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157-631: Although the poems of the Neoterics may seem to address superficial subjects, many scholars view their work as subtle and accomplished works of art. Neoteric poetry has frequently been compared to the Modernist movement of the late 19th through the 20th century, as well as the Imagist movement . Influenced by the Greek Hellenistic poets, the Neoterics rejected traditional social and literary norms. Their poetry

314-447: 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. 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,

471-718: A higher power and meaning in the world. Modernism often yearns for a romantic or metaphysical centre, but later finds its collapse. This distinction between modernism and romanticism extends to their respective treatments of 'symbol'. The romantics at times see an essential relation (the 'ground') between the symbol (or the 'vehicle', in I.A. Richards 's terms) and its 'tenor' (its meaning)—for example in Coleridge's description of nature as 'that eternal language which thy God / Utters'. But while some romantics may have perceived nature and its symbols as God's language, for other romantic theorists it remains inscrutable. As Goethe (not himself

628-560: A mystical approach to suggest a non-rational sense of meaning. For these reasons, modernist metaphors may be unnatural, as for instance in T.S. Eliot's description of an evening 'spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table'. Similarly, for many later modernist poets nature is unnaturalized and at times mechanized, as for example in Stephen Oliver's image of the moon busily 'hoisting' itself into consciousness. Modernism developed out of Romanticism's revolt against

785-472: A "growing alienation " from prevailing " morality , optimism , and convention " and a desire to change how " human beings in a society interact and live together ". The modernist movement emerged during the late 19th century in response to significant changes in Western culture , including secularization and the growing influence of science. It is characterized by a self-conscious rejection of tradition and

942-497: A "later modernist". African-American author James Baldwin has also been called a "late modernist" as were poets of the Beat Generation . Eliot published two plays in the 1950s and Bunting's long modernist poem " Briggflatts " was published in 1965. The poets Charles Olson (1910–1970) and J. H. Prynne (b. 1936) are, amongst other writing in the second half of the 20th century, who have been described as late modernists. There

1099-677: A Circle ), which he later called the first abstract painting. In 1912, Metzinger and 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 ,

1256-409: A conservative position. Some even argue that Modernism in literature and art functioned to sustain an elite culture that excluded the majority of the population. 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". The word "surrealist" was coined by Guillaume Apollinaire and first appeared in

1413-587: A critical stance towards the Enlightenment concept of rationalism . The movement also rejected the concept of absolute originality — the idea of "creation from nothingness" — upheld in the 19th century by both realism and Romanticism , replacing it with techniques of collage , reprise , incorporation, rewriting, recapitulation , revision, and parody. Another feature of modernism was reflexivity about artistic and social convention, which led to experimentation highlighting how works of art are made as well as

1570-450: A demonstration of the impossibility of accepting their opposition. 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. In abstract painting and sculpture during

1727-401: A direct means of accessing a higher reality. Modernism often rejects 19th-century realism when the latter is understood as focusing on the embodiment of meaning within a naturalistic representation. Instead, some modernists aim at a more 'real' realism, one that is uncentered. For instance, Picasso's 1907 Proto-Cubist painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon does not present its subjects from

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1884-402: A do it yourself aesthetic, and valued simplicity over complexity. Like Dada before it, Fluxus included a strong current of anti-commercialism and an anti-art sensibility, disparaging the conventional market-driven art world in favor of an artist-centered creative practice. Fluxus artists preferred to work with whatever materials were at hand, and either created their own work or collaborated in

2041-425: A line from W. B. Yeats : "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold" (in ' The Second Coming '). Modernists often search for a metaphysical 'centre' but experience its collapse. ( Postmodernism , by way of contrast, celebrates that collapse, exposing the failure of metaphysics, such as Jacques Derrida 's deconstruction of metaphysical claims.) Philosophically, the collapse of metaphysics can be traced back to

2198-808: A new art form, combining sculpture, dance, and music or sound, often with audience participation. The works were characterized by the reductive philosophies of minimalism , and the spontaneous improvisation, and expressivity of abstract expressionism . During the same period — the late 1950s through the mid-1960s various avant-garde artists created Happenings . Happenings were mysterious and often spontaneous and unscripted gatherings of artists and their friends and relatives in varied specified locations. Often incorporating exercises in absurdity, physical exercise, costumes, spontaneous nudity , and various random and seemingly disconnected acts. Allan Kaprow , Claes Oldenburg , Jim Dine , Red Grooms , and Robert Whitman among others were notable creators of Happenings. Fluxus

2355-484: A precursor to conceptual art. 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, where each move triggers a lighting effect or projection. At the premiere, the game was played between John Cage and Marcel Duchamp . Some other famous examples being John Cage 's 4' 33" which

2512-453: A rebellion against, "the administered culture of the 1950s, in which a moderate, domesticated modernism served as ideological prop to the Cold War ." As a kind of response to Clement Greenberg 's Avant-Garde and Kitsch in 1990 Kirk Varnedoe and Adam Gopnik curated High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture , at New York's Museum of Modern Art . The exhibition attempted to elucidate

2669-522: A revolutionary culture that included political revolution. In Russia after the 1917 Revolution , there was indeed initially a burgeoning of avant-garde 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

2826-442: A romantic) said, ‘the idea [or meaning] remains eternally and infinitely active and inaccessible in the image’. This was extended in modernist theory which, drawing on its symbolist precursors, often emphasizes the inscrutability and failure of symbol and metaphor. For example, Wallace Stevens seeks and fails to find meaning in nature, even if he at times seems to sense such a meaning. As such, symbolists and modernists at times adopt

2983-479: A single point of view, instead presenting a flat, two-dimensional picture plane . The Poet of 1911 is similarly decentered, presenting the body from multiple points of view. As the Peggy Guggenheim Collection comments, "Picasso presents multiple views of each object, as if he had moved around it, and synthesizes them into a single compound image." Modernism, with its sense that "things fall apart,"

