The Modernist Movement

Student: Gheorghe Adina

• Modernismis modern thought, character, or practice.. More specifically, the term describes both

a set of cultural tendencies and an array of associated cultural movements, originally

arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society in the late

nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The term 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daily life were becoming outdated in the new economic, social and political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.

Beginnings

• The first half of the nineteenth century for Europe was marked by a number of wars and revolutions, which contributed to an aesthetic "turning away" from the realities of political and social fragmentation, and so facilitated a trend towards Romanticism: emphasis on individual subjective experience, the sublime, the supremacy of "Nature" as a subject for art, revolutionary or radical extensions of expression, and individual liberty.

Political & Social Climate• The political and social climate

during the first part of the century was a major catalyst for modernist ideas.

• Starting before World War I, many countries were facing growing tensions and unrest in the social order.

• These tensions became evident in the design world as modernists sought to break from past ideologies, and experiment with new forms that echoed their dissatisfaction with tradition.

World War I

• With the onset of World War I in 1914, applied art took on a new role as a means of propaganda.

• Countries seeking to justify their involvement in “the war to end all wars” launched poster campaigns to acquire resources necessary for the conflict, and to garner support from the public.

• Modernist ideals of simplistic form and geometric expression are evident in these examples of propaganda from various countries.

The Nazi Rising• The National Socialist German Workers (Nazi) Party,

led by Adolf Hitler, rose to power during the economic and political turn in Germany that followed World War I.

• Hitler and the Nazi party launched a massive, and psychologically powerful propaganda effort in order to advance their views and gain power.

• These posters, like propaganda used during World War I, embody the ideals of modernist theory. Even the swastika symbol of the Nazi party (right) embraces the pure geometric form loved by modernists.

The Russian Revolution and the Spread of Socialism

• Like Germany, Russia was facing serious political and economic turmoil following the war.

• Political and social upheavals resulted in the overthrowing of Czar Nicholas II and the end of Russia’s Romanov dynasty.

• Shortly after, the Bolshevik party led by Vladimir Lenin, gained power, establishing rule in what was to become the Soviet Union.

• Under the new socialist regime, the artist’s sole purpose was to advance socialist theory. Art for art’s sake was denounced, and artists who refused to comply were severely punished. Unable to express themselves, many artists and designers perished in the Gulags (Soviet prison and labor camps).

Results• One of the most visible changes of

this period was the adoption of objects of modern production into daily life. Electricity, the telephone, the automobile and the need to work with them, repair them and live with them—created the need for new forms of manners and social life. The kind of disruptive moment that only a few knew in the 1880s became a common occurrence. For example, the speed of communication reserved for the stock brokers of 1890 became part of family life.

Modernism after World War II• In Britain and America, modernism as a literary movement

is generally considered to be relevant up to the early 1930s, and "modernist" is rarely used to describe authors prominent after 1945. This is somewhat true for all areas of culture, with the exception of the visual and performing arts.

• 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.

Modern Art Influences• Around the world, modern art was in a constant

state of change. Pressing economic and political turmoil pushed artists to find new ways of expression, resulting in a series of modern art movements that went on to influence graphic design.

Cubism• Cubism began to appear in the

first part of the 20th century. Cubist art often displayed its subject using a series of geometric planes, allowing the viewer to see multiple angles in one piece.

• The geometric abstraction present in Cubist paintings became a pivotal influence on modernism.

Futurism• Futurism was a movement

launched by Filippo Marinetti, designed to express the speed and noise of 20th century life.

• Futurist artwork used typography and writing as its own expressive means. Words used color, character attributes, and position to express what images could not.

Dada

• Dada was a short-lived movement reacting to the horrors that fell on society during and after World War I.

• Dadaists sought to destroy tradition through the use of shock and nonsense, and the movement became a means for protest with a deep underlying negativity.

Surrealism

• Artists found a means of expressing fantasy and intuition through Surrealism.

• Surrealist works often included dream-like images, unexpected juxtapositions, and non-sequiturs.

Expressionism• Expressionism

extended beyond its subject to depict emotions and personal responses using color, line and proportion.

• Images were often exaggerated or distorted in symbolic representation.

Photography• Although not a new medium,

photography was rapidly developing during this time period. Artists began to explore photographic options such as multiple exposures, and differences in light and shadow.

