event of the First World War, a conflict which swept away all preconceived notions

about the nature of so-called modern warfare.

In the world of art, generally speaking, Modernism was the beginning of the distinction

between “high” art and “low” art. The educational reforms of the Victorian Age had led

to a rapid increase in literacy rates, and therefore a greater demand for literature or all

sorts. A popular press quickly developed to supply that demand. The sophisticated

literati looked upon this new popular literature with scorn. Writers who refused to bow

to the popular tastes found themselves in a state of alienation from the mainstream of

society. To some extent, this alienation fed into the stereotype of the aloof artist,

producing nothing of commercial value for the market. It’s worth mentioning that this

alienation worked both ways, as the reading public by and large turned their backs on

many “elitist” artists. The academic world became something of a refuge for disaffected

artists, as they could rub elbows with fellow disenfranchised intellectuals. Still, the most

effective poets and novelists did manage to make profound statements that were

absorbed by the whole of society and not just the writer’s inner circles. In the later years

of the Modernist period, a form of populism returned to the literary mainstream, as

regionalism and identity politics became significant influences on the purpose and

direction of artistic endeavor.

The nineteenth century, like the several centuries before it, was a time of privilege for

wealthy Caucasian males. Women, minorities, and the poor were marginalized to the

point of utter silence and inconsequence. The twentieth century witnessed the

beginnings of a new paradigm between first the sexes, and later between different

cultural groups. Class distinction remains arguably the most difficult bridge to cross in

terms of forming a truly equitable society. Some would argue that class has become a

euphemism for race, but that’s another discussion. The point is that as the twentieth

century moved forward, a greater variety of literary voices won the struggle to be heard.

What had so recently been inconceivable was steadily becoming a reality. African-

Americans took part in the Harlem Renaissance, with the likes of Langston Hughes at

the forefront of a vibrant new idiom in American poetry. Women like Hilda Doolittle

and Amy Lowell became leaders of the Imagist movement. None of this is to suggest

that racism and sexism had been completely left behind in the art world. Perhaps such

blemishes can never be fully erased, but the strides that were taken in the twentieth

century were remarkable by any measure.

In Modernist literature, it was the poets who took fullest advantage of the new spirit of

the times, and stretched the possibilities of their craft to lengths not previously

imagined. In general, there was a disdain for most of the literary production of the last

century. The exceptions to this disdain were the French Symbolist poets like Charles

Beaudelaire, and the work of Irishman Gerard Manley Hopkins. The French Symbolists

were admired for the sophistication of their imagery. In comparison to much of what

was produced in England and America, the French were ahead of their time. They were

similarly unafraid to delve into subject matter that had usually been taboo for such a

refined art form. Hopkins, for his part, brought a fresh way to look at rhythm and word

usage. He more or less invented his own poetic rhythms, just as he coined his own

words for things which had, for him, no suitable descriptor. Hopkins had no formal

training in poetry, and he never published in his lifetime. This model – the self-taught

artist-hermit who has no desire for public adulation – would become synonymous with

the poet in the modern age. This stereotype continues unrivaled to this day, despite the

fact that the most accomplished poets of the Modern period were far from recluses.

Even though alienation was a nearly universal experience for Modernist poets, it was

impossible to escape some level of engagement with the world at large. Even if this

engagement was mediated through the poetry, the relationship that poets had with their

world was very real, and very much revealing of the state of things in the early

twentieth century.

Leading up to the First World War, Imagist poetry was dominating the scene, and

sweeping previous aesthetic points of view under the rug. The Imagists, among them

Ezra Pound, sought to boil language down to its absolute essence. They wanted poetry

to concentrate entirely upon “the thing itself,” in the words of critic-poet T. E. Hulme.

To achieve that effect required minimalist language, a lessening of structural rules and a

kind of directness that Victorian and Romantic poetry seriously lacked. Dreaminess or

Pastoral poetry were utterly abandoned in favor of this new, cold, some might say

mechanized poetics. Imagist poetry was almost always short, unrhymed, and noticeably

sparse in terms of adjectives and adverbs. At some points, the line between poetry and

natural language became blurred. This was a sharp departure from the ornamental,

verbose style of the Victorian era. Gone also were the preoccupations with beauty and

nature. Potential subjects for poetry were now limitless, and poets took full advantage of

this new freedom.

No Modernist poet has garnered more praise and attention than Thomas Stearns Eliot.

Born in Missouri, T. S. Eliot would eventually settle in England, where he would

produce some of the greatest poetry and criticism of the last century. Eliot picked up

where the Imagists left off, while adding some of his own peculiar aesthetics to the mix.

His principal contribution to twentieth century verse was a return to highly intellectual,

allusive poetry. He looked backwards for inspiration, but he was not nostalgic or

romantic about the past. Eliot’s productions were entirely in the modern style, even if

his blueprints were seventeenth century metaphysical poets. One of the distinguishing

characteristics of Eliot’s work is the manner in which he seamlessly moves from very

high, formal verse into a more conversational and easy style. Yet even when his poetic

voice sounds very colloquial, there is a current underneath, which hides secondary

meanings. It is this layering of meanings and contrasting of styles that mark Modernist

poetry in general and T. S. Eliot in particular. It is no overstatement to say that Eliot

was the pioneer of the ironic mode in poetry; that is, deceptive appearances hiding

difficult truths.

In American Literature, the group of writers and thinkers known as the Lost Generation

has become synonymous with Modernism. In the wake of the First World War, several

American artists chose to live abroad as they pursued their creative impulses. These

included the intellectual Gertrude Stein, the novelists Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott

Fitzgerald, and the painter Waldo Pierce, among others. The term itself refers to the

spiritual and existential hangover left by four years of unimaginably destructive warfare.

