"Modernism in the arts meant exactly this victory of form over content."
Some slathering praise about the 100 year anniversary of the first Modernist painting.
I am just glad to read an ariticle today by a gushing journalist that does not involve Steve Jobs or a "new" military strategy.
via ArtsJournal.
8 comments:
Could the beginning of Modernism merely be the point at which the folks who celebrate Artists (the kind of Artist who is still alive, that is) decided that visual experimentation was in fashion, thus lowering the risks of visual experimentation to said artists? Is it possible that this sort of thing happened before during pre-modernism but didn't catalyze because electrical means of communication had yet to be invented? I, admittedly, know less about art history than Jason or Pete, so do clue me in guys if I'm totally wrong...
Economic and technological development was a major catalyst for every avant garde movement after the beginning of the nineteenth century. The telegraph and telephone likely compounded the pressures brought on art by the re-ordering of society.
Cezanne and Gaugin laid the groundwork for such formal experimentation, for a gaggle of artists, who didn't suffer the pariah status given to their forebearers. (Stinkin' hipsters.)
That is not to question Picasso's audacity, or say that there isn't a kernel of truth buried in his folk-hero status. His output was mind boggling. However...
To say that Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is the first Modernist painting is bad scholarship.
The historian Marvin Trachtenberg makes a pretty good case that Gothic art was medieval Modernism, that spread in the same localized, leap-frog way that we see in early twentieth century art.
It's much more useful to think of Modernism as a social force, with Tradition on the other side of the coin. Note that both are required for the generation and transmission of knowlege.
In that way, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is no longer Modernist, and those who consider it so should also be driving Model T's and voting for Teddy Roosevelt.
It's much more useful to think of Modernism as a social force, with Tradition on the other side of the coin.
How fucking true! And the funnest part to me is that "tradition" is completely arbitrary. I'm sure in another dimension this is considered "traditional" portraiture. "Tradition" has more to do with who was who's Dad than any quantifiable metric...
While Pete's point is a good one about thinking about Modernism in a relative way, you cannot deny that it became a codified genre and stylistic movement in the 20th century.
It helps to think of these kinds of broad cultural movements not just through the lense of a single art. The ideas behind Modernism I think are easier to evaluate and guage their strengths, weaknesses, and impact based on what has been made in architecture. While in painting this branched out in many different applications, as in Matisse or Kandinsky, at the same time the continuing effort to break stylistic conventions at every turn developed into something so standard that theorists had to come up with something else: Post-Modernism. But Modernist architecture is still very much with us along with its larger cultural attitude of "new is better" even if the new is quickly done with cheap materials, which was an important aspect of the Modernist aesthetic. Just go to your local shopping mall to see a contemporary example.
Another example of this lense is Surrealism which never was very coherent as a painting movement but was quite clear in terms of liturature (particularly in France).
If we were splitting hairs, maybe it would be good to differentiate between mordernism as a social or artistic force as Pete is talking about; and Modernism (with capital M) that encompasses all the stylistic challenges that happened rapidly in Europe in the early 20th century.
Regarding you first comment Alex. I think that manufacturing and mechanization was what operated as a catalyst. Everyone, particularly artists, were excited about all the changes and improved accesability to machined goods. (See Futurism.) People were thinking about a bright utopian future with shiny widgets and conveyer belts. Unfortunately this culminated in the first World War and turning mechanization into really efficient ways of killing manyfold more people in warfare.
I am not of the opinion that Modernism had much to do with telegraph wires. Vastly improved trains and steam boats maybe . . .
Right. The failure of scholarship and "theorists" in the latter half of the twentieth century was the reductio-ad-absurdum of the tremendous variety and output of artists into a boring fable that was short enough to fill a few dozen pages of an art history survey text.
The hallmark of Modernism, as a force or a genre, is rapid innovation. I would contend that the early twentieth-century saw more innovation in the arts because people had more free time. There weren't larger leaps of innovation, per se, just many more of them.
The test of this would be go fish for works/periods that are more radical than Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (from what point of view, though?). A fun test this would be.
Also, I think "theory" in the way that, say, people theorize about dark matter, is a less useful practice in visual art than many seem to think. This is because art is data-driven, rather than concept-driven. There is undoubtedly a conceptual aspect to art-works, but poor production and delivery will always ruin a good idea and a compelling presentation can redeem a bad idea.
That's not to say it's pointless to talk about art. It's one of my favorite past-times.
I should stop putting stuff in "quotes". It makes me sound like a prick.
I am sure that anyone that fancies themselves an art "theorist" thinks that you are a "prick" now.
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