Modernism
Modernism was the broad movement in literature, visual art, performance and music that dominated the first half of the twentieth century. Emerging in the late nineteenth century in response to secularization, industrialization and the growing authority of science, it was marked by a self-conscious rejection of tradition and the search for new means of expression, and it hardened into a cultural force after the First World War. In the visual arts it prized experimentation, abstraction and subjective experience over narrative naturalism, spinning off movements from Fauvism and Cubism to Abstract Expressionism, while treating reflexivity - showing how a work is made - as part of the subject. Debates continue over its timeline, with 'high' and 'late' modernism usually distinguished from the postmodernism that followed.
Defining characteristics
- Self-conscious rejection of tradition and academic convention
- Experimentation with new means of expression: abstraction, collage, montage, dissonance
- Subjective experience and inner states favored over narrative naturalism
- Reflexivity: works that expose their own making and materials
- Fragmentation and recombination: collage, pastiche, rewriting, quotation
- Embrace of technology, industry, and the modern city as subject and form
Key figures
- Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) — Co-inventor of Cubism, whose radical restructuring of the picture defined modernist form
- Henri Matisse (1869-1954) — Liberated color from description and made decoration a modernist end in itself
- Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) — Pioneer of pure abstraction and theorist of spiritual content in art
- Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) — Turned conceptual questioning of art itself into modernist practice
Example works
- Les Demoiselles d'Avignon — Pablo Picasso (1907)
- Composition VII — Wassily Kandinsky (1913)
- Fountain — Marcel Duchamp (1917)
Sources
- Modernism - WikiArt institution
- Modernism - Wikipedia encyclopedia