The Function of Art in Modernism

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The Function of Art in Modernism

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👉Name : Upasna Goswami
👉Roll no.20
👉Enrollment no. 