Supplied original text
Modernism (English: modernism) refers to:
Modernism.
Experimental artistic movements that arose in various fields in the early twentieth century. Also called modern art (discussed in detail in this article).
A movement that arose in the Catholic Church in the late nineteenth century and advocated a faith suited to the modern age, but was deemed heretical. See Modernism (Catholicism).
For modernist movements in Spanish and Portuguese, see Modernismo.
Modernism refers to artistic movements that emerged from the twentieth century onward, particularly avant-garde tendencies centered on the 1920s after the First World War (the interwar period). In contrast to established nineteenth-century art, these movements sought forms of expression unbound by traditional frameworks.
Frank Lloyd Wright, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1946–1959[1]
Modernism in Various Fields
Literature
In literature, the term refers to experimental works by James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and others (modernist literature). The modernist movement in Latin American literature, in particular, is known as Modernismo literature. Speaking about the relationship between art and tradition, T. S. Eliot said that our forebears emphasized their immortality[2].
Painting
Various movements, including Impressionism, Neo-Impressionism, Fauvism, Futurism, Cubism, Surrealism, and Pop Art, arose as new movements in painting in opposition to the traditional, conservative art establishment[3]. See Twentieth-Century Art. Modernism often rejects nineteenth-century realism when the latter is understood as focusing on the embodiment of meaning in naturalistic representation. Some modernists instead sought a more realistic realism. For example, Picasso's 1907 proto-Cubist painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon represents its subjects on a flat, two-dimensional pictorial plane rather than from a single viewpoint. Picasso's The Poet of 1911 is similarly decentered, depicting the body from multiple perspectives. The Peggy Guggenheim Collection comments that Picasso presents multiple views of each object, as though he had moved around it, and combines them into a single composite image.
There are various theories about the beginning of modernism in painting. One of the earliest places the starting point of the avant-garde in France at the Salon des Refusés of 1863, where painters who would later become Impressionists and others exhibited after being rejected by the academy's Salon. However, major support for modernism came from the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, which opened in 1929, and the American art critic Clement Greenberg, who published the essay Avant-Garde and Kitsch in 1939. After the turbulence of the 1960s, the end of modernism began to be proclaimed around the late 1970s. (See Postmodernism.)
Philosophy and Thought
In philosophy and political thought, the term refers to ideas centered on human reason since the Enlightenment, in opposition to authoritarian ideas and systems such as classical monarchy, theocracy, and feudalism. Modernism has roots in thinkers such as Machiavelli[4], and its philosophers included Sartre, Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, and Jaspers.
Modern philosophy, or modernism, is also sometimes criticized by postmodernism for its human-centered outlook, belief in progress, emphasis on industry, and tendency toward uniformity.
Architecture
In architecture, movements such as the Vienna Secession, De Stijl, and the Bauhaus rejected historical styles that used ornament from the past; from these tendencies eventually emerged the modern architectural movement, which regarded rational, functional architecture as its ideal[5]. Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and Frank Lloyd Wright are considered representative architects of modern architecture worldwide (modernist architecture). One landscape style favored around the world in the twentieth century was the naturalistic landscape garden. The main reason for its popularity was that naturalistic planting, which could serve as a restrained “ground,” was best suited to modern architecture, which rejected the pressure and symbolism of architecture. The conclusion is that landscape did not fail to become modern because, as Fletcher Steele wrote in his work (F. Steele (1930): New Pioneering in Garden Desi Landscape Architecture, October.), “trees remained trees; therefore landscape could not be modernized.” Rather, it could not achieve modernity because it was compelled to appear natural.
The restructuring of cities in accordance with the ecological distribution of vegetation had already been undertaken in the early twentieth century by Frederick Law Olmsted, the forefather of modern landscape architecture. Boston's Emerald Necklace is one example. Rather than defining Boston's outskirts through artificial forms, it sought to define them through continuous vegetation following the waterways. This was not only a solution to social problems such as sanitation and welfare, but also an extraordinary feat of translating that organic form into a transportation system called the parkway. It was a proposal for vegetation that addressed the problems of modernity in a multifaceted way, rather than the one-dimensional idea of adding greenery to cities. While regional planning was developing through this reassessment in terms of ecological zones of vegetation, pioneers such as Dan Kiley began actively experimenting with new garden compositions around the 1940s so that planting could become a new language in spatial design.
Further experiments in Minimalism[6] and environmental art took place during the 1960s and 1970s. In these, one can see the rhythm pursued by early landscape architects, as well as ways of handling plants in environmental art. David Nash, for example, incorporated the process of sawing timber into the creation of works based on ideas such as “wood as a sculptural material was originally a tree.” According to J. Andrew[7], he stood at the intersection between the sculptor's intention to move toward minimal forms and the contingent forms of trees as living organisms. Minimalist art was based on a “rejection of rhetoric.” When the approach of excluding all narrative from form—a concept within modern visual art—was extended to landscape by Dieter Kienast in Europe and by the next generation, including Peter Walker, it brought the distinctive qualities of plants as living materials into renewed focus. Within arrangements purified to the utmost, plants revealed their formal value as living organisms: no two could have the same form. Meanwhile, George Hargreaves developed environmental art's interest in plants into an approach that entrusted the restoration of landfill sites as parks and the improvement of riverbanks to the contingency of spontaneously growing plants. He focused on how much environmental art drew inspiration from the biological characteristics of plants—individual variation, contingency, and proliferation—and created a formal language of resistance to institutions and questioning of structures.
