A Selection of Significant Moments in Modernism

Date Literary / Artistic Event Other Historical Event

1872 “Impressionism” foreshadows avant-gardism
1879 Henrik Ibsen’s early feminist play A Doll’s House Edison invents the light bulb
1883 Nietzsche introduces notion of the “superman” in
Thus Spake Zarathustra
1884 London Underground opens
1885 Invention of internal combustion
engine
1890 First skyscraper in USA
1893 Edvard Munch’s early expressionist painting, The
Cry
1894 Discovery of X-rays
1895 Joseph Conrad, Almayer’s Folly Trial of Oscar Wilde
Marconi invents telegraphy
1896 Anton Chekhov departs from traditional dramatic
action in The Seagull
1897 Discovery of the electron
1898 Thomas Hardy, Wessex Poems The Curies discover radium and
HG Wells, War of the Worlds plutonium
Oscar Wilde, Ballad of Reading Gaol
1899 Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, famous for its Beginning of the Boer War (1899–
hazy impressionistic technique and critique of 1902)
colonialism Peace Conference at The Hague
1900 Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim Birth of Quantum physics
Freud introduces psychoanalysis with The
Interpretation of Dreams
1901 Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks, seen as a novel on Death of Queen Victoria
the threshold of modernist literature First transmission of radio wave
August Strindberg’s play about marital dysfunction, signals across the Atlantic
Dance of Death
Picasso’s pre-Cubist “Blue Period”
1902 André Gide, The Immoralist
John Atkinson Hobson, Imperialism
Lenin, What is to be Done?
William James, Varieties of Religious Experience
1903 Henry James, The Ambassadors Wright brothers’ first successful
George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman flight
Emmeline Pankhurst founds
Women’s Social and Political
Union
Opening of Ford Motor Company
1904 Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard Beginning of Russo-Japanese War
Conrad, Nostromo
Date Literary / Artistic Event Other Historical Event
1905 Richard Strauss, Salome 1905 Russian Revolution
Oscar Wilde, De Profundis Einstein proposes his Special Theory
Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth of Relativity
Beginning of Fauvism in Paris with its Founding of Irish nationalist party,
“expressionist” element Sinn Féin
First electric bus in London
1907 Picasso produces Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, an
archetypal modernist work and prototype of
Cubism which violently overturns established
conventions

1908 Gertrude Stein, Three Lives

Jacob Epstein, Figures
Béla Bartók, First String Quartet
George Sorel, Reflections on Violence
1909 Gustav Mahler, Symphony No 9 Freud lectures on psychoanalysis in
Henry Matisse, The Dance the US
Filippo Marinetti’s first manifesto of Italian
Futurism in Paris, creating an artistic
philosophy rejecting the past and celebrating
speed, machinery, violence, youth and industry
Serge Diaghilev founds Ballets Russes
1910 First Post-impressionist exhibition in London rocks Japanese annexation of Korea
the art establishment Death of Edward VII, accession of
Igor Stravinsky, The Firebird George V
Italian Futurist Marinetti gives popular lecture
series in London
TS Eliot publishes poem “The Love Song of J.
Alfred Prufrock”, describing modernist cultural
disenchantment
1911 Kandinsky and others found Expressionist art group
in Munich
1912 Marcel Duchamp produces his “last painting”, Sinking of the Titanic
Nude Descending a Staircase Beginning of the Balkan Wars (1912–
Arnold Schonberg, Pierre Lunaire 1913)
Russian Futurists issue manifesto, A Slap in the Ford Model T production begins
Face of Public Taste
1913 DH Lawrence, Sons and Lovers Suffragette demonstrations in London
Thomas Mann, Death in Venice
Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way
Vorticist movement named by Ezra Pound
Kandinsky outlines the principles of abstraction in
art in On the Spiritual in Art
Igor Stravinsky’s composition The Rite of Spring
for the Ballets Russes causes Paris riot
1914 James Joyce’s experimental short stories, Opening of the Panama Canal
Dubliners Outbreak of WWI
Wyndham Lewis publishes first edition of
modernist literary magazine Blast
Date Literary / Artistic Event Other Historical Event
1915 Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out
DH Lawrence, The Rainbow
Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier
Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage
Ezra Pound, Cathay
1916 James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man
Anti-war, anarchic Dadaism founded in Zurich
1917 TS Eliot, Prufrock and Other Observations Revolution in Russia
Paul Valéry, La Jeune Parquet
Prokofiev, “Classical” Symphony
Carl Jung, The Unconscious
1918 Lytton Strachey’s book of biographies, Eminent Votes for women over thirty in
Victorians “take[s] down …the pretensions of Britain
the Victorian age to moral superiority”
1919 Pablo Picasso, Pierrot and Harlequin Treaty of Versailles; end of WWI
United Artists film studio founded in Hollywood
1920 DH Lawrence, Women in Love Founding of the League of Nations
American women achieve the vote
1921 Pablo Picasso, Three Musicians, two paintings New Economic Policy in the USSR
exemplifying the synthetic Cubist style Irish Free State proclaimed
Man Ray produces Dadaist “Rayographs”
Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an
Author
1922 James Joyce, Ulysses Founding of BBC
TS Eliot, The Waste Land Fascists march on Rome
Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room
Wittgenstein publishes key work of modernist
logic, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
1924 André Breton’s first Surrealist Manifesto
Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
Sean O’Casey, Juno and the Paycock
1925 Sergei Eisenstein deploys modernist film Hitler publishes Mein Kampf
techniques in Battleship Potemkin
Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway
Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans
Franz Kafka, The Trial
1926 Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises General Strike throughout Britain
Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis
Henry Moore’s sculpture, Draped Reclining Figure
1927 Launch of Close Up, the first English film review Lindbergh flies across Atlantic
“to approach films from the angles of art,
experiment and possibility”
Al Jolson, first talkie
Date Literary / Artistic Event Other Historical Event
1928 Formation of CIAM (Congrés Internationaux Alexander Fleming discovers
d’Architecture Moderne), a forum for penicillin
Modernist architectural theory
Virginia Woolf, Orlando
DH Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover
Wyndham Lewis, The Childermas, Lewis’s most
radical novel
1929 William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury New York stock market collapses
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
Second Surrealist Manifesto
Opening of the Museum of Modern Art, New York
1930 F.R. Leavis, Mass Civilisation and Minority
Culture
Sigmund Freud, Civilisation and its Discontents
1931 Fritz Lang’s modernist film classic, M
1933 Hitler appointed Chancellor of
Germany
First German Concentration Camps
1934 Commissar Zhdanov in the USSR
decrees “the end of modernism”
1935 Salvador Dalí, Giraffe on Fire
Dmitri Shostakovich, Symphony No 1
1936 Stevie Smith, Novel on Yellow Paper Beginning of Spanish Civil War
1937 Nazi’s “degenerate art” exhibition ridicules Nazi prohibition of modernist art and
modernism sanctions against its practitioners
1939 James Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake Beginning of WWII

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