The artists of the Lost Generation struggled to find some meaning in the world in the

wake of chaos. As with much of Modernist literature, this was achieved by turning the

mind’s eye inward and attempting to record the workings of consciousness. For

Hemingway, this meant the abandonment of all ornamental language. His novels are

famous for their extremely spare, blunt, simple sentences and emotions that play out

right on the surface of things. There is an irony to this bluntness, however, as his

characters often have hidden agendas, hidden sometimes even from themselves, which

serve to guide their actions. The Lost Generation, like other “High Modernists,” gave up

on the idea that anything was truly knowable. All truth became relative, conditional, and

in flux. The War demonstrated that no guiding spirit rules the events of the world, and

that absolute destruction was kept in check by only the tiniest of margins.

The novel was by no means immune from the self-conscious, reflective impulses of the

new century. Modernism introduced a new kind of narration to the novel, one that

would fundamentally change the entire essence of novel writing. The “unreliable”

narrator supplanted the omniscient, trustworthy narrator of preceding centuries, and

readers were forced to question even the most basic assumptions about how the novel

should operate. James Joyce’sUlysses is the prime example of a novel whose events are

really the happenings of the mind, the goal of which is to translate as well as possible

the strange pathways of human consciousness. A whole new perspective came into

being known as “stream of consciousness.” Rather than looking out into the world, the

great novelists of the early twentieth century surveyed the inner space of the human

mind. At the same time, the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud had come into

mainstream acceptance. These two forces worked together to alter people’s basic

understanding of what constituted truth and reality.

Experimentation with genre and form was yet another defining characteristic of

Modernist literature. Perhaps the most representative example of this experimental

mode is T. S. Eliot’s long poem The Waste Land. Literary critics often single out The

Waste Land as the definitive sample of Modernist literature. In it, one is confronted by

biblical-sounding verse forms, quasi-conversational interludes, dense and frequent

references which frustrate even the most well-read readers, and sections that resemble

prose more than poetry. At the same time, Eliot fully displays all the conventions which

one expects in Modernist literature. There is the occupation with self and inwardness,

the loss of traditional structures to buttress the ego against shocking realities, and a fluid

nature to truth and knowledge.

The cynicism and alienation of the first flowering of Modernist literature could not

persist. By mid-century, indeed by the Second World War, there was already a strong

reaction against the pretentions of the Moderns. Artists of this newer generation pursued

a more democratic, pluralistic mode for poetry and the novel. There was optimism for

the first time in a long time. Commercialism, publicity, and the popular audience were

finally embraced, not shunned. Alienation became boring. True, the influence of

Modernist literature continues to be quite astonishing. The Modern poet-critics changed

the way people think about artists and creative pursuits. The Modern novelists changed

the way many people perceive truth and reality. These changes are indeed profound, and

cannot easily be replaced by new schemas.

This article is copyrighted © 2011 by Jalic Inc. Do not reprint it without permission.

Written by Josh Rahn. Josh holds a Masters degree in English Literature from

Morehead State University, and a Masters degree in Library Science from the

University of Kentucky.

Major Modernist Writers

Bishop, Elizabeth (1911-1979)

Conrad, Joseph (1857-1924)

Doolittle, Hilda (1886-1961)

Eliot, Thomas Stearns (1888-1965)

Faulkner, William (1897-1962)

Fitzgerald, F. Scott (1896-1940)

Hemingway, Ernest (1899-1961)

Hughes, Langston (1902-1967)

James, Henry (1843-1916)

Lawrence, D. H. (1885-1930)

Lowell, Amy (1874-1925)

Pound, Ezra (1885-1972)

Shaw, George Bernard (1856-1950)

Stevens, Wallace (1879-1955)

Williams, Tennessee (1882-1941)

Woolf, Virginia (1882-1941)

Yeats, William Butler (1865-1939)

Modernism

What is Modernism?

Modernism is notoriously difficult to define clearly because the term encompasses a

variety of specific artistic and philosophical movements including symbolism, futurism,

surrealism, expressionism, imagism, vorticism, dada, and others.  To further complicate

matters, many Modernists (including some of the most successful and most famous), are

not affiliated with any of these groups.

However, there are some basic tenets of the Modernist period that apply, in one way or

another, to all these movements and those writers and artists not associated with them:

“Modernist literature is characterized chiefly by a rejection of 19th-century traditions

and of their consensus between author and reader” (Baldick 159).  Specifically,

Modernists deliberately tried to break away from the conventions of the Victorian era. 

This separation from 19th century literary and artistic principles is a major part of a

broader goal.  Modernists wished to distinguish themselves from virtually the entire

history of art and literature.  Ezra Pound captured the essence of Modernism with his

famous dictum, “Make it new!”  Many Modernist writers felt that every story that could

possibly be told had, in one way or another, been told already.  Therefore, in order to

create something new, they often had to try using new forms of writing.  The period

thus produced many experimental and avant-garde styles.  Perhaps best known for such

experimentation are fiction writers  James Joyce  and Virginia Woolf, and poets T. S.

Eliot and Ezra Pound, just to name a few.

When Was Modernism?

The dates of the Modernist movement (itself a problematic term, as there was in no

sense a singular, consolidated, “movement”) are sometimes difficult to determine.  The

beginning of the 20th century is an extremely convenient starting point.  It saw the end

of Queen Victoria’s reign, marking a symbolic break from the preceding century.  The

turn of the century also roughly coincided with the publication of several

groundbreaking theories, such as Freud’sInterpretation of Dreams and Einstein’s theory

of special relativity.  As such, there were real shifts (not merely symbolic changes) in

the natural sciences, social sciences, and liberal arts occurring at this time as well. 

However, using the year 1900 as a starting point for Modernism is also problematic, as

it would exclude some writers or texts from the late 1800s which definitively display

Modernist tendencies.  Many scholars thus use the year 1890 as a starting point; it is

close to the end of Queen Victoria’s reign and the end of the century, but still fairly

inclusive.  It is important to remember, however, that while 1890 is an entirely

appropriate starting date, it is also an artificial one.