3140-433: A situation the logical conditions of which can no longer be described as modernist." The expansion of the category of sculpture to include land art and architecture , "brought about the shift into postmodernism." Minimalists like Donald Judd , Dan Flavin , Carl Andre , Agnes Martin , John McCracken and others continued to produce their late modernist paintings and sculpture for the remainder of their careers. By

3297-406: A struggle with the sense of nature's significance, falling under two headings: poems in which the speaker denies that nature has meaning, only for nature to loom up by the end of the poem; and poems in which the speaker claims nature has meaning, only for that meaning to collapse by the end of the poem. Modernism often rejects nineteenth century realism , if the latter is understood as focusing on

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3454-406: A subsector of the contemporary movement which replaced modernity and modernism, while other notable critics: Hilton Kramer , Robert C. Morgan , Kirk Varnedoe , Jean-François Lyotard and others have argued that postmodern objects are at best relative to modernist works. The jargon which encompasses the two terms late modernism and postmodern art is used to denote what may be considered as

3611-414: A technique used in commercial reproduction. There is a clear connection between the radical works of Duchamp , the rebellious Dadaist — with a sense of humor; and pop artists like Claes Oldenburg , Andy Warhol , Roy Lichtenstein and the others. In general pop art and minimalism began as modernist movements, a shift in the paradigm and a philosophical split between formalism and anti-formalism in

3768-404: A term to describe movements in art after the peak of abstract expressionism is well established. However, although the concept of change has come to consensus, and whether it is a post-modernist change, or a late modernist period, is undetermined, the consensus is that a profound change in the perception of works of art has occurred and a new era has been emerging on the world stage since at least

3925-427: A tonal center. 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 1907 Salon d'Automne . In Cubist artwork, objects are analyzed, broken up, and reassembled in an abstract form; instead of depicting objects from one viewpoint, the artist depicts the subject from a multitude of viewpoints to represent

4082-425: A way for knowledge to explain that which was as yet unknown, came the first wave of modernist works in the opening decade of the 20th century. Although their authors considered them to be extensions of existing trends in art, these works broke the implicit understanding the general public had of art: that artists were the interpreters and representatives of bourgeois culture and ideas. These "modernist" landmarks include

4239-485: Is a late modernist movement and depending on the context can be construed as a precursor to the post modern movement. Hal Foster , in his essay The Crux of Minimalism , examines the extent to which Donald Judd and Robert Morris both acknowledge and exceed Greenbergian modernism in their published definitions of minimalism. He argues that minimalism is not a "dead end" of modernism, but a "paradigm shift toward postmodern practices that continue to be elaborated today." In

4396-448: Is a late modernist movement or is Postmodern . Thomas McEvilly , agreeing with Dave Hickey , says that postmodernism in the visual arts began with the first exhibitions of pop art in 1962, "though it took about twenty years before postmodernism became a dominant attitude in the visual arts." Frederic Jameson , too, considers pop art to be postmodern. One way that Pop art is postmodern is that it breaks down what Andreas Huyssen calls

4553-991: Is a sense of compositional randomness, all over composition, low key and relaxed compositional drama and an emphasis on process, repetition, and an all over sensibility. During the 1960s and 1970s artists as powerful and influential as Robert Motherwell , Adolph Gottlieb , Phillip Guston , Lee Krasner , Cy Twombly , Robert Rauschenberg , Jasper Johns , Richard Diebenkorn , Josef Albers , Elmer Bischoff , Agnes Martin , Al Held , Sam Francis , Ellsworth Kelly , Morris Louis , Helen Frankenthaler , Gene Davis , Frank Stella , Kenneth Noland , Joan Mitchell , Friedel Dzubas , and younger artists like Brice Marden , Robert Mangold , Sam Gilliam , John Hoyland , Sean Scully , Elizabeth Murray , Larry Poons , Walter Darby Bannard , Larry Zox , Ronnie Landfield , Ronald Davis , Dan Christensen , Joan Snyder , Ross Bleckner , Archie Rand , Susan Crile , Mino Argento and dozens of others continued to produce vital and influential paintings. By

4710-476: Is among the first skyscrapers in the world. 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. Many aspects of modernist design 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

4867-775: Is another modernist movement. In 1909, the Parisian newspaper Le Figaro published F. T. Marinetti 's first manifesto. Soon afterward, a group of painters ( Giacomo Balla , Umberto Boccioni , Carlo Carrà , Luigi Russolo , and Gino Severini ) co-signed the Futurist Manifesto . Modeled on Marx and Engels ' famous " Communist Manifesto " (1848), such manifestos 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

Neoteric - Misplaced Pages Continue

5024-709: Is characterized by tight construction, a playful use of genre , punning , and complex allusions . The most significant surviving Neoteric works are those of Catullus . His poetry exemplifies the elegant vocabulary, meter, and sound – all of which the Neoterics sought – while balancing those elements with the equally important allusive characteristic of the Neoteric style. Latin poets normally classified as Neoterics are Catullus and his fellow poets, such as Helvius Cinna , Publius Valerius Cato , Marcus Furius Bibaculus , Quintus Cornificius , among others. Some Neoteric stylistic features can also be seen in

5181-703: Is commonly recognized as "a key point of Matisse's career and in the development of modern painting". With its large expanse of blue, simplicity of design and emphasis on pure feeling the painting was enormously influential to American artists who viewed it at MoMA in New York City. The ignition point for the definition of modernism as a movement was the austere rejection of popular culture as kitsch by important post-war artists and taste-makers, most notably Clement Greenberg with his essay Avant-Garde and Kitsch , first published in Partisan Review in 1939. During

5338-461: 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 created by the viewer viewing an object or act as art, not from the intrinsic qualities of the work itself. An important series of movements in art which have consistently been described as postmodern involved installation art and creation of artifacts that are conceptual in nature. One example being

5495-525: Is highly regarded for his humorous short stories that he published in magazines in the 1930s and 1940s, most often in The New Yorker , which are considered to be the first examples of surrealist humor in America. Modern ideas in art also began to appear more frequently in commercials and logos, an early example of which, from 1916, is the famous London Underground logo designed by Edward Johnston . One of

