Art Music and Literature Reflect the Times During Which They Were Created

History of Modernism click to run into a PowerPoint presentation Modernism: Characteristics

Arising out of the rebellious mood at the beginning of the twentieth century, modernism was a radical approach that yearned to revitalize the way modernistic civilization viewed life, art, politics, and science. This rebellious mental attitude that flourished betwixt 1900 and 1930 had, as its basis, the rejection of European culture for having become too corrupt, complacent and lethargic, ailing considering it was bound past the artificialities of a society that was besides preoccupied with image and likewise scared of modify. This dissatisfaction with the moral bankruptcy of everything European led modern thinkers and artists to explore other alternatives, especially primitive cultures. For the Establishment, the result would be cataclysmic; the new emerging civilisation would undermine tradition and potency in the hopes of transforming contemporary society.

The first characteristic associated with modernism is nihilism, the rejection of all religious and moral principles as the simply ways 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 and so was non necessarily because they did not believe in God, although there was a great majority of them who were atheists, or that they experienced swell doubt about 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 carry were a restrictive and limiting force over the man 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 free of all the encumbering baggage of hundreds of years of hypocrisy

The rejection of moral and religious principles was compounded by the repudiation of all systems of beliefs, whether in the arts, politics, sciences or philosophy. Dubiety was not necessarily the most significant reason why this questioning took place. 1 of the causes of this iconoclasm was the fact that early 20th-century culture was literally re-inventing itself on a daily ground. With so many scientific discoveries and technological innovations taking identify, the earth was changing and then chop-chop that civilization had to re-define itself constantly in order to keep pace with modernity and not appear anachronistic. By the time a new scientific or philosophical arrangement or artistic fashion had found credence, each was soon subsequently questioned and discarded for an even newer one. Another reason for this fickleness was the fact that people felt a tremendous creative free energy always looming in the background equally if to announce the birth of some new invention or theory.

As a consequence of the new technological dynamics, the modernists felt a sense of constant anticipation and did not want to commit to any one system that would thereby harness creativity, ultimately restricting and annihilating it. And and then, in the arts, for example, at the beginning of the 20th-century, artists questioned academic art for its lack of freedom and flirted with so many isms: secessionism, fauvism, expressionism, cubism, futurism, constructivism, dada, and surrealism. Pablo Picasso, for instance, went every bit far as experimenting with several of these styles, never wanting to feel as well comfortable with any one style.
The wrestling with all the new assumptions about reality and culture generated a new permissiveness in the realm of the arts. The arts were at present beginning to interruption all of the rules since they were trying to keep pace with all of the theoretical and technological advances that were changing the whole structure of life. In doing and then, artists bankrupt rank with everything that had been taught as existence sacred and invented and experimented with new artistic languages that could more than accordingly express the significant of all of the new changes that were occurring. The upshot was a new art that appeared strange and radical to whoever experienced it because the creative standard had always been mimesis, the literal imitation or representation of the appearance of nature, people, and order. 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 style dorsum in ancient Hellenic republic, had been perfected during the Renaissance, and had found prominence during the nineteenth-century. But for modern artists this old standard was besides limiting and did non reverberate the style that life was now being experienced. Freud and Einstein had radically changed perception of reality. Freud had asked u.s. to await inwardly into a personal globe that had previously been repressed, and Einstein taught us that relativity was everything. And, thus, new artistic forms had to be found that expressed this new subjectivity. Artists countered with works that were and then 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 own individual character. No more conventional cookie-cutter forms to be superimposed on human expression What were some of the creative behavior that the modernists adopted? Above all they embraced freedom, and they found it in the artistic forms and emotions of the primitive cultures of Africa, the Orient, the Americas and Oceania. This act 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 form, which was to go one of the hallmarks of modernism. This abstraction of form suggested that some essential structure, previously subconscious by realistic technique, would come to light. Art had, according to the modernists, become too concerned with irrelevant sophistications and conventions that detracted from the main purpose of fine art: the discovery of truth. On the other mitt, primitivism was the expression of all that civilized man had to repress in order to enter into contract with society. According 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 within the self, such as the natural appetite for adultery, 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 1000 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 authentic expression of that subconscious self that but finds expression at nighttime when nosotros dream.

The modernist involvement in primitivism also 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 and so many artistic people at the time believed to have been repressed or had lain dormant. Frederich Nietzsche blames this dormancy on the 19th-century's preoccupation with class. 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 two gods who existed in opposition to one another, Apollo and Dionysius. Apollo represented the essence of light, rationality, civility, civilisation, and restraint. In contrast, Dionysius suggested wine, the primitive urge, all that was uncivilized. Although these ii gods existed in opposition to ane another, they were both, still, revered as, thus striking a residue betwixt form (the Apollonian) and creative impulse (Dionysius). The modernists concurred with Nietzsche that art had degenerated because information technology was too concerned with the rules of course and not plenty with the creative energies that prevarication underneath the surface.

It is that exploration of what is underneath the surface that the modernists were and so great most, and what meliorate fashion to do so than to scrutinize man'south real aspirations, feelings, and actions. What was revealed was a new honesty in this portrayal: disintegration, madness, suicide, sexual depravity, impotence, morbidity, deception. Many would assail this portrayal as morally degenerate; the modernists, on the other hand, would defend themselves by calling information technology liberating.

