Modernism (pronounced mod-er-niz-uhm)
(1) A modern usage or characteristic; modern character, tendencies, or values; adherence to or sympathy with what is modern.
(2) In theology, a movement in Roman Catholic thought that sought to interpret the teachings of the Church in the light of philosophic and scientific conceptions prevalent in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (always with initial capital). The movement was in 1907 condemned by Pope Pius X (1835–1914; pope 1903-1914).
(3) In theology, the liberal theological tendency in Protestantism which emerged in the twentieth century and became the intellectual core of the moderate wings in many denominations, most obviously displayed in the interplay between the liberal and evangelical factions at recent Lambeth Conferences.
(4) A deliberate philosophical and practical estrangement or divergence from the techniques and practices of the past in the arts and literature, occurring from late in the nineteenth century and (a little arbitrarily), thought to have concluded in the post-war years. Taking the form in any of various innovative movements and styles, it was an aesthetic descriptor used in mostly in architecture, literature and art to label work thought modern in character, quality of thought, expression or technique (sometimes with initial capital).
1730-1740: The construct was modern + ism. Modern was from the Middle French moderne, from the Late Latin modernus (modern), from the Classical Latin modo (just now; in a (certain) manner)), from the adverb modo (to the measure) originally ablative of modus (manner; measure) and hence, by measure, "just now". Root was the primitive Indo-European med- (take appropriate measures). The adjective modern entered English circa 1500 in the sense of "now existing", the meaning "of or pertaining to present or recent times" attested from the 1580s. The verb modernize (give a modern character or appearance to, cause to conform to modern ideas, adapt to modern persons) has existed since the 1680s, thought probably a borrowing from the French modernizer rather than a native coining. The –ism suffix was from the Ancient Greek ισμός (ismós) & -isma noun suffixes, often directly, sometimes through the Latin –ismus & -isma (from where English picked up ize) and sometimes through the French –isme or the German –ismus, all ultimately from the Ancient Greek (where it tended more specifically to express a finished act or thing done). It appeared in loanwords from Greek, where it was used to form abstract nouns of action, state, condition or doctrine from verbs and on this model, was used as a productive suffix in the formation of nouns denoting action or practice, state or condition, principles, doctrines, a usage or characteristic, devotion or adherence (criticism; barbarism; Darwinism; despotism; plagiarism; realism; witticism etc).
In the narrow, technical sense, modern began in English enjoying a broad meaning, simply a description of that which was not ancient and medieval, but it quickly gained niches, Shakespeare using it to indicate something "every-day, ordinary, commonplace" and the meaning "not antiquated or obsolete, in harmony with present ways" was formalized by the early nineteenth century. Formerly, the scientific linguistic division of historical languages into old, middle, and modern began only in the nineteenth century, the first university department of modern (ie those still living (unlike Latin and Ancient Greek) and of some literary or historical importance) was created in 1821 although the use of Modern English can be traced from at least circa 1607 when jurist John Cowell (1554–1611) published The Interpreter, a dictionary of law which, inter alia, examined and explained the words of Old and Middle English. The extended form modern-day was noted from 1872; Modern dance is attested by 1912; modern conveniences (increasingly electrically-powered labour-saving devices) dates from 1926; modern jazz was used in 1954 and the slang abbreviation mod (tidy, sophisticated teen-ager (and one contrasted usually with a disreputable rocker or some other delinquent)) dates from a surprisingly early 1960.
There have been references to modern art since 1807 but it then was simply a chronological acknowledgement in the sense of something being recent rather than a recognizable style or school, that sense, “work representing a departure from or repudiation of traditional or accepted styles”, not attested until 1895, the idea by 1897 extended to the individual, a modern person one thought “thoroughly up to date”. Although it would take decades to assume its (now) modern meaning, as an adjective, post–modern appears first to have been use in 1919 and by the late 1940s had become common in the language of architects (presumably the first among the modernists to feel no longer modern) and use extended to the arts in the 1960s, infecting politics, literature and just about every form of criticism and critical theory. The "moment" of post-modernism has passed but but some of its strands have become orthodoxies and so profound were the influences it will for at least decades remain a reference point.