5652-483: Is 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." Stream of consciousness was an important modernist literary innovation, and it has been suggested that Arthur Schnitzler (1862–1931)

5809-525: Is often seen as the apotheosis of Romanticism. As August Wilhelm Schlegel, an early German Romantic, described it, while Romanticism searches for metaphysical truths about character, nature, higher power , and meaning in the world, modernism, although yearning for such a metaphysical center, only finds its collapse. In the context of the Industrial Revolution (~1760–1840), influential innovations included steam-powered industrialization , especially

5966-406: Is post-modern art universally separated from modernism, with many critics seeing it as merely another phase in modern art or as another form of late modernism. As with all uses of the term post-modern there are critics of its application, however, at this point, these critics are in the minority. This is not to say that the phase of art denoted by post-modernism is accepted, merely that the need for

6123-456: Is seen as believing that all stances are unstable and insincere, and therefore irony, parody and humor are the only positions which cannot be overturned by critique or later events. Many of these traits are present in modern movements in art, particularly the rejection of the separation between high and low forms of art. However, these traits are considered fundamental to post-modern art, as opposed to merely present in one degree or another. One of

6280-459: Is similarly decentred, presenting the body from multiple points of view. As the Peggy Guggenheim Collection website puts it, 'Picasso presents multiple views of each object, as if he had moved around it, and synthesizes them into a single compound image'. Modernism, with its sense that 'things fall apart,' can be seen as the apotheosis of romanticism , if romanticism is the (often frustrated) quest for metaphysical truths about character, nature,

6437-435: Is the further question as to whether late modernist literature differs in any important way from the modernist works produced before 1930. To confuse matters, 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

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6594-525: The Hecatomb of the First World War — disclose a common cause and psychological matrix in the fight against (perceived) decadence ." All of them embody bids to access a "supra-personal experience of reality" in which individuals believed they could transcend their mortality and eventually that they would cease to be victims of history to instead become its creators. Literary modernism is often summed up in

6751-469: The Holocaust and the dropping of the atom bomb . Late modernism describes movements which both arise from, and react against, trends in modernism and reject some aspect of modernism, while fully developing the conceptual potentiality of the modernist enterprise. In some descriptions post-modernism as a period in art is completed, whereas in others it is a continuing movement in contemporary art . In art,

6908-522: The Judson Memorial Church , New York City , 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 . These performances were often designed to be the creation of

7065-505: 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 that encompassed

7222-434: The appropriation art of artists such as Sherrie Levine and Robert Longo because, "Allegorical imagery is appropriated imagery." Appropriation art debunks modernist notions of artistic genius and originality and is more ambivalent and contradictory than modern art, simultaneously installing and subverting ideologies, "being both critical and complicit." The return to the traditional art forms of sculpture and painting in

7379-414: The avant-garde myth had held the artist to be a precursor; the significant work is the one that prepares the future. The cult of the precursor ended by cluttering the landscape with absurd prophetic claims. The idea of a cultural avant-garde was unimaginable before 1800. It was fostered by the rise of liberalism . Where the taste of religious or secular courts determined patronage, "subversive" innovation

7536-484: The avant-garde of various arts and disciplines. It is also often perceived, especially in the West, as a socially progressive movement that affirms the power of human beings to create, improve, and reshape their environment with the aid of practical experimentation, scientific knowledge, or technology. From this perspective, modernism encourages the re-examination of every aspect of existence. Modernists analyze topics to find

7693-571: The avant-garde ". This relates to the negation of what post-structuralist philosophers call " metanarratives ". Rosalind Krauss was one of the important annunciators of the view that avant-gardism was over, and that the new artistic era existed in a post-liberal and post-progress normalcy. An example of this viewpoint is explained by Robert Hughes in The Shock of the New in his chapter "The Future That Was": Where did this new academy begin? At its origins

7850-617: The capitalist system and that workers are anything but free led to the formulation of Marxist theory . Art historians have suggested various dates as starting points for modernism. Historian William Everdell 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 . Everdell also believed modernism in painting began in 1885–1886 with post-Impressionist artist Georges Seurat 's development of Divisionism ,

8007-650: The neoclassicism of the 1920s (as represented most famously by T. S. Eliot and Igor Stravinsky —which rejected popular solutions to modern problems), the rise of fascism , the Great Depression , and the march to war helped to radicalize a generation. 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. There were, however, also modernists explicitly of 'the right', including Salvador Dalí , Wyndham Lewis , T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound ,

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8164-681: The " stream of consciousness " technique, such as Dorothy Richardson , James Joyce , and Virginia Woolf (1882–1941). Also important in Bergson's philosophy was the idea of élan vital , the life force, which "brings about the creative evolution of everything." His philosophy also placed a high value on intuition , though without rejecting the importance of the intellect. Important literary precursors of modernism included esteemed writers such as Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881), whose novels include Crime and Punishment (1866) and The Brothers Karamazov (1880); Walt Whitman (1819–1892), who published

8321-470: The " will to power " ( Wille zur macht ), were of central importance: "Nietzsche often identified life itself with 'will to power', that is, with an instinct for growth and durability." Henri Bergson (1859–1941), on the other hand, emphasized the difference between scientific, clock time and the direct, subjective human experience of time. His work on time and consciousness "had a great influence on 20th-century novelists" especially those modernists who used

8478-431: The "Great Divide" between high art and popular culture. Postmodernism emerges from a "generational refusal of the categorical certainties of high modernism." Although to presuppose that modernism stands for "high art" only, and is in any way certain as to what constitutes "high" art is to profoundly and basically misunderstand modernism. During the late 1950s and 1960s artists with a wide range of interests began to push

8635-606: 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 German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) "the first real modernist", although he also wrote, "What can be safely called modernism emerged in the middle of the last century—and rather locally, in France, with Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) in literature and Manet in painting, and perhaps with Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880), too, in prose fiction. (It

