Jansons Basic History of Western Art Text Only 9th 14 Pdf

History of Modernism click to see 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 modern civilization viewed life, art, politics, and science. This rebellious attitude that flourished between 1900 and 1930 had, as its basis, the rejection of European culture for having become too decadent, conceited and lethargic, ailing considering information technology was bound by the artificialities of a society that was too preoccupied with image and also scared of change. This dissatisfaction with the moral bankruptcy of everything European led modern thinkers and artists to explore other alternatives, especially archaic cultures. For the Institution, the event would be cataclysmic; the new emerging civilization would undermine tradition and authority in the hopes of transforming contemporary society.

The first characteristic associated with modernism is nihilism, the rejection of all religious and moral principles every bit the only means 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 then was non necessarily because they did non believe in God, although there was a great bulk of them who were atheists, or that they experienced nifty doubt nigh 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 deport were a restrictive and limiting force over the homo spirit. The modernists believed that for an individual 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 by the repudiation of all systems of beliefs, whether in the arts, politics, sciences or philosophy. Doubt was non necessarily the most meaning reason why this questioning took place. One of the causes of this iconoclasm was the fact that early 20th-century civilisation was literally re-inventing itself on a daily basis. With so many scientific discoveries and technological innovations taking place, the world was changing then quickly that culture had to re-ascertain itself constantly in social club to continue pace with modernity and non announced anachronistic. Past the time a new scientific or philosophical system or artistic style had found acceptance, each was soon after questioned and discarded for an fifty-fifty newer one. Another reason for this fickleness was the fact that people felt a tremendous creative energy ever looming in the background as if to denote the birth of some new invention or theory.

As a issue of the new technological dynamics, the modernists felt a sense of constant anticipation and did not desire to commit to whatever one arrangement that would thereby harness creativity, ultimately restricting and annihilating it. And so, in the arts, for instance, at the beginning of the 20th-century, artists questioned bookish art for its lack of freedom and flirted with so many isms: secessionism, fauvism, expressionism, cubism, futurism, constructivism, dada, and surrealism. Pablo Picasso, for example, went every bit far as experimenting with several of these styles, never wanting to experience likewise comfy with any 1 mode.
The wrestling with all the new assumptions most 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 footstep with all of the theoretical and technological advances that were changing the whole structure of life. In doing and 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 accordingly express the significant 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 because the creative standard had always been mimesis, the literal imitation or representation of the advent of nature, people, and society. In other words, fine 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 way back in aboriginal Hellenic republic, had been perfected during the Renaissance, and had found prominence during the nineteenth-century. Only for modern artists this former standard was too limiting and did not reflect the way that life was now beingness 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 united states that relativity was everything. And, thus, new artistic forms had to exist institute 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 private work begged to be judged as a self-sufficient unit of measurement which obeyed its own internal laws and its ain internal logic, thereby attaining its ain individual character. No more conventional cookie-cutter forms to be superimposed on homo expression What were some of the creative behavior that the modernists adopted? Above all they embraced freedom, and they found information technology in the creative 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 footing of 19th-century creative endeavour. On the one hand, primitivism represented the simplification of form, which was to become i of the hallmarks of modernism. This abstraction of form suggested that some essential structure, previously hidden past realistic technique, would come to light. Art had, according to the modernists, become as well 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. Co-ordinate to Sigmund Freud's Civilisation and Its Discontents, in club for man to partake in civilized society, he had had to lay bated 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. Every bit a Jew, Freud was too well acquainted with the THOU SHALL NOTS of the Ten Commandments. Symbolically, the encompass of primitivism is a negation of the very principles of the Judeo-Christian tradition and an affirmation of authentic expression of that hidden self that only finds expression at dark 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 way of life which 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 form. In his seminal work The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche had traced the origins and development of drama back in Ancient Hellenic republic to the balance that existed betwixt two gods who existed in opposition to one another, Apollo and Dionysius. Apollo represented the essence of calorie-free, rationality, civility, culture, and restraint. In contrast, Dionysius suggested wine, the archaic urge, all that was uncivilized. Although these ii gods existed in opposition to 1 some other, they were both, nevertheless, revered equally, thus striking a balance between form (the Apollonian) and creative impulse (Dionysius). The modernists concurred with Nietzsche that fine art had degenerated because it was as well concerned with the rules of form and not enough with the artistic energies that prevarication underneath the surface.

Information technology is that exploration of what is underneath the surface that the modernists were so bang-up most, and what better mode to exercise so than to scrutinize man's real aspirations, feelings, and deportment. What was revealed was a new honesty in this portrayal: disintegration, madness, suicide, sexual depravity, impotence, morbidity, charade. Many would assail this portrayal equally morally degenerate; the modernists, on the other manus, would defend themselves past calling it liberating.

