Modernism is a term applied to a range of international artistic movements that emerged in the early years of the 20th century, with the aim of challenging traditional forms and values.
Modernism drew in part on the new social sciences, notably Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). Freud’s ideas revolutionized concepts of human behaviour and prompted writers, composers and others to delve deeper into psychological states.
‘The inner nature of the unconscious mind is just as unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and is just as imperfectly reported to us through the data of consciousness as is the external world through our organs of sense.’
Sigmund Freud, Dream Psychology (1921)
In the second half of the 19th century writers from Baudelaire to Walt Whitman had started to experiment with language and narrative, creating more ambiguous, self-conscious and ironic forms of expression. Modernist literature could be demanding. It challenged the reader with intricate layers of allusion, often to mythology. It also evolved new forms, notably stream of consciousness, which presents the world through the moment-by-moment thoughts and impressions of characters, rather than through the ‘objective’ voice of the author or narrator. This technique pervades the innovative epic novel Ulysses (1922) by James Joyce (1882–1941), where life in modern Dublin echoes episodes in Homer’s Odyssey .
In poetry, traditional stanza forms, meters and rhyming schemes were replaced by free verse, which, having no predictable structure, continually overthrew the reader’s expectations. One of the most influential poems of this period, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), uses free verse to throw together very different voices and fractured ideas, and, like Ulysses , counterpoints myth and literary heritage with the raw realities and alienations of modern life after the devastation of the First World War. Alienation was also explored by Franz Kafka – a double outsider as a German-speaking Jew in Prague, the capital of the new Czechoslovakia. Kafka employed a seemingly realistic narrative style to depict modern life as something akin to a nightmare, in which all human endeavour is doomed to failure at the hands of a faceless bureaucracy administering laws that no one can understand.
Man and machine
‘A roaring car that seems to run on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Winged Victory of Samothrace .’ So wrote Filippo Marinetti, the spokesperson of Futurism, a modernist movement that emerged in Italy before the First World War. Many modernist artists embraced the machine aesthetic, which also became a feature of architecture. Le Corbusier described a house as ‘a machine for living in’, and modernist architecture discarded the abundant decoration found in many 19th-century buildings in favour of the mantra that ‘form follows function’.
Music, too, embraced experiment. Traditional tonality, based on familiar Western scales, was replaced by ‘atonality’, in which no key was dominant. Arnold Schoenberg in Vienna developed serialism, a new structural convention in which, for example, every phrase must employ all twelve tones and semitones found in the octave. Igor Stravinsky’s pounding music for Diaghilev’s ballet The Rite of Spring caused a riot at its first performance in 1913. The new music that had the greatest public appeal was jazz, born out of the musical traditions of African Americans. Although its origins were distant from those of classical music, it came to have a great influence on the latter.
Similarly, the visual arts increasingly drew on the arts of peoples from round the world – for example, Pablo Picasso featured African masks in several works painted before the First World War. Western ‘high art’ no longer possessed a superior status. Picasso also turned new eyes on the physical world, through Cubism. Cubist painters discarded traditional perspective and attempted to depict a person or object from several viewpoints at once, and constructed their subjects out of a series of simpler geometric shapes, such as cubes. The key role of dreams and the unconscious stressed by Freud underlay the rise in the 1920s of Surrealism, in which painters such as Salvador Dalí and René Magritte used meticulously realistic techniques to depict objects and scenes far removed from those encountered in the everyday world. Surrealism also influenced cinema and literature; in the latter, many attempted to create works by surrendering conscious control and employing ‘automatic writing’.
For most of the general public, the works of the modernists were for long regarded as incomprehensible, even laughable. In the Soviet Union, after a few years when modernist experiments had been encouraged, Joseph Stalin decreed that modernism in all its forms was an example of Western decadence and bourgeois formalism, alien to working people. Modernism was to be replaced by ‘Socialist Realism’. Similarly, the Nazis decried modernist art as ‘degenerate’ and ‘un-German’. Although many elsewhere in the West were similarly suspicious, by the end of the 20th century many aspects of modernism had entered the mainstream, and had come to have a pervasive influence on popular culture.