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Slide 01
Modernism
- Modern
- Art & Culture
- A seismic cultural shift across art, literature, architecture, and music — from the 1880s to the 1960s — that rejected tradition, embraced experimentation, and declared the present moment new territory to be mapped.
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Slide 02
What Was Modernism?
- Definition
- Modernism was a broad cultural movement that swept the arts in the late 19th and early 20th centuries — characterised by a radical break with the past, an embrace of experimentation, and a faith in the liberating power of the new.
- Rejection of Victorian conventions and 19th-century Romanticism
- Embraced abstraction, fragmentation, and subjective experience
- Driven by urbanisation, industrialisation, World War I, and Freudian psychology
- Across literature, visual art, architecture, music, and philosophy simultaneously
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Slide 03
The World That Made Modernism
- Context
- Modernism did not arise from aesthetic whim — it was the cultural response to the most disorienting period in human history: industrialisation, mass death in war, the city, Freud, Einstein, and Darwin all colliding at once.
- Industrial cities created alienation, anonymity, and unprecedented speed of change
- World War I (1914–18) shattered faith in progress, reason, and tradition
- Freud revealed the unconscious — the self was no longer transparent to itself
- Einstein's relativity undermined absolute space, time, and certainty
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Slide 04
Seeds of Modernity
- Precursors
- Modernism had antecedents — artists and thinkers who strained against Romanticism and Realism in the second half of the 19th century, planting seeds that would bloom into full revolution by 1910.
- Baudelaire's poetry of urban experience and beauty in the transient (1860s)
- Impressionism (1870s): dissolving solid forms into light and sensation
- Nietzsche — "God is dead"; traditional values must be revalued and replaced
- Cézanne's geometric analysis of form — the direct ancestor of Cubism
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Slide 05
Modernism in Visual Art
- Visual Art
- Modern art abandoned the mimetic tradition — the task of accurately representing the visible world — and turned instead toward abstraction, emotion, structure, and the interior life as legitimate subjects of painting.
- Fauvism (1905): Matisse and Derain used violent colour for emotional expression
- Cubism (1907): Picasso and Braque shattered single viewpoint representation
- Futurism (1909): Boccioni and Marinetti celebrated speed, machines, and violence
- Expressionism: Munch, Kirchner — inner psychological states made visible
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Slide 06
Cubism: Shattering the Eye
- Cubism
- Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) and the Analytic Cubism that followed destroyed the single viewpoint that had governed Western painting since the Renaissance — showing multiple perspectives simultaneously.
- Analytic Cubism (1908–12): fragmented, monochromatic, multi-perspectival
- Synthetic Cubism (1912–14): collage introduced non-art materials into high art
- African masks and Iberian sculpture as liberating formal influences on Picasso
- Cubism's visual language spread immediately into architecture, design, and literature
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Slide 07
The Birth of Abstraction
- Abstraction
- Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, and Kazimir Malevich independently arrived at pure abstraction — the conviction that art need not represent anything external, that colour, form, and line were sufficient as subjects.
- Kandinsky's "Composition VII" (1913) — first purely non-representational painting
- Mondrian's De Stijl: primary colours and horizontal/vertical lines only — pure harmony
- Malevich's Black Square (1915) — zero point of painting, absolute abstraction
- Abstract art asked: what does painting mean when freed from resemblance?
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Slide 08
Dada: Anti-Art as Art
- Dada
- In Zurich in 1916, artists reeling from the absurdity of World War I created an anti-art movement — using nonsense, chance, and mockery to attack rationalism, bourgeois culture, and the very concept of artistic seriousness.
- Hugo Ball's sound poetry at Cabaret Voltaire — pure phonetic nonsense
- Marcel Duchamp's readymades: a urinal signed "R. Mutt" submitted to an exhibition
- Hannah Höch's photomontages — cutting up newspapers to expose media's violence
- Dada asked: if civilisation produced this war, why should we respect civilisation's art?
