In literary criticism, it is customary to call, first of all, three literary movements that made themselves known in the period from 1890 to 1917 as modernist. These are symbolism, acmeism and futurism, which formed the basis of modernism as literary direction. On its periphery, other, less aesthetically distinct and less significant phenomena of “new” literature arose.
Modernism (Italian modernismo - “modern movement”; from Latin modernus - “modern, recent”) is a direction in the art and literature of the 20th century, characterized by a break with previous historical experience artistic creativity, the desire to establish new unconventional principles in art, continuous renewal artistic forms, as well as the conventionality (schematization, abstraction) of the style.
If we approach the description of modernism seriously and thoughtfully, it will become clear that the authors classified as modernism actually set themselves completely different goals and tasks, wrote in different manners, saw people differently, and what often united them was that they simply lived and wrote at the same time. For example, modernism includes Joseph Conrad and David Gerberg Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and Thomas Stearns Eliot, Guillaume Apollinaire and Marcel Proust, James Joyce and Paul Eluard, futurists and dadaists, surrealists and symbolists, without thinking about whether there is anything between them. something in common, except for the era in which they lived. The literary critics who are most honest with themselves and with their readers admit the fact that the very term “modernism” is vague.
Modernist literature is characterized, first of all, by the rejection of the traditions of the nineteenth century, their consensus between the author and the reader. The conventions of realism, for example, were rejected by Franz Kafka and other novelists, including expressionist drama, and poets abandoned the traditional metric system in favor of free verse. Modernist writers saw themselves as an avant-garde that had abandoned bourgeois values, and forced the reader to think by using complex new literary forms and styles. IN fiction The conventional flow of chronological events was turned on its head by Joseph Conrad, Marcel Proust and William Faulkner, while James Joyce and Virginia Woolf introduced new ways of tracking the flow of their characters' thoughts using a stream-of-consciousness style.
The beginning of the 20th century was accompanied by both social changes and the development of scientific thought, old world changed before our eyes, and the changes often outpaced the possibility of their rational explanation, which led to disappointment in rationalism. To understand them, new techniques and principles for generalizing the perception of reality, a new understanding of man’s place in the universe (or “Cosmos”) were needed. It is no coincidence that the majority of representatives of modernism looked for ideological substratum in popular philosophical and psychological concepts that paid attention to the problems of individuality: in Freudianism and Nietzscheanism. The diversity of initial concepts of worldview, by the way, largely determined the very diversity of movements and literary manifestos: from surrealism to Dada, from symbolism to futurism, etc. But the glorification of art as a type of secret mystical knowledge, which is opposed to the absurdity of the world, and the question of the place of the individual with his individual consciousness in the Cosmos, the tendency to create his own new myths allow us to consider modernism as a single literary movement.
Favorite character of modern prose writers - “ little man", most often the image of an average employee (typical are the broker Bloom in Joyce's Ulysses or Gregor in Kafka's Reincarnation), since the one who suffers is an unprotected person, a toy of higher powers. Life path characters - a series of situations, personal behavior - a series of acts of choice, and real choice is realized in “borderline”, often unrealistic situations. Modernist heroes seem to live outside of real time; society, government or the state for them are some kind of enemy phenomena of an irrational, if not downright mystical nature.
Camus equates, for example, between life and plague. In general, in the depiction of modernist prose writers, evil, as usual, surrounds the heroes on all sides. But despite the external unreality of the plots and circumstances that are depicted, through the authenticity of the details, a feeling of reality or even the everydayness of these mythical situations is created. Authors often experience the loneliness of these heroes in front of the enemy light as their own. Refusal of the position of “omniscience” allows writers to get closer to the characters they depict, and sometimes to identify themselves with them. The discovery of such a new method of presentation deserves special attention. inner monologue as a “stream of consciousness”, in which both the feeling of the hero, and what he sees, and thoughts with associations caused by the images that arise, along with the very process of their occurrence, are mixed, as if in an “unedited” form.
Modernism, understood as "post-realism", united symbolism and existentialism within a single movement in art and literature of the 20th century. At the same time, while coinciding in some ways, they mostly turned out to be diametrically opposed to each other.
What united the symbolists and existentialists was the attitude towards time as a fulfilled and completed whole, in which the future, present and past merge into one. Thus, according to Heidegger, “time manifestation” does not mean a “change” of ecstatic states: the future is not later than the past, and the latter is not earlier than the present: “Time-possibility,” in his words, “reveals itself as a future that resides in the past and present.” “The fourth coordinate – time,” wrote P. Florensky, “became so alive that time lost its character of bad infinity, became cozy and closed, and approached eternity.” It is no coincidence that symbolism and existentialism, having revived interest in myth following Nietzsche, gave rise to unique creative, individual interpretations of it, actualized the very principle of mythopoetic thinking and, in connection with this, interest in the roots, the “source” - in the forgotten beginning of what has always is assumed as something self-evident, always already given.
