The Modernist

Movement

Student: Gheorghe Adina

• Modernism
is modern thought, character, or practice..
More specifically, the term describes both a
set of cultural tendencies and an array of
associated cultural movements, originally
arising from wide-scale and far-reaching
changes to Western society in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The term encompasses the activities and
output of those who felt the "traditional"
forms of art, architecture, literature,
religious faith, social organization and daily
life were becoming outdated in the new
economic, social and political conditions of
an emerging fully industrialized world.
Beginnings
• The first half of the nineteenth century for
Europe was marked by a number of wars
and revolutions, which contributed to an
aesthetic "turning away" from the realities
of political and social fragmentation, and so
facilitated a trend towards Romanticism:
emphasis on individual subjective
experience, the sublime, the supremacy of
"Nature" as a subject for art, revolutionary
or radical extensions of expression, and
individual liberty.
 Political & Social Climate
• The political and social climate
during the first part of the century
was a major catalyst for modernist
ideas.
• Starting before World War I, many
countries were facing growing
tensions and unrest in the social
order.
• These tensions became evident in
the design world as modernists
sought to break from past
ideologies, and experiment with
new forms that echoed their
dissatisfaction with tradition.
• With the onset of World War I in
1914, applied art took on a new role
World
•
as a means of propaganda.
Countries seeking to justify their
War I
involvement in “the war to end all
wars” launched poster campaigns to
acquire resources necessary for the
conflict, and to garner support from
the public.
• Modernist ideals of simplistic form
and geometric expression are
evident in these examples of
propaganda from various countries.
The Nazi Rising
• The National Socialist German Workers (Nazi) Party,
led by Adolf Hitler, rose to power during the economic
and political turn in Germany that followed World War
I.
• Hitler and the Nazi party launched a massive, and
psychologically powerful propaganda effort in order to
advance their views and gain power.
• These posters, like propaganda used during World War
I, embody the ideals of modernist theory. Even the
swastika symbol of the Nazi party (right) embraces the
pure geometric form loved by modernists.
The Russian Revolution and the Spread of
Socialism
• Like Germany, Russia was facing serious
political and economic turmoil following the
war.
• Political and social upheavals resulted in
the overthrowing of Czar Nicholas II and the
end of Russia’s Romanov dynasty.
• Shortly after, the Bolshevik party led by
Vladimir Lenin, gained power, establishing
rule in what was to become the Soviet
Union.
• Under the new socialist regime, the artist’s
sole purpose was to advance socialist
theory. Art for art’s sake was denounced,
and artists who refused to comply were
severely punished. Unable to express
themselves, many artists and designers
perished in the Gulags (Soviet prison and
labor camps).
Results
• One of the most visible changes of
this period was the adoption of
objects of modern production into
daily life. Electricity, the telephone,
the automobile and the need to work
with them, repair them and live with
them—created the need for new
forms of manners and social life.
The kind of disruptive moment that
only a few knew in the 1880s
became a common occurrence. For
example, the speed of
communication reserved for the
stock brokers of 1890 became part
of family life.
 Modernism after World War II
• In Britain and America, modernism as a literary movement is
generally considered to be relevant up to the early 1930s, and
"modernist" is rarely used to describe authors prominent
after 1945. This is somewhat true for all areas of culture,
with the exception of the visual and performing arts.

• The post-war period left the capitals of Europe in upheaval

with an urgency to economically and physically rebuild and
to politically regroup. In Paris (the former center of European
culture and the former capital of the art world) the climate for
art was a disaster. Important collectors, dealers, and
modernist artists, writers, and poets had fled Europe for New
York and America. The surrealists and modern artists from
every cultural center of Europe had fled the onslaught of the
Nazis for safe haven in the United States. Many of those who
didn't flee perished. A few artists, notably Pablo Picasso,
Henri Matisse, and Pierre Bonnard, remained in France and
survived.
 Modern Art Influences
• Around the world, modern art was in a constant
state of change. Pressing economic and political
turmoil pushed artists to find new ways of
expression, resulting in a series of modern art
movements that went on to influence graphic
design.
 Cubism
• Cubism began to appear in the
first part of the 20th century.
Cubist art often displayed its
subject using a series of
geometric planes, allowing the
viewer to see multiple angles in
one piece.
• The geometric abstraction
present in Cubist paintings
became a pivotal influence on
modernism.
 Futurism
• Futurism was a movement
launched by Filippo Marinetti,
designed to express the speed
and noise of 20th century life.
• Futurist artwork used
typography and writing as its
own expressive means. Words
used color, character
attributes, and position to
express what images could not.
 Dada

