Modernism in 2000 words

An essay written for 1st year critical discourse:

What does it mean to be a Modernist?  

Modernism in art is an abstraction that came to refer to the new forms and techniques of art that emerged in the time of great historical change following the industrial revolution. It spans from roughly the 1890s to the 1970s. Just as old ideas in the sciences underwent radical change, many artists broke from tradition and accepted forms and reinvented the visual arts. Speaking broadly, art started to move past its instrumentalist and strictly representational roles and began to communicate and reflect the new ideas of the increasingly complex society that gave birth to it, in brand new ways.

That new modes of art were produced in the late 1800s is not, in retrospect, surprising. The combustible engine, radio and the telephone had recently shattered man's millennia old concept of space. Likewise, mass media, by facilitating nationalism, had changed human identity.  New modes of transport and communication meant that ideas spread and mutated at a rate unimaginable to previous generations. Intellectual and artistic movements were able to became international and borderless.  Science and secular liberal thinking were taking the place of religious tradition and fatalism. The invention of photography had wiped out painting's monopoly on representational art.

The revolutionary and not so revolutionary social, scientific and philosophic ideas that the world was brimming with in the late 19th and early 20th centuries bubbled through into artistic minds and found voice, and often powerful symbols, in images. Munch and Giacometti's figures of anguish, loneliness and isolation became symbols of existentialism.  Surrealists attempted to plumb the subconscious depths that Freud had brought into the public mind. Muybridge's scientific photographic analyses of human and animal movement provided artists with a new way of looking at time and space. Politically it was a time of extremes, and so it was in the art world. Boundaries were pushed, distorted, and broken. Countless movements with various agendas, accompanied by now unreadable manifestos, spawned: the futurists (Italian proto-fascists), the constructivists (Russian socialists), the Dadaists (disparate avant garde intellectuals), to name but a few. The web-like relationships and interweaving influences of the artistic groups of the 20th century, combined with the influences of science, technology and the new medias that were emerging, created a seething arena of new and relevant ideas. It may now be looked on as telling the story of its age and, for some, a heralded utopian future that didn't materialise.

Impressionism provided one bridge to modernism. The import of this movement was that it acknowledged and celebrated the role of human perception in painting. While a photograph is light directly creating a picture, the impressionists saw that a painting of something is the light from that thing, fleetingly impressed in the mind through the eyes, and transferred to the canvas. The impressionists consciously painted these subjective impressions. This new approach was paralleled at the time by the new scientific theories about the subjective properties of light: electromagnetic waves de-codified by the mind. Because impressionism retained a single view point, tended to have traditional subject matter, and contained behind it's spontaneity "the essence of realism" (Hughes, 113), it is considered a precursor to modernism. There are however a handful of impressionists who have been admitted entry to the modernist pantheon.

There is no way to pin the birth of modernism down, but there is a widespread acceptance that Cezanne had a lot to do with it. It is difficult to visit a major gallery today without spotting at least one painting of someone mimicking his style, and impossible to visit one where his influence is not apparent. Cezanne was a true original, his style strange, blocky and searching, his planes flattened and tilted. The picturesque was not his aim.  There is a solid physicality to his paintings that set them apart form the other impressionists. Though his edges are sharp and clearly delineated, or perhaps because of this, there is always some uncertainty in regards to the positioning of the objects, and their relation to one another, as if he is searching to find a language to express these actual objects on a two dimensional plane. The result is striking and was revolutionary in it's time.

Signac and Seurat's Pointillism, a kind of post-impressionism, sought to express form using scientific colour theory. They used the concept of optical mixing, where planes of small discrete points of colour are combined and mixed by the mind, to create new colours and subtle tonal effects. This technically specific movement later fed into genres as diverse as neo-expressionism and super-realism.

Expressionism too played a large part in the departure from tradition that modernism represented. Figures such as Van Gogh (regarded a post-impressionist), Munch and Schiele charged their canvases with raw emotion, transfiguring landscapes and figurative images into reflections of the soul. This reflexivity, the idea that the painting would say as much about the painter's inner world as the subject, was a notion that modernism constantly toyed with. Abstract expressionists took it even further by discarding the subject altogether. At the other end of the spectrum, Duchamp and, later, Warhol subverted the notion, discarding the role of the artiste by essentially making him/her a reproducer of popular cultural artifacts. The Dadaists scorned expressionism and, by heading in the opposite direction with gags and provocation aimed at the art world (e.g. Duchamp's witty Fountain), paradoxically brought art to new levels of austere group navel-gazing in the latter part of the century.

In the early 1900s Picasso and Braque took Cezanne's late work to it's logical conclusion by rendering single objects from multiple viewpoints, breaking them down into their constituent parts, piecing them back together, simplifying them. The style was cubism, and Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) was the first of it's kind.  Drawing on Cezanne, El Greco and African masks, Picasso's depiction of five whores describes space in a way that was shockingly new and almost indecipherable. In fact, it was such an unusual painting for its time that it was two years finished before Picasso was prepared to show it publicly. Picasso continued to leap from genre to genre throughout his career, and was of the opinion that his different modes of painting were simply different means to express different ideas and did not imply evolution or progress in art (Harrison and Wood, 216-217).  This is an interesting statement to consider in the context of writing an essay on modernism: it is not compatible with the construct of history as a sum of innovations. And yet Picasso was surely a man personally qualified to make it.