Thus, the existentialist myth, which arose in the bosom of the philosophy of life, was built on the conviction that man is truly (“existentially”) given existence “from within” (and not “from without”) as his own natural attraction and experience. The truth of human existence (more precisely, of being in general) was thus sought at the very bottom of individuality - in “the individuality of everything individual, the finitude of everything finite in man.” Since the individual was not taken in relation to the universal (generic), but was considered as existing in itself, the search for truth could not lead to anything other than the correlation of individuality with its non-existence, and the human individual with death.
For the symbolists, in particular for V. Solovyov, “movement to the source” meant movement towards that model of the world, according to which being is not exhausted by physical reality, but presupposes the presence of another world (the world of Platonic ideas - “eidos”) and spiritual-physical ( mental-intelligent) person who must penetrate into the supersensible world and, like the immortal Christ-Logos, become a new stage in the history of the cosmos. (R. Steiner even tried to develop a method for such penetration). In this regard, the Young Symbolists, who considered themselves life builders, theurgists, and not representatives literary school, despite the fact that they were eschatologically inclined, the approaching end of the world was perceived not so much as the end, but as the beginning of (“new heaven” and “new earth”) and overcoming death. At the same time, V. Solovyov spoke about the superpersonal (although not impersonal) nature of the moral process, and S. Trubetskoy proceeded from the understanding of its “conciliarity”, since consciousness, he noted, can be neither impersonal nor individual, for it is more than personally – it is “conciliar”.
Nevertheless, both of them were characterized by a catastrophic feeling of the world, the culmination of which was universal The First World War became a catastrophic sensation. At that time, Kandinsky wrote about the “darkened spiritual sky”, the disintegration of worlds, the expression of which for him, as for many others (in particular, Andrei Bely) was the discovery of the disintegration of the atom. The processes of increasing the activity of form and dissonance as the basis of thinking produced a new artistic vision of the world and man: Dadaism proclaimed attention to the “random object,” cubism and futurism were busy searching for methods of expressing new thinking. The most remarkable phenomena in art were such movements as surrealism and suprematism.
Like existentialism, surrealism arose in the “womb of the philosophy of life.” Like existentialism, it proceeded from the fact that man is adequately given being (nature) not “from the outside,” but “from within.” But surrealism recognized that what is true in man is that he is an individual bearer of the generic principle - the principle of universality and universality. In this regard, the source of surreal art was, on the one hand, the sphere of the unconscious, on the other, the severance of logical connections, associations, apparent authenticity, and the “supernaturalness” of the image. At the same time, surrealism does not distort, like expressionism, a thing taken separately, “it distorts the system of things, proportions, volumes, styles; in surrealism there are Chimeras, juxtapositions of incomparables. It is the art of breaking systemic connections by combining objects that would not normally be combined.” (Vadim Rudnev). (S. Dali, Max Ernst, Joan Miro, M. Horkheimer, TADORNO, G. Marcuse).
The deep source of “suprematism” associated with the name of Malevich (or “mystical avant-gardeism” associated with the name of Kandinsky) was symbolism in painting, music, literature and philosophy. The main task for artists was the search for a new unity of the world based on a still unclear new spirituality. Thus, Kandinsky perceived painting as “a roaring collision of different worlds, called upon to create worlds among themselves through struggle and in the midst of this struggle.” new world, which is called a product. Each work also arises technically in the same way that the cosmos arose - it passes through catastrophes, similar to the chaotic roar of an orchestra, which ultimately results in a symphony, whose name is the music of the spheres. The creation of a work is the creation of the universe.” – In the cosmic scale of thinking, the symbolic interconnectedness of all things in the world, the prophetic mission of his art, Kandinsky’s echo of the German romantics is visible.
To realize any particular event as included in a universal system, to see and embody the invisible, which opens to “spiritual vision” - the essence of Malevich’s quest. At the same time, the basis for the expression of the new reason, based on higher intuition, became alogism: an absurd, from the point of view of common sense, convergence of heterogeneous things proclaimed the implicit universal connection of phenomena. Thus, in the easel works of the Suprematists, the idea of “top” and “bottom”, “left” and “right” disappeared - all directions turned out to be equal (as in outer space). The space of the picture ceased to be geocentric (a special case of the universe), an independent world arose, closed in itself, possessing its own field of cohesion-gravity and at the same time correlated as an equal with the universal world harmony. (In this Malevich came into contact with the position of the Russian philosopher Nikolai Fedorov).
