Tut write-up:Modernism        

Modernism describes the modernist movement in the arts, its set of cultural tendencies and associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to western society in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.The development of modern industrial societies and the rapid growth of cities, followed then by the horror of world war I, were among the factors that shaped Modernism.Modernism also rejects the lingering certainty of enlightenment thinking, as well as the idea of a compassionate, all-powerful Creator. In general, the term modernism encompasses the activities and output of those who felt the "traditional" forms of art, architecture, literature, religious faith, social organization and daily life were becoming outdated in the new economic, social, and political conditions of an emerging fully industrialized world.A salient characteristic of modernism is self-consciousness. This self-consciousness often led to experiments with form and work that draws attention to the processes and materials used.

 Modernism in literature:It is an European movement beginning in the early 20th century that was characterised by a self-conscious break with traditional aesthetic forms.It represents the radical shift in cultural sensibilities surrounding world war I, modernist literature struggled with the new realm of subject matter brought about by an increasingly industrialised and globalised world.In its earliest incarnations, modernism fostered a utopian spirit, stimulated by innovations happening in the fields of anthropology,phsycology,philosophy,political theory, and phsycoanalysis. Writers such as Ezra pound and other poets of the Imagist movement characterised this exuberant spirit, rejecting the sentiment and discursiveness typical of Romanticism and Victorian literature for poetry that instead favoured precision of imagery and clear, sharp language.This new idealism ended, however, with the outbreak of war, when writers began to generate more cynical postwar works that reflected a prevailing sense of disillusionment and fragmented thought. Many modernist writers shared a mistrust of institutions of power such as government and religion, and rejected the notion of absolute truths. Like T.S.Eliot’s masterpiece,The waste land, later modernist works were increasingly self-aware, introspective, and often embraced the unconscious fears of a darker humanity

Modernism in architecture: It is an overarching movement .It is characterized by simplification of form and creation of ornament from the structure and theme of the building.It began at the turn of the 20th century with efforts to reconcile the principles underlying architectural design with rapid technological advancement and the modernisation of society.It would take the form of numerous movements, schools of design, and architectural styles, some in tension with one another, and often equally defying such classification.Gaining popularity after the second world war, architectural modernism was adopted by many influential architects and architectural educators, and continues as a dominant architectural style for institutional and corporate buildings into the 21st century.

Modernism in art:Modern art denotes the style and philosophy of the art produced during the period 1860s to the 1970s.it includes artistic works produced in that period.The term is usually associated with art in which the traditions of the past have been thrown aside in a spirit of experimentation.Modern artists experimented with new ways of seeing and with fresh ideas about the nature of materials and functions of art. A tendency toward abstraction is characteristic of much modern art.Modern art begins with the heritage of painters like Vincent van gogh,paul gauguin,paul cezanne,georges seurat and henri de Toulouse lautrec all of whom were essential for the development of modern art. At the beginning of the 20th century henri matisse and several other young artists including the pre-cubist georges braque,andre derain, Raoul dufy and Maurice de vlaminck revolutionized the Paris art world with "wild", multi-colored, expressive landscapes and figure paintings that the critics called Fauvism.Henri Matisse 's two versions of The Dance signified a key point in his career and in the development of modern painting.It reflected Matisse's incipient fascination with primitive art: the intense warm color of the figures against the cool blue-green background and the rhythmical succession of the dancing nudes convey the feelings of emotional liberation and hedonism.With the painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907),Picasso dramatically created a new and radical picture depicting a raw and primitive brothel scene with five prostitutes, violently painted women, reminiscent of African tribal masks and his own new Cubist inventions.Analytic cubism was jointly developed by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, exemplified by Violin and Candlestick, Paris, from about 1908 to 1912. Analytic cubism, the first clear manifestation of cubism, was followed by synthetic cubism, practised by Braque, Picasso,Fernand Leger,juan Gris,Albert Gleizes,Marcel Duchamp and several other artists into the 1920s.Synthetic cubism is characterized by the introduction of different textures, surfaces,collage elements,papier colle and a large variety of merged subject matter

Modernism in music:  It refers to the significant departures in musical language that occurred in the start of the 20th century, creating new understandings of harmonic, melodic, sonic, and rhythmic aspects of music. The operative word most associated with it is "innovation". Its leading feature is a "linguistic plurality", which is to say that no one musical language ever assumed a dominant position.Musicologist Carl Dahlhaus restricted his definition of musical modernism to progressive music in the period 1890–1910:The year 1890 lends itself as an obvious point of historical discontinuity.The "breakthrough" Mahler,Strauss and Debussy implying a profound historical transformation.If we were to search for a name to convey the breakaway mood of the 1890s (a mood symbolized musically by the opening bars of Strauss's Don Juan) but without imposing a fictitious unity of style on the age, we could do worse than revert to [the] term "modernism" extending (with some latitude) from the 1890 to the beginnings of our own twentieth-century modern music in 1910 The label "late romanticism" is a terminological blunder of the first order and ought to be abandoned forthwith. It is absurd to yoke Strauss, Mahler, and the young Schoenberg, composers who represent modernism in the minds of their turn-of-the-century contemporaries, with the self-proclaimed anti-modernist Pfitzner, calling them all "late romantics " in order to supply a veneer of internal unity to an age fraught with stylistic contradictions and conflicts.Leon Botstein, on the other hand, asserts that musical modernism is characterized by "a conception of modernity dominated by the progress of science, technology and industry, and by positivism, mechanization, urbanization, mass culture and nationalism", an aesthetic reaction to which "reflected not only enthusiasm but ambivalence and anxiety".Other writers regard musical modernism as an historical period extending from about 1890 to 1930, and apply the term "post modernism" to the period after that year.Still other writers assert that modernism is not attached to any historical period, but rather is "an attitude of the composer; a living construct that can evolve with the times".