Ironically, the modernist portrayal of human nature takes place within the context of the metropolis rather than in nature, where it had occurred during the entire 19th-century. At the kickoff of the 19th-century, the romantics had idealized nature as evidence of the transcendent existence of God; towards the end of the century, it became a symbol of cluttered, random being. For the modernists, nature becomes irrelevant and laissez passer�, for the city supersedes nature as the life force. Why would the modernists shift their interest from nature and unto the metropolis? The first reason is an obvious one. This is the fourth dimension when then many left the countryside to make their fortunes in the city, the new capital of culture and technology, the new bogus paradise. But more importantly, the city is the place where man is dehumanized by then many degenerate forces. Thus, the metropolis becomes the locus where modern man is microscopically focused on and dissected. In the final analysis, the metropolis becomes a "brutal devourer", a cemetery for lost souls. The Forces That Shaped Modernism
The year 1900 ushered a new era that changed the way that reality was perceived and portrayed. Years after this revolutionary new catamenia would come to exist known as modernism and would forever exist divers as a time 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 be short-lived, from 1900 to 1930, we are nevertheless reeling from its influences lx-five years later.
How was modernism such a radical difference from what had preceded information technology in the by? The modernists were militant about distancing themselves from every traditional idea that had been held sacred by Western civilization, and perhaps nosotros can fifty-fifty go so far as to refer to them as intellectual anarchists in their willingness to vandalize anything connected to the established order. In society to ameliorate understand this modernist iconoclasm, permit's go back in fourth dimension to explore how and why the human being landscape was changing then speedily.

By 1900 the world was a bustling place transformed by all of the new discoveries, inventions and technological achievements that were existence thrust on culture: electricity, the combustion engine, the incandescent calorie-free bulb, the automobile, the airplane, radio, X-rays, fertilizers and so along. These innovations revolutionized the earth in two distinct means. For one, they created an optimistic aura of a worldly paradise, of a new technology that was to reshape man 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 human. Secondly, the new engineering quickened the pace through which people experienced life on a day to day footing. For instance, the innovations in the field of transportation and communication accelerated the daily life of the individual. Whereas in the past, a person'south life was confining by the lack of mechanical resource available, a person could at present aggrandize the telescopic of daily activities through the new liberating power of the motorcar. Man now became literally energized past 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, however, was not only shaped past this new technology. Several philosophical theoreticians were to change the style that modernistic man perceives the external world, specially 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 listen is a more fundamental feature of the universe than matter and that its purpose is to search for truth. His most aggressive work, Appearance and Reality: A Metaphysical Essay (1893), introduced the concept that an object in reality can have no absolute contours but 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 effect of this work was to encourage rather than dispel uncertainty. In one of the nigh seminal works of this century, "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies," Albert Einstein'southward theory of relativity held that, if, for all frames of reference, the speed of light is constant and if all natural laws are the same, then both time and motion are found to be relative to the observer. In other words, at that place is no such thing as universal time and thus experience runs very differently from man to homo. Alfred Whitehead was some other who revised the ideas of time, space and motion as 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 substantially relevant to each other'due south existence since every entity involves an infinite array of perspectives." For all of these thinkers, subjectivity was at present the main focus.

Several psychological theoreticians were to also fundamentally modify the way that modern man viewed his ain internal reality, an unexplored center of darkness. Sigmund Freud was the offset to gaze inwardly and to find a world within where dynamic, often warring forces shape the individual'southward psyche and personality. To explicate this internal globe inside each of us, he developed a complex theory of the unconscious that illustrated the importance of unconscious motivation in beliefs and the suggestion that psychological events can go along outside of conscious awareness. Then, co-ordinate to Freud, fantasies, dreams, and slips of the natural language are outward manifestations of unconscious motives. Furthermore, in explaining the evolution of personality, Freud expanded human's definition of sexuality to include oral, anal, and other bodily sensations. Thus his legacy to the mod world was to betrayal a darker side of man that had been hidden from view past the hypocrisy of 19th- century society.

Freud was not the simply psychological theoretician who asked us to gaze inwardly to better understand the human being psyche. His disciple, Carl Jung, was also to develop another theory delving into the unconscious which explored the nature of the irrational self and which explained the common grounds shared by so many cultures. Jung'south Theory of the Collective Unconscious, about 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 too to turn his gaze to the unconscious to explore the nature of retentivity as experienced in the present moment. Bergson'southward Fourth dimension and the Costless Will was an attempt to establish the notion of elapsing, or lived fourth dimension, as opposed to what he viewed as the spatialized conception of time measured by the clock and unremarkably known as chronological time. Co-ordinate to Bergson, states of conscious memory permeate 1 some other in storage within the unconscious, in the same mode that "oldie-goldies" are stored in a juke-box. A sense impression, such equally whiff of cologne or the taste of sweet spud pie, might trigger consciousness to recall ane of these memories, much similar a coin will cause the record of your choice to play. Once the submerged retention resurfaces in the conscious heed, the self becomes suspended, there might exist a spontaneous wink of intuition most the by, and just maybe, this insight will interpret into some kind of realization of the present moment. In fact, isn't this what we practice when we mind to an old song, forget the present, re-experience the past, and, then, all of a sudden, apply information technology all to our lives in the present? And thus, intuition leads to knowledge.
Politics and the economic system would as well transform the style that modern human looked at himself and the globe in which he lived. Science and technology were radically changing the means of production. Whereas in the past, a worker became involved in production from beginning to end, by 1900 he had become a mere cog in the production line, making an insignificant contribution. Thus, sectionalization of labor made him feel fragmented, alienated not only from the rest of social club merely from himself. Ane of the furnishings 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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