Confusion is sometimes attached to the words “modernity” and “modernism”. The noun modernity, dating from the 1620s, meant simply the "quality or state of being modern", an elaborated way of saying “recent”, the sense "something that is modern" noted since 1733. As a word to describe specifically the epoch which began in the early twentieth century, it was in use before World War I (1914-1918). The sense of that modernity was the particular combination of circumstances and forces which had coalesced to produce in Europe and North America a society which had in technical and other ways progressed with greater rapidity than any in history: (1) A long period of general peace, (2) a level of prosperity, which although uneven and often erratic, was unprecedented, (3) an array of technical innovations (electricity, radio, flight, telegraphs, internal combustion engines etc), (4) increasing literacy and a proliferation of mass-media, (4) an on-rush of new and transformative theories in psychology, philosophy & science (Freud, Darwin, Einstein et al), and (5) a relaxation of historically censorious attitudes which allowed innovations in art and literature to flourish.
Modernism, a word Dr Johnson (1709-1784) claimed was invented by the novelist Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) to suggest any "deviation from the ancient and classical manner" had by 1830 come to refer to generally to "modern ways and styles" but since the mid-1920s, it’s been used exclusively to describe the movements in art, music, architecture and literature which depart in some radical way from classical and other traditional antecedents. By 1925, the noun modernist was applied to a producer or follower of the work of the movement. In the 1580s it had meant "one who admires or prefers the modern"; something similar but without the political and other connotations modernity imposed.
Modernism, even if considered separately within the genres where the label was adopted had no coherence of style, intent or result, the significance being what it was not in that it deliberately aimed to depart from classical and traditional forms. Although it’s contested still, much of what began as modernist art is attributed to the modernist’s growing alienation from the strictures and conventions which had characterized their formative years during the Victorian age. It defined an epoch and, somewhere in the post-war period, became part of the history of art or architecture and for those for whom modernism is now just another product, such as art dealers, there’s really no distinction between modernist and postmodernist phases, both grouped under the rubric of Modern Art.
Proto-Cubism (which some prefer as Pre-Cubism because they detect a distinct break rather than an evolution) was a term coined by art historians to describe the works produced in the last years of the twentieth century’s first decade. However expressed, what was being described was the early framework of cubism, characterized by artists reducing images to component parts and rendering them in geometric forms, soon distorting things further by arranging the constructs roughly in place but viewed from different perspectives, the various cones, cubes, cylinders and polygons inherently were simplified forms yet when re-assembled yielding something complex which delighted some and appalled others. The unhappy critics had to prepare themselves because worse was to come for while the Proto-Cubist works were at least vaguely recognizable representations of someone or something, as the movement unfolded, there was the feeling the technique was being exploited to produce material weird beyond immediate understanding: newness for the sake of newness.
It was what came to be called Analytical Cubism (circa 1908–1912) which took the deconstruction and re-assembly of Proto-Cubism down its logical path, the fragments viewed from multiple viewpoints and abandoning the tradition of lineal perspective which had developed from Antiquity, through the Primitives and the Renaissance to the modern era. The palettes tended to be monochromatic or at least muted (shades of brown & gray predominate) and, by the standards of the time, many paintings were jarringly abstract and sometimes described as “wrongly assemble jigsaw puzzles” with pieces dissected into overlapping planes, three dimensional depth and volume flattened to be twisted back to the two dimensions of a flat surface. Something of an arms race developed between artists as they vied to see who would conjure something which demanded of the viewer even more work to interpret. As an intellectual exercise in perception and structural analysis, it must have been great fun for those in the studios and for the avant-garde who “got it” but many would have agreed with comrade Stalin (1878-1953; Soviet leader 1924-1953) who later would condemn such exercises of technical ecstasy as “formalism”.