8792-439: The (perceived) erosion of an overarching ' nomos ', or 'sacred canopy', under the fragmenting and secularizing impact of modernity". Therefore, phenomena apparently unrelated to each other such as " Expressionism , Futurism , Vitalism , Theosophy , Psychoanalysis , Nudism , Eugenics , Utopian town planning and architecture, modern dance , Bolshevism , Organic Nationalism — and even the cult of self-sacrifice that sustained

8949-478: The 1860s, two approaches in the arts and letters 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 attempted to convey 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

9106-463: The 1920s and 1930s were Bertolt Brecht and Federico 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 published his first major work,

9263-731: 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 . The modernist movement continued during this period in Soviet Russia . In 1930 composer Dimitri Shostakovich 's (1906–1975) opera The Nose

9420-659: The 1930s. Between 1930 and 1932 composer Arnold Schoenberg worked on Moses und Aron , one of the first operas to make use of the twelve-tone technique, Pablo Picasso painted in 1937 Guernica , his cubist condemnation of fascism , while in 1939 James Joyce pushed the boundaries of the modern novel further with Finnegans Wake . Also by 1930 modernism began to influence mainstream culture, so that, for example, The New Yorker magazine began publishing work, influenced by modernism, by young writers and humorists like Dorothy Parker , Robert Benchley , E. B. White , S. J. Perelman , and James Thurber , amongst others. Perelman

9577-476: The 1940s and 1950s Greenberg proved to be an articulate and powerful art critic. In particular his writing on American Abstract expressionism, and 20th-century European modernism persuasively made the case for High art and culture. In 1961 Art and Culture , Beacon Press, a highly influential collection of essays by Clement Greenberg was first published. Greenberg is primarily thought of as a formalist art critic and many of his most important essays are crucial to

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9734-743: The 1950s and 1960s Geometric abstraction emerged as an important direction in the works of many sculptors and painters. In painting color field painting , minimalism , hard-edge painting and lyrical abstraction constituted radical new directions. Helen Frankenthaler , Morris Louis , Frank Stella , Ellsworth Kelly , Richard Diebenkorn David Smith , Sir Anthony Caro , Mark di Suvero , Gene Davis , Kenneth Noland , Jules Olitski , Isaac Witkin , Anne Truitt , Kenneth Snelson , Al Held , Ronald Davis , Howard Hodgkin , Larry Poons , Brice Marden , Robert Mangold , Walter Darby Bannard , Dan Christensen , Larry Zox , Ronnie Landfield , Charles Hinman , Sam Gilliam , Peter Reginato , were some of

9891-520: The 1950s is contemporary art . Not all art labelled as contemporary art is modernist or post-modern, and the broader term encompasses both artists who continue to work in modern and late modernist traditions, as well as artists who reject modernism for post-modernism or other reasons. Arthur Danto argues explicitly in After the End of Art that contemporaneity was the broader term, and that postmodern objects represent

10048-448: The 1960s. In literature, the term late modernism refers to works of literature produced after World War II. However, several different definitions of late modernist literature exist. The most common refers to works published between 1930 and 1939, or 1945. However, there are modernists, such as Basil Bunting (1900–1985) and T. S. Eliot (1888–1965), writing later than 1945, and Samuel Beckett , who died in 1989, has been described as

10205-623: The 19th century. Arguments arose that the values of the artist and those of society were not merely different, but in fact oftentimes opposed, and that society's current values were antithetical to further progress; therefore, civilization could not move forward in its present form. Early in the century, the philosopher Schopenhauer (1788–1860) ( The World as Will and Representation , 1819/20) called into question previous optimism. His ideas had an important influence on later thinkers, including Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). Similarly, Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) and Nietzsche both later rejected

10362-481: The Dutch author Menno ter Braak and others. 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, 1930s and early 1940s. Two other significant modernist dramatists writing in

10519-700: The German Nazarenes ). The Pre-Raphaelites foreshadowed Manet (1832–1883), 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." Two of the most significant thinkers of the mid-19th century were biologist Charles Darwin (1809–1882), author of On the Origin of Species through Natural Selection (1859), and political scientist Karl Marx (1818–1883), author of Das Kapital (1867). Despite coming from different fields, both of their theories threatened

10676-541: The Hope of Women was the first fully Expressionist work for the theater, which opened on 4 July 1909 in Vienna . 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. Futurism

10833-490: The Impressionist Claude Monet had already been innovative in his use of perspective. 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

10990-609: The Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–1776), who argued that we never actually perceive one event causing another. We only experience the ' constant conjunction ' of events, and do not perceive a metaphysical 'cause'. Similarly, Hume argued that we never know the self as object, only the self as subject, and we are thus blind to our true natures. Moreover, if we only 'know' through sensory experience—such as sight, touch and feeling—then we cannot 'know' and neither can we make metaphysical claims. Thus, modernism can be driven emotionally by

11147-960: The artistic superhighway filled to capacity. Consequently, magnificent and important works of art continue to be made albeit in a wide variety of styles and aesthetic temperaments, the marketplace being left to judge merit. Frank Stella's La scienza della pigrizia ( The Science of Laziness ), from 1984, is an example of Stella's transition from two-dimensionality to three-dimensionality and an excellent example of Late Modernism. Hard-edge painting , geometric abstraction , appropriation , hyperrealism , photorealism , expressionism , minimalism , lyrical abstraction , pop art , op art , abstract expressionism , color field painting , monochrome painting , neo-expressionism , collage , intermedia painting, assemblage painting, digital painting , postmodern painting, Neo-Dada painting, shaped canvas painting, environmental mural painting , traditional figure painting , landscape painting , portrait painting , are

11304-400: The artists whose works characterized abstract painting and sculpture in the 1960s. Lyrical abstraction shares similarities with color field painting and abstract expressionism especially in the freewheeling usage of paint — texture and surface. Direct drawing, calligraphic use of line, the effects of brushed, splattered, stained, squeegeed, poured, and splashed paint superficially resemble

