Modernism is a term covering a wide-ranging movement that dominated Western culture from around the mid-19th century to roughly the mid-20th. Straddling many different art forms, its central credo was a rejection of traditional styles in favour of experimentation (with form, technique and materials) in an effort to better echo the conditions and characteristics of the modern world. Modernism was never afraid to challenge its audience, sometimes revelling in a reputation for being ‘difficult’.
Modernist architecture
Modernism saw a redefinition of architecture, with architects focusing on functionality and simplicity of form. To this end, they were helped by technological innovations (such as the steel frame, the curtain wall and reinforced concrete). Arguably its greatest stars were Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius (founder of the hugely influential Bauhaus movement), Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright. Between them, they changed the look of the built world, eschewing ornament for clean lines. Modernism brought us the skyscraper – those era-defining monoliths of steel and glass – as well as the mass housing estates that moulded urban living around the world.
In the realm of the visual arts, it encompassed a number of other movements discussed elsewhere in this chapter – for example, Abstraction, Cubism, Expressionism, Impressionism and Surrealism – each of which experimented to create original visions of the world. In literature, meanwhile, modernism ushered in a prolonged period of formal innovation (such as stream-of-consciousness) and treatments of non-traditional subjects, with figures such as Joseph Conrad, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf at the vanguard. Music, too, underwent a revolution, not least in the willingness of composers to challenge conventional tonal and structural patterns. The likes of Béla Bartók, Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky collectively turned on its head the accepted rulebook of ‘serious’ music, while the spontaneity inherent in jazz redefined popular music for evermore.
By the 1960s and 70s, modernism no longer represented the revolutionary reaction to tradition but had instead become the new ‘traditional’. Having been absorbed into the mainstream of culture, it inspired its own reactions. These took two distinct paths: on the one hand, a wistful nod to some of the past traditions that modernism had so ruthlessly swept away; and on the other, the emergence of postmodernism (see here), which urged a reappraisal of how we look at the world and made modernism seem decidedly old hat.