Modernism
Historical outline
- Emerged in mid-nineteenth century Western Europe.
- “Traditional” forms of art, literature, religious faith, social organization and daily life had become outdatedsweep them aside.
-In the first half of the nineteenth centurywars and revolutions and rise of Romantic movements (emphasis on individual subjective experience, the supremacy of "Nature" as a subject for art).
-By mid-century after failure of Romantic ideal. In GBVictoria era (Realism)reality dominates over impressions that are subjective.
-Friedrich Nietzsche and Søren Kierkegaardantirationalists (Existentialism) challenged ideas of certainty from pure reason.
- From the 1870s'progress always good’was in crisis.
- Charles Darwin, Karl Marxman driven by animal impulses and economic problems not transient but contradictions within the capitalist system.
-In the arts and letters, two ideas originating in France1) Impressionismhuman beings do not see objects, but instead see light itself.Symbolismlanguage is expressly symbolic and poetry and writing should follow connections that the words create.
The beginning of modernism, 1890 — 1910
- 1890spush aside previous norms entirely, instead of revising past.
-Theory of Relativity + increased role of the social sciencesif thenature of reality itself was in question, and restrictions were falling, then art, too, would have to radically change.
- Attempt to find a way to explain what was unknowna number of works broke the implicit contract that artists were the interpreters and representatives of bourgeois culture and ideasArnold Schoenberg's atonal music + abstract expressionist paintings of Wassily Kandinsky + rise of cubismof Picasso.
The explosion of modernism 1910–1930
- Modernismdisruption, rejecting Realism in literature and artset modernists apart from 19th century artists, who had tended to believe in 'progress' like Dickens.
- Futurism exemplifies this trend. In 1909, Marinetti's first manifesto was published.
-World War IRealism could not explain the fundamentally fantastic nature of trench warfare and the view that mankind was making slow and steady moral progress came to seem ridiculous in the face of the senseless slaughter of the Great War.
- Thus in the 1920s, modernism, which had been such a minority taste before the war, came to define the age.
- Exhibitions, theatre, cinema, books and buildings all served to cement in the public view the perception that the world was changing.
- By 1930, Modernism had entered popular culture.
Symbolism
- Late nineteenth centuryart movement of French and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts.
Precursors and origins
- Reaction against Naturalism and Realismcapture reality in its particularity.
- Reaction in favour of spirituality, imagination, and dreams.
- The Symbolist movement in literature has its roots in Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire.
The Symbolist Manifesto
- Art should aim to capture more absolute truths only through indirect methods. They wrote in a highly metaphorical and suggestive manner, endowing particular images or objects with symbolic meaning.
- In this art, scenes from nature, human activities, and all other real world phenomena will not be described for their own sake: they are perceptible surfaces created to represent their esoteric affinities with the primordial Ideals.
Techniques
- The Symbolist poets wished to liberate techniques of versification in order to allow greater room for "fluidity", and as such were aligned with the movement towards free verse,…Symbolist poems sought to evoke, rather than to describe; symbolic imagery was used to signify the state of the poet's soul.
- Verlaine argued that in their individual and very different ways, the Symbolist poets found genius a curse; it isolated them from their contemporaries, and as a result these poets were not at all concerned to avoid hermeticism.
Philosophy
- Art as a contemplative refuge from the world of strife and Will. From this desire for an artistic refuge from the world, the Symbolists took characteristic themes of mysticism and otherworldliness and a keen sense of mortality.
- Symbolism had a significant influence on Modernism and its traces can be seen in a number of modernist artists, including T. S. Eliot and William Butler Yeats.
Imagism
- In early 20th century in Anglo-Americanpoetry
- Favored precision of imagery, and clear, sharp language. The Imagists rejected the sentiment and artifice typical of much Romantic and Victorian poetry.
-Group publication of work under the Imagist name in magazines between 1914 and 1917 featured writing by many of the most significant figures in Modernist poetry in English.
- Based in London, the Imagists were drawn from Britain, Ireland and the United States.
- They called for a return to more Classical valuesdirectness of presentation + economy of language + willingness to experiment with non-traditional verse forms.
- Focus on the "thing" as "thing" (an attempt at isolating a single image to reveal its essence) also mirrors contemporary developments in avant-garde art, especially Cubism. Although Imagism isolates objects through the use of what Ezra Pound called "luminous details", Pound's Ideogrammic Method of juxtaposing concrete instances to express an abstraction, is similar to the way in which Cubism synthesizes a single image from multiple perspectives.
Pre-Imagism
- In 1909 the 'Secession Club' met in Soho to discuss plans to reform contemporary poetry through free verse and the removal of all unnecessary verbiage from poems.
- In April 1909, the American poet Ezra Pound was introduced to this group.
- Pound admired the condensed, direct expression that he detected in the writings of Arnaut Daniel, Dante, and Guido Cavalcanti,..For example,…Pound writes of Daniel's line "pensar de lieis m'es repaus" ("it rests me to think of her"): "You cannot get statement simpler than that, or clearer, or less rhetorical".
- Directness, clarity, lack of rhetoricdefining qualities of Imagist poetry.
Statements of intent
- April 1913: Imagism as a movement was launched."Imagism's enabling text", the haiku-like poem of Ezra Pound entitled "In a Station of the Metro":
The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.
- Pound's definition of an image as that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time. Pound goes on to state that It is better to present one Image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works.
Vorticism
- Vorticismshort lived Britishart movement of the early 20th century. Lasted less than three years.
Origins
- The name "Vorticism" given by Ezra Pound in 1913.
- Grew out of Cubism, but more closely related to Futurism in its embrace of dynamism, the machine age and all things modern.
- Vorticism diverged from Futurism in the way that it tried to capture movement in an image. In a Vorticist painting modern life is shown as an array of bold lines and harsh colours drawing the viewer's eye into the centre of the canvas.
- The Vorticists had their own journal, BLAST, edited by Lewis. It published work by Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot