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Modernism
Modern and Modernist are not synonymous. The term modern broadly refers to that which is contemporary, that which pertains to the present day. Diane Elam states that "a modernist, I mean specifically a philosophical modernist, someone who is concerned with enlightenment" (Romancing The Postmodern 194 f24). Modernist refers to the complex of characteristics shared by those who participated in or follow the modernist movement.
Brief History
A revolutionary movement encompassing all of the creative arts that had its roots in the 1890s (the fin de siècle), a transitional period during which artists and writers sought to liberate themselves from the constraints and polite conventions we associate with Victorianism. Modernism exploded onto the international scene in the aftermath of World War I, a traumatic transcontinental event that physically devastated and psychologically disillusioned the West in an entirely unprecedented way. A wide variety of new and experimental forms and techniques arose in architecture, dance, literature, music, painting, and sculpture.
Passchendaele aerial view 1917
Technique
"Literary modernism is the point at which the striving for liberation becomes an explicitly formal activity in literature. Liberation is not a matter of adjusting content so much as of breaking forms" (Romancing The Postmodern 194 f24).
- Injected order by creating patterns of allusion, symbol and myth.
- Modernist authors sought to break away from traditions and conventions through experimentation with new literary forms, devices, and styles.
- They incorporated the new psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung into their works and paid particular attention to language—both how it is used and how they believe it could or ought to be used.
- Their works reflected the pervasive sense of loss, disillusionment, and even despair in the wake of the Great War, hence their emphasis on historical discontinuity and the alienation of humanity.
- Modernism encompassed a number of literary endeavors and styles, many of which became known as movements in their own right, such as Dadaism, expressionism, formalism, and surrealism. Modernist works are often called avant-garde.
- Stream of Consciousness and steam-of-consciousness novel
- Stream of Consciousness is a literary technique that approximates the flow (or jumble) thoughts and sensory impressions that pass through the mind each instant. Psychological association (rather than rules of syntax or logic) determines the presence or absence, as well as the order, of elements in the "stream." William James, in his Principles of Psychology (1890), gave currency to the term stream of consciousness, which he used to designate the flow and mixture of all past and present experience in the mind.
Examples
Writing
- Marcel Proust (1871-1922)
- Á La Recherche du Temps Perdu (Remembrance of Things Past)
- Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918)
- L'enchanteur pourrissant (1909) Poetry
- "Les mamelles de Tirésias" (1917) Drama
- L'esprit nouveau et les poètes (1918) Artistic Manifesto
- Calligrammes (1918) Poetry (influential typography and layout added to the overall effect)
- James Joyce (1882-1940)
- The Dead (1914)
- Ulysses (1922)
- Finnagans Wake (1938)
- Virginia Woolf (1882-1940)
- To The Lighthouse (1927)
- The Waves (1931)
- T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)
Futurism
Imagism
Vorticism
- BLAST
- Wyndam Lewis (writer, painter & editor)
- Ezra Pound
- William Roberts (painter)
Cubism
Surrealism
- André Breton (1896-1966)
- Salvador Dalí (1904-1989)
- Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978)
- Robert Desnos (1900-1945)
- Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968)
- Leonora Carrington (1917-)
Painting
- Edvard Munch (1863-1944)
- Skrik "The Scream" or "The Cry" (1893)"a conical expression of the great modernist thematics of alienation, anomie, solitude, social fragmentation, and isolation, a virtually programmatic emblem of what used to be called the age of anziety" (Jameson 11).
Cubism
- Piet Mondrian (1872-1944)
- Pablo Picasso (born Pablo Ruiz-Picasso) (Spanish, 1881-1973)
- Fernand Léger (French, 1881-1955)
- Marcel Duchamp (French, 1887-1968)
- Nude Descending a Staircase, 1911-1912, oil on canvas, 58 x 35 inches, Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA
- Fountain, 1917 (original lost) Readymade: porcelin urinal, Height 60 cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA
Dada
Surrealism
- Max Ernst (1891-1976)
- The Elephant Celebes, 1921, Oil painting
- The Woman Bird 1921, collage and guache on paper 18.5 x 10.6 cm
- Approaching Puberty, 1921, mixed media on paper 24.5 x 16.6 cm
- The Virgin Spanking the Christ Child before Three Witnesses: Andre Breton, Paul Eluard, and the Painter, 1926 Oil on canvas 196 x 130 cm
- Attirement of the Bride (La Toilette de la mariée), 1940. Oil on canvas, 129.6 x 96.3 cm.
- Ernst & Dorthia Tanning playing chess w/ pieces designed by Ernst and notice Ernst holding the picture frame.
- Salvador Dali (1904-1989)
- The Department of Objects and Delusions site with more images
Abstract Expressionism
- Mark Rothko (1903-1970)
- William de Kooning (1904-1997)
- Franz Kline (1910-1962)
- New York, N.Y. 1953, Oil on canvas, 79 x 51 in. (200.6 x 129.5 cm); Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo.
- Painting Number 2 1954, Oil on canvas, 6'8 1/2" x 8'9" (204.3 x 271.6 cm); The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
- Untitled 1957, Oil on canvas, 200 x 158.5 cm; Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf.
- Jackson Pollock (1912-1956)
Music
- Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)
- Le Sacre du printemps [The Rites of Spring] (1913)
- The Adoration of the Earth 16:36
- The Sacrifice 17:45
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