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Slide 09
Surrealism: Dreaming Awake
- Surrealism
- André Breton's Surrealist Manifesto (1924) sought to reconcile dream and reality into a "super-reality" — using automatic writing, dream imagery, and chance to bypass conscious censorship and access the unconscious.
- Salvador Dalí's melting watches (The Persistence of Memory, 1931) — dream logic rendered precisely
- René Magritte's visual paradoxes: "This is not a pipe" under a painting of a pipe
- Frida Kahlo — personal mythology, pain, and Mexican identity in surreal self-portraits
- Max Ernst's frottage and decalcomania — chance as creative collaborator
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Slide 10
Modernist Literature
- Literature
- Modernist writers abandoned linear narrative, omniscient narration, and conventional prose — experimenting with stream of consciousness, unreliable narrators, time fragmentation, and the limits of language itself.
- James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) — one day in Dublin, 265,000 words, eighteen styles
- Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway (1925) — interior consciousness as the true subject
- T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922) — allusion, fragmentation, and cultural despair
- Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time — 3,000 pages of memory and sensation
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Slide 11
The Modernist Poem
- Poetry
- Modernist poets broke from Victorian metre and rhyme — using free verse, imagism, and compression to make poetry more immediate, more precise, and more honest about the difficulty of meaning.
- Ezra Pound: "Make it new!" — his editorial hand shaped both Eliot and Joyce
- Imagism: exact language, hard clear image, no excess decoration or abstraction
- W.B. Yeats — myth, symbol, and the apocalyptic vision in "The Second Coming" (1919)
- William Carlos Williams: "no ideas but in things" — the ordinary as poetic subject
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Slide 12
Modernist Architecture
- Architecture
- Modernist architecture declared war on historical ornament — "ornament is crime" (Adolf Loos) — and pursued pure function expressed through new materials: steel, glass, and reinforced concrete.
- Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye (1929) — the five points of modern architecture realised
- Mies van der Rohe: "Less is more" — Barcelona Pavilion (1929), Seagram Building (1958)
- Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus school building in Dessau (1926)
- Frank Lloyd Wright: organic architecture, Prairie style, Fallingwater (1936)
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Slide 13
Modernism in Music
- Music
- Musical Modernism dismantled the tonal system that had organised Western music for three centuries — Schoenberg's atonality and serialism, Stravinsky's rhythmic violence, and Bartók's folk-inflected abstraction all pointing away from harmony.
- Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique: all notes treated equally, no tonal hierarchy
- Stravinsky's Rite of Spring (1913) premiere — audience riot in the concert hall
- Debussy's Impressionism — dissolving tonal resolution into floating harmonics
- Cage's 4'33" (1952) — silence as composition, the room itself as the music
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Slide 14
The Harlem Renaissance
- Harlem Renaissance
- The 1920s Harlem Renaissance brought Black American cultural production — literature, jazz, visual art, and philosophy — into the mainstream of Modernism, transforming American culture while insisting on Black intellectual life as its equal centre.
- Langston Hughes — jazz rhythms and vernacular voice in poetry of African American life
- Zora Neale Hurston — folklore, anthropology, and dialect as literary resources
- Duke Ellington defined jazz as America's genuinely modernist art form
- Aaron Douglas — geometric Cubist forms merged with African American iconography
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Slide 15
Modernism and Cinema
- Film
- Cinema itself was a Modernist medium — born in the 1890s, it rapidly became the most powerful art form of the 20th century, absorbing Modernist techniques of montage, discontinuity, and subjective experience.
- Eisenstein's montage theory — meaning emerges from collision of images (Battleship Potemkin, 1925)
- German Expressionist cinema: twisted forms and shadow as psychological reality
- French New Wave (1950s–60s): Godard, Truffaut — jump cuts, fourth-wall breaks, improvisation
- Citizen Kane (1941) — subjective time, multiple narrators, deep focus photography
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Slide 16
Abstract Expressionism
- New York in the 1940s–50s became the new centre of modern art — as European modernists fled fascism, American painters synthesised their influences into a new painting of raw scale, gesture, and emotional intensity.
