Facts about Modernism

Modernism's stress on freedom of expression, experimentation, radicalism, and primitivism disregards conventional expectations.

Modernism, while it was still "progressive" increasingly saw traditional forms and traditional social arrangements as hindering progress, and therefore the artist was recast as a revolutionary, overthrowing rather than enlightening.

Modernism was seen in Europe in such critical movements as Dada, and then in constructive movements such as Surrealism, as well as in smaller movements of the Bloomsbury Group.

Modernism flourished mainly in consumer/capitalist societies, despite the fact that its proponents often rejected consumerism itself.

Such movements see Modernism as reductionist, and therefore subject to the failure to see systemic and emergent effects.

The use of photography, which had rendered much of the representational function of visual art obsolete, strongly affected this aspect of Modernism.

Each of these "modernisms," as some observers labeled them at the time, stressed new methods to produce new results.

Modernism has philosophical antecedents that can be traced to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment but is rooted in the changes in Western society at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries.

Modernism in social organization would produce inquiries into sex and the basic bondings of the nuclear, rather than extended, family.

Modernism comprised a series of sometimes-contradictory responses to the situation as it was understood, and the attempt to wrestle universal principles from it.

Composers such as Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and George Antheil represent Modernism in music.

Modernism encompasses the works of artists who rebelled against nineteenth-century academic and historicist traditions, believing that earlier aesthetic conventions were becoming outdated.

Some writers declared that Modernism had become so institutionalized that it was now "post avant-garde," indicating that it had lost its power as a revolutionary movement.

Modernism, here limited to aesthetic modernism (see also modernity), describes a series of sometimes radical movements in art, architecture, photography, music, literature, and the applied arts which emerged in the three decades before 1914.

Initially an avant guarde movement confined to an intellectual minority, modernism achieved mainstream acceptance and exerted a pervasive influence on culture and popular entertainment in the course of the twentieth century.

Many have interpreted this transformation as the beginning of the phase that became known as Post-Modernism.

By 1930, Modernism had won a place in the establishment, including the political and artistic establishment, although by this time Modernism itself had changed.

The roots of Protestantism are often traced to movements in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries which protested against the wealth and exploitation of the medieval Catholic hierarchy in Europe.

Several figures outside of artistic Modernism were influenced by artistic ideas; for example, John Maynard Keynes was friends with Woolf and other writers of the Bloomsbury group.

Hostile reaction often followed, as paintings were spat upon, riots organized at the opening of works, and political figures denounced modernism as unwholesome and immoral.