11461-555: The atonal ending of Arnold Schoenberg 's Second String Quartet in 1908, the Expressionist paintings of Wassily Kandinsky starting in 1903, and culminating with his first abstract painting and the founding of the Blue Rider group in Munich in 1911, and the rise of fauvism and the inventions of Cubism from the studios of Henri Matisse , Pablo Picasso , Georges Braque , and others, in

11618-488: The boundaries of contemporary art . Yves Klein in France, and Carolee Schneemann , Yayoi Kusama , Charlotte Moorman , and Yoko Ono in New York City 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

11775-512: The city, including King's Cross station (1852) and Paddington Station (1854). These technological advances spread abroad, leading to later structures such as the Brooklyn Bridge (1883) and the Eiffel Tower (1889), the latter of which broke all previous limitations on how tall man-made objects could be. While such engineering feats radically altered the 19th-century urban environment and

11932-519: The coming of the Great War of 1914–1918 (World War I) and the Russian Revolution of 1917, the world was drastically changed, and doubt was 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: before 1914, it had been argued that no one would fight such a war, since the cost

12089-444: 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." 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

12246-739: The cultural institution as a whole is through its relationship to realism and the dominant conventions of representation." More explicitly: the Expressionists rejected the ideology of realism. There was a concentrated Expressionist movement in early 20th-century German theater, of which Georg Kaiser and Ernst Toller were the most famous playwrights. Other notable Expressionist dramatists included Reinhard Sorge , Walter Hasenclever , Hans Henny Jahnn , and Arnolt 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,

12403-497: The daily lives of people, the human experience of time itself was altered with the development of the electric telegraph in 1837, as well as the adoption of " standard time " by British railway companies from 1845, a concept which would be adopted throughout the rest of the world over the next fifty years. Despite continuing technological advances, the ideas that history and civilization were inherently progressive and that such advances were always good came under increasing attack in

12560-527: The dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously." However, the relationship of modernism with tradition was complex, as literary scholar Peter Child's 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." An example of how modernist art can apply older traditions while also incorporating new techniques can be found within

12717-412: The definitions and possibilities that artists had available for the creation of new works of art. 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 and others opened the floodgates to the diversity and scope of all the art that followed them. Related to abstract expressionism

12874-540: The desire for metaphysical truths, while understanding their impossibility. Some modernist novels, for instance, feature characters like Marlow in Heart of Darkness or Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby who believe that they have encountered some great truth about nature or character, truths that the novels themselves treat ironically while offering more mundane explanations. Similarly, many poems of Wallace Stevens convey

13031-649: The development of railways starting in Britain in the 1830s, and the subsequent advancements in physics, engineering, and architecture they led to. 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 throughout

13188-571: The early 1960s minimalism emerged as an abstract movement in art (with roots in geometric abstraction via Malevich , the Bauhaus and Mondrian ). Important artists who emerged as pioneers of minimalism include Frank Stella , Larry Bell , Ad Reinhardt , Agnes Martin , Barnett Newman , Donald Judd , Tony Smith , Carl Andre , Robert Smithson , Sol LeWitt , Dan Flavin , Robert Mangold , Robert Morris , and Ronald Bladen among others. These artists also frequently employed shaped canvases , as in

13345-431: The early 1970s caused those movements to be viewed by some as precursors, or transitioning to postmodern art. Other modern movements cited as influential to postmodern art are Conceptual art , Dada and Surrealism and the use of techniques such as assemblage , montage , collage , bricolage and art forms which used recording or reproduction as the basis for artworks. There are differing opinions as to whether pop art

13502-556: The effects of the Industrial Revolution and bourgeois values. Literary scholar Gerald Graff , argues that, "The ground motive of modernism was criticism of the 19th-century bourgeois social order and its world view; the modernists, carrying the torch of Romanticism." While J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851), one of the most notable landscape painters of the 19th century, was a member of the Romantic movement , his pioneering work in

13659-408: The effects seen in abstract expressionism and color field painting. However the styles are markedly different. Setting it apart from abstract expressionism and action painting of the 1940s and 1950s is the approach to composition and drama. As seen in action painting there is an emphasis on brushstrokes, high compositional drama, dynamic compositional tension. While in lyrical abstraction there

13816-407: The embodiment of meaning within a naturalistic representation. At the same time, some modernists aim at a more 'real' realism, one that is uncentered. Picasso's proto-cubist painting, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon of 1907 (see picture above), does not present its subjects from a single point of view (that of a single viewer), but instead presents a flat, two-dimensional picture plane . 'The Poet' of 1911

13973-672: The end of its tether". Jean-François Lyotard , in Frederic Jameson 's analysis, does not hold that there is a postmodern stage radically different from the period of high modernism ; instead, postmodern discontent with this or that high modernist style is part of the experimentation of high modernism, giving birth to new modernisms. Radical movements in Modernism, Modern art, and radical trends regarded as influential and potentially as precursors to late modernism and postmodernism emerged around World War I and particularly in its aftermath. With

14130-402: The established order. Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection undermined religious certainty and the idea of human uniqueness ; in particular, the notion that human beings are driven by the same impulses as "lower animals" proved to be difficult to reconcile with the idea of an ennobling spirituality . Meanwhile, Marx's arguments that there are fundamental contradictions within

14287-459: The example Richard Tuttle . Minimal art rejected the idea of relational, and subjective painting, the complexity of abstract expressionist surfaces, and the emotional zeitgeist and polemics present in the arena of action painting . Minimalism argued that extreme simplicity could capture all of the sublime representation needed in art. Associated with painters such as Frank Stella , minimalism in painting and sculpture, as opposed to other areas,

14444-451: The extent that artists and high culture drew on and from popular culture. Although universally panned at the time as the only event that could bring Douglas Crimp and Hilton Kramer together in a chorus of scorn. The exhibition is remembered today as a benchmark of the conflict between late modernism and postmodernism. Conceptual art became an important development in contemporary art in the late 1960s, it delivered an influential critique on

