Modernism

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MODERNISM

Modernism emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century as a means of reimagining and ultimately securing art's role within a culture progressively detaching itself from the institutions and practitioners of aesthetic culture. Amid the growing influence of mass media, popular entertainment, and widespread consumerism, two phenomena in particular were pivotal in establishing the conditions under which the new forms of modernist practice developed: the waning influence of the official academic Salons, and the pressure exerted on individuals by increasingly technologically mediated modes of experience. Threatened with obsolescence in the face of a dissolving system of state-sponsored patronage, art had to find new forms of address and alternative modes of expression. Modernism, then, names a set of relentlessly self-critical formal strategies that surfaced in response to art's contingent status in the wake of the rapid industrialization ushered in by the expanding social strata of the urban bourgeoisie. This quest for criticality through formal analysis was intended to reflect on the terms of art's shifting terrain while continuing to offer a realization of the potential left to art under such conditions.

Artists and writers reacted to these circumstances by updating both the forms and the subjects of their works in an attempt to adequately represent their new urban experiences. With his article "The Painter of Modern Life" (1863) the poet and critic Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) emerged as a leading theorist of modernism, championing the creation of new styles of artistic production suited to capturing the texture and feel of life in the swelling metropolis. He embodied these ideals in his own poetry, most notably in his collection Les Fleurs du mal (1857; The Flowers of Evil), which evinced new symbolic relationships between language and the sensory phenomena elicited by the city.

Baudelaire's literary influence gave rise to the symbolists, a diverse group of writers working in France at the end of the nineteenth century. Poets like Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898) and Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) were united by a desire to evoke the nature of their urban perambulations via imaginative free-verse passages. The symbolists eschewed earlier modes of naturalism and realism, giving primacy instead to the often-arbitrary associations of the mind stimulated by the dizzying and sometimes dreamy character of life in the burgeoning metropolis.

Symbolism rippled across national borders as well, with an important variant cropping up in Germany under the leadership of the poet Stefan George (1868–1933). Borrowing from the symbolists' revolt against naturalism, George theorized a program for literary production that drew heavily on the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). Meanwhile, removed from life in the frenzied urban centers, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) expanded the boundaries of lyric poetry, using rhymed, metered composition to survey previously unexamined subjects. He is best known for his "object poems," which were modeled after the work of the sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) and attempted to crystallize the reality of physical objects.

In the visual arts, modernism arrived via a picnic in the park. In 1863 a group of artists and their supporters created the Salon des Refusés, a democratically run alternative to the juried Salon exhibitions of the academy of fine arts, which had dominated official painting in France since the seventeenth century. In its inaugural show, Édouard Manet (1832–1883) exhibited his Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (Luncheon on the grass), which appropriated and radically reworked the subjects and technique of Old Master painting, offering an uncompromising representation of a classically inspired female nude recontextualized in the space of a park luncheon with two contemporary bourgeois gentlemen. Manet's handling of paint, which employed flat, untransitioned patches of color, also engaged with the new forms of mechanical reproduction to create the flash-like visual fields characteristic of photography.

The impressionist painters furthered Manet's concern with absorbing the look of ready-made technology within the medium of painting. Artists such as Claude Monet (1840–1926) created canvases filled with tiny brushstrokes that when viewed from a distance produced optical sensations that mirrored the effects of naturally illuminated landscapes. Other artists, like Edgar Degas (1834–1917) and Gustave Caillebotte (1848–1894), rose to Baudelaire's demands by taking to the streets to create works that were produced from everyday encounters. The so-called neo-impressionists, who included Paul Signac (1863–1935) and Georges Seurat (1859–1891), updated the science behind impressionism's reformulated color theories by further atomizing their predecessors' tactile brushwork. Elsewhere, post-impressionists including Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) and Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) built on the tradition of landscape by undertaking to represent a remote, removed vision of the world. The flatness and discontinuous composition of canvases like Cézanne's Mont Sainte-Victoire series and Gauguin's works from Brittany and Tahiti gave form to an alienated subjectivity that longed to reassert itself through mining the bare materiality of the painted surface itself.

In Vienna artists previously operating under state-controlled academies similarly broke with the more traditional exhibition sites and societies for art. In 1897, led by the painter Gustav Klimt (1862–1918), a group calling themselves the secessionists formally split with these institutions of high art. Their work drew heavily on the design language of art nouveau to create large mural-size pieces that fused erotically depicted subjects in the context of highly ornamental decorative programs.

The early twentieth century witnessed an eruption of formal variants to the issues linking modernism to ideas of the self. Liberated from the burden of a purely mimetic correspondence to the world, the assertion of flatness as a structural limit to painting enabled artists to imagine and realize new visions of the world. Movements like fauvism, exemplified in paintings like Henri Matisse's (1869–1954) The Red Studio (1911), actively obliterated form through areas of wild, violent color. In Germany, expressionism—colorful street scenes and distorted perspectives first popularized by a collective known as Die Brücke (The bridge)—became the dominant style in the visual arts. Der Blaue Reiter (The blue rider), a group of German artists that included Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) and Paul Klee (1879–1940), updated the ambitions of the earlier expressionists, connecting the inner vision of the artist, through painting, to a more transcendental theosophical worldview.

In France, Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) and Georges Braque (1882–1963) developed the technique they called cubism, which fused abstraction and figuration within a single painted register. This radical analysis of form reworked the traditional subjects of still life and portraiture according to the parameters of the two-dimensional picture plane. In later variations, cubist painters also employed synthetic collage elements like pasted paper in order to further scrutinize the relationship between everyday objects and the flat surfaces native to painting.

Futurism, spawned in Italy shortly before the outbreak of World War I, denounced the dominant paradigm of expressionistic, subject-oriented artistic production. According to the group's 1909 manifesto, penned by the poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944), futurism's overarching ambition was to bring art into direct conversation with the character of urban experience. Artistically, this translated into a repudiation of the traditional subjects and contexts for art in order to adequately capture the movement and dizzying speed of modern technology.

After the start of World War I modernism continued to develop and explore new aesthetic terrain. As technology and mass media increased their hold on popular culture, questions surrounding art's function in Europe's rapidly changing societies became essential to a sustained engagement with modernism. This self-reflexivity, born in response to modernism's self-imagined obsolescence, has given rise to a tradition of relentless formal innovation that has sustained modernist aesthetic production throughout the twentieth century and beyond.