Period of Experimentation in the Arts From the Late Nineteenth

History of Modernism click to see a PowerPoint presentation Modernism: Characteristics

Arising out of the rebellious mood at the beginning of the twentieth century, modernism was a radical arroyo that yearned to revitalize the fashion modernistic civilization viewed life, art, politics, and science. This rebellious attitude that flourished between 1900 and 1930 had, every bit its basis, the rejection of European culture for having get too corrupt, complacent and lethargic, ailing because it was bound by the artificialities of a guild that was too preoccupied with image and too scared of change. This dissatisfaction with the moral defalcation of everything European led modernistic thinkers and artists to explore other alternatives, especially archaic cultures. For the Establishment, the result would be cataclysmic; the new emerging culture would undermine tradition and authority in the hopes of transforming contemporary society.

The offset characteristic associated with modernism is nihilism, the rejection of all religious and moral principles as the only means of obtaining social progress. In  other words, the modernists repudiated the moral codes of the society in which they were living in. The reason that they did so was not necessarily because they did non believe in God, although there was a nifty majority of them who were atheists, or that they experienced great doubt most the meaninglessness of life. Rather, their rejection of conventional morality was based on its arbitrariness, its conformity and its exertion of control over human feelings. In other words, the rules of acquit were a restrictive and limiting force over the human spirit. The modernists believed that for an individual to feel whole and a correspondent to the re-vitalization of the social process, he or she needed to be complimentary of all the encumbering baggage of hundreds of years of hypocrisy

The rejection of moral and religious principles was compounded past the repudiation of all systems of behavior, whether in the arts, politics, sciences or philosophy. Dubiety was non necessarily the most significant reason why this questioning took place. One of the causes of this iconoclasm was the fact that early 20th-century culture was literally re-inventing itself on a daily basis. With so many scientific discoveries and technological innovations taking place, the earth was changing and so quickly that culture had to re-define itself constantly in order to keep pace with modernity and non appear anachronistic. Past the fourth dimension a new scientific or philosophical arrangement or artistic style had constitute acceptance, each was soon later on questioned and discarded for an even newer one. Another reason for this fickleness was the fact that people felt a tremendous artistic energy always looming in the groundwork equally if to announce the birth of some new invention or theory.

As a upshot of the new technological dynamics, the modernists felt a sense of abiding anticipation and did non want to commit to any one system that would thereby harness creativity, ultimately restricting and annihilating information technology. And and then, in the arts, for instance, at the beginning of the 20th-century, artists questioned academic art for its lack of freedom and flirted with then many isms: secessionism, fauvism, expressionism, cubism, futurism, constructivism, dada, and surrealism. Pablo Picasso, for instance, went as far as experimenting with several of these styles, never wanting to feel also comfortable with any 1 style.
The wrestling with all the new assumptions well-nigh reality and culture generated a new permissiveness in the realm of the arts. The arts were now beginning to break all of the rules since they were trying to keep pace with all of the theoretical and technological advances that were irresolute the whole construction of life. In doing and so, artists bankrupt rank with everything that had been taught as existence sacred and invented and experimented with new artistic languages that could more accordingly express the meaning of all of the new changes that were occurring. The result was a new art that appeared strange and radical to whoever experienced it because the artistic standard had always been mimesis, the literal imitation or representation of the advent of nature, people, and lodge. In other words, art was supposed to be judged on the standard of how well it realistically reflected what something looked or sounded like.
This mimetic tradition had originated fashion back in ancient Hellenic republic, had been perfected during the Renaissance, and had found prominence during the nineteenth-century. Simply for modern artists this one-time standard was likewise limiting and did not reverberate the way that life was now existence experienced. Freud and Einstein had radically changed perception of reality. Freud had asked us to look inwardly into a personal world that had previously been repressed, and Einstein taught us that relativity was everything. And, thus, new creative forms had to exist found that expressed this new subjectivity. Artists countered with works that were so personal that they distorted the natural appearance of things and with reason. Each individual work begged to be judged as a self-sufficient unit which obeyed its own internal laws and its own internal logic, thereby attaining its ain individual grapheme. No more conventional cookie-cutter forms to be superimposed on human expression What were some of the artistic beliefs that the modernists adopted? Above all they embraced freedom, and they found it in the creative forms and emotions of the primitive cultures of Africa, the Orient, the Americas and Oceania. This human action was the repudiation of all of the stylistic refinements that were the basis of 19th-century artistic endeavor. On the one hand, primitivism represented the simplification of course, which was to become ane of the hallmarks of modernism. This abstraction of form suggested that some essential structure, previously subconscious past realistic technique, would come to light. Art had, according to the modernists, get too concerned with irrelevant sophistications and conventions that detracted from the main purpose of art: the discovery of truth. On the other hand, primitivism was the expression of all that civilized man had to repress in order to enter into contract with society. Co-ordinate to Sigmund Freud'due south Civilization and Its Discontents, in order for man to partake in civilized society, he had had to lay aside many uncivilized urges inside the cocky, such as the natural appetite for infidelity, incest, murder, homosexuality, etc., all held as taboos. It is this repression of natural desires that, Freud argues, is the source of modern neurosis. As a Jew, Freud was too well acquainted with the THOU SHALL NOTS of the Ten Commandments. Symbolically, the embrace of primitivism is a negation of the very principles of the Judeo-Christian tradition and an affirmation of accurate expression of that hidden self that simply finds expression at nighttime when we dream.