14601-471: The face of the senseless slaughter, described in works such as Erich Maria Remarque 's novel All Quiet on the Western Front (1929). Therefore, modernism's view of reality, which had been a minority taste before the war, became more generally accepted in the 1920s. In literature and visual art, some modernists sought to defy expectations mainly to make their art more vivid or to force the audience to take

14758-456: The founding of the Society of Incoherent Arts. The theories of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), Krafft-Ebing and other sexologists were influential in the early days of modernism. Freud's first major work was Studies on Hysteria (with Josef Breuer , 1895). Central to Freud's thinking is the idea "of the primacy of the unconscious mind in mental life", so that all subjective reality was based on

14915-444: 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. 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

15072-472: The hermeneutic and psychological interior, in favor of art which 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 , John McHale , and Eduardo Paolozzi were considered seminal examples in the movement. While later American examples include the bulk of the careers of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein and his use of Benday dots ,

15229-632: The horse, so modernist design should reject the old styles and structures inherited from Ancient Greece or 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. The skyscraper is the archetypal modernist building, and the Wainwright Building , a 10-story office building completed in 1891 in St. Louis, Missouri , United States,

15386-444: The idea of pluralism . The "crisis" in painting, sculpture and current art and current art criticism today is brought about by pluralism . There is no consensus, nor need there be, as to a representative style of the age. There is an anything goes attitude that prevails; an "everything going on", and consequently "nothing going on" syndrome; this creates an aesthetic traffic jam with no firm and clear direction and with every lane on

15543-499: The idea that reality could be understood through a purely objective lens, a rejection that had a significant influence on the development of existentialism and nihilism . Around 1850, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (a group of English poets, painters, and art critics) began to challenge the dominant trends of industrial Victorian England in "opposition to technical skill without inspiration." They were influenced by

15700-426: The interactions between basic drives and instincts, through which the outside world was perceived. Freud's description of subjective states involved an unconscious mind full of primal impulses, and counterbalancing self-imposed restrictions derived from social values. The works of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) were another major precursor of modernism, with a philosophy in which psychological drives, specifically

15857-546: The introduction of the use of industrial artifacts in art, movements such as Cubism , Dada and Surrealism as well as techniques such as collage and artforms such as cinema and the rise of reproduction as a means of creating artworks. Both Pablo Picasso the Modernist and Marcel Duchamp the rebel created important and influential works from found objects . In the early 20th century, following Henri Matisse and André Derain 's impact as Fauvist painters and Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque 's monumental innovations and

16014-552: The late 1960s however, process art emerged as a revolutionary concept and movement that encompassed painting and sculpture, via lyrical abstraction and the postminimalist movement, and in early Conceptual Art . Eva Hesse , Robert Smithson , Walter De Maria , Keith Sonnier , Richard Serra , Nancy Graves , Jannis Kounellis , Bruce Nauman , Richard Tuttle , Mel Bochner , Hannah Wilke , Lynda Benglis , Robert Morris , Sol LeWitt , Barry Le Va , Michael Heizer , Lawrence Weiner , Joseph Kosuth , and Alan Saret , were some of

16171-479: The late 1960s the term Post-minimalism was coined by Robert Pincus-Witten to describe minimalist derived art which had content and contextual overtones which minimalism rejected, and was applied to the work of Eva Hesse , Keith Sonnier , Richard Serra and new work by former minimalists Robert Smithson , Robert Morris , Sol LeWitt , and Barry Le Va, and others. Rosalind Krauss argues that by 1968 artists such as Morris, LeWitt, Smithson and Serra had "entered

16328-456: The late 1970s and early 1980s seen in the work of neo-expressionist artists such as Georg Baselitz and Julian Schnabel has been described as a postmodern tendency, and one of the first coherent movements to emerge in the postmodern era. Its strong links with the commercial art market has raised questions, however, both about its status as a postmodern movement and the definition of postmodernism itself. Hal Foster states that neo-expressionism

16485-482: The mainstream in the first decade of the 20th century was still inclined towards a 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. Western art had been, from

16642-482: The material from which they are created. Debate about the timeline of modernism continues, with some scholars arguing that it evolved into late modernism or high modernism . Postmodernism , meanwhile, rejects many of the principles of modernism. Modernism was a cultural movement that impacted the arts as well as the broader Zeitgeist . It is commonly described as a system of thought and behavior marked by self-consciousness or self-reference , prevalent within

16799-426: The mission of art in the present, and that postmodern therefore, represents a contradiction of the value of "art of our times". One compact definition offered is that while post-modernism acts in rejection of modernism's grand narratives of artistic direction, and to eradicate the boundaries between high and low forms of art, to disrupt genre and its conventions with collision, collage and fragmentation. Post-modern art

16956-608: The modernist propensity to challenge established styles and forms, along with Surrealism , futurism and abstract expressionism . From a chronological point of view Dada is located solidly within modernism, however a number of critics have held that it anticipates postmodernism, while others, such as Ihab Hassan and Steven Connor , consider it a possible changeover point between modernism and postmodernism. Fauvism and Henri Matisse in particular became an important influence on both abstract expressionism and color field painting , important milestones of Late Modernism. The Dance

17113-530: 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. In 1863, the Salon des Refusés , created by Emperor Napoleon III , displayed all of the paintings rejected by the Paris Salon. While most were in standard styles, but by inferior artists,

17270-400: The most important points of difference, however, between post-modernism, and modernism, as movements in art, is modernism's ultimately progressive stance that new works be more "forward looking" and advanced, whereas post-modern movements generally reject the notion that there can be advancement or progress in art per se, and thus one of the projects of art must be the overturning of the "myth of

17427-495: The most visible changes of this period was the adoption of new technologies into the daily lives of ordinary people in Western Europe and North America. 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

17584-428: The music of the composer Arnold Schoenberg . On the one hand, he rejected traditional tonal harmony , the hierarchical system of organizing works of music that had guided musical composition for at least a century and a half. Schoenberg believed he had discovered a wholly new way of organizing sound based on the use of twelve-note rows . Yet, while this was indeed a wholly new technique, its origins can be traced back to

