The Ultimate Modernism Quiz

Modernism: A Summary

• Modernism is a philosophical and arts movement that emerged during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

• The movement reflected a desire for the creation of new forms of art, philosophy, and social organization which reflected the newly emerging industrial world.

• Artists attempted to depart from traditional forms of art, which they considered outdated or obsolete.

• Modernist innovations included abstract art, the stream-of-consciousness novel, montage cinema, atonal and twelve-tone music, divisionist painting, and modern architecture.

• Modernism also rejected the ideology of realism and made use of the works of the past by the employment of reprise, incorporation, rewriting, recapitulation, revision, and parody.

• Modernism rejected the certainty of Enlightenment thinking, and many modernists also rejected religious belief.

• A notable characteristic of modernism is self-consciousness concerning artistic and social traditions.

• Postmodernism is a departure from modernism and rejects its basic assumptions.

• Modernism can be defined as a mode of thinking or a socially progressive trend of thought that affirms the power of human beings to create, improve, and reshape their environment.

• Modernism sought to restore a "sense of sublime order and purpose to the contemporary world".

• Modernism began in the mid-19th century with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the writings of John Ruskin.

• Important literary precursors of modernism were Fyodor Dostoevsky, Walt Whitman, and August Strindberg.

• The main period of modernism was from the early 20th century to 1930, and it was characterized by a complex relationship with tradition.Modernism in Art, Literature, and Design

• Modernist art can be revolutionary and still related to past tradition

• Modernist painters like Picasso and Matisse rejected traditional perspective

• Cubism emerged in 1911 in Paris and spread throughout Paris and beyond

• Expressionism developed in the early 20th century in Germany in reaction to industrialization

• Futurism, another modernist movement, began in 1909 in Paris

• Modernist architects and designers believed that new technology rendered old styles of building obsolete

• Stream of consciousness was an important modernist literary innovation

• The trauma of World War I altered basic assumptions and made modernism's view of reality more generally accepted in the 1920s

• Modernists sought to defy expectations to make their art more vivid or to force the audience to question their own preconceptions

• Some modernists saw themselves as part of a revolutionary culture that included political revolution

• Surrealism, which originated in the early 1920s, is regarded as the most extreme form of modernism

• By 1930, Modernism had won a place in the mainstream of cultureModernism from 1930-1945: Literature, Art, and Politics

• Modernism continued to evolve during the 1930s with the use of twelve-tone technique in music, cubist art, and experimental novels.

• The New Yorker magazine began publishing work by young writers and humorists influenced by Modernism in the 1930s.

• The adoption of new technologies such as electricity, the telephone, and the automobile created social change during this period.

• Marxism became a strong influence on Modernism during this period, inspiring artists and writers to become more politically active.

• Significant Modernist literary works were created during the 1920s and 1930s, including works by Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner.

• Modernist poetry in English was an American phenomenon, with leading exponents including Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, but important British Modernist poets also existed.

• Modernism continued during this period in Soviet Russia, with composers like Dimitri Shostakovich and Alban Berg producing significant works.

• Modernist artists in Europe during the 1930s faced censorship and persecution by the Nazi regime, causing many to flee to the Americas.

• American art during the Great Depression was characterized by social realism and American Scene painting, with artists like Edward Hopper and Grant Wood producing famous works.

• The term "late modernism" is sometimes applied to Modernist works published after 1930, and many literary modernists lived into the 1950s and 1960s.

• The revival of modernism in music after World War II was led by composers like Boulez, Barraqué, Babbitt, Nono, Stockhausen, and Xenakis.

• Late modernists still publishing after 1945 include Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, and Ezra Pound.

• Modernism continued to influence mainstream culture during this period, with its ideas appearing more frequently in commercials and logos.Late Modernism: Post-WWII Art and Literature

• Late Modernism refers to works created after 1945, with the idea that the ideology of Modernism was re-shaped by the events of World War II.

• The postwar period left Europe in upheaval, with many artists, writers, and poets fleeing to the United States for safety.

• In New York City, American abstract expressionism emerged as the dominant movement in the late 1940s, with artists like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Mark Rothko leading the way.

• Paris recaptured its luster in the 1950s and 60s as the center of a machine art florescence, with sculptors Jean Tinguely and Nicolas Schöffer launching their careers there.

• The Theatre of the Absurd, which expresses the belief that human existence has no meaning or purpose, began in the 1950s with the plays of Samuel Beckett.

• The London School of figurative painters, including Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff, and Michael Andrews, gained widespread international recognition.

• In the 1960s, post-painterly abstraction, color field painting, hard-edge painting, and lyrical abstraction emerged as radical new directions in abstract painting.

• Postminimalism, process art, and Arte Povera also emerged as revolutionary concepts and movements that encompassed both painting and sculpture.

• Pop art rejected abstract expressionism and celebrated material consumer culture, advertising, and the iconography of the mass production age.

• Minimalism emerged as an abstract movement in art in the early 1960s, rejecting the idea of relational and subjective painting.

• Prominent artists associated with minimalism include Donald Judd, John McCracken, Agnes Martin, Dan Flavin, Robert Morris, Ronald Bladen, Anne Truitt, and Frank Stella.

• Late Modernist writers include Basil Bunting, Hermann Broch, Thomas Mann, Samuel Beckett, Charles Olson, and J. H. Prynne.