By convention and convenience, most scholars use 1945 as the endpoint for

Modernism.  The date marks the end of WWII, and a momentous shift in world politics

as well as in the most prominent social, cultural, and literary values.  Personally, I prefer

to use the year 1939 as a demarcation point.  It is the beginning of WWII, and

symbolically represents the same political and cultural changes brought about by the

war as 1945 would represent.  There is, however, a specific literary reason to use 1939

rather than 1945: it is the publication year of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.  Insofar as

Modernism is characterized chiefly by experimentation in structure, form, and

technique, Finnegans Wake is the ultimate work of Modernism.  It is truly the pinnacle

of this experimentation and novelty.  After the Wake, it is no longer possible for a writer

to attempt to supersede his or her predecessors in the way Modernists often strove to

do.  As such, the Modernist movement had reached its natural teleological conclusion,

and anything which came after must be part of a different part of literary history.

More on the Modernist Aesthetic:

The goal of accomplishing something which, artistically speaking, had never been done

before was often accompanied by a sense of despair due to the inherent difficulty (and

sometimes the apparent impossibility) of accomplishing that goal.  This despair

coincided with a changing worldview that filtered throughout British and much of

European and American society.  While the pre-Modernist world is characterized by

sense of order and stability rooted in the meaningful nature of faith, collective social

values, and a clear sense of identity (both personal and cultural), the Modernist period is

characterized by a sense of chaotic instability rooted in the revelation that collective

social values are not particularly meaningful, leading to faithlessness, skepticism, and a

confused sense of identity.  This worldview is prominent in much (though certainly not

all) Modernist literature, perhaps most famously in the fragmented verse of T. S.

Eliot’s The Waste Land.

An excellent visual depiction of this distinction between the pre-Modernist and

Modernist ideology appears to the right. The painting at left is Bruegel's Landscape with

the Fall of Icarus (the inspiration for W. H. Auden's poem "Musée des Beaux Arts").

Notice the clear imagery: the coastline with the seaside town; the shepherd with his dog

and his flock; the plowman working his field; the ships, the sunset, and the flailing legs

of the fallen Icarus. The images are clear, as is the classical allusion, and likely the

message. Compare that to the painting at the right, Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending

a Staircase. Notice the fragmented imagery, the multiple perspective coalescing into a

single view. If not for the title, many people would have no idea what the painting is

supposed to depict. The clarity and order which characterize Bruegel's painting are

entirely absent, replaced by a sense of chaos, confusion, and futility of meaning.

 Modernism and the Modern Novel

The term modernism refers to the radical shift in aesthetic and cultural sensibilities

evident in the art and literature of the post-World War One period. The ordered, stable

and inherently meaningful world view of the nineteenth century could not, wrote T.S.

Eliot, accord with "the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is

contemporary history." Modernism thus marks a distinctive break with Victorian

bourgeois morality; rejecting nineteenth-century optimism, they presented a profoundly

pessimistic picture of a culture in disarray. This despair often results in an apparent

apathy and moral relativism.

In literature, the movement is associated with the works of (among others) Eliot, James

Joyce, Virginia Woolf, W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, H.D., Franz Kafka and

Knut Hamsun. In their attempt to throw off the aesthetic burden of the realist novel,

these writers introduced a variety of literary tactics and devices:

the radical disruption of linear flow of narrative; the frustration of conventional

expectations concerning unity and coherence of plot and character and the cause and

effect development thereof; the deployment of ironic and ambiguous juxtapositions to

call into question the moral and philosophical meaning of literary action; the adoption

of a tone of epistemological self-mockery aimed at naive pretensions of bourgeois

rationality; the opposition of inward consciousness to rational, public, objective

discourse; and an inclination to subjective distortion to point up the evanescence of the

social world of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie. (Barth, "The Literature of

Replenishment" 68)

Modernism is often derided for abandoning the social world in favour of its narcissistic

interest in language and its processes. Recognizing the failure of language to ever fully

communicate meaning ("That's not it at all, that's not what I meant at all" laments Eliot's

J. Alfred Prufrock), the modernists generally downplayed content in favour of an

investigation of form. The fragmented, non-chronological, poetic forms utilized by Eliot

and Pound revolutionized poetic language.

Modernist formalism, however, was not without its political cost. Many of the chief

Modernists either flirted with fascism or openly espoused it (Eliot, Yeats, Hamsun and

Pound). This should not be surprising: modernism is markedly non-egalitarian; its

disregard for the shared conventions of meaning make many of its supreme

accomplishments (eg. Eliot's "The Wasteland," Pound's "Cantos," Joyce's Finnegans

Wake, Woolf's The Waves) largely inaccessible to the common reader. For Eliot, such

obscurantism was necessary to halt the erosion of art in the age of commodity

circulation and a literature adjusted to the lowest common denominator.

It could be argued that the achievements of the Modernists have made little impact on

the practices of reading and writing as those terms and activities are generally

understood. The opening of Finnegans Wake, "riverrun, past Eve's and Adam's, from

swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back

to Howth Castle and Environs," seems scarcely less strange and new than when it was

first published in 1939. Little wonder, then, that it is probably the least read of the

acknowledged "masterpieces" of English literature. In looking to carry on many of the

aesthetic goals of the Modernist project, hypertext fiction must confront again the

politics of its achievements in order to position itself anew with regard to reader. With

its reliance on expensive technology and its interest in re-thinking the linear nature

of The Book, hypertext fiction may find itself accused of the same elitism as its

modernist predecessors.

Modernism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For other uses of the word, see Modernism (disambiguation). For the period in

sociology beginning with the industrialization, see Modernity.

The term Modernism describes the modernist movement in the arts, its set of cultural

tendencies and associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and

far-reaching changes to Western society in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In

particular the development of modern industrial societies and the rapid growth of cities,

followed then by the horror of World War I, were among the factors that shaped

Modernism. Modernism also rejects the lingering certainty of Enlightenment thinking,

and many modernists rejected religious belief.[2][3]

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

what it saw as the now obsolete culture of the past. All the same innovations, like

the stream-of-consciousness novel,twelve-note music and abstract art, all had precursors

in the 19th-century.

