Introduction | Modernism 1900-1950
Popular culture 1900-1950 | High culture 1950-2000
Pop culture 1950-2000 | Culture and technology
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Modernism 1900-1950

Modernism – the 'shock of the new' – made an impact early in the century. It can be defined as a cultural trend that tried to make a sharp break with the past and find new forms of expression.

Modern art (abstract shapes and colours rather than reproductions of recognisable scenes), modern music (atonal rather than traditionally harmonious), modernist literature (experiments in streams of consciousness rather than straightforward stories) and modern architecture (straight lines and no ornamentation) had already made an impact by 1914.

By 1925, the great names of European modernism were already well known:

• painters: Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso

• composers: Arnold Schönberg, Igor Stravinsky, Alban Berg

• architects: Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier

• novelists: Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Italo Svevo

• poets: W B Yeats, Ezra Pound, T S Eliot, Anna Akhmatova

• playwrights: Bertolt Brecht, Federico Garcia Lorca.

Prior to the 1930s, a variety of styles blossomed in modern art. All across Europe, groups dedicated to them were launched, usually with manifestos (from the artists) and initial outrage (from the public).

Expressionism

Artists such as the French Henri Matisse (also called a fauvist because of his bold use of colour), the Norwegian Edvard Munch (whose 1893 Scream summed up modern urban alienation) and the Austrian Oskar Kokoschka used vivid colours and broad brushstrokes to express mood and emotion, and the personal feelings evoked by a situation rather than the way it literally looked.

As a movement, expressionism was dominated by two groups: Die Brücke (The Bridge) in Dresden (1905-12) and Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) in Munich (1911-13).

Cubism

This movement was started in 1907 by the Spaniard Pablo Picasso and the Frenchman Georges Braque. Cubists tried new ways of solving the problem of painting three-dimensional scenes on to canvas. They produced work in which linear, broken images seen from several points of view suggested a new kind of reality. They were called cubists because of their use of straight lines and hard edges.

Abstract art

Some artists chose not to represent the world. Between 1910 and 1914, the Russian Wassily Kandinsky produced the first truly abstract works. In 1915, Kasimir Malevich, another Russian, and the Dutchman Piet Mondrian began painting patches of red, black, yellow and blue within arrangements of vertical and horizontal lines. All these artists were widely influential, especially in the second half of the century.

Primitivism

Many of the great artists of the 20th century were influenced by the 'primitive' art of Africa, Central America and Indonesia. Picasso was one notable example. British sculptors Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth also used primitive forms to re-examine natural shapes and textures and give a new vitality to traditional art.

Futurism

Launched in 1909 in Paris by Italian poet Filippo Marinetti, the futurists were a group of Italian artists who vehemently rejected the past. Instead, they painted fragmented visions of the future, emphasising speed, machine technology and dynamic modernism. In the 1920s, some of them joined Mussolini's Fascists.

Vorticism

This radical English art movement was named by American poet Ezra Pound, led by writer Wyndham Lewis and included French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. In 1914, they published Blast, a polemical magazine; they copied futurist rhetoric and fauve styles.

Dada

Although many modernist artists anticipated the breakdown of liberal democratic society in the 1930s, and expressed a real anxiety about the pace of change, one art movement was a particular response to the horrors of World War I.

Dada claimed to be anti-art. It specialised in scandalous events, attacked all conventions and experimented not only in painting, using collages and other new techniques, but also in poetry and theatre. Started in Zurich in 1916 by Romanian poet Tristan Tzara, its ideas spread all over Europe after World War I. Typical anti-art acts included Marcel Duchamp exhibiting a urinal, magazines with crazy typography, zany poetry readings aimed at provoking the audience, and a dada exhibition in 1920 that could only be entered via a men's lavatory.

The nihilism of dada was taken up and developed by the surrealists in Paris in the 1930s.

Surrealism

In 1900, Sigmund Freud suggested that dreams reveal ideas that are usually hidden or repressed. Led by the French poet André Breton, the surrealists – a group that started in Paris in 1924 – adopted this insight and published manifestos and magazines, using public scandals to publicise their work. They developed techniques such as using ordinary objects as art works and automatic writing.

Surrealist painters such as Salvador Dali, René Magritte and Max Ernst tried to reveal the subconscious through their paintings, which consisted of seemingly unconnected images rendered in a precise, realistic style. To the general viewer, their art did not make sense – but it was intended to surprise and mildly derange the senses so that the viewer would question social and artistic norms.

By the 1930s, most of the surrealists had become politicised and, with the notable exception of Dali, were radical Communists, aiming for a revolution not only in government but also in everyday life. The group lost its importance during World War II.

The Bauhaus

In terms of design, top of the list of innovators and vital in transforming the look and feel of daily life, from the kitchen to the office, was the Bauhaus. This German school of design and architecture was set up by Walter Gropius, first in Weimar and then in Dessau, during the Weimar Republic (1918-33). Those who worked and taught there included architect Mies van der Rohe and artists Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and Kasimir Malevich.

Instead of decorating hand-crafted everyday objects with fussy art nouveau swirls, Bauhaus designers' creations were practical, clean-cut and suitable for mass production: car bodies, aircraft seats and advertising graphics. Their architecture set the scene for the 'international style', which persisted throughout the 20th century.

With the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, the Bauhaus practitioners scattered. Many of them surfaced in the United States where they were extremely influential.

Modernist culture and the public

Much avant-garde modernist culture – books such as James Joyce's Ulysses, poems such as T S Eliot's The Waste Land, modern art, modern architecture, ballets staged by Sergei Diaghilev – was, for most of the first half of the 20th century, only enjoyed by small groups of intellectuals.

The public reacted with jeers and contempt to the music of Stravinsky, the art of the surrealists and the 1913 Armory Show of modern paintings in New York. As for avant-garde bohemians, they labelled the masses 'philistines'. If you were a modern artist of any kind, it helped to be based in Paris (as American expatriate writers Ernest Hemingway or F Scott Fitzgerald were) or Berlin.

The 1930s on

In the 1930s, while some modern artists (such as many of the dadaists and surrealists) became left-wing revolutionaries, others were right-wing reactionaries. These included T S Eliot, Salvador Dali, Ezra Pound, W B Yeats, Knut Hamsun, D H Lawrence and Louis-Ferdinand Céline.

At the same time, the influence of avant-garde modernism on everyday life grew. Marcel Breuer's tubular chair (1925-29) and similar modern furniture began to appear in offices. The sleek design of kitchenware and other commonplace objects echoed the lines of futurist art and of Russian constructivism. The angular art deco style, pioneered at the Paris Exposition of Decorative Arts in 1925, constantly cropped up in suburbia. Avant-garde typography by designers such as Jan Tschichold was popularised by its use on paperback books, such as those introduced by Penguin in the 1930s.

And soon after World War II, the international style of modern skyscrapers and houses built by architects such as Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright began to dominate the skylines of cities such as New York and the design of residences everywhere.

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