- Jackson Pollock's drip paintings — action as the meaning, process as the work
- Mark Rothko's colour fields — vast rectangles of luminous colour and spiritual yearning
- Willem de Kooning — violent brushwork and the human figure at the edge of dissolution
- Clement Greenberg's criticism gave Abstract Expressionism its theoretical framework
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Slide 17
The Modernist Novel's Techniques
- The Novel
- The stream of consciousness technique — following the continuous, associative flow of thought — was Modernism's most radical narrative innovation, refusing to summarise interiority and instead performing it in real time.
- Interior monologue: Molly Bloom's soliloquy at the end of Ulysses — 36 pages without punctuation
- Unreliable narrators: the reader cannot trust what they are told — meaning requires work
- Spatial form: novels structured as spatial patterns rather than temporal sequence
- Myth as scaffolding: Joyce's Homeric parallel gave Ulysses its invisible architecture
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Slide 18
International Modernism Spreads
- International Style
- After World War II, modernist architecture became synonymous with the reconstruction of Europe and the ambitions of the developing world — glass-curtain-wall towers and concrete housing blocks arising in every capital city.
- United Nations Headquarters, New York (1952) — modernism as world order
- Chandigarh (1950s, Le Corbusier) — designing a new Indian capital from scratch
- Brasília (1960, Niemeyer/Costa) — entire capital city as modernist manifesto
- Social housing: utopian design at scale — some a triumph, many a catastrophe
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Slide 19
Women in Modernism
- Gender and Modernity
- Modernism claimed universality but often sidelined women — yet women were central to the movement as artists, writers, patrons, and intellectual conveners, frequently creating its most powerful works.
- Virginia Woolf — "A Room of One's Own" (1929) diagnosed the institutional exclusion
- Gertrude Stein's Paris salon was the social engine of early literary Modernism
- Frida Kahlo merged Surrealism with Indigenous Mexican identity and feminist pain
- Bauhaus women were directed away from architecture into weaving — and transformed textiles
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Slide 20
The Philosophy of Modernism
- Philosophy
- Modernism coincided with a philosophical revolution that dismantled Enlightenment certainties — Nietzsche, Bergson, Husserl, and Heidegger each contributed to a new understanding of consciousness, time, and being.
- Nietzsche: will to power, the death of God, the eternal recurrence — revaluation of all values
- Bergson: time is durée — lived, flowing duration rather than mechanical clock-time
- Husserl's phenomenology: return to the structures of conscious experience itself
- Heidegger: being-in-the-world, authenticity, and the critique of technological modernity
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Slide 21
Paris: Capital of Modernism
- Paris
- Between 1880 and 1940 Paris was the undisputed world capital of Modernist culture — attracting every significant artist, writer, and intellectual to the cafés of Montparnasse and the galleries of Montmartre.
- Café de Flore and Café de la Rotonde: Picasso, Hemingway, Simone de Beauvoir
- Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company bookshop first published Ulysses (1922)
- Natalie Barney's salon — weekly gathering of leading Modernist writers for decades
- The Paris School: Modigliani, Soutine, Chagall — internationalism of the Modernist hub
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Slide 22
Modernism and Political Power
- Modernism and Politics
- Modernism's relationship to politics was deeply troubled — some of its greatest artists embraced fascism or Stalinism while others became its most eloquent critics. Art and ideology collided with catastrophic force.
- Nazi Degenerate Art exhibition (1937): modernism as Jewish, communist, and depraved
- Soviet Socialist Realism mandated representational art in service of the state from 1934
- Picasso's Guernica (1937) — modernist fragmentation to depict fascist atrocity
- The Frankfurt School: Adorno and Benjamin — culture industry and enlightenment's dark side
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Slide 23
Late Modernism
- By the 1950s and 1960s, Modernism had become the established tradition it had once revolted against — generating movements that pushed its logic to extreme conclusions or began the turn toward Postmodernism.