The search for the possibility of entering into a direct connection with the Universe was associated with liberation from the mediation of objectivity and the movement towards “non-objective”, “non-figurative” art. At the same time, “escaping from the subject” did not mean escaping from nature as such (everything was subject to its laws) - it was not about new methods of expression, but about new thinking, which has a structure and meaning. Thus, alogism in the word (“zaumi”), Kruchenykh believed, should destroy the outdated movement of thought according to the law of causality. Therefore, “zaum” was sharply different, for example, from the “words in freedom” of the Italian futurist Marinetti with his demands for the destruction of syntax, the use of verbs in the indefinite mood, the abolition of adjectives and adverbs, and the abandonment of punctuation marks - the so-called “telegraphic style.” The Suprematists were busy searching for the “language of the universe” and creating a “grammar of art” - beyond the boundaries of its various types: Continuing the work of the German romantic Philipp Otto Runge (the first to talk about abstract art, not bound by the framework of the tradition of the plot) in compiling a “symbolarium” of colors and linear forms (and, first of all, the triangle and the circle), Kandinsky thought through the path from the linear arabesque to the painting. The point and line became the main ones for him, but he considered the circle as a sign of the universe - as the only form capable of reproducing the “fourth dimension”, like “ice with a raging fire inside of it.” (A. Bely was busy bringing the meaning of rhythm in poetry to geometric figures). For Kandinsky (as well as for Khlebnikov), color had sound and the ability to transform into sound. (It is noteworthy that in the early 20s, Pavel Florensky began creating a “Dictionary of Symbols,” which was supposed to contain the signs of all symbolic forms - the entire universe). But the work of the Suprematists in this direction turned out to be unfinished, interrupted, however, alogism (as a method) permeated the work of Filonov and Chagall, was especially prominent in Meyerhold’s theater, and took root in the poetry of the Oberiuts (Kharms, Vvedensky, Zabolotsky), in the prose of Platonov, Bulgakov, Zoshchenko.
Symbolism, with its search for meaning, continued to influence the art of the second half of the 20th century: Until the 1980s, “Russian Conceptualism,” uniting artists and writers, according to Grace, was an attempt “to identify the conditions that make it possible for art to go beyond its boundaries, that is, an attempt to consciously return and preserve that which establishes art as an event in the History of the Spirit and makes its own history incomplete.” (E. Bulatov,
O. Vasiliev, I. Chuikov. And Kabakov, A Kosolapov. L. Sokov. V. Komar, A. Melamid, R. and V. Gorlovin, E. Gorokhovsky, V. Pivovarov. Y. Satunovsky, G. Aigi, S. Shablavin, V. Skersis, M. Roginsky, B. Orlov, I. Shelkovsky, F. Infanta, etc.) The focus on culture remained relevant for conceptual writers of the mid-second half of the 20 centuries, in the works of which the main character becomes a character, whose searches and experiences are determined not so much by the problems of “real” life”, but by the topography of artistic space, the laws of aesthetics (I. Kholin, Vs. Nekrasov, G. Sapgir, then E. Limonov, D. .Prigov, V.Sorokin, etc.). The tradition continued to affect the work of conceptualist (“avant-garde”) writers of the late 20th century (Rubenstein, V. Druk, T. Kibirov, etc.), who were influenced by the structuralist ideas of R. Barthes, who proclaimed the “death of the author.” So, according to D. Prigov, the avant-garde artist has only a hero, the author in the usual sense is absent: the role of the author-director is that he brings together different heroes and is just a stenographer. But at the same time. D. Prigov notes that “the writer reproduces the mentality of various literatures - classical, everyday, Soviet,” as a result of which “multi-layered stylization” arises.
At the same time, the processes of increasing individualism in existentialism, the displacement of religious and idealistic ideas by scientific ones, running parallel to the processes of increasing the activity of the form, which takes on the functions of a metaphorical statement, lead to the implementation in the art of modernism of ideas about it as a system of fonts reflecting non-external the world, but a general schematic of consciousness or its particular states. At the same time, myth begins to be thought of as a panacea for the rationalistic troubles of our time, not as a way of uniting people (monomythologism, Marquader believes, is as harmful as monotheism), but as a form of affirmation of the unique. This is how a special myth-novel becomes widespread, in which various mythological traditions are used syncretically as material for the poetic reconstruction of certain original mythological archetypes.
The concept of a subject endowed with conscious goal-setting and will begins to disappear. The unconscious components of spiritual life come to the fore (as in surrealism).
The end of modernism thus means the end of faith in reason ( we're talking about about the will to its destruction), the end of the possibility of thinking the idea of unity and universality (totality), the rejection of the principles of subjectivity, a return to the stage of prehistoric religiosity, deifying nature, and the rehabilitation of myth as a source of collective consciousness (Sinn). The result was the irrationalization of all processes of ethos and culture in the art of postmodernism.
