One of the Hallmarks of Academic Taste in French Art Is

History of Modernism click to meet 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 manner mod civilization viewed life, art, politics, and science. This rebellious attitude that flourished between 1900 and 1930 had, every bit its footing, the rejection of European civilisation for having become likewise corrupt, conceited and lethargic, bilious because it was bound by the artificialities of a society that was also preoccupied with image and too scared of modify. This dissatisfaction with the moral bankruptcy of everything European led modern thinkers and artists to explore other alternatives, specially archaic cultures. For the Institution, the result would be cataclysmic; the new emerging culture would undermine tradition and authority in the hopes of transforming contemporary society.

The start feature associated with modernism is nihilism, the rejection of all religious and moral principles as the only 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 so was not necessarily because they did not believe in God, although there was a bully majority of them who were atheists, or that they experienced great doubt about the meaninglessness of life. Rather, their rejection of conventional morality was based on its arbitrariness, its conformity and its exertion of command over man feelings. In other words, the rules of conduct were a restrictive and limiting forcefulness over the human spirit. The modernists believed that for an private to feel whole and a contributor 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 past the repudiation of all systems of behavior, whether in the arts, politics, sciences or philosophy. Doubt was not necessarily the most meaning 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 ground. With then many scientific discoveries and technological innovations taking place, the world was changing and so quickly that civilization had to re-define itself constantly in club to proceed footstep with modernity and non appear anachronistic. By the time a new scientific or philosophical system or creative manner had plant acceptance, each was presently after questioned and discarded for an even newer one. Another reason for this fickleness was the fact that people felt a tremendous creative energy always looming in the groundwork every bit if to announce the birth of some new invention or theory.

As a outcome of the new technological dynamics, the modernists felt a sense of abiding anticipation and did not want to commit to any one system that would thereby harness inventiveness, ultimately restricting and annihilating information technology. And so, in the arts, for example, at the commencement of the 20th-century, artists questioned academic art for its lack of liberty and flirted with so many isms: secessionism, fauvism, expressionism, cubism, futurism, constructivism, dada, and surrealism. Pablo Picasso, for instance, went as far every bit experimenting with several of these styles, never wanting to experience too comfortable with any 1 mode.
The wrestling with all the new assumptions about reality and civilisation generated a new permissiveness in the realm of the arts. The arts were at present beginning to break all of the rules since they were trying to proceed pace with all of the theoretical and technological advances that were changing the whole structure of life. In doing so, artists broke rank with everything that had been taught as being sacred and invented and experimented with new artistic languages that could more than appropriately limited the meaning of all of the new changes that were occurring. The result was a new fine art that appeared strange and radical to whoever experienced it considering the artistic standard had always been mimesis, the literal fake or representation of the appearance of nature, people, and gild. In other words, art was supposed to be judged on the standard of how well it realistically reflected what something looked or sounded similar.
This mimetic tradition had originated fashion back in ancient Greece, had been perfected during the Renaissance, and had establish prominence during the nineteenth-century. But for modern artists this sometime standard was too limiting and did not reflect the way that life was now being experienced. Freud and Einstein had radically changed perception of reality. Freud had asked us to look inwardly into a personal globe that had previously been repressed, and Einstein taught u.s.a. that relativity was everything. And, thus, new creative forms had to be constitute 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 ain internal logic, thereby attaining its ain private character. 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 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 class, which was to become one of the hallmarks of modernism. This brainchild of form suggested that some essential structure, previously hidden by realistic technique, would come up to low-cal. Art had, according to the modernists, become 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. According to Sigmund Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents, in guild for human to partake in civilized society, he had had to lay aside many uncivilized urges within the self, such every bit the natural appetite for infidelity, incest, murder, homosexuality, etc., all held as taboos. Information technology is this repression of natural desires that, Freud argues, is the source of modernistic neurosis. As a Jew, Freud was also 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 authentic expression of that subconscious cocky that merely finds expression at nighttime when we dream.

The modernist interest 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 mode of life which then many artistic people at the fourth dimension believed to accept been repressed or had lain dormant. Frederich Nietzsche blames this dormancy on the 19th-century's preoccupation with form. In his seminal work The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche had traced the origins and development of drama back in Ancient Greece to the balance that existed betwixt two gods who existed in opposition to one some other, Apollo and Dionysius. Apollo represented the essence of lite, rationality, civility, culture, and restraint. In contrast, Dionysius suggested wine, the primitive urge, all that was uncivilized. Although these two gods existed in opposition to one another, they were both, however, revered equally, thus striking a balance between form (the Apollonian) and artistic impulse (Dionysius). The modernists concurred with Nietzsche that art had degenerated because information technology was besides concerned with the rules of form and not enough with the creative energies that prevarication underneath the surface.