A salient characteristic of Modernism is self-consciousness. This self-consciousness

often led to experiments with form and an approach that draws attention to the processes

and materials used in creating a painting, poem, building, novel, etc.[4] In art,

Modernism explicitly rejects the ideology of realism [5] [6] [7]  and makes use of the works of

the past through the application of reprise, incorporation, rewriting, recapitulation,

revision and parody in new forms.[8][9][10]

Some commentators define Modernism as a socially progressive trend of thought that

affirms the power of human beings to create, improve and reshape their environment

with the aid of practical experimentation, scientific knowledge, or technology.[11] 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).[12]

Contents

  [hide] 

1 History

o 1.1 Beginnings: the 19th century

o 1.2 Late 19th to early 20th century

o 1.3 Explosion, early 20th century to 1930

o 1.4 Modernism: 1930–1945

2 After World War II (mainly the visual and performing arts)

o 2.1 Introduction

o 2.2 Theatre of the Absurd

o 2.3 Pollock and abstract influences

o 2.4 In the 1960s after abstract expressionism

o 2.5 Pop art

o 2.6 Minimalism

2.6.1 Postminimalism

2.6.2 Collage, assemblage, installations

2.6.3 Neo-Dada

2.6.4 Performance and happenings

2.6.5 Intermedia, multi-media

2.6.6 Fluxus

o 2.7 Late period

o 2.8 Differences between Modernism and postmodernism

o 2.9 Criticism and hostility to modernism

3 See also

History[edit]

Beginnings: the 19th century[edit]

According to one critic, modernism developed out of Romanticism's revolt against the

effects of the Industrial Revolution and bourgeoisvalues: "The ground motive of

modernism, Graff asserts, was criticism of the nineteenth-century bourgeois social order

and its world view […] the modernists, carrying the torch of romanticism".[5][6]

[7] While J. M. W. Turner (1775-1851), one of the greatest landscape painters of the 19th

century, was a member of the Romantic movement, as "a pioneer in the study of light,

colour, and atmosphere", he "anticipated theFrench Impressionists" and therefore

Modernism "in breaking down conventional formulas of representation; [though] unlike

them, he believed that his works should always express significant historical,

mythological, literary, or other narrative themes".[13]

The dominant trends of industrial Victorian England, was also opposed, from about

1850, by the English poets and painters that constituted the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood,

because of their "opposition to technical skill without inspiration".[14] They were

influenced by the writings of the art critic John Ruskin(1819–1900), who had strong

feelings about the role of art in helping to improve the lives of the urban working

classes, in the rapidly expanding industrial cities of Britain.[15] Art critic Clement

Greenberg describes the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood as proto-Modernists: "There the

proto-Modernists were, of all people, the pre-Raphaelites (and even before them, as

proto-proto-Modernists, the German Nazarenes. The Pre-Raphaelites actually

foreshadowed Manet (1832-83), with whom Modernist painting most definitely begins.

They acted on a dissatisfaction with painting as practiced in their time, holding that its

realism wasn't truthful enough".[16] Rationalism has also had other opponents later in the

19th century. In particular, this can be seen in the reaction against the philosophy

of Hegel (1770–1831)) from Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55) and laterFriedrich

Nietzsche (1844-1913).

However, the Industrial Revolution continued. Influential innovations included steam-

powered industrialization, and especially the development of railways, starting in

Britain in the 1830s, and the subsequent advancements in physics, engineering and

architecture associated with this. A major 19th-century engineering achievement

was The Crystal Palace, the huge cast-iron and plate glass exhibition hall built for The

Great Exhibition of 1851 in London. Glass and iron were used in a similar monumental

style in the construction of major railway terminals in London, such as Paddington

Station (1854) and King's Cross Station (1852). These technological advances led to the

building of later structures like theBrooklyn Bridge (1883) and the Eiffel Tower (1889).

The latter broke all previous limitations on how tall man-made objects could be. These

engineering marvels radically altered the 19th-century urban environment and the daily

lives of people. The human experience of time itself was altered, with the development

of electric telegraph from 1837, and the adoption of standard time by British railway

companies from 1845, and in the rest of the world over the next fifty years.

But despite continuing technological advances, from the 1870s onward, the idea that

history and civilization were inherently progressive, and that progress was always good,

came under increasing attack. Arguments arose that the values of the artist and those of

society were not merely different, but that Society was antithetical to Progress, and

could not move forward in its present form. The philosopher Schopenhauer (1788–

1860) (The World as Will and Idea, 1819) called into question the previous optimism,

and his ideas had an important influence on later thinkers, including Nietzsche. Two

other significant thinkers of the period were biologist Charles Darwin (1809–82), author

of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859), and political

scientist Karl Marx (1818–83), author of Das Kapital (1867). Darwin's theory of

evolution by natural selection undermined religious certainty and the idea of human

uniqueness. In particular, the notion that human beings were driven by the same

impulses as "lower animals" proved to be difficult to reconcile with the idea of an

ennobling spirituality. Karl Marx argued that there were fundamental contradictions

within the capitalist system, and that the workers were anything but free.

Historians, and writers in different disciplines, have suggested various dates as starting

points for modernism. Historian William Everdell, for example, has argued that

Modernism began in the 1870s, when metaphorical (or ontological) continuity began to

yield to the discrete with mathematician Richard Dedekind's (1831–1916) Dedekind cut,

and Ludwig Boltzmann's (1844–1906) statistical thermodynamics.[17]Everdell also

thinks Modernism in painting began in 1885-86 with Seurat's Divisionism, the "dots"

used to paint "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte." On the other hand

visual art critic Clement Greenberg called Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) "the first real

Modernist",[18] though he also wrote, "What can be safely called Modernism emerged in

the middle of the last century—and rather locally, in France, with Baudelaire in

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)."[19] The poet Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of

Evil), and Flaubert's novel Madame Bovary were both published in 1857.