As a technique, Analytical Cubism could go only so far because ultimately, it remained tied to something which began as representational and had to get back there, albeit in distorted form. What came next, from 1912-1923, came to be known as Synthetic Cubism which took everyday, real-world objects from kitchens, factories and the streetscape, reducing them to their simplest form to become building blocks to be synthesized into a new whole. With this came brighter and more varied colors which seemed to imply something more traditional decorative than the often drab geometrical exercises of the analytic works but not all were convinced. At the time, the general audience seems to have found cubism in any flavour no fun at all: collages with no unifying structure. That would be the theme of public scepticism about modern art for the next century-odd but there was in places a recognition the cubists were sometimes being playful in their “construction without prior deconstruction”. As has long happened in the art market, there were those for whom the notion of comparing (1) the analytic dissecting of reality with (2) assembling previously unconnected parts of it to create a synthetic “new” was intriguing but most stuck to the Old Masters.
Modernist literature was influenced by the bleak surroundings created by urbanization and industrialization but it was the blast of the Great War which left writers grasping to find a response to what was a much-changed world. The roots of modernist literature can be found in pre-war works but the war had so undermined faith in the foundations of Western society and culture which early in the century had been viewed with an optimism it’s hard now to convey. An inescapable element in modernism was a rejection of beauty as if humanity had proved itself somehow unworthy of loveliness and modernist literature reflected disillusionment and betrayal, TS Eliot’s (1888-1965) epic-length poem The Waste Land (1922) is emblematic, reflecting the search for redemption in a spiritually empty landscape and technically, its discordant images and deliberate obscurity typify Modernism and preview the techniques developed in post-modernism which demand the reader be involved in interpreting and deconstructing the text.
Modernist fiction however, in content or technique, wasn’t monolithic and even to label it a genre does require that word to adopt a nuance of meaning, the works could explore the life of one, of a group or all of humanity and ranged from the nihilistic to the utopian. The great landmark was James Joyce’s (1882-1941) Ulysses (1922), a work of such sometimes impenetrable density which adopted the even then known device of a stream of consciousness to document the events of one day in the lives of three Dubliners, the idea being the abandonment of any structural order, conventional sentence construction sacrificed in an attempt to capture the nature of human fragmentary thought. Not all readers were seduced by the approach but Ulysses picked up a cult following which endures to this day, some of the adherents compelled even to praise Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939), a work which in which a few find rare genius while others conclude it's merely modernism pursued to its inevitable unintelligible conclusion. Reading Joyce can be hard work although Anthony Burgess (1917–1993), a fair critic of modernism, literary and otherwise, claimed to find a laugh of every page of Finnegans Wake. For most, it's no fun at all.
In painting, the roots really lie in mannerism although elements can be traced through thousands of years of what is, strictly speaking, non-representational art, exemplified in many aspects by the sometimes (and not deliberately) almost abstract Italian primitives created between the late eleventh and mid-thirteenth centuries. However, historians regard the first of the modernists as Édouard Manet (1832-1883) who, from his early thirties began to distort perspective and devalue representation, using techniques of brushstroke to emphasize the very nature of the flat canvas on which he worked, something artists had for centuries crafted to disguise. In his wake came the rush of -isms that would characterize modernism: Impressionism, Cubism, Constructivism, Post-Impressionism, Cubism, Futurism & Expressionism, an array of visions which would see the techniques and physical construction of the works vie for attention (at least among fellow artists and critics) with what was once thought the art itself.
In architecture, while not literally technologically deterministic, the advances in the technologies available made possible the abandonment of earlier necessities. However, while the existence of steel frames and increasingly complex shapes rendered in reinforced concrete may have allowed what came to be known as the “new international style”, neither precluded the ongoing use of decoration and embellishment, the discarding of which was a hallmark of modernist architecture. It was the choice of the architects to draw simple geometric shapes with unadorned facades, a starkness associated especially with the mid-to-late twentieth century steel and glass skyscrapers. Architects are less keen to be associated with some other high-rise buildings of the era, especially the grim housing projects which blighted so much of the urban redevelopment of the post-war years; there was none of the awful grandeur of the best neo-brutalism to many of these.
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