- Minimalism (1960s): Donald Judd, Carl Andre — pure geometric objects, no illusion
- Pop Art (1960s): Warhol, Lichtenstein — consumer culture reclaimed as artistic subject
- Postwar literature: Beckett, Nabokov — the novel aware of its own fictionality
- The New Novel (Robbe-Grillet, Duras) — eliminating psychology and plot from fiction
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Slide 24
Jazz as American Modernism
- Modernist Music 2
- Jazz was the great vernacular Modernism of the 20th century — improvisation as the equivalent of stream of consciousness, ensemble conversation as democratic art, rhythm as the primary language of feeling.
- Louis Armstrong transformed jazz from ensemble to virtuoso art in the 1920s
- Duke Ellington's orchestra as compositional instrument — jazz and classical synthesis
- Bebop (1940s, Parker, Monk): speed, dissonance, complexity — jazz as art music
- Miles Davis's Kind of Blue (1959) — modal jazz, space, and the cool aesthetic
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Slide 25
Modernism's Contested Legacy
- Legacy
- Modernism transformed every art form and produced some of humanity's greatest cultural achievements — but it also carried elitism, exclusivity, and sometimes political complicity that its critics have rightly refused to ignore.
- Modernist housing: utopian vision met social disaster in the tower-block estates
- High Modernism's difficulty excluded popular audiences — an intentional barrier
- The Eurocentrism of canonical Modernism marginalised non-Western contributions
- Yet its formal innovations remain the lingua franca of all subsequent art and literature
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Slide 26
Essential Modernist Works
- Key Texts
- 1905Matisse's "The Open Window" — colour as emotional reality, not optical truth.
- 1913Stravinsky's Rite of Spring — primal rhythm and atonality causing a concert hall riot.
- 1922Ulysses and The Waste Land published in the same year — peak Modernism.
- 1929Barcelona Pavilion, Villa Savoye, A Room of One's Own — architecture and literature in convergence.
- 1947Pollock's drip paintings begin — Modernism migrates to New York as Europe recovers from war.
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Slide 27
From Modernism to Postmodernism
- Postmodernism
- Postmodernism emerged in the 1960s–70s not as Modernism's opposite but as its self-aware, often ironic continuation — questioning Modernism's grand narratives, universalism, and faith in progress from within.
- Jean-François Lyotard: "incredulity toward metanarratives" — progress is no longer credible
- Postmodern architecture: ornament returned, history quoted, irony embraced
- Derrida's deconstruction: meaning is unstable, the text undermines its own claims
- Pop culture, kitsch, and mass media admitted as legitimate artistic subjects
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Slide 28
Modernism in the Digital Age
- Digital Age
- Modernist aesthetics — minimalism, abstraction, the primacy of form and function — are embedded in the visual language of Silicon Valley technology: the iPhone, Google's Material Design, Spotify, and Apple Music all owe formal debts to Modernism.
- Swiss International Style typography lives inside every operating system and app
- Bauhaus colour theory and grid systems govern contemporary UX and UI design
- The stream-of-consciousness as metaphor for the internet's nonlinear information flow
- Modernist critical theory — Frankfurt School — informs platform capitalism critique
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Slide 29
Why Modernism Still Matters
- Why It Still Matters
- A century after its peak, Modernism remains the indispensable context for understanding contemporary art, architecture, literature, and culture — the foundation that subsequent movements accepted, rejected, or ironised.
- Its formal innovations — abstraction, montage, stream of consciousness — remain foundational
- Its political failures — elitism, complicity — remain instructive warnings
- Its defining question — "what does art do, and for whom?" — is permanently unresolved
- Modernism taught us that culture is made, not given — and can always be remade
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Slide 30
"Make it new."
- Modern
- Takeaway
- Ezra Pound's three-word command summarises Modernism's entire project. Whether the new meant abstract canvases, fragmented novels, concrete buildings, or twelve-tone music, Modernism insisted that inherited forms were not enough — that the unprecedented present demanded unprecedented forms. That insistence never grew old.
- — Ezra Pound
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