In the arts and letters, two important approaches developed separately in France. 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

French school was Symbolism, which literary historians see beginning with Charles

Baudelaire (1821–67), and including the later poets, Arthur Rimbaud (1854–91) Une

Saison en Enfer (A Season in Hell, 1873), Paul Verlaine (1844–96), Stéphane

Mallarmé (1842–98), and Paul Valéry (1871–1945). The symbolists "stressed the

priority of suggestion and evocation over direct description and explicit analogy," and

were especially interested in "the musical properties of language."[20] Cabaret, which

gave birth to so many of the arts of modernism, may be said to have begun in France in

1881 with the opening of the Black Cat in Montmartre, the beginning of the ironic

monologue, and the founding of the Society of Incoherent Arts.[21]

Late 19th to early 20th century[edit]

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

contemporary techniques. The growing movement in art paralleled developments in

physics, such as Einstein'sSpecial Theory of Relativity (1905); innovations in industry,

such as the development of the internal combustion engine; and the increased role of the

social sciences in public policy. Thus, in the first twenty years of the 20th century many

writers, thinkers, and artists broke with the traditional means of organizing literature,

painting, and music; the results were abstract art, atonal music, and the stream of

consciousness technique in the novel.

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.

Influential in the early days of Modernism were the theories of Sigmund Freud (1856–

1939). Freud's first major work was Studies on Hysteria (with Josef Breuer) (1895).

According to Freud's ideas, all subjective reality was based on the play of basic drives

and instincts, through which the outside world was perceived. Freud's description of

subjective states, involving an unconscious mind full of primal impulses, and

counterbalancing self-imposed restrictions, was combined by Carl Jung (1875–1961)

with the idea of the collective unconscious, with which the conscious mind fought or

embraced. While Charles Darwin's work remade the Aristotelian concept of "man, the

animal" in the public mind, Jung suggested that human impulses toward breaking social

norms were not the product of childishness, or ignorance, but rather derived from the

essential nature of the human animal.

Friedrich Nietzsche was another major precursor of modernism[22] with a philosophy in

which psychological drives, specifically the 'Will to power', were more important than

facts, or things. Henri Bergson (1859–1941), on the other hand, emphasized the

difference between scientific, clock time and the direct, subjective, human experience of

time[23] His work on time and consciousness "had a great influence on twentieth-century

novelists," especially those modernists who used the stream of consciousness technique,

such as Dorothy Richardson, Pointed Roofs, (1915), James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)

and Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927).[24] Also important in Bergson's philosophy was the idea of élan vital, the life force,

which "brings about the creative evolution of everything"[25] His philosophy also placed

a high value on intuition, though without rejecting the importance of the intellect.[25]These various thinkers were united by a distrust of Victorian positivism and certainty.

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 ofArnold 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.

Important literary precursors of Modernism were: Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–

81) Crime and Punishment (1866), The Brothers Karamazov (1880);[26] Walt

Whitman (1819–92) (Leaves of Grass) (1855–91); August Strindberg (1849–1912),

especially his later plays, including, the trilogy To Damascus 1898–1901, A Dream

Play (1902), The Ghost Sonata(1907).

Explosion, early 20th century to 1930[edit]

Arguably one the most important aspects of Modernism is how it relates to tradition

through its adoption of techniques like reprise, incorporation, rewriting, recapitulation,

revision and parody in new forms.[8][9] The beginning of the 20th century marked the

first time a movement in the arts was described as "avant-garde"—a term previously

used in military and political contexts,[27]

T. S. Eliot made significant comments on the relation of the artist to tradition, including:

"[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."[28]

However, relationship of modernism with tradition was complex, as literary scholar

Peter Childs indicates:

"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."[10]

An example of how modernist art can be both revolutionary and yet be related to past

tradition, is the music of the composer Arnold Schoenberg. On the one hand

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. Yet while this was indeed wholly new, its origins can be traced

back in the work of earlier composers, such as Franz Lizst,[29] Richard Wagner, Gustav

Mahler and Richard Strauss.[30] Furthermore it must be noted that Schoenberg also wrote

tonal music throughout his career.

In the world of art, in the first decade of the 20th century, 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,[31] though the impressionist Monet had

already been innovative in his use of perspective.[32] In 1907, as Picasso was

painting Les 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 (1908), his first composition without a tonal centre.

A primary influence that led to Cubism was the representation of three-dimensional

form in the late works of Paul Cézanne, which were displayed in a retrospective at the

1907Salon d'Automne.[33] In Cubist artwork, objects are analyzed, broken up and

reassembled in an abstracted form and instead of depicting objects from one viewpoint,

the artist depicts the subject from a multitude of viewpoints to represent the subject in a

greater context.[34] Cubism was brought to the attention of the general public for the first

time in 1911 at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris (held 21 April – 13 June). Jean

Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Henri Le Fauconnier, Robert Delaunay, Fernand

Léger and Roger de La Fresnayewere shown together in Room 41, provoking a 'scandal'

out of which Cubism emerged and spread throughout Paris and beyond. Also in

1911, Kandinsky painted Bild mit Kreis(Picture With a Circle) which he later called the

first abstract painting.[35] In 1912 Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes wrote the first (and

only) major Cubist manifesto, Du "Cubisme", published in time for the Salon de

la Section d'Or, the largest Cubist exhibition to date. In 1912 Metzinger painted and

exhibited his enchanting La Femme au Cheval(Woman with a horse) and Danseuse au

café (Dancer in a café). Albert Gleizes painted and exhibited his Les Baigneuses (The

Bathers) and his monumental Le Dépiquage des Moissons (Harvest Threshing). This

work, along with La Ville de Paris (City of Paris) by Robert Delaunay, is the largest

and most ambitious Cubist painting undertaken during the pre-War Cubist period.[36]

In 1905, a group of four German artists, led by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, formed Die

Brücke (the Bridge) in the city of Dresden. This was arguably the founding organization

for theGerman Expressionist movement, though they did not use the word itself. A few

years later, in 1911, a like-minded group of young artists formed Der Blaue Reiter (The

Blue Rider) in Munich. The name came from Wassily Kandinsky's Der Blaue Reiter

painting of 1903. Among their members were Kandinsky, Franz Marc, Paul Klee,

and Auguste Macke. However, the term Expressionism did not firmly establish itself

until 1913.[37] Though initially mainly a German artistic movement, [38] most

predominant in painting, poetry and the theatre between 1910-30, most precursors of the

movement were not German. Furthermore there have been expressionist writers of prose

fiction, as well as non-German speaking expressionist writers, and, while the movement

had declined in Germany with the rise of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s, there were

subsequent expressionist works.