• Often these photographic discoveries intersected with surrealism, resulting in dream-like images.

Art Nouveau• Art Nouveau was a movement

characterized by its simplification of objects.

• Subjects were drawn with very little detail, and little or no tonal variation. Modernists expanded on this idea, simplifying objects even further.

• The result was a mechanized, often geometric representation of subjects that embodied the cultural shift toward reliance on technology and industry.

Pop art • Pop art is a visual art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art challenged tradition by asserting that an artist's use of the mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture is contiguous with the perspective of fine art. Pop removes the material from its context and isolates the object, or combines it with other objects, for contemplation. The concept of pop art refers not as much to the art itself as to the attitudes that led to it.

Bauhaus• At the height of the

Modernist movement emerged one of the most influential design schools of all time, the Bauhaus.

• The Bauhaus was opened in 1919 in Weimar, and closed in 1933 as a result of Nazi persecution.

• Even after its closing, the Bauhaus continued to leave its mark on the world, through influences on graphic design, architecture, and furniture design.

Performance art• In performance art, usually one or

more people perform in front of an audience. In contrast to the traditional performing arts, performance art is unconventional. Performance artists often challenge the audience to think in new and unconventional ways about theater and performing, break conventions of traditional performing arts, and break down conventional ideas about "what art is," similar to the postmodern art movement.Thus, even though in most cases the performance is in front of an audience, in some cases, the audience becomes the performers. The performance may be scripted, unscripted, or improvisational. It may incorporate music, dance, song, or complete silence.

Fashion• The height of fashion still

seemed to be that of the Lady - mature, sophisticated and well-bred. But increasingly, there was hope for the ordinary woman, hope that had been founded in the last decade of the previous century.

• The woman of 1901 presented a new, flowing silhouette unlike that of any of her Victorian predecessors. Her skirt curved outwards over her full behind, downwards and apparently slightly inwards towards knee-level and then sharply outwards again at the hem. This gave the appearance of a concave skirt.

•

• Back in 1952 the fashion world succumbed to the new sweater girl and the more casual looks of

jeans.  Gradually the sweater was replaced by a T shirt and the almost universal dress of the young became denims.  The jeans of the fifties paved the way for a new kind of fashion that emerged in the sixties, ripping open the world of haute couture. Since the fifties, which Vogue called 'the formative years of the century', fashion has never really been the same.  Mass production, the introduction of synthetic fabrics and the comparative prosperity of the late fifties enabled the average British woman to be one of the best dressed women in the world.  The young continued to demand clothes to suit a teenage market.

Music

• Modernism in music is characterized by a desire for or belief in progress and science, surrealism, anti-romanticism, political advocacy, general intellectualism, and/or a breaking with the past or common practice — Ezra Pound's modernist slogan, "Make it new” as applied to music.

Modernist literature• Modernism as a

literary movement reached its height in Europe between 1900 and the middle 1920s.Modernist literature addressed aesthetic problems similar to those examined in non-literary forms of contemporaneous Modernist art, such as Modernist painting.

• Thematic characteristics• Breakdown of social norms• Realistic embodiment of social

meanings• Separation of meanings and senses

from the context• Despairing individual behaviours in

the face of an unmanageable future• Spiritual loneliness• Alienation• Frustration• Disillusionment• Rejection of history• Rejection of outdated social

systems• Objection to traditional thoughts

and traditional moralities• Objection to religious thoughts• Substitution of a mythical past• Two World Wars' effects on

Humanity

• Modernist authors include : Knut Hamsun (whose novel Hunger is considered to be the first modernist novel), James Joyce, Mikhail Bulgakov, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, H.D., Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, John Steinbeck, Dylan Thomas, D. H. Lawrence, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Ezra Pound, Mina Loy, Hugh MacDiarmid, William Faulkner, Jean Toomer, Ernest Hemingway, E. M. Forster, Rainer Maria Rilke, Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, Joseph Conrad, Andrei Bely, W. B. Yeats, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Luigi Pirandello, Katherine Mansfield, Jaroslav Hašek, Samuel Beckett, Menno ter Braak, Robert Frost, Boris Pasternak, Djuna Barnes, Patricia Highsmith, Sherwood Anderson, Mervyn Peake among others.

Criticisms of modernism• The most controversial aspect of the modern

movement was, and remains, its rejection of tradition. 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.