Etc.), therefore it is necessary to distinguish between these two concepts in order to avoid confusion.
Modernism in the visual arts
Modernism- totality artistic directions second in art half of the 19th century- mid-20th century. The most significant modernist trends were impressionism, expressionism, neo- and post-impressionism, fauvism, cubism, and futurism. As well as later movements - abstract art, Dadaism, surrealism. In a narrow sense, modernism is considered as an early stage of avant-gardeism, the beginning of a revision of classical traditions. The date of the birth of modernism is often called 1863 - the year of the opening of the “Salon of the Rejected” in Paris, where the works of artists were accepted. In a broad sense, modernism is “another art”, the main goal of which is to create original works based on internal freedom and the author’s special vision of the world and bringing new means of expression figurative language, often accompanied by shockingness and a certain challenge to established canons.
Modernism in literature
In literature, modernism has replaced classic novel. Instead of a biography, the reader was offered literary interpretations various philosophical, psychological and historical concepts (not to be confused with psychological, historical and philosophical novel, which are classical), a style appeared called Stream of Consciousness (English. Stream of consciousness), characterized by deep penetration into inner world heroes. The theme of understanding the war and the lost generation occupies an important place in the literature of modernism.
The main forerunners of modernism were: Dostoevsky (1821-81) ( Crime and Punishment (1866), Brothers Karamazov(1880); Whitman (1819-92) ( grass leaves) (1855-91); Baudelaire (1821-67) ( Flowers of Evil), A. Rimbaud (1854-91) ( Insights, 1874); Strindberg (1849-1912), especially his later plays.
Modernism did away with the old style in the first three decades of the 20th century and radically redefined possible literary forms. The main writers of this period:
Modernism in architecture
The expression “modernism in architecture” is often used as a synonym for the term “modern architecture,” but the latter term is still broader. Modernism in architecture covers the work of the pioneers of modern architecture and their followers in the time period from the early 1920s to the 1970s-1980s (in Europe), when new trends emerged in architecture.
In the specialized literature, the term “architectural modernism” corresponds to the English terms “ modern architecture», « modern movement" or " modern", used in the same context. The expression “modernism” is sometimes used as a synonym for the concept “modern architecture”; or as the name of the style (in English literature - “ modern»).
Architectural modernism includes such architectural movements as European functionalism of the 1920s and 1930s, constructivism and rationalism in the 1920s in Russia, the Bauhaus movement in Germany, architectural art deco style, international style, brutalism, organic architecture. Thus, each of these phenomena is one of the branches of a common tree, architectural modernism.
The main representatives of architectural modernism are the pioneers of modern architecture Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter Gropius, Richard Neutra, Ludwig Mies van Der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Alvar Aalto, Oscar Niemeyer, as well as several others.
Modernist movements in art
Criticism
Opponents of modernism were Maxim Gorky and Mikhail Lifshits.
See also
Write a review about the article "Modernism"
Notes
Literature
- Nilsson Nils Åke. Archaism and modernism // Poetry and painting: Collection of works in memory of N. I. Khardzhiev / Compilation and general editing by M. B. Meilakh and D. V. Sarabyanov. - M.: Languages of Russian culture, 2000. - P. 75-82. - ISBN 5-7859-0074-2.
Links
- Lifshits M. A.
|
||||||||||||||||||
An excerpt characterizing Modernism
Pierre was led into the large, illuminated dining room; a few minutes later steps were heard, and the princess and Natasha entered the room. Natasha was calm, although a stern, without a smile, expression was now again established on her face. Princess Marya, Natasha and Pierre equally experienced that feeling of awkwardness that usually follows the end of a serious and intimate conversation. Continue old conversation impossible; It’s shameful to talk about trifles, but it’s unpleasant to remain silent, because you want to talk, but with this silence you seem to be pretending. They silently approached the table. The waiters pushed back and pulled up chairs. Pierre unfolded the cold napkin and, deciding to break the silence, looked at Natasha and Princess Marya. Both, obviously, at the same time decided to do the same: contentment with life and recognition that, in addition to grief, there are also joys, shone in their eyes.- Do you drink vodka, Count? - said Princess Marya, and these words suddenly dispersed the shadows of the past.
“Tell me about yourself,” said Princess Marya. “They tell such incredible miracles about you.”
“Yes,” Pierre answered with his now familiar smile of gentle mockery. “They even tell me about such miracles as I have never seen in my dreams.” Marya Abramovna invited me to her place and kept telling me what had happened to me, or was about to happen. Stepan Stepanych also taught me how to tell things. In general, I noticed that being an interesting person is very peaceful (I now interesting person); they call me and they tell me.