Expressionism is notoriously difficult to define, in part because it "overlapped with

other major 'isms' of the modernist period:

withFuturism, Vorticism, Cubism, Surrealism and Dada." [39] Richard Murphy also

comments: "the search for an all-inclusive definition is problematic to the extent that the

most challenging expressionists" such as the novelist Franz Kafka, poet Gottfried Benn,

and novelistAlfred Döblin were simultaneously the most vociferous anti-expressionists.[40] What, however, can be said, is that it was a movement that developed in the early

twentieth-century mainly in Germany in reaction to the dehumanizing effect of

industrialization and the growth of cities, and that "one of the central means by which

expressionism identifies itself as an avant-garde movement, and by which it marks its

distance to traditions and the cultural institution as a whole is through its relationship

to realism and the dominant conventions of representation."[41] More explicitly: that the

expressionists rejected the ideology of realism.[42]

There was a concentrated Expressionist movement in early 20th

century German theatre of which Georg Kaiser and Ernst Toller were the most

famous playwrights. Other notable Expressionist dramatists included Reinhard

Sorge, Walter Hasenclever, Hans Henny Jahnn, andArnolt Bronnen. They looked back

to Swedish playwright August Strindberg and German actor and dramatist Frank

Wedekind as precursors of their dramaturgical experiments. Oskar

Kokoschka's Murderer, the Hope of Women was the first fully Expressionist work for

the theatre, which opened on 4 July 1909 in Vienna.[43] The extreme simplification of

characters to mythic types, choral effects, declamatory dialogue and heightened

intensity would become characteristic of later Expressionist plays. The first full-length

Expressionist play was The Son by Walter Hasenclever, which was published in 1914

and first performed in 1916.[44]

Futurism is yet another modernist movement and in 1909, the Parisian newspaper Le

Figaro published F.T. Marinetti's first manifesto. Soon afterwards a group of painters

(Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, and Gino Severini) co-

signed the Futurist Manifesto. Modeled on Marx and Engels' famous "Communist

Manifesto" (1848), such manifestoes put forward ideas that were meant to provoke and

to gather followers. However, arguments in favor of geometric or purely abstract

painting were, at this time, largely confined to "little magazines" which had only tiny

circulations. Modernist primitivism and pessimism were controversial, and the

mainstream in the first decade of the 20th century was still inclined towards a Victorian

faith in progress and liberal optimism.

Abstract artists, taking as their examples the impressionists, as well as Paul

Cézanne (1839-1906) and Edvard Munch (1863-1944), began with the assumption that

color and shape, not the depiction of the natural world, formed the essential

characteristics of art.[46] Western art  had been, from the Renaissance up to the middle of

the 19th century, underpinned by the logic of perspective and an attempt to reproduce

an illusion of visible reality. The arts of cultures other than the European had become

accessible and showed alternative ways of describing visual experience to the artist. By

the end of the 19th century many artists felt a need to create a new kind of art which

would encompass the fundamental changes taking place in technology, science and

philosophy. The sources from which individual artists drew their theoretical arguments

were diverse, and reflected the social and intellectual preoccupations in all areas of

Western culture at that time.[47] 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.[48]

Modernist architects and designers, such as Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier,

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.[49] 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 rejected decorative motifs in design, preferring to emphasize the materials

used and pure geometrical forms.[50] The skyscraper is the archetypal modernist building

and the Wainwright Building, a 10-story office building built 1890-91, in St. Louis,

Missouri, USA, is among the first skyscrapers in the world.[51] Ludwig Mies van der

Rohe's Seagram Building in New York (1956–1958) is often regarded as the pinnacle of

this modernist high-rise architecture.[52]

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, so as 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,

though previous dogmatism has given way to a more playful use of decoration,

historical quotation, and spatial drama.

In 1913, which was the year of philosopher Edmund Husserl's Ideas, Physicist Niels

Bohr's quantized atom, Ezra Pound's founding of imagism, the Armory Show in New

York, and, inSaint Petersburg, the "first futurist opera", Mikhail Matyushin's, Victory

Over the Sun, another Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, composed The Rite of Spring,

a ballet that depicts human sacrifice, and has a musical score full of dissonance and

primitive rhythm. This caused uproar on its first performance in Paris. At this time

though Modernism was still "progressive", increasingly it saw traditional forms and

traditional social arrangements as hindering progress, and was recasting the artist as a

revolutionary, engaged in overthrowing rather than enlightening society. Also in 1913 a

less violent event occurred in France with the publication of the first volume of Marcel

Proust's important novel sequence À la recherche du temps perdu(1913–1927) (In

Search of Lost Time). This often presented as an early example of a writer using

the stream-of-consciousness technique, but Robert Humphrey comments, that Proust "is

concerned only with the reminiscent aspect of consciousness" and, that he "was

deliberately recapturing the past for the purpose of communicating; hence he did not

write a stream-of-consciousness novel".[53]

Stream of consciousness was an important modernist literary innovationas, and it has

been suggested that Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931), was the first to make full use it in

his short story '"Leutnant Gustl" ("None but the Brave" ) (1900).[54] Dorothy

Richardson was the first English writer to use it, in the early volumes of her novel

sequence Pilgrimage (1915–67).[55]The other modernist novelists that are associated

with the use of this narrative technique include James Joyce in Ulysses (1922), and Italo