Henri Matisse was a contemporary of Picasso who was also veering towards abstraction in many of his works. Like Picasso, Matisse was a seminal modernist, and also much like Picasso, a sponge of ideas and inspirations. He began as an impressionist much influenced by Cezanne, and was one of the founding members of the Fauves, or "wild beasts", an impressionist group typified by it's wild non-representational colours. Matisse went on to draw on decorative Islamic and Asian art, the German expressionists, and his peers, to name a few, to create works recognisable by their vivid colour, bold lines and decorative elements. In Matisse's hands many of the elements of modernism; expressionism, impressionism, cubism, abstraction, naive art, were wielded, not as party tricks, but as a coherent language. His French Window of Colliere, 1914, preempted abstract minimalism by decades, and even in his infirm old age Matisse broke new ground with his decorative "cut-outs", large abstracted collage pieces created by cutting out gouache painted paper with scissors.

With literal representation no longer a concern mixed media became viable and accepted. Collage was used by the cubists to add another layer of complexity to their works. Soon collage, photomontage and typography had all become accepted tools, often used to portray an industrial, mass produced and information-overloaded world. Artists, propagandists, designers and advertisers alike recognised the strong communicative power of these devices. 

Cubism, as a form of abstraction, encouraged other forms of abstraction and a deep well was uncovered. Figures such as Kandinsky and Klee created wholly abstract works (as opposed to abstracted) with stated idealist intentions. A primitive, spiritual and universal language was sought, in line with new-age philosophies and religions of the time. The Jungian idea of the subconscious also fed into mainstream culture and provided artists with fodder for non-representational works. Halfway through the century Jackson Pollock invented the visual counterpart of jazz - the "all-over" painting. Using his paint drip method, standing over the canvas, Pollock created works that were revolutionary. They did not divide space in the way that all paintings until that point had done. There was no subject and not even a point of focus. Any region on the canvas was the equal of any other. Abstract expressionism was born and America, for the first time, had claim to being the homeland of an important movement of the visual arts.

Abstract expressionism of the purest kind, Jackson's all-over paintings or Rothko's colour fields, were meditative and atmospheric. Later Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, who had begun to use found objects and cultural artifacts and symbols as the meat of their works, provided the link to pop-art. Warhol took the appropriation of popular imagery further. By distancing the artist from his work through means of commercial imagery, industrial printing processes, and duplication, he created the perfect analogy for the modern consumer lifestyle.  Superficiality was celebrated.  People were products.  Fame could be bought, sold and borrowed. Pop-art both epitomised and parodied shallow and disposable pop culture.

In the first half of the 20th century, Utopian and Marxist ideas abounded in the arts, especially in the fields of urban design and architecture.  It was believed that a universal way of living and a universal language of form could be achieved, and that it would pave the way, literally, to a social paradise.  This search for universality was a theme of the times: there are parallels in the creations, close to this time, of Esperanto, a unified language, and theosophy, a unified religion.

The Bauhaus school is regarded as the great centre of modernist design in the 1920s. Set up by architect Walter Gropius with the intention of creating an art and design school that would encourage cross-pollination of artistic disciplines, the school's legacy ultimately hangs on its philosophy and the calibre of the people who taught there, among them Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and Mies Van De Rohe.  The school's lofty aspiration of uniting form and function while serving a new society's needs was never reached. In the end the internationalist leftist creation of Gropius, who once spoke of the "evil demon of commercialism" (Harrison and wood,269), failed in its attempts at commercial collaborations, and was shut down by the Nazi government in 1933 (Crouch 70).

Constructivism in Russia and De Stijl and The International Style in Western Europe were movements that similarly emphasised utilitarianism, functionality, rationality, mechanisation, clean lines over bourgeois ornamentation and the collective over the individual. Mondrian and Rietveld's iconic black, white and primary colour scheme was a result of ideological reductionism. The architecture that resulted from the idea of arranging space as social medicine, and the uses to which it was put, were wildly varied. They ranged from Le Corbusier's futuristic, levitating Villa Savoye in Poissy, to the appalling blockish buildings meted out as Soviet punishment in the states of the former  USSR, to the now ubiquitous skyscraper, the ultimate phallic symbol of capitalism.

In the history of modernism innumerable movements and groups schismed and merged, but the strong unique visions of individuals were of equal importance. The dawning acceptance of art that would have once been seen as quite radical was key.  Each door opened another. These individuals owed debts to the ground-breakers, but the fact that the ground was now broken allowed them to bring their new forms and ideas into the public arena. In pre-industrial western society a stiflingly socially conservative culture was the norm. The turbulence of the ensuing social change had lifted this, and these generations were living in a new and changed world. Modernism is the (in my opinion unfortunate) name given to the intellectual dust that was raised and the work it created.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Crouch, C., Modernism in Art Design & Architecture, MacMillan Press, UK (1999)

Essers, V., Matisse, Master of Colour, Taschen, Germany (1993)

Harrison, C. & Wood, P., Eds., Art in Theory, 1900 - 2000, Blackwell Publishing, UK (2003)

Hughes, R., The Shock of the New, BBC Books, UK (1991)