Natasha smiled and wanted to say something.
“We were told,” Princess Marya interrupted her, “that you lost two million in Moscow.” Is this true?
“And I became three times richer,” said Pierre. Pierre, despite the fact that his wife’s debts and the need for buildings changed his affairs, continued to say that he had become three times richer.
“What I have undoubtedly won,” he said, “is freedom...” he began seriously; but decided not to continue, noticing that this was too selfish a subject of conversation.
-Are you building?
- Yes, Savelich orders.
– Tell me, did you not know about the death of the Countess when you stayed in Moscow? - said Princess Marya and immediately blushed, noticing that by making this question after his words that he was free, she ascribed to his words a meaning that they, perhaps, did not have.
“No,” answered Pierre, obviously not finding the interpretation that Princess Marya gave to his mention of her freedom awkward. “I learned this in Orel, and you can’t imagine how it struck me.” We were not exemplary spouses,” he said quickly, looking at Natasha and noticing in her face the curiosity about how he would respond to his wife. “But this death struck me terribly.” When two people quarrel, both are always to blame. And one’s own guilt suddenly becomes terribly heavy in front of a person who no longer exists. And then such death... without friends, without consolation. “I’m very, very sorry for her,” he finished and was pleased to notice the joyful approval on Natasha’s face.
“Yes, here you are again, a bachelor and a groom,” said Princess Marya.
Pierre suddenly blushed crimson and tried for a long time not to look at Natasha. When he decided to look at her, her face was cold, stern and even contemptuous, as it seemed to him.
– But did you really see and talk with Napoleon, as we were told? - said Princess Marya.
Pierre laughed.
- Never, never. It always seems to everyone that being a prisoner means being a guest of Napoleon. Not only have I not seen him, but I have also not heard of him. I was in much worse company.
Dinner ended, and Pierre, who at first refused to talk about his captivity, gradually became involved in this story.
- But is it true that you stayed to kill Napoleon? – Natasha asked him, smiling slightly. “I guessed it when we met you at the Sukharev Tower; remember?
Pierre admitted that it was true, and from this question, gradually guided by the questions of Princess Marya and especially Natasha, he became involved in a detailed story about his adventures.
At first he spoke with that mocking, meek look that he now had at people and especially at himself; but then, when he came to the story of the horrors and suffering that he had seen, he, without noticing it, became carried away and began to speak with the restrained excitement of a person experiencing strong impressions in his memory.
Princess Marya looked at Pierre and Natasha with a gentle smile. In this whole story she saw only Pierre and his kindness. Natasha, leaning on her arm, with a constantly changing expression on her face along with the story, watched Pierre without looking away for a minute, apparently experiencing with him what he was telling. Not only her look, but the exclamations and short questions she made showed Pierre that from what he was telling, she understood exactly what he wanted to convey. It was clear that she understood not only what he was saying, but also what he would like and could not express in words. Pierre told about his episode with the child and the woman for whose protection he was taken in the following way:
– It was a terrible sight, children were abandoned, some were on fire... In front of me they pulled out a child... women, from whom they pulled things off, tore out earrings...
Pierre blushed and hesitated.
“Then a patrol arrived, and all those who were not robbed, all the men were taken away. And me.
– You probably don’t tell everything; “You must have done something…” Natasha said and paused, “good.”
Pierre continued to talk further. When he talked about the execution, he wanted to avoid the terrible details; but Natasha demanded that he not miss anything.
Pierre started to talk about Karataev (he had already gotten up from the table and was walking around, Natasha was watching him with her eyes) and stopped.
- No, you cannot understand what I learned from this illiterate man - a fool.
“No, no, speak up,” said Natasha. - Where is he?
“He was killed almost in front of me.” - And Pierre began to tell lately their retreats, Karataev’s illness (his voice trembled incessantly) and his death.
Pierre told his adventures as he had never told them to anyone before, as he had never recalled them to himself. He now saw, as it were, a new meaning in everything that he had experienced. Now, when he was telling all this to Natasha, he was experiencing that rare pleasure that women give when listening to a man - not smart women who, while listening, try to either remember what they are told in order to enrich their minds and, on occasion, retell it or adapt what is being told to your own and quickly communicate your clever speeches, developed in your small mental economy; but the pleasure that real women give, gifted with the ability to select and absorb into themselves all the best that exists in the manifestations of a man. Natasha, without knowing it herself, was all attention: she did not miss a word, a hesitation in her voice, a glance, a twitch of a facial muscle, or a gesture from Pierre. On the fly she caught an unspoken word and brought it directly into her open heart, guessing secret meaning all Pierre's spiritual work.