Svevo in La coscienza di Zeno (1923).[56]

However, with the coming of Great War of 1914-18, and the Russian Revolution of

1917, the world was drastically changed and doubt cast on the beliefs and institutions of

the past. 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 1914 it had been argued that

no one would fight such a war, since the cost was too high. The birth of a machine age

which had made major changes in the conditions of daily life in the 19th-century now

had radically changed the nature of warfare. The traumatic nature of recent experience

altered basic assumptions, and realistic depiction of life in the arts seemed inadequate

when faced with the fantastically surreal nature of trench warfare, The view that

mankind was making steady moral progress now seemed ridiculous in the face of the

senseless slaughter, that was described in works such as Erich Maria Remarque's

novelAll Quiet on the Western Front (1929). Therefore Modernism's view of reality,

which had been a minority taste before the war, became to more generally accepted in

the 1920s.

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.[57] 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 saw themselves as part of a revolutionary culture, that included

political revolution. In Russia after the 1917 Revolutionthere was indeed initially a

burgeoning of avant grade cultural activity, which included Russian futurism. However

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. But many modernists saw themselves as apolitical. Others, such as T. S.

Eliot, rejected mass popular culture from a conservative position. Some even argue that

Modernism in literature and art functioned to sustain an elite culture which excluded the

majority of the population.[57]

Surrealism, which originated in the early 1920s, came to be regarded by the public as

the most extreme form of modernism, or "the avant-garde of modernism".[58]

By 1930, Modernism won a place in the establishment, including the political and

artistic establishment, although by this time Modernism itself had changed.

Modernism: 1930–1945[edit]

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.[citation needed] As Modernism was studied in universities, 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

theneoclassicism 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 of 1917 catalyzed the fusion of political radicalism and utopianism,[citation needed] 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 form of Marxism. This move to

the radical[citation needed] 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 others.[citation needed]

One of the most visible changes of this period was the adoption of new technologies

into daily life of ordinary people. Electricity, the telephone, the radio, the automobile—

and the need to work with them, repair them and live with them—created social change.

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, at least in North America. Associated with urbanization

and changing social mores also came smaller families and changed relationships

between parents and their children. Significant modernist literary works continued to be

created in the 1920s and 1930s, including further novels by Marcel Proust,Virginia

Woolf, Robert Musil, and Dorothy Richardson. The American modernist

dramatist Eugene O'Neill's, career began in 1914, but his major works appeared in the

1920s and 1930s and early 1940s. Two other significant modernist dramatists writing in

the 1920s and 1930s were Bertolt Brecht andFederico García Lorca. D. H.

Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover was privately published in 1928, while another

important landmark for the history of the modern novel came with the publication

of William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury in 1929. In the 1930s, in addition to

further major works by Faulkner, Samuel Beckett's published his first major work, the

novel Murphy (1938). Then in 1939 James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake appeared. In

poetry T. S. Eliot, E. E. Cummings, and Wallace Stevens were writing from the 1920s

until the 1950s. While modernist poetry in English is often viewed as an American

phenomenon, with leading exponents including Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Marianne

Moore, William Carlos Williams, H.D., and Louis Zukofsky, there were important

British modernist poets, including David Jones, Hugh MacDiarmid, Basil Bunting,

and W. H. Auden. European modernist poets include Federico García Lorca, Anna

Akhmatova, Constantine Cavafy, and Paul Valéry.

After World War II (mainly the visual and performing arts)[edit]

Introduction[edit]

Though The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature sees Modernism ending by

c.1939,[59] 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".[60] Clement Greenberg sees Modernism

ending in the 1930s, with the exception of the visual and performing arts,[61] but 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.[62] In fact

many literary modernists lived into the 1950s and 1960s, though generally speaking

they were no longer producing major works. The term late modernism is also sometimes

applied to modernist works published after 1930.[63] Among modernists (or late

modernists) still publishing after 1945 were Wallace Stevens, Gottfried Benn, T. S.

Eliot, Anna Akhmatova, William Faulkner, Dorothy Richardson, John Cowper Powys,

and Ezra Pound. Basil Bunting, born in 1901, published his most important modernist

poem Briggflatts in 1965. In addition Hermann Broch's The Death of Virgil was

published in 1945 and Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus in 1947. Samuel Beckett, who

died in 1989, has been described as a "later modernist".[64] Beckett is a writer with roots

in the expressionist tradition of modernism, who produced works from the 1930s until

the 1980s, including Molloy (1951), En attendant Godot (1953), Happy

Days (1961), Rockaby (1981). The terms minimalist and post-modernist have also been

applied to his later works.[65] The poets Charles Olson (1910-1970) and J. H.

Prynne (1936- ) are, amongst other writing in the second half of the 20th century, who

have been described as late modernists.[66]

More recently the term late modernism has been redefined by at least one critic and

used to refer to works written after 1945, rather than 1930. With this usage goes the idea

that the ideology of modernism was significantly re-shaped by the events of World War

II, especially the Holocaust and the dropping of the atom bomb.[67]

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.

Theatre of the Absurd[edit]

The term Theatre of the Absurd is applied to plays written by primarily

European playwrights, that express the belief that human existence has no meaning or

purpose and therefore all communication breaks down. Logical construction and

argument gives way to irrational and illogical speech and to its ultimate conclusion,

silence.[68] While there are significant precursors, including Alfred Jarry (1873-1907),

the Theatre of the Absurd is generally seen as beginning in the 1950s with the plays

of Samuel Beckett.