The modernist interest in primitivism too expressed itself in its correlative, the exploration of perversity. This obsession with the forbidden and the lurid was tantamount to the re-discovery of passion, a way of life which so many creative people at the fourth dimension believed to take been repressed or had lain dormant. Frederich Nietzsche blames this dormancy on the 19th-century'south preoccupation with form. In his seminal work The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche had traced the origins and development of drama dorsum in Ancient Greece to the balance that existed between ii gods who existed in opposition to one another, Apollo and Dionysius. Apollo represented the essence of light, rationality, civility, culture, and restraint. In contrast, Dionysius suggested wine, the primitive urge, all that was uncivilized. Although these ii gods existed in opposition to one some other, they were both, nevertheless, revered equally, thus hitting a balance between form (the Apollonian) and artistic impulse (Dionysius). The modernists concurred with Nietzsche that art had degenerated because it was too concerned with the rules of grade and not enough with the creative energies that prevarication underneath the surface.

It is that exploration of what is underneath the surface that the modernists were and then smashing about, and what ameliorate way to do so than to scrutinize man's existent aspirations, feelings, and deportment. What was revealed was a new honesty in this portrayal: disintegration, madness, suicide, sexual depravity, impotence, morbidity, charade. Many would assail this portrayal as morally degenerate; the modernists, on the other mitt, would defend themselves past calling it liberating.

Ironically, the modernist portrayal of human nature takes place within the context of the city rather than in nature, where it had occurred during the entire 19th-century. At the beginning of the 19th-century, the romantics had idealized nature as evidence of the transcendent beingness of God; towards the end of the century, it became a symbol of chaotic, random existence. For the modernists, nature becomes irrelevant and pass�, for the city supersedes nature as the life forcefulness. Why would the modernists shift their interest from nature and unto the city? The commencement reason is an obvious one. This is the time when so many left the countryside to brand their fortunes in the city, the new capital of culture and technology, the new artificial paradise. But more importantly, the metropolis is the place where human is dehumanized past so many degenerate forces. Thus, the urban center becomes the locus where modern human being is microscopically focused on and dissected. In the final assay, the city becomes a "barbarous devourer", a cemetery for lost souls. The Forces That Shaped Modernism
The yr 1900 ushered a new era that changed the fashion that reality was perceived and portrayed. Years later this revolutionary new flow would come to be known as modernism and would forever be defined every bit a fourth dimension when artists and thinkers rebelled against every conceivable doctrine that was widely accepted by the Establishment, whether in the arts, science, medicine, philosophy, etc. Although modernism would exist short-lived, from 1900 to 1930, we are notwithstanding reeling from its influences sixty-five years later.
How was modernism such a radical difference from what had preceded it in the past? The modernists were militant about distancing themselves from every traditional idea that had been held sacred by Western civilization, and perhaps we can fifty-fifty go so far equally to refer to them every bit intellectual anarchists in their willingness to vandalize anything continued to the established order. In order to better understand this modernist iconoclasm, let'due south go back in fourth dimension to explore how and why the human landscape was changing and then rapidly.

Past 1900 the world was a bustling place transformed by all of the new discoveries, inventions and technological achievements that were beingness thrust on civilization: electricity, the combustion engine, the incandescent light bulb, the automobile, the airplane, radio, 10-rays, fertilizers and and then along. These innovations revolutionized the world in two distinct ways. For one, they created an optimistic aura of a worldly paradise, of a new technology that was to reshape homo into moral perfection. In other words, technology became a new religious cult that held the key to a new utopian dream that would transform the very nature of man. Secondly, the new applied science quickened the pace through which people experienced life on a 24-hour interval to day basis. For instance, the innovations in the field of transportation and communication accelerated the daily life of the individual. Whereas in the past, a person'due south life was confining past the lack of mechanical resource available, a person could now aggrandize the scope of daily activities through the new liberating power of the machine. Man now became literally energized by all of these scientific and technological innovations and, more of import, felt a rush emanating from the feeling that he was invincible, that there was no stopping him.