Princess Marya understood the story, sympathized with it, but now she saw something else that absorbed all her attention; she saw the possibility of love and happiness between Natasha and Pierre. And for the first time this thought came to her, filling her soul with joy.
It was three o'clock in the morning. Waiters with sad and stern faces came to change the candles, but no one noticed them.
Pierre finished his story. Natasha, with sparkling, animated eyes, continued to look persistently and attentively at Pierre, as if wanting to understand something else that he might not have expressed. Pierre, in bashful and happy embarrassment, occasionally glanced at her and thought of what to say now in order to shift the conversation to another subject. Princess Marya was silent. It didn’t occur to anyone that it was three o’clock in the morning and that it was time to sleep.
“They say: misfortune, suffering,” said Pierre. - Yes, if they told me now, this very minute: do you want to remain what you were before captivity, or first go through all this? For God's sake, once again captivity and horse meat. We think how we will be thrown out of our usual path, that everything is lost; and here something new and good is just beginning. As long as there is life, there is happiness. There is a lot, a lot ahead. “I’m telling you this,” he said, turning to Natasha.
Modernism is a movement in art characterized by a departure from the previous historical experience of artistic creativity, up to its complete negation. Modernism appeared at the end of the 19th century, and its heyday occurred at the beginning of the 20th century. The development of modernism was accompanied by significant changes in literature, fine arts and architecture. Culture and art are not always amenable to spontaneous change, but the need for modernism as a means of change was already felt at the beginning of the 20th century. Basically, the process of renewal proceeded calmly, but sometimes modernism took militant forms, as was the case with the young artist Salvador Dali, who tried to elevate surrealism to the rank of art without delay. However, culture and art have the property of timeliness, so no one can speed up or slow down the process.
The evolution of modernism
The paradigm of modernism became dominant in the first half of the 20th century, but then the desire for radical changes in art began to decline, and the French Art Nouveau, German Jugendstil and Russian Art Nouveau, which preceded modernism as a revolutionary phenomenon, took a calmer form .
Modernism in art or the art of modernism?
It was up to writers, artists and architects from the entire civilized world to understand the priority of these formulations. Some representatives of the elite in the field of art believed that modernism was a long-awaited change, and it should be placed at the forefront of the further development of the entire civilization, others assigned modernism the role of updating certain trends in the field of art and nothing more. The debate continued; no one was able to prove that they were right. Nevertheless, modernism in art has arrived, and this has become an incentive for its further development in all directions. The changes were not immediately noticeable, the inertia of society affected, as is usually the case, discussions began on new trends, some were for the changes, some did not accept them. Then the art of modernism, directors, famous writers, musicians, everyone who thought progressively, began to promote everything new, and gradually modernism was recognized.
Modernism in the visual arts
The main directions of modernism in natural painting, portrait drawing, sculpture and others were formed in the second half of the nineteenth century. It began in 1863, when the so-called “Salon of the Rejected” was opened in Paris, where avant-garde artists gathered and presented their works. The name of the salon spoke for itself; the public did not accept abstract painting and rejected it. Nevertheless, the very fact of the appearance of the “Salon of the Rejected” indicated that the art of modernism was already awaiting recognition.
Directions of modernism
Soon modernist trends took concrete forms, the following directions in art:
- - a special style of painting, when the artist spends a minimum amount of time on his creativity, scatters paints on the canvas, chaotically touches the painting with brushes, and randomly applies strokes.
- Dadaism - works of art in collage style, arrangement on canvas of several fragments of the same theme. The images are usually imbued with the idea of denial, a cynical approach to the topic. The style arose immediately after the end of the First World War and became a reflection of the feeling of hopelessness that reigned in society.
- Cubism - chaotically arranged geometric shapes. The style itself is highly artistic; Pablo Picasso created true masterpieces in the Cubist style. The artist approached his work somewhat differently - his canvases are also included in the treasury of world art.
- Post-Impressionism - rejection of visible reality and replacement of real images decorative stylization. A style with enormous potential, but only Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin fully realized it.
Surrealism, one of the main strongholds of modernism
Surrealism - dream and reality, authentic fine arts, reflecting the most extraordinary thoughts of the artist. The most notable surrealist artists were Salvador Dali, Ernst Fuchs and Arno Brecker, who together made up the "Golden Triangle of Surrealism".
Painting style with extreme shade
Fauvism is a special style that evokes a feeling of passion and energy, characterized by exaltation of color and “wild” expressiveness of colors. The plot of the film is also in most cases on the verge of extreme. The leaders of this direction were Henri Matisse and Andre Derain.
Organics in art
Futurism - an organic combination artistic principles cubism and fomism, a riot of colors mixed with the intersections of straight lines, triangles and angles. The dynamics of the image are all-consuming, everything in the picture is in motion, energy can be traced in every stroke.