Information technology is that exploration of what is underneath the surface that the modernists were so bully about, and what amend fashion to practice so than to scrutinize man's existent aspirations, feelings, and actions. 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 hand, would defend themselves by 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 unabridged 19th-century. At the outset of the 19th-century, the romantics had idealized nature as evidence of the transcendent being of God; towards the terminate of the century, it became a symbol of cluttered, random existence. For the modernists, nature becomes irrelevant and pass�, for the city supersedes nature as the life force. Why would the modernists shift their interest from nature and unto the city? The first reason is an obvious 1. This is the time when then many left the countryside to make their fortunes in the city, the new capital of culture and engineering, the new bogus paradise. But more importantly, the urban center is the place where man is dehumanized by so many degenerate forces. Thus, the city becomes the locus where modern man is microscopically focused on and dissected. In the final analysis, the urban center becomes a "cruel 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 afterwards this revolutionary new period would come to be known as modernism and would forever be defined as a fourth dimension when artists and thinkers rebelled against every conceivable doctrine that was widely accustomed by the Establishment, whether in the arts, scientific discipline, medicine, philosophy, etc. Although modernism would exist short-lived, from 1900 to 1930, we are still reeling from its influences threescore-five years later.
How was modernism such a radical departure from what had preceded it in the past? The modernists were militant nigh distancing themselves from every traditional idea that had been held sacred by Western culture, and perhaps nosotros can even go so far as to refer to them as intellectual anarchists in their willingness to vandalize anything connected to the established guild. In social club to meliorate understand this modernist iconoclasm, let'southward go back in time to explore how and why the human landscape was changing and then apace.

By 1900 the world was a bustling place transformed by all of the new discoveries, inventions and technological achievements that were being thrust on civilization: electricity, the combustion engine, the incandescent lite bulb, the automobile, the airplane, radio, Ten-rays, fertilizers and so forth. These innovations revolutionized the world in 2 distinct ways. For one, they created an optimistic aura of a worldly paradise, of a new technology that was to reshape human being 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 science quickened the pace through which people experienced life on a day to mean solar day basis. For instance, the innovations in the field of transportation and communication accelerated the daily life of the private. Whereas in the by, a person's life was circumscribed by the lack of mechanical resource available, a person could now aggrandize the scope of daily activities through the new liberating power of the automobile. Man now became literally energized by all of these scientific and technological innovations and, more important, felt a blitz emanating from the feeling that he was invincible, that there was no stopping him.

Modernity, withal, was not but shaped by this new technology. Several philosophical theoreticians were to change the way that modern 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 commencement to practise 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 well-nigh aggressive work, Appearance and Reality: A Metaphysical Essay (1893), introduced the concept that an object in reality can take 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 it. The effect of this piece of work was to encourage rather than dispel uncertainty. 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 calorie-free 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, there is no such matter equally universal time and thus feel runs very differently from man to human. Alfred Whitehead was another who revised the ideas of time, space and motion as the basis of homo'southward perception of the external world. He viewed reality equally 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's existence since every entity involves an infinite array of perspectives." For all of these thinkers, subjectivity was now the principal focus.

Several psychological theoreticians were to besides fundamentally change the way that modern man viewed his own internal reality, an unexplored heart of darkness. Sigmund Freud was the first to gaze inwardly and to discover a world within where dynamic, often warring forces shape the individual'southward psyche and personality. To explain this internal earth within each of the states, he developed a complex theory of the unconscious that illustrated the importance of unconscious motivation in behavior and the proposition that psychological events can continue outside of conscious awareness. And and then, according to Freud, fantasies, dreams, and slips of the tongue are outward manifestations of unconscious motives. Furthermore, in explaining the development of personality, Freud expanded man's definition of sexuality to include oral, anal, and other actual sensations. Thus his legacy to the modernistic world was to expose a darker side of man that had been hidden from view past the hypocrisy of 19th- century society.

Freud was non the only psychological theoretician who asked u.s. to gaze inwardly to ameliorate understand the human psyche. His disciple, Carl Jung, was as well to develop another theory delving into the unconscious which explored the nature of the irrational self and which explained the mutual grounds shared by and then many cultures. Jung'south Theory of the Commonage Unconscious, about an area of the listen 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 besides 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 attempt to establish the notion of duration, or lived time, equally opposed to what he viewed as the spatialized conception of time measured by the clock and unremarkably known as chronological time. According to Bergson, states of conscious memory permeate ane another in storage within the unconscious, in the same way that "oldie-goldies" are stored in a juke-box. A sense impression, such as whiff of cologne or the taste of sweet spud pie, might trigger consciousness to recall one of these memories, much like a coin will crusade the tape of your choice to play. Once the submerged retentiveness resurfaces in the witting listen, the self becomes suspended, there might exist a spontaneous flash of intuition well-nigh the past, and simply possibly, this insight will interpret into some kind of realization of the present moment. In fact, isn't this what we do when we mind to an old song, forget the present, re-experience the past, and, and so, all all of a sudden, utilize information technology all to our lives in the present? And thus, intuition leads to knowledge.
Politics and the economy would also transform the way that modern man looked at himself and the world in which he lived. Science and applied science were radically irresolute the ways of production. Whereas in the by, a worker became involved in product from outset to end, by 1900 he had become a mere cog in the product line, making an insignificant contribution. Thus, division of labor made him feel fragmented, alienated non simply from the rest of society just from himself. One 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

fordesmagal.blogspot.com

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