• Dada was a short-lived movement

reacting to the horrors that fell on society
during and after World War I.
• Dadaists sought to destroy tradition
through the use of shock and nonsense,
and the movement became a means for
protest with a deep underlying negativity.
 Surrealism
• Artists found a means of expressing
fantasy and intuition through Surrealism.
• Surrealist works often included dream-
like images, unexpected juxtapositions,
and non-sequiturs.
Expressionism
• Expressionism
extended beyond
its subject to
depict emotions
and personal
responses using
color, line and
proportion.
• Images were often
exaggerated or
distorted in
symbolic
representation.
• Although not a new medium,
photography was rapidly
developing during this time
Photography
period. Artists began to explore
photographic options such as
multiple exposures, and
differences in light and shadow.
• Often these photographic
discoveries intersected with
surrealism, resulting in dream-
like images.
 Art Nouveau
• Art Nouveau was a movement
characterized by its
simplification of objects.
• Subjects were drawn with very
little detail, and little or no
tonal variation. Modernists
expanded on this idea,
simplifying objects even
further.
• The result was a mechanized,
often geometric representation
of subjects that embodied the
cultural shift toward reliance
on technology and industry.
Pop art • Pop art is a visual art
movement that emerged in
the mid 1950s in Britain
and in the late 1950s in the
United States. Pop art
challenged tradition by
asserting that an artist's
use of the mass-produced
visual commodities of
popular culture is
contiguous with the
perspective of fine art. Pop
removes the material from
its context and isolates the
object, or combines it with
other objects, for
contemplation. The concept
of pop art refers not as
much to the art itself as to
the attitudes that led to it.
 Bauhaus
• At the height of the
Modernist movement
emerged one of the most
influential design schools
of all time, the Bauhaus.
• The Bauhaus was opened
in 1919 in Weimar, and
closed in 1933 as a result
of Nazi persecution.
• Even after its closing, the
Bauhaus continued to
leave its mark on the
world, through influences
on graphic design,
architecture, and
furniture design.
 Performance art
• In performance art, usually one or
more people perform in front of an
audience. In contrast to the traditional
performing arts, performance art is
unconventional. Performance artists
often challenge the audience to think in
new and unconventional ways about
theater and performing, break
conventions of traditional performing
arts, and break down conventional
ideas about "what art is," similar to the
postmodern art movement.Thus, even
though in most cases the performance
is in front of an audience, in some
cases, the audience becomes the
performers. The performance may be
scripted, unscripted, or
improvisational. It may incorporate
music, dance, song, or complete
silence.
 Fashion
• The height of fashion still seemed to
be that of the Lady - mature,
sophisticated and well-bred. But
increasingly, there was hope for the
ordinary woman, hope that had been
founded in the last decade of the
previous century.
• The woman of 1901 presented
a new, flowing silhouette unlike
that of any of her Victorian
predecessors. Her skirt curved
outwards over her full behind,
downwards and apparently slightly
inwards towards knee-level and then
sharply outwards again at the hem.
This gave the appearance of a
concave skirt.
•
• Back in 1952 the fashion world
succumbed to the new sweater girl and
the more casual looks of jeans.  
Gradually the sweater was replaced by a
T shirt and the almost universal dress of
the young became denims.  The jeans of
the fifties paved the way for a new kind
of fashion that emerged in the sixties,
ripping open the world of haute couture.
Since the fifties, which Vogue called
'the formative years of the
century', fashion has never really
been the same.  Mass production, the
introduction of synthetic fabrics and the
comparative prosperity of the late fifties
enabled the average British woman to
be one of the best dressed women in the
world.  The young continued to demand
clothes to suit a teenage market.
 Music
• Modernism in music is characterized by a
desire for or belief in progress and
science, surrealism, anti-romanticism,
political advocacy, general intellectualism,
and/or a breaking with the past or common
practice — Ezra Pound's modernist
slogan, "Make it new” as applied to music.
 Modernist literature
• Thematic characteristics
• Breakdown of social norms
• Modernism as a • Realistic embodiment of social
literary movement meanings
reached its height in • Separation of meanings and senses
Europe between 1900 from the context
and the middle • Despairing individual behaviours in
the face of an unmanageable future
1920s.Modernist • Spiritual loneliness
literature addressed • Alienation
aesthetic problems • Frustration
similar to those • Disillusionment
examined in non- • Rejection of history
literary forms of • Rejection of outdated social systems
contemporaneous • Objection to traditional thoughts
Modernist art, such as and traditional moralities
Modernist painting. • Objection to religious thoughts
• Substitution of a mythical past
• Two World Wars' effects on
Humanity
• Modernist authors include : Knut Hamsun (whose novel
Hunger is considered to be the first modernist novel), James
Joyce, Mikhail Bulgakov, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, H.D.,
Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, John Steinbeck, Dylan
Thomas, D. H. Lawrence, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Ezra
Pound, Mina Loy, Hugh MacDiarmid, William Faulkner, Jean
Toomer, Ernest Hemingway, E. M. Forster, Rainer Maria
Rilke, Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, Joseph Conrad, Andrei
Bely, W. B. Yeats, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Luigi Pirandello,
Katherine Mansfield, Jaroslav Hašek, Samuel Beckett, Menno
ter Braak, Robert Frost, Boris Pasternak, Djuna Barnes,
Patricia Highsmith, Sherwood Anderson, Mervyn Peake
among others.
 Criticisms of modernism
• The most controversial aspect of the modern
movement was, and remains, its rejection of
tradition. Modernism's stress on freedom of
expression, experimentation, radicalism, and
primitivism disregards conventional expectations.
In many art forms this often meant startling and
alienating audiences with bizarre and
unpredictable effects, as in the strange and
disturbing combinations of motifs in surrealism or
the use of extreme dissonance and atonality in
modernist music. In literature this often involved
the rejection of intelligible plots or characterization
in novels, or the creation of poetry that defied clear
interpretation.