Style of Georgian artist Niko Pirosmani
Primitivism - artistic image in the style of conscious and deliberate simplification, resulting in a primitive drawing akin to the creativity of a child or wall paintings in the caves of primitive tribes. The primitive style of a painting does not at all reduce its artistic level if it is painted a true artist. A prominent representative of primitivism was Niko Pirosmani.
Literary modernism
Modernism in literature has replaced the established classical canons of storytelling. The style of writing novels, novellas and short stories that was formed at the beginning of the 20th century gradually began to show signs of stagnation, and some monotony of presentation forms appeared. Then writers began to turn to other, previously unused interpretations artistic design. The reader was offered psychological and philosophical concepts. This is how a style emerged that was defined as “Stream of Consciousness”, based on a deep penetration into the psychology of the characters. Most a shining example modernism in literature is the novel by the American writer William Faulkner called "The Sound and the Fury".
Each of the novel's heroes is analyzed from the point of view of his life principles, moral qualities and aspirations. Faulkner's method is justified because it is precisely because of a conscientious and in-depth analysis of the character's character that most interesting story. Thanks to his research style of writing, William Faulkner is one of the “golden five” US writers, as well as two other writers - and Scott Fitzgerald, who try to follow the rule of deep analysis in their work.
Representatives of modernism in literature:
- Walt Whitman, best known for his collection of poetry Leaves of Grass.
- Charles Baudelaire - collection of poetry "Flowers of Evil".
- Arthur Rambo - poetic works"Illuminations", "One Summer in Hell".
- Fyodor Dostoevsky with the works "The Brothers Karamazov" and "Crime and Punishment", this is Russian modernism in literature.
The role of guiding vector forces influencing the writers - the founders of modernism, was played by philosophers: Henri Bergson, William James, Friedrich Nietzsche and others. Sigmund Freud did not stand aside either.
Thanks to modernism, literary forms were radically changed in the first thirty years of the 20th century.
The era of modernism, writers and poets
Among the most famous writers of the modernist period, the following writers and poets stand out:
- Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966) - Russian poetess with tragic fate, who lost her family during the years. She is the author of several poetry collections, as well as the famous poem “Requiem”.
- Franz Kafka (1883-1924) is an extremely controversial Austrian writer whose works were considered absurd. During the writer's lifetime, his novels were not published. After Kafka's death, all of his works were published, despite the fact that he himself categorically objected to this and, during his lifetime, conjured his executors to burn the novels immediately after his death. The writer could not destroy the manuscripts himself, since they were distributed among different hands, and none of his admirers was going to return them to the author.
- (1898-1962) - laureate Nobel Prize on literature in 1949, who became famous for creating an entire fictional county in the American outback called Yoknapatawpha, populating it with characters and began to describe their lives. Faulkner's works are incredibly complex structurally, but if the reader manages to grasp the thread of the narrative, then it is no longer possible to tear him away from the novel, short story or story of the famous American writer.
- Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) is one of the most faithful followers of modernism in literature. His novels and stories amaze with their life-affirming power. All his life, the writer was an irritant to the American authorities, he was bothered by absurd suspicions, the methods that the CIA officers used to attract Hemingway to their side were absurd. It all ended with the writer’s nervous breakdown and temporary placement in a psychiatric clinic. The writer had only one love in his life - his hunting rifle. On July 2, 1961, Hemingway committed suicide by shooting himself with this gun.
- Thomas Mann (1875-1955) - German writer, essayist, one of Germany's most active political authors. All his works are permeated with politics, but artistic value they don't lose from it. Erotica is also no stranger to Mann’s work; an example of this is the novel “Confession of the Adventurer Felix Krull.” Main character The work is reminiscent of Oscar Wilde's character, Dorian Gray. The signs of modernism in the works of Thomas Mann are obvious.
- (1871-1922) - author of the seven-volume work “In Search of Lost Time,” which is rightfully considered one of the most significant examples of literature of the 20th century. Proust is a convinced follower of modernism as the most promising path of literary development.
- Virginia Woolf (1882-1942) - English writer, is considered the most reliable follower of the "Stream of Consciousness". Modernism was the meaning of her entire life for the writer; in addition to numerous novels, Virginia Woolf has several film adaptations of her works.
Literary modernism had a significant influence on the work of writers and poets in terms of improvement and development.
Architectural modernism
The phrase “modernism in architecture” refers us to the term “modern architecture”, since there is a logical connection here. But the concept of modernism does not always mean “modern”; the word “modern” is more suitable here. Modernism and modernism are two different concepts.
The architecture of modernism implies the beginning of the creativity of the pioneers of modern architecture and their activities over a certain period of time, from the 20s to the 70s of the last century. Modern architecture dates back to later dates. The designated fifty years are the period of modernism in architecture, the time of the emergence of new trends.