17741-451: The nature of reality. They argued that since each viewer interprets art through their own subjective perspective, it can never convey the ultimate metaphysical truth that the Romantics sought. Nonetheless, the modernists did not completely reject the idea of art as a means of understanding the world. To them, it was a tool for challenging and disrupting the viewer's point of view, rather than as

17898-409: The novel Murphy (1938). Then in 1939 James Joyce's Finnegans Wake appeared. This is written in a largely idiosyncratic language , consisting of a mixture of standard English lexical items and neologistic multilingual puns and portmanteau words, which attempts to recreate the experience of sleep and dreams. In poetry T. S. Eliot, E. E. Cummings , and Wallace Stevens were writing from

18055-548: The novelist Franz Kafka , poet Gottfried Benn , and novelist Alfred Döblin were simultaneously the most vociferous anti-Expressionists. What, however, can be said, is that it was a movement that developed in the early 20th 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

18212-423: The ones they believe to be holding back progress , replacing them with new ways of reaching the same end. According to historian Roger Griffin , modernism can be defined as a broad cultural, social, or political initiative sustained by the ethos of "the temporality of the new". Griffin believed that modernism aspired to restore a "sense of sublime order and purpose to the contemporary world, thereby counteracting

18369-434: The poetry collection Leaves of Grass (1855–1891); and August Strindberg (1849–1912), especially his later plays, including the trilogy To Damascus 1898–1901, A Dream Play (1902) and The Ghost Sonata (1907). Henry James has also been suggested as a significant precursor to modernism in works as early as The Portrait of a Lady (1881). Out of the collision of ideals derived from Romanticism and an attempt to find

18526-446: 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. In his 1980 essay The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism , Craig Owens identifies the re-emergence of an allegorical impulse as characteristic of postmodern art. This impulse can be seen in

18683-487: The preface to his play Les Mamelles de Tirésias , which was written in 1903 and first performed in 1917. Major surrealists include Paul Éluard , Robert Desnos , Max Ernst , Hans Arp , Antonin Artaud , Raymond Queneau , Joan Miró , and Marcel Duchamp . By 1930, modernism had won a place in the political and artistic establishment, although by this time modernism itself had changed. Modernism continued to evolve during

18840-514: The priority of suggestion and evocation over direct description and explicit analogy," and were especially interested in "the musical properties of language." Cabaret , which gave birth to so many of the arts of modernism, including the immediate precursors of film, 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

18997-456: The process artists that emerged during the 1960s. 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, scale, size, and plastic and real space. 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

19154-434: 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

19311-430: The representational function of visual art obsolete, strongly affected this aspect of modernism. 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. Just as cars had replaced

19468-436: 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: with Futurism , Vorticism , Cubism, Surrealism and Dada ." Richard Murphy also comments: "[The] search for an all-inclusive definition is problematic to the extent that the most challenging Expressionists," such as

19625-432: The same period that conceptual and feminist art practices were systematically reevaluating modern art. Critiques on the institutions of art (principally museums and galleries) are made in the work of Marcel Broodthaers , Daniel Buren and Hans Haacke . At the beginning of the 21st century contemporary painting, contemporary sculpture and contemporary art in general continues in several contiguous modes, characterized by

19782-494: The search for newer means of cultural expression . Modernism was influenced by widespread technological innovation , industrialization, and urbanization, as well as the cultural and geopolitical shifts that occurred after World War I . Artistic movements and techniques associated with modernism include abstract art , literary stream-of-consciousness , cinematic montage , musical atonality and twelve-tonality , modernist architecture , and urban planning . Modernism took

19939-543: The signs of Jenny Holtzer which use the devices of art to convey specific messages, such as "Protect Me From What I Want". Installation Art has been important in determining the spaces selected for museums of contemporary art in order to be able to hold the large works which are composed of vast collages of manufactured and found objects. These installations and collages are often electrified, with moving parts and lights. They are often designed to create environmental effects, as Christo and Jeanne-Claude 's Iron Curtain which

20096-449: The specific traits of modernism which are cited are generally formal purity, medium specificity , art for art's sake , the possibility of authenticity in art , the importance or even possibility of universal truth in art, and the importance of an avant-garde and originality. This last point is one of particular controversy in art, where many institutions argue that being visionary, forward looking, cutting edge and progressive are crucial to

20253-458: The status quo. Late modernism expanded and contracted during the late 1960s and for some, conceptual art made a complete break with modernism. Sometimes it is labelled as postmodern because it is expressly involved in deconstruction of what makes a work of art, "art". Conceptual art, because it is often designed to confront, offend or attack notions held by many of the people who view it, is regarded with particular controversy. Duchamp can be seen as

20410-463: The stock brokers of 1890 became part of family life, at least in middle class North America. Associated with urbanization and changing social mores also came smaller families and changed relationships between parents and their children. Another strong influence at this time was Marxism . After the generally primitivistic/irrationalism aspect of pre-World War I modernism (which for many modernists precluded any attachment to merely political solutions) and

20567-472: The study of light, color, and atmosphere "anticipated the French 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." However, the modernists were critical of the Romantics' belief that art serves as a window into

20724-596: The subject in a greater context. 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 Fresnaye were 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

20881-424: The term "Expressionism" did not firmly establish itself until 1913. Though initially mainly a German artistic movement, most predominant in painting, poetry and the theatre between 1910 and 1930, 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

21038-453: The term postmodernism in 1969 to describe Rauschenberg's "flatbed" picture plane, containing a range of cultural images and artifacts that had not been compatible with the pictorial field of premodernist and modernist painting. Craig Owens goes further, identifying the significance of Rauschenberg's work not as a representation of, in Steinberg's view, "the shift from nature to culture", but as

21195-578: 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 reject such consumerist attitudes to undermine conventional thinking. The art critic Clement Greenberg expounded this theory of modernism in his essay Avant-Garde and Kitsch . Greenberg labeled

