Modernism

describes many different styles and reactions Impressionism and

Postimpressionism

Abstract Expressionism

CubismDada

Surrealism

Modernism

REMEMBER:Modernism moves from a…

Truth Centered World

1. Existence of meta-narratives

2. God as creator

3. Truth is absolute

4. There is order to the world

World of Individuation

1. Meta-narratives collapse

2. Individual is creator

3. Truth is contextual

4. Order is false; the world is disordered

Early Twentieth Century1900—1945 in Europe and the US

Guiding Questions

What are ideal justifications for war?

How does culture respond to war?

Guiding Historical Events• World War I—1914-17

• Begun with the promise that bravery and the wills of men can continue making progress

• Welcomed by European youth who wanted to destroy any remnant of the past. It was to be the culmination of the promises of modernism.

• Russian Revolution—1917

• Spanish Civil War—1936-39

• World War II—1939-1945• The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki show that technology has gone

insane.

1900-1914

Before WWI Modernism is hopeful that mankind can return to something pure and untainted by language

Kandinsky’sImprovisation No. 30, 1913

BLUE RIDER GROUP

• Seeking spirituality in painting• A synesthete,

Kandinsky hears colors

• Influenced by Arnold Schoenberg, an atonal composer• The goal is to lose the

subject of art, so leads to abstraction

Braque’s Portuguese, 1911 and Picasso’s Young Ladies of Avignon, 1907

A reordering of the world based on geometry and the subjectivity

of the artist—Artist as God

CUBISM

• Influenced by African and Oceanic masks

• Shameless women of the red light district sexuality celebrated

Severini’s Suburban Train Arriving at Paris, 1915

FUTURISM

• War is a cleansing agent for civilization

• Only war can reform society• Get rid of the

feminine• Replace with the

masculine—speed, aggressive movement

World War IWhy is it so devastating?

It completely demolished the hopes of modernism.

What was supposed to end quickly and gloriously brought about machine guns, flame throwers, fighter aircraft, poison gas

In 1916 alone, Germany lost 850,000, France, 700,000, and England, 400,000

Political leaders use patriotism to mask war profiteering. Food is rationed. WWI is the most brutal in human history at this time.

SO, if man, not god, is the center of the universe, mankind is evil.

If man, not god, holds his own destiny, he is lost.—and so the “Lost Generation” of writers and poets.

Mankind is at the mercy of its own inadequacies. This is the disillusionment of Modernism.

1917-1936

Between the Two World WarsArtists return to romantic gestures to explore why we are so evil (Freud) or they become anti-art

Duchamps’ The Fountain, 1917

DADA

• Artist is not God, but dead• Art is what the artists

says it is

• Responds to the disillusionment of Modernism• Art cannot take us away

from our associations• Art cannot bring

progress• Life is absurd

Dali’s,The Persistence of Memory, 1931

SURREALISM

• Tries to explore the unconscious, that which can tell us who we are

• A vision of the dream world

• Tries to escape language without abstraction (unlike Kandinsky)

Picasso’s Guernica, 1937

Response to the brutality of Spanish Civil War

Devastation in Literature

T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

• A poem about a man who does not fit in with women

• Prufrock cannot profess his own feelings for a woman

W. B. Yeats “Second Coming”

• Explores chaos

• Explores the demise of traditional religious ideas• Salvation• A paradise to come

US Reactions to World WarsArtists give in to stoicism, loneliness, and escapism

Georgia O’Keefe’s Yellow Calla, 1926

BIOMORPHISM• Abstract Art takes its

cues from nature (rather than industry and technology)

• O’Keefe leaves behind a life in the modern world for one in Sante Fe, New Mexico—her attempt to find the pure and primitive

Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California, 1917

SOCIAL REALISM• Portrays workers devastated

by the Depression and drought

• This is what the Depression looks like• Soup lines• Displaced Americans

• Part of a Works Progress Administration (WPA) project with the “New Deal”

Hopper’s Nighthawks, 1942SOCIAL REALISM

• Modernism brings only loneliness, detachment• Stoicism is an American expression to cultural discontent--

Lacks the “hysterical” reaction of the Europeans

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, Bear Run, Pennsylvania, 1936

• Combines interior and exterior, and the industrial with the organic

• Combines man made architecture and natural forms

• Individual movements/expressions of Modernism through Manifestos

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