Directions in architectural modernism
Architectural modernism is a separate direction of architecture, such as the European functional construction of the 1920-30s or the immutable rationalism of Russian architecture of the twenties, when houses were built in the thousands according to one design. This is the German “Bauhaus”, “Art Deco” in France, the international style, brutalism. All of the above are branches of one tree - architectural modernism.
Representatives of modernism in architecture are: Le Corbusier, Richard Neutra, Walter Gropius, Frank Lloyd Wright and others.
Modernism in music
Modernism is a replacement of styles in principle, and in the field of music changes primarily depend on general trends ethnographic culture society. Progressive trends in cultural segments are inevitably accompanied by transformations in the world of music. Modernity dictates its terms to musical institutions circulating in society. At the same time, the culture of modernism does not imply changes in classical musical forms.
Modernism in literature originates on the eve of the First World War and reaches its peak in the twenties simultaneously in all countries Western Europe and in America. Modernism is an international phenomenon, consisting of different schools(Imagism, Dadaism, Expressionism, Constructivism, Surrealism, etc.). This is a revolution in literature, the participants of which announced a break not only with the tradition of realistic verisimilitude, but also with the Western cultural and literary tradition in general. Any previous direction in literature defined itself through its attitude to classical tradition: one could directly proclaim antiquity as a model of artistic creativity, like the classicists, or prefer the Middle Ages to antiquity, like the romantics, but all cultural eras before modernism are today increasingly called “classical” because they developed in line with classical heritage European thought. Modernism is the first cultural and literary era, which put an end to this legacy and gave new answers to “eternal” questions. As I wrote English poet S. Spender in 1930: “It seems to me that the modernists are consciously striving to create a completely new literature. This is a consequence of their feeling that our era is in many respects unprecedented and stands outside any conventions of past art and literature."
The generation of the first modernists acutely felt the exhaustion of the forms of realistic storytelling, their aesthetic fatigue. For modernists, the concept of “realism” meant the absence of effort to independently comprehend the world, the mechanical nature of creativity, superficiality, the boredom of vague descriptions - interest in the button on a character’s coat, and not in his state of mind. Modernists place above all else the value of an individual artistic vision of the world; created by them art worlds uniquely different from each other, each bears the stamp of a bright creative individuality.
They happened to live in a period when the values of traditional humanistic culture collapsed - “freedom” meant very different things in Western democracies and in totalitarian states; The carnage of the First World War, in which weapons of mass destruction were used for the first time, revealed the true cost human life For modern world; The humanistic ban on pain and physical and spiritual violence was replaced by the practice of mass executions and concentration camps. Modernism is the art of a dehumanized era (the term of the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset); the attitude towards humanistic values in modernism is ambiguous, but the world of modernists appears in a harsh, cold light. Using the metaphor of J. Conrad, we can say that the hero of the modernist work seemed to be staying overnight in an uncomfortable hotel at the end of the world, with very suspicious owners, in a shabby room, illuminated by the merciless light of a light bulb without a lampshade.
Modernists conceptualize human existence as a short, fragile moment; the subject may or may not be aware of the tragedy, frailty of our absurd world, and the artist’s job is to show the horror, greatness and beauty contained, despite everything, in the moments of earthly existence. Social issues, which played such an important role in the realism of the 19th century, are given indirectly in modernism, as an inseparable part of the holistic portrait of the individual. The main area of interest of modernists is the depiction of the relationship between the conscious and unconscious in a person, the mechanisms of his perceptions, and the whimsical work of memory. The modernist hero is, as a rule, taken in the entirety of his experiences, his subjective existence, although the very scale of his life may be small and insignificant. In modernism, the main line of development of literature of the New Age continues with a constant decline social status hero; the modernist hero is an “everyman,” any and every person. Modernists learned to describe such states of mind people who literature had not noticed before, and did it with such conviction that it seemed to bourgeois critics an insult to morality and a profanation of the art of words. Not only the content - the large role of intimate and sexual issues, the relativity of moral assessments, the emphasized apoliticality - but, first of all, the unusual forms of modernist storytelling caused especially sharp rejection. Today, when most of the masterpieces of modernist literature are included in school and university curricula, it is difficult for us to sense the rebellious, anti-bourgeois character of early modernism, the harshness of the accusations and challenges posed to it.
Three major writers of modernism- Irishman James Joyce (1882-1943), Frenchman Marcel Proust (1871-1922), Franz Kafka (1883-1924). Each of them, in his own direction, reformed the art of speech of the twentieth century, each is considered a great pioneer of modernism. Let's look at James Joyce's novel Ulysses as an example.