21352-649: The turn of the century via Cubism and constructed sculpture, Pollock redefined the way art gets made at the mid-century point. Pollock's move — away from easel painting and conventionality — was a liberating signal to his contemporaneous artists and to all that came after. Artists realized that Jackson Pollock's process — working on the floor, unstretched raw canvas, from all four sides, using artist materials, industrial materials, imagery, non-imagery, throwing linear skeins of paint, dripping, drawing, staining, brushing, essentially blasted artmaking beyond any prior boundary. Abstract expressionism in general expanded and developed

21509-472: The ultimate phase of modern art , as art at the end of modernism or as certain tendencies of contemporary art. There are those who argue against a division into modern and postmodern periods. Not all critics agree that the stage called modernism is over or even near the end. There is no agreement that all art after modernism is post-modern. Contemporary art is the more-widely used term to denote work since roughly 1960, though it has many other uses as well. Nor

21666-433: The understanding of Modern art history, and the history of modernism and Late Modernism. During the late 1940s 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 near

21823-469: The work of Manet attracted attention and opened commercial doors to the movement. The second French school was symbolism , which literary historians see beginning with Charles Baudelaire and including the later poets Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) with Une Saison en Enfer ( A Season in Hell , 1873), Paul Verlaine (1844–1896), Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898), and Paul Valéry (1871–1945). The symbolists "stressed

21980-401: The work of earlier composers such as Franz Liszt , Richard Wagner , Gustav Mahler , Richard Strauss , and Max Reger . In the world of art, in the first decade of the 20th century, young painters such as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse caused much controversy and attracted great criticism with their rejection of traditional perspective as the means of structuring paintings, though

22137-611: The works of Vergil , who was a generation younger than the poetae novi . The Neoterics were occasionally the subject of scorn from older and more traditionally minded Romans, such as Cicero . This poetry -related article is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Modernism Modernism was an early 20th century movement in literature, visual arts, and music that emphasized experimentation, abstraction , and subjective experience. Philosophy, politics, architecture, and social issues were all aspects of this movement. Modernism centered around beliefs in

22294-488: The worldwide success of Cubism and the emboldening of the avant-garde , Marcel Duchamp exhibited a urinal as a sculpture. His point was to have 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 ." The Fountain , was a urinal signed with the pseudonym R. Mutt, that shocked the art world in 1917. This and Duchamp's other works are generally labelled as Dada . Dadaism can be viewed as part of

22451-560: 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. Art critic Clement Greenberg described 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,

22608-443: The years between 1900 and 1910. An important aspect of modernism is how it relates to tradition through its adoption of techniques like reprise, incorporation, rewriting, recapitulation, revision, and parody in new forms. 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

22765-484: Was a row of barrels intended to create a traffic jam . 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 artforms along the lines of Fluxus , Concrete Poetry , Found objects , Performance art , and Computer art . Higgins was the publisher of the Something Else Press ,

22922-413: Was a while later, and not so locally, that modernism appeared in music and architecture)." The poet Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal ( The Flowers of Evil ) and the author Flaubert's Madame Bovary were both published in 1857. Baudelaire's essay " The Painter of Modern Life " (1863) inspired young artists to break away from tradition and innovate new ways of portraying their world in art. Beginning in

23079-564: Was complicit with the conservative cultural politics of the Reagan-Bush era in the U.S. Félix Guattari disregards the "large promotional operations dubbed 'neo-expressionism' in Germany", (an example of a "fad that maintains itself by means of publicity") as a too easy way for him "to demonstrate that postmodernism is nothing but the last gasp of modernism." These critiques of neo-expressionism reveal that money and public relations really sustained contemporary art world credibility in America during

23236-468: Was first performed in 1935. Like Shostakovich, other composers faced difficulties in this period. Late modernism In the visual arts , late modernism encompasses the overall production of most recent art made between the aftermath of World War II and the early years of the 21st century. The terminology often points to similarities between late modernism and postmodernism , although there are differences. The predominant term for art produced since

23393-541: 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

23550-520: Was not esteemed as a sign of artistic quality. Nor was the artist's autonomy, that would come with the Romantics . As with all uses of the term postmodern there are critics of its application. Kirk Varnedoe , for instance, stated that there is no such thing as postmodernism, and that the possibilities of modernism have not yet been exhausted. These critics are currently in the minority. Hilton Kramer describes postmodernism as "a creation of modernism at

23707-743: Was premiered, in which he uses a montage of different styles, including folk music , popular song and atonality. Among his influences was Alban Berg 's (1885–1935) opera Wozzeck (1925), which "had made a tremendous impression on Shostakovich when it was staged in Leningrad." However, from 1932 socialist realism began to oust modernism in the Soviet Union, and in 1936 Shostakovich was attacked and forced to withdraw his 4th Symphony. Alban Berg wrote another significant, though incomplete, modernist opera, Lulu , which premiered in 1937. Berg's Violin Concerto

23864-428: Was still "progressive", it increasingly saw traditional forms and social arrangements as hindering progress and recast 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

24021-435: Was the emergence of combined manufactured items — with artist materials, moving away from previous conventions of painting and sculpture. This trend in art is exemplified by the work of Robert Rauschenberg , whose "combines" in the 1950s were forerunners of Pop Art and Installation art , and made use of the assemblage of large physical objects, including stuffed animals, birds and commercial photography . Leo Steinberg uses

24178-532: Was the first to make full use of it in his short story "Leutnant Gustl" ("None but the brave") (1900). Dorothy Richardson was the first English writer to use it, in the early volumes of her novel sequence Pilgrimage (1915–1967). 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). However, with

24335-758: Was the largest and most ambitious Cubist painting undertaken during the pre-war Cubist period. 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 the German 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 August Macke . However,

24492-694: 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 in Saint 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 an uproar on its first performance in Paris. At this time, though modernism

24649-454: Was too high. The birth of a machine age, which had made major changes in the conditions of daily life in the 19th century had now radically changed the nature of warfare. The traumatic nature of recent experience altered basic assumptions, and a 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

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