Ironically, the modernist portrayal of human nature takes place inside the context of the city rather than in nature, where it had occurred during the entire 19th-century. At the beginning of the 19th-century, the romantics had idealized nature as evidence of the transcendent existence of God; towards the end of the century, information technology became a symbol of cluttered, random being. For the modernists, nature becomes irrelevant and pass�, for the urban center supersedes nature as the life force. Why would the modernists shift their involvement from nature and unto the city? The first reason is an obvious one. This is the time when so many left the countryside to brand their fortunes in the city, the new capital of culture and applied science, the new bogus paradise. But more chiefly, the metropolis is the place where human being is dehumanized past so many degenerate forces. Thus, the city becomes the locus where modern man is microscopically focused on and dissected. In the last analysis, the city becomes a "fell devourer", a cemetery for lost souls. The Forces That Shaped Modernism
The year 1900 ushered a new era that inverse the way that reality was perceived and portrayed. Years later this revolutionary new period would come up to be known equally modernism and would forever exist defined every bit a fourth dimension when artists and thinkers rebelled against every believable doctrine that was widely accepted by the Establishment, whether in the arts, science, medicine, philosophy, etc. Although modernism would be brusque-lived, from 1900 to 1930, we are withal reeling from its influences sixty-five years later.
How was modernism such a radical difference from what had preceded it in the past? The modernists were militant about distancing themselves from every traditional thought that had been held sacred past Western civilization, and possibly we can fifty-fifty go so far as to refer to them every bit intellectual anarchists in their willingness to vandalize anything connected to the established order. In order to amend understand this modernist iconoclasm, let'due south go back in time to explore how and why the human landscape was changing so rapidly.

Past 1900 the world was a bustling identify transformed past all of the new discoveries, inventions and technological achievements that were being thrust on civilization: electricity, the combustion engine, the incandescent low-cal bulb, the automobile, the airplane, radio, X-rays, fertilizers and then forth. These innovations revolutionized the globe in two distinct ways. 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, applied science became a new religious cult that held the key to a new utopian dream that would transform the very nature of man. Secondly, the new applied science quickened the stride through which people experienced life on a solar day to day basis. For instance, the innovations in the field of transportation and communication accelerated the daily life of the private. Whereas in the past, a person's life was confining past the lack of mechanical resource bachelor, a person could now expand the scope of daily activities through the new liberating ability of the car. Man now became literally energized by all of these scientific and technological innovations and, more important, felt a rush emanating from the feeling that he was invincible, that there was no stopping him.

Modernity, however, was not only shaped by this new technology. Several philosophical theoreticians were to change the way that mod man perceives the external world, particularly in their refutation of the Newtonian principle that reality was an absolute, unquestionable entity divorced from those observing information technology. The first to practise so was F. H. Bradley, who considered that the man mind is a more than key feature of the universe than matter and that its purpose is to search for truth. His most ambitious piece of work, Advent and Reality: A Metaphysical Essay (1893), introduced the concept that an object in reality can have no accented contours but varies from the angle from which it is seen. Thus Bradley defines the identity of a things equally the view the onlooker takes of it. The effect of this piece of work was to encourage rather than dispel doubt. In one of the well-nigh seminal works of this century, "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies," Albert Einstein'south theory of relativity held that, if, for all frames of reference, the speed of low-cal is constant and if all natural laws are the same, so both time and motion are establish to be relative to the observer. In other words, there is no such affair as universal time and thus experience runs very differently from human to man. Alfred Whitehead was another who revised the ideas of fourth dimension, infinite and motion as the ground of man'southward 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 essentially relevant to each other'due south existence since every entity involves an space array of perspectives." For all of these thinkers, subjectivity was at present the main focus.

Several psychological theoreticians were to as well fundamentally change the way that modern human viewed his ain internal reality, an unexplored centre of darkness. Sigmund Freud was the showtime to gaze inwardly and to discover a world within where dynamic, frequently warring forces shape the private'south psyche and personality. To explain this internal world within each of united 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 go on exterior of conscious sensation. And so, according to Freud, fantasies, dreams, and slips of the natural language 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 bodily sensations. Thus his legacy to the modern world was to expose a darker side of human being that had been subconscious from view by the hypocrisy of 19th- century society.

Freud was not the just psychological theoretician who asked united states to gaze inwardly to ameliorate sympathise the man psyche. His disciple, Carl Jung, was likewise to develop some other 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'southward Theory of the Collective Unconscious, about an area of the listen that he believed was shared past 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 also to turn his gaze to the unconscious to explore the nature of retentivity as experienced in the nowadays moment. Bergson'due south Time and the Free Will was an try to institute the notion of duration, or lived time, equally opposed to what he viewed equally the spatialized formulation of fourth dimension measured by the clock and commonly known as chronological fourth dimension. Co-ordinate to Bergson, states of conscious retentiveness permeate one another in storage within the unconscious, in the same mode that "oldie-goldies" are stored in a juke-box. A sense impression, such as whiff of cologne or the taste of sweet potato pie, might trigger consciousness to recall one of these memories, much like a coin will cause the record of your choice to play. In one case the submerged memory resurfaces in the witting heed, the self becomes suspended, there might be a spontaneous flash of intuition about the past, and just maybe, this insight volition translate into some kind of realization of the present moment. In fact, isn't this what we do when we listen to an quondam song, forget the present, re-experience the past, and, and then, suddenly, apply it all to our lives in the nowadays? And thus, intuition leads to knowledge.
Politics and the economic system would also transform the way that modernistic human looked at himself and the earth 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 get-go to end, by 1900 he had become a mere cog in the production line, making an insignificant contribution. Thus, partition of labor made him feel fragmented, alienated not only from the rest of club merely 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

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Source: https://www.mdc.edu/wolfson/Academic/ArtsLetters/art_philosophy/Humanities/history_of_modernism.htm

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