http://www.worldhistory.com/wiki/M/Modernism.htm
The modern movement emerged in the late 19th century, and was rooted in
the idea that "traditional" forms of art, literature, social
organization and daily life had become outdated, and that it was therefore
essential to sweep them aside and reinvent culture. It encouraged the idea of
re-examination of every aspect of existence, from commerce to philosophy, with
the goal of finding that which was "holding back" progress, and
replacing it with new, and therefore better, ways of reaching the same end. In
essence, the Modern Movement argued that the new realities of the 20th century
were permanent and immament, and that people should
adapt to their world view to accept that what was new was also good and beautiful.
Modernism in the cultural historical sense
is generally defined as the new artistic and literary styles that emerged in
the decades before 1914 as
artists rebelled against the late 19th century norms
of depiction and literary form, in an attempt to present what they regarded as
a more emotionally true picture of how people really feel and think.
Some divide the 20th century into modern and post-modern periods, where
as others see them as two parts of the same larger period, this article will
focus on the movement that grew out of the late 19th and early 20th century,
while Post-modernism has its own article.
The first half of the 19th century for Europe was
marked by a series of turbulent wars and revolutions, which gradually formed
into a series of ideas and doctrines now identified as Romanticism,
which focused on individual subjective experience, the supremacy of
"Nature" as the standard subject for art, revolutionary or radical
extensions of expression, and individual liberty. By mid-century, however, a
synthesis of these ideas, and stable governing forms had emerged. Called by
various names, this synthesis was rooted in the idea that what was
"real" dominated over what was subjective. Exemplified by Otto von Bismarck's
realpolitik, philosophical
ideas such as positivism and cultural norms
now described by the word Victorian.
Core to this synthesis, however, was the importance of institutions,
common assumptions and frames of reference. These drew their support from
religious norms found in Christianity, scientific norms found in classical physics and doctrines which asserted that depiction of the basic external
reality from an objective
standpoint was possible. Cultural critics and historians label this set of
doctrines Realism,
though this term is not universal. In philosophy, the rationalist and positivist
movements established a primacy of reason and system.
Against this current were a series of ideas. Some were direct
continuations of Romantic schools of thought. Notable were the agrarian and
revivalist movements in plastic arts and poetry (e.g.
the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the philosopher John Ruskin). Rationalism also drew responses from the anti-rationalists in
philosophy. In particular, Hegel's dialectic view
of civilization and history drew responses from Friedrich Nietzsche and Søren Kierkegaard, who was a major precursor to Existentialism. All of these separate reactions together, however, began to be seen as
offering a challenge to any comfortable ideas of certainty derived by
civilization, history, or pure reason.
From the 1870s onwards, the view that history and civilization were
inherently progressive was increasingly called into question. Writers like Wagner and Ibsen had
been reviled for their own critiques of contemporary civilisation. Increasingly
it began to be argued not merely that the values of the artist and those of
society were different, but that society was antithetical to progress itself,
and could not move forward in its present form. Moreover, there were new views
of philosophy which called into question the previous optimism. The work of
Schoppenhauer was labelled "pessimistic" for its idea of the
"negation of the will", an idea which would be both rejected and
incorporated by later thinkers such as Nietzsche.
Two of the most disruptive thinkers of the period were, in biology
Charles Darwin, whose theory of evolution by natural selection undermined religious certainty of the general
public, and the sense of human uniqueness of the intelligentsia. 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. In the same vein, Karl Marx seemed to present a
political version of the same problem: that problems with the economic order
were not transient, the result of specific wrong doers or temporary conditions,
but were fundamentally contradictions within the "capitalist" system.
Both thinkers would spawn defenders and schools of thought which would become
decisive in establishing modernism.
Separately, in the arts and letters, to ideas originating in France would
have particular impact. The first was Impressionism, a school of painting which
was initially focused on work done, not in studios, but in the "plain
air". They argued that human beings do not see objects, but instead see
light itself. The school gathered adherents, and despite deep internal
divisions among its leading practitioners, became increasingly influential.
Initially rejected from the most important commercial show of the time - the
government sponsored Paris Salon (Emperor Napoleon III created the "Salon des rejects," which displayed all of the
paintings rejected by the Paris Salon). While most were in standard styles, but
by inferior artists, the work of Manet attracted tremendous attention, and opened commercial doors to the
movement.
The second school was Symbolism, marked by a belief that language is expressly symbolic in its nature, and that poetry and writing should follow whichever
connection the sheer sound and texture of the words create. The poet
Stéphane Mallarmé would be of particular importance to what would
occur afterward.
At the same time social, political, and economic forces were at work
which would eventually be used as the basis to argue for a radically different
kind of art and thinking.
Chief among these was industrialization, which produced buildings such as the Eiffel Tower that
broke all previous limitations on how tall man-made objects could be, and at
the same time offered a radically different environment in urban life. The
miseries of industrial urbanity, and the possibilities created by scientific
examination of subjects would be crucial in the series of changes which would
shake European civilization, which, at that point, regarded itself as having a
continuous and progressive line of development from the Renaissance.
