When was the modernist movement

In the period between the two world wars, European architects embraced this concept and designed not just commercial buildings, but houses in this bold, new form. In that same timeframe stateside, American architects continued to design more traditional style houses, yet experiment with new forms for skyscrapers and commercial buildings.

As Europe sunk into chaos just before WWII, many prominent architects emigrated to the US, bringing their new architectural concepts with them. In the first modern architectures exhibit in America was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City which brought these new ideas in architecture to the forefront. 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 not necessarily the most significant reason why this questioning took place. One of the causes of this iconoclasm was the fact that early 20th-century culture was literally re-inventing itself on a daily basis. With so many scientific discoveries and technological innovations taking place, the world was changing so quickly that culture had to re-define itself constantly in order to keep pace with modernity and not appear anachronistic. By the time a new scientific or philosophical system or artistic style had found acceptance, each was soon after questioned and discarded for an even newer one.

Another reason for this fickleness was the fact that people felt a tremendous creative energy always looming in the background as if to announce the birth of some new invention or theory. As a consequence of the new technological dynamics, the modernists felt a sense of constant anticipation and did not want to commit to any one system 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 academic art for its lack of freedom and flirted with so many isms: secessionism, fauvism, expressionism, cubism, futurism, constructivism, dada, and surrealism. Pablo Picasso, for instance, went as far as experimenting with several of these styles, never wanting to feel too comfortable with any one style.

The wrestling with all the new assumptions about reality and culture generated a new permissiveness in the realm of the arts. The arts were now beginning to break all of the rules since they were trying to keep pace with all of the theoretical and technological advances that were changing the whole structure of life.

In doing so, artists broke rank with everything that had been taught as being sacred and invented and experimented with new artistic languages that could more appropriately express the meaning of all of the new changes that were occurring. The result was a new art that appeared strange and radical to whoever experienced it because the artistic standard had always been mimesis, the literal imitation or representation of the appearance of nature, people, and society.

In other words, 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 ancient Greece, had been perfected during the Renaissance, and had found prominence during the nineteenth-century. But for modern artists this old standard was too limiting and did not reflect the way that life was now being experienced. Freud and Einstein had radically changed perception of reality.

Freud had asked us to look inwardly into a personal world that had previously been repressed, and Einstein taught us that relativity was everything. And, thus, new artistic forms had to be found 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 individual work begged to be judged as a self-sufficient unit which obeyed its own internal laws and its own internal logic, thereby attaining its own individual character.

No more conventional cookie-cutter forms to be superimposed on human expression What were some of the artistic beliefs that the modernists adopted? Above all they embraced freedom, and they found it in the artistic 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 basis of 19th-century artistic endeavor. On the one hand, primitivism represented the simplification of form, which was to become one of the hallmarks of modernism.

This abstraction of form suggested that some essential structure, previously hidden by realistic technique, would come to light. Art had, according to the modernists, become too 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. Within a few years, many Modernist writers moved overseas.

These writers held and attended literary salons. Poets such as E. Not all Modernist poets followed the writers who were making revolutionary changes to the world of poetics. Marianne Moore, for example, wrote some form poetry, and Robert Frost once said that writing free verse was "like playing tennis without a net.

By the s, a new generation of Postmodern poets came to the forefront. The Modernist ideas of Imagism and the work of William Carlos Williams, for example, continue to have a great influence on writers today. Main Menu. Magazines 3. Evaluating your Sources 4. As a movement, Vorticism rejected the typical landscapes and nudes of the time in favor of a geometric style tending towards abstraction.

The Vorticism group began with the Rebel Art Centre established by Wyndham Lewis as a break with other traditional schools, and had its intellectual and artistic roots in the Bloomsbury Group, Cubism, and Futurism. Lewis saw Vorticism as an independent alternative to Cubism, Futurism, and Expressionism.

Though the style grew out of Cubism, it is more closely related to Futurism in its embrace of dynamism, the machine age, and all things modern. However, Vorticism diverged from both Cubism and Futurism in the way it tried to capture movement in an image.

It contained work by Ezra Pound, T. Eliot, and by the Vorticists themselves. Its typographical adventurousness was cited by El Lissitzky as one of the major forerunners of the revolution in graphic design in the s and s.

After this, the movement broke up, largely due to the onset of World War I and public apathy towards their work. Symbolism was a late 19th century art movement of French, Russian, and Belgian origin that manifested in poetry and other arts. Symbolism was largely a reaction against naturalism and realism, anti-idealistic styles that were attempts to represent reality in its gritty particularity, and to elevate the humble and the ordinary over the ideal. Symbolism, on the other hand, favored spirituality, the imagination, dreams, emotions, and the personal subjectivity of the artist as a tool to illustrate larger truths.

Thematically, Symbolist artists tended to focus on themes surrounding the occult, decadence, melancholy, and death. Symbolists believed that art should represent absolute truths that could only be described indirectly. Thus, they wrote and painted in a very metaphorical and suggestive manner, endowing particular images or objects with symbolic meaning.

Though the aesthetics of the styles can be considered similar in some ways, the two remain distinct. The symbolist painters were an important influence on expressionism and surrealism in painting, two movements that descend directly from symbolism proper.

The work of some symbolist visual artists, such as Jan Toorop, directly affected the curvilinear forms of art nouveau. Art Nouveau was an international style of art and architecture that was most popular from — Art Nouveau is an international style of art and architecture that was most popular from — AD.

It is also considered a philosophy of furniture design. Art Nouveau furniture is structured according to the whole building and made part of ordinary life. Art Nouveau was most popular in Europe, but its influence was global. It is a very varied style with frequent localized tendencies. These decorative displays became so strongly associated with the style, that the name of his gallery subsequently provided a commonly used term for the entire style.

Likewise, Jugend Youth was the illustrated weekly magazine of art and lifestyle of Munich, founded in by Georg Hirth.

Jugend was instrumental in promoting the Art Nouveau style in Germany. As a result, Jungenstil , or Youth Style, became the German word for the style. The origins of Art Nouveau are found in the resistance of the artist William Morris to the cluttered compositions and revivalist tendencies of the 19th century. His theories helped initiate the Art Nouveau movement. About the same time, the flat perspective and strong colors of Japanese wood block prints, especially those of Katsushika Hokusai, had a strong effect on the formulation of Art Nouveau.