Critic Martin Esslin coined the term in his 1960 essay "Theatre of the Absurd." He

related these plays based on a broad theme of the Absurd, similar to the way Albert

Camus uses the term in his 1942 essay, "The Myth of Sisyphus".[69] The Absurd in these

plays takes the form of man’s reaction to a world apparently without meaning, and/or

man as a puppet controlled or menaced by invisible outside forces. Though the term is

applied to a wide range of plays, some characteristics coincide in many of the plays:

broad comedy, often similar to Vaudeville, mixed with horrific or tragic images;

characters caught in hopeless situations forced to do repetitive or meaningless actions;

dialogue full of clichés, wordplay, and nonsense; plots that are cyclical or absurdly

expansive; either a parody or dismissal of realism and the concept of the "well-made

play".

Playwrights commonly associated with the Theatre of the Absurd include Samuel

Beckett (1906–89), Eugène Ionesco (1909–94), Jean Genet (1910–86), Harold

Pinter (1930-2008),Tom Stoppard (1937- ), Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–90), Alejandro

Jodorowsky (1929- ), Fernando Arrabal (1932- ), Václav Havel (1936-2011)

and Edward Albee (1928- ).

Pollock and abstract influences[edit]

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 viacubism 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.

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,[70] Griselda

Pollock [71]  and Catherine de Zegher [72]  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[edit]

Main articles: Post-painterly Abstraction, Color Field, 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 abstractionbegan 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 [73]  emerged as radical new directions.

By the late 1960s however, postminimalism, process art and Arte Povera [74]  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.[74] 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.[75]

Pop art[edit]

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 andEduardo Paolozzi (who created the

groundbreaking I was a Rich Man's Plaything, 1947) are 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 Warholand 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[edit]

Main articles: Minimalism, Minimal music, Literary minimalism, Postminimalism,

and 20th-century Western painting

Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual

art and music, wherein artists intend to expose the essence or identity of a subject

through eliminating all non-essential forms, features or concepts. Minimalism is any

design or style wherein the simplest and fewest elements are used to create the

maximum effect.

As a specific movement in the arts it is identified with developments in post–World War

II Western Art, most strongly with American visual arts in the 1960s and early 1970s.

Prominent artists associated with this movement include Donald Judd, John

McCracken, Agnes Martin, Dan Flavin, Robert Morris, Anne Truitt, and Frank Stella.[76] It derives from the reductive aspects of Modernism and is often interpreted as a

reaction against Abstract expressionism and a bridge to Postminimal art practices. By

the early 1960s minimalism emerged as an abstract movement in art (with roots

in geometric abstraction of Kazimir Malevich,[77] the Bauhaus and Piet Mondrian) that

rejected the idea of relational and subjective painting, the complexity of abstract

expressionist surfaces, and the emotionalzeitgeist and polemics present in the arena

of action painting. Minimalism argued that extreme simplicity could capture all of the

sublime representation needed in art. 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,[78] examines the extent to which Donald Judd and Robert Morris both

acknowledge and exceed Greenbergian Modernism in their published definitions of

minimalism.[78] He argues that minimalism is not a "dead end" of modernism, but a

"paradigm shift toward postmodern practices that continue to be elaborated today."[78]

The terms have expanded to encompass a movement in music that features such

repetition and iteration as those of the compositions of La Monte Young, Terry

Riley, Steve Reich,Philip Glass, and John Adams. Minimalist compositions are

sometimes known as systems music. The term "minimalist" often colloquially refers to

anything that is spare or stripped to its essentials. It has also been used to describe

the plays and novels of Samuel Beckett, the films of Robert Bresson, the stories

of Raymond Carver, and the automobile designs of Colin Chapman.

Postminimalism[edit]

In the late 1960s Robert Pincus-Witten [74]  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[edit]

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

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 ofRobert 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[edit]

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 Drawing. 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

qualities 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.[79]

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.[80]

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

artistAlison Knowles and an admirer of Marcel Duchamp.

Performance and happenings[edit]

Main articles: Performance art, Happenings, and Fluxus

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. Images of Schneeman's performances of pieces

meant to shock are occasionally used to illustrate these kinds of art, and she is often

seen photographed while performing her piece Interior Scroll. However, the images of

her performing this piece are illustrating precisely what performance art is not. In

performance art, the performance itself is the medium. Other media cannot illustrate

performance art. Performance art is performed, not captured. By its nature performance

is momentary and evanescent, which is part of the point of the medium as art.

Representations of performance art in other media, whether by image, video, narrative

or otherwise, select certain points of view in space or time or otherwise involve the

inherent limitations of each medium, and which therefore cannot truly illustrate the

medium of performance as art.

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,[82] Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, Red Grooms, and Robert

Whitman.[83]

Intermedia, multi-media[edit]

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.[84] 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[edit]

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-artsensibility, 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."[85] 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."[86]

Late period[edit]

Main article: Late modernism

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.[87][88][89]

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[edit]

By the early 1980s the postmodern movement in art and architecture began to establish

its position through various conceptual andintermedia 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".[90] while in British literature, The

Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature sees Modernism "ceding its predominance to

postmodernism" as early as 1939.[91] However dates are highly debatable, especially as

according to Andreas Huyssen: "one critic's postmodernism is another critic's

modernism".[92] 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.[93]

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.[94][95][96]

Postmodern theory asserts that the attempt to canonise Modernism "after the fact" is

doomed to undisambiguable contradictions.[97]

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.[98]

Criticism and hostility to modernism

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" (see Anti-semitism) and

"Negro". The Nazis exhibited modernist paintings alongside works by thementally 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.[99]

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.

Some traditionalist artists like Alexander Stoddart reject Modernism generally as the

product of "an epoch of false money allied with false culture".[100]

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[edit]

Late modernism

American modernism

Modernismo

Remodernism

Avant-garde

Russian avant-garde

Anti-art

Modern architecture

Contemporary architecture

Modern art

Contemporary art

Postmodern art

Sculpture

Experimental film

Modernism (music)

20th-century classical music

History of classical music traditions (section 20th century music)

Contemporary classical music

Experimental music

Contemporary literature

Contemporary French literature

Modern literature

Modernist literature

Experimental literature

Modernist poetry

Modernist poetry in English

History of theatre

List of modernist writers

List of modernist women writers

Theatre of the Absurd