The breadth of the changes can be seen in how many disciplines are
described, in their pre-20th century form, as being "classical", including physics, economics, and
arts such as ballet.
Initially the movement can be described as a rejection of tradition, and
a tendency to face problems from a fresh perspective based on current ideas and
techniques. Thus Gustav Mahler considered himself a "modern" composer and Gustave Flaubert made his famous remark that "It is essential to be thoroughly
modern in one's tastes." The rejection of tradition by the Impressionist movement makes it one of the first artistic movements to be seen, in
retrospect, as a modern movement. In literature the symbolist
movement would have a tremendous influence on the development of the Modernism,
because of its focus on sensation. Philosophically, the break with tradition by
Nietzsche and Freud
provides a key underpinning of the movement going forward: to begin again from
first principles, abandoning previous definitions and systems. This wave of the
movement generally stayed within late 19th century norms of presentation; often
its practitioners regarded themselves as reformers rather than revolutionaries.
Beginning in the 1890s and with increasing force afterwards, a strand of thinking began to
assert that it was necessary to push aside previous norms entirely, and instead
of merely revising past knowledge in light of current techniques, it would be
necessary to make more thorough changes. The movement in art paralleled such
developments as the Theory of Relativity in physics; the increasing integration of internal combustion and industrialization; and the rise of social sciences in public policy. In the first fifteen years of the twentieth century a
series of writers, thinkers, and artists made the break with traditional means
of organizing literature, painting, and music - again, in parallel to the
change in organizational methods in other fields. The argument was that if the
nature of reality itself was in question, and the restrictions which, it was
felt, had been in place around human activity were falling, then art too, would
have to radically change.
As vividly Sigmund Freud offered a view of subjective states that involved a subconscious mind full of primal impulses and counterbalancing restrictions, and Carl Jung would
combine Freud's doctrine of the subconscious with a belief in natural essence
to stipulate a collective unconscious that was full of basic typologies that the conscious mind fought or
embraced. This attacked the idea that people's impulses towards breaking social
norms were the product of being childish or ignorant, and were instead
essential to the nature of the human animal, and the ideas of Darwin had
introduced the idea of "man, the animal" to the public mind.
At the same time, and in nearly the same place as Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche championed a process philosophy, in which processes and forces, specifically the 'will to power', were
more important than facts or things. Similarly the writings of Henri Bergson became increasingly influential, who also championed the vital 'life
force' over static conceptions of reality. What united all these writers was a romantic
distrust of the Victorian positivism and certainty. Instead they championed,
or, in case of Freud, attempted to explain, irrational thought processes through
the lens of rationality and holism. This was connected with a general search to
culminate the century long trend to thinking in terms of holistic ideas, which
would include an increased interest in the occult, and "the vital
force".
Out of this collision of ideals from Romanticism, and an attempt to find
a way for knowledge to explain that which was as yet unkown, came the first
wave of works, which, while their authors considered them extensions of
existing trends in art, broke the implicit contract that artists were the
interpreters and representatives of bourgeoise culture and ideas. The landmarks
include Arnold Schoenberg's atonal
ending to his Second String Quartet in 1906, the abstract paintings of Wassily Kandinsky starting in 1903 and
culminating with the founding of the Blue Rider group in Munich, and
the rise of cubism from
the work of Picasso and Georges Braque in 1908.
Powerfully influential in this wave of modernity were the theories of
Freud, who argued that the mind had a basic and fundamental structure, and that
subjective experience was based on the interplay of the parts of the mind. All
subjective reality was based, according to Freud's ideas, on the play of basic
drives and instincts, through which the outside world was perceived. This
represented a break with the past, in that previously it was believed that
external and absolute reality could impress itself on an individual, as, for
example, in John Locke's tabula rasa
doctrine.
However, the modern movement was not merely defined by its avant garde but
also by a reforming trend within previous artistic norms. This search for
simplification of diction was found in the work of Joseph Conrad. The pressures of communication, transportation and more rapid
scientific development began placing a premium on architectural styles which
were cheaper to build and less ornamented, and on writing which was shorter,
clearer, and easier to read. The rise of cinema and "moving pictures" in the first decade of the twentieth century
gave the modern movement an artform which was uniquely its own, and again,
created a direct connection between the perceived need to extend the
"progressive" tradition of the late nineteenth century, even if this
conflicted with then established norms.
This wave of the modern movement broke with the past in the first decade
of the twentieth century, and tried to redefine various artforms in a radical
manner. Leading lights within the literary wing of this movement include Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Guillaume Apollinaire, Joseph Conrad, Marcel Proust, Gertrude Stein, Wyndham Lewis, H.D., Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, and Franz Kafka.
Composers such as Schoenberg and Stravinsky
represent modernism in music. Artists such as Gustav Klimt, Picasso, Matisse, Mondrian, and
the Surrealists
represent the visual arts,
while architects and designers
such as Le Corbusier Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe brought modernist ideas into everyday urban life. Several figures outside of artistic modernism were influenced by
artistic ideas, for example John Maynard Keynes was friends with Woolf and other writers of the Bloomsbury group.