Modernity, yet, was not but shaped by this new engineering science. Several philosophical theoreticians were to change the way that modernistic man perceives the external globe, peculiarly in their refutation of the Newtonian principle that reality was an absolute, unquestionable entity divorced from those observing it. The first to do so was F. H. Bradley, who considered that the human mind is a more fundamental characteristic of the universe than matter and that its purpose is to search for truth. His most ambitious piece of work, Appearance and Reality: A Metaphysical Essay (1893), introduced the concept that an object in reality tin can have no absolute contours merely varies from the angle from which it is seen. Thus Bradley defines the identity of a things as the view the onlooker takes of information technology. The result of this work was to encourage rather than dispel incertitude. In one of the about seminal works of this century, "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies," Albert Einstein's theory of relativity held that, if, for all frames of reference, the speed of lite is constant and if all natural laws are the same, then both time and move are plant to exist relative to the observer. In other words, there is no such affair as universal time and thus experience runs very differently from man to human being. Alfred Whitehead was some other who revised the ideas of time, space and motion every bit the basis of man's perception of the external world. He viewed reality as living geometry and believed in the essential relevance of every object to all other objects: "all entities or factors in the universe are essentially relevant to each other'southward existence since every entity involves an space array of perspectives." For all of these thinkers, subjectivity was now the main focus.

Several psychological theoreticians were to also fundamentally alter the way that modern human viewed his own internal reality, an unexplored eye of darkness. Sigmund Freud was the first to gaze inwardly and to find a world within where dynamic, often warring forces shape the individual's psyche and personality. To explain this internal world within each of united states of america, he developed a circuitous theory of the unconscious that illustrated the importance of unconscious motivation in beliefs and the suggestion that psychological events tin can go along outside of conscious awareness. And so, according to Freud, fantasies, dreams, and slips of the tongue are outward manifestations of unconscious motives. Furthermore, in explaining the evolution of personality, Freud expanded man's definition of sexuality to include oral, anal, and other bodily sensations. Thus his legacy to the modern world was to expose a darker side of man that had been hidden from view past the hypocrisy of 19th- century social club.

Freud was not the simply psychological theoretician who asked us to gaze inwardly to improve sympathise the human being psyche. His disciple, Carl Jung, was as well to develop another theory delving into the unconscious which explored the nature of the irrational cocky and which explained the common grounds shared past then many cultures. Jung'southward Theory of the Collective Unconscious, nigh an area of the mind that he believed was shared by everyone, states that there are patterns of behavior or actions and reactions of the psyche which he calls archetypes that are determined by race. These instinctive, universal patterns manifest themselves in dreams, visions, and fantasies and are expressed in myths, religious concepts, fairy tales, and works of art.
The French philosopher Henry Bergson was also to turn his gaze to the unconscious to explore the nature of memory as experienced in the present moment. Bergson's Time and the Free Volition was an try to establish the notion of elapsing, or lived fourth dimension, as opposed to what he viewed as the spatialized conception of fourth dimension measured past the clock and commonly known as chronological time. According to Bergson, states of conscious retentivity permeate i some other in storage inside the unconscious, in the same way that "oldie-goldies" are stored in a juke-box. A sense impression, such equally whiff of cologne or the taste of sweet white potato pie, might trigger consciousness to recollect one of these memories, much similar a coin will cause the record of your pick to play. Once the submerged retentivity resurfaces in the witting mind, the self becomes suspended, there might be a spontaneous flash of intuition about the past, and simply possibly, this insight will translate into some kind of realization of the present moment. In fact, isn't this what we practice when we listen to an old song, forget the present, re-experience the past, and, then, all of a sudden, apply it all to our lives in the present? And thus, intuition leads to knowledge.
Politics and the economic system would also transform the way that modern man looked at himself and the earth in which he lived. Science and technology were radically changing the means of production. Whereas in the past, a worker became involved in product from beginning to end, by 1900 he had get a mere cog in the production line, making an insignificant contribution. Thus, division of labor made him feel fragmented, alienated non only from the rest of lodge but from himself. 1 of the effects of this fragmentation was the consolidation of workers into political parties that threatened the upper classes. And, thus, the new political idealism that was to culminate in the Russian Revolution that swept through Europe. click for study exercises

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Source: https://www.mdc.edu/wolfson/academic/artsletters/art_philosophy/humanities/history_of_modernism.htm

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