Modernism Early 1900s- Interwar Period Flashcards
Picasso & Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
-Impressionist artist
Stravinsky
-Russian modern classical composer
Serge Diaghilev
Russian art critic, famous for modern ballet
Schoenberg
Austrian composer and painter assoc. w/ the expressionist movement
Neoclassicism
Western movements in the arts that draw inspiration from the classical art and culture of Ancient Greece/Rome
Modernism
- Encompasses a diverse and contradictory set of theories of cultural production- art, dance, and music.
- Shared traits included a sense that the world had changed and such change should be embraced.
- A second belief was that traditional values and assumptions were outdated.
- Thirdly, a new conception of what art could do, that stressed expression over representation and insisted on experimentation and freedom.
Charles Baudelaire and the Flowers of Evil
-French poet whose work dealt with decadence and eroticism in the modernist movement
Impressionism
- Young artists who attempted to record phenomena objectively
- Emphasis on experimentation and autonomy
Expressionism
Present the world from subjective perspective to evoke moods and ideas
- emphasis on individual perspective
- reaction to impressionism
Gustav Klimt
Austrian symbolist painter- eroticism
-Member of the Vienna Secession movement which objected to prevailing conservatism
Freud
- Austrian who introduced psychoanalysis in which unconscious drives and desires conflict with a rational and moral conscience (which causes mental disorders)
- Challenged rationality by stressing the irrational/unconscious, a type of modernism. -He was Jewish, studied internal workings of the mind as he was persecuted by Anti-Semitists
Justine Baker, Louis Armstrong
- Jazz
- Spreads from America to Europe
- Exotic, wild, modern, sexualized
- Anti-bourgeoisie
Einstein, Curie, Planck, Heisenberg
- Physicists
- Changing views of the world by disproving fundamentals
- Nothing is definite, lacked objectivity: ambiguities of the modern world
The New Woman
- New fashion, smoking, drinking, swearing etc.
- Political activism: getting the vote
- Went to work, educated
- Seen as unnerving and dangerous since they could disrupt the power structure
- Served as a flashpoint for other social anxieties
Walter Gropius/ Bauhaus
- Bauhaus: German school est. in 1919
- “modern” building: not ornamental but pragmatic
- functionalism: practical, useful
- democratic structure: everyone has equal access to usable spaces
- Materials pre-fabricated
- WWI: extension of Wilson’s self-determination principle- every nation deserves independence, every people deserve access to space
Dada
Modern art movement
- Experimental, shock factor
- Subconscious focus
- Political undertones: social critique, challenging established culture, anarchy
Nietzche
- Argued that faith in science, reason, and religion were futile attempts to attain security and truth.
- Challenge to rationality by stating that individual struggle against chaotic universe was the only form of salvation for Western civilizations
Heidiger, Sarte, Camus, Lukacs
- Philosophers, existentialists
- Believed that philosophical thinking begins with the human subject—not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual
Liberal democracy
- representative democracy
- characterized by fair, free, and competitive elections
- ,a separation of powers into different branches of government,
- the equal protection of human rights, civil rights, civil liberties, and political freedoms
Fascism
- seek to unify their nation through a totalitarian state that promotes the mass mobilization of the national community
- the veneration of the state, a devotion to a strong leader, and an emphasis on ultranationalism, ethnocentrism, and militarism.
Communism
-movement to create a classless, moneyless and stateless social order -structured upon common ownership of the means of production, as well as a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of this social order