Minimalism
Minimalism denotes movements in various forms of art and design, particularly visual art and music. In these movements, artists reveal the essence or identity of a subject by eliminating all nonessential forms, features, or concepts. Minimalism is a design or style that achieves the greatest effect through the simplest, most minimal elements.
As a particular movement in art, it is associated with developments in Western art after the Second World War, most strongly with American visual art of the 1960s and early 1970s. Prominent artists associated with the movement include Donald Judd, John McCracken, Agnes Martin, Dan Flavin, Robert Morris, Ronald Bladen, Anne Truitt, and Frank Stella.[8] It arose from the reductive aspects of modernism and is often interpreted as a response to Abstract Expressionism and a bridge to postminimalist art. By the early 1960s, Minimalism had emerged as an abstract movement in art (Kazimir Malevich's geometric abstraction,[9] the Bauhaus, and Piet Mondrian), in contention with relational and subjective painting, ideas about the complexity of abstract expressionist surfaces, and the emotional spiritualists and polemicists found in action painting. Minimalism argued that extreme simplicity could capture all the sublime expression necessary in art. It has variously been interpreted as a precursor to postmodernism or as a postmodern movement in its own right. In the latter view, early Minimalism produced advanced modernist works, but the movement partially abandoned this direction when some artists, such as Morris, changed course in support of the Anti-Form movement.
In his essay The Minx of Minimalism[10], Hal Foster examines whether Donald Judd and Robert Morris both acknowledge and surpass Greenbergian modernism in their published definitions of Minimalism[10]. He argues that Minimalism is not a “dead end” of modernism but a “paradigm shift toward contemporary practices that continue today”[10].
The term was extended to encompass musical movements characterized by repetition and reiteration, such as the compositions of La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and John Adams. Minimalist composition is known as systems music. In colloquial use, “minimalist” means something spare in, or stripped down to, its essential elements. It has also been used to describe Samuel Beckett's plays and novels, Robert Bresson's films, Raymond Carver's stories, and Colleen Chapman's automobile designs.
Smithson's Spiral Jetty seen from the top of Rozel Point in Utah, United States, in mid-April 2005. Created in 1970 and still in existence, it is often submerged beneath the lake's surface as the water level changes. Composed of earth, salt, and basalt, it weighs approximately 6,500 tons.
Modernism in Africa and Asia
Santiniketan: The Making of a Contextual Modernism (see also Santiniketan: The Making of a Contextual Modernism and Hanshinkan Modernism).
Peter Kalliney suggests that “modernist concepts, especially aesthetic autonomy, were fundamental to the literature of decolonization in anglophone Africa”[11]. In his view, Rajat Neogy, Christopher Okigbo, and Wole Soyinka were among the writers who “repurposed modernist aesthetic autonomy to declare freedom from colonial bondage, from systems of racial discrimination, and even from a new colonial era”[12].
According to the scholar William J. Tyler, the terms “modernism” and “modernist” have only recently become part of standard English-language discourse about modern Japanese literature, and questions remain about their validity in relation to Western European modernism. Tyler finds this curious in light of the clearly modern prose of prominent Japanese writers such as Yasunari Kawabata, Kafū Nagai, Jun'ichirō Tanizaki[13], and Riichi Yokomitsu. However, “scholars of visual art, architecture, and poetry readily accepted ‘modernism’ as an important concept for describing and analyzing Japanese culture of the 1920s and 1930s”[14]. In 1924, various young Japanese writers, including Yasunari Kawabata and Riichi Yokomitsu, launched the literary magazine Bungei Jidai (“Artistic Age”). This magazine was “part of an ‘art for art's sake’ movement influenced by European Cubism, Expressionism, Dada, and other modernist styles”[15].
The Japanese modernist architect Kenzō Tange (1913–2005) was one of the architects who combined traditional Japanese styles with modernism, and he designed buildings on every continent. He said, “I think it was around 1959 or the beginning of the 1960s that I started thinking about what I later called structuralism”[16]. His modernism was influenced by Le Corbusier, and he became famous after winning the design competition for Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park in 1949.
In China, the “New Sensationists” (the New Sensory Stimulation School, Xīn Gǎnjué Pài) were a Shanghai-based group of writers influenced by Western and Japanese modernism during the 1930s and 1940s. They wrote fiction more concerned with the unconscious and aesthetics than with politics or social issues. These writers included Mu Shiying, Liu Na'ou, and Shi Zhecun.
In India, the Progressive Artists' Group was a group of contemporary artists based in Mumbai, India, formed mainly in 1947. Although it lacked a specific style, it synthesized Indian art with European and North American influences from the first half of the twentieth century, including Post-Impressionism, Cubism, and Expressionism.
Source and contextual reading
No original source URL or bibliography accompanied the supplied text. Citation markers [1]–[16] are retained as part of that text. The full text, including its dates, names and attributed quotations, has not been independently verified.
Materials from MoMA, the V&A, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art provide context for experimentation in modern art, the Bauhaus and modern architecture, and encounters between international practices and local traditions in India. They do not establish or verify the source of every assertion in the supplied original note.
Modern art — MoMA
Modernist architecture: the Bauhaus and beyond — V&A
Modern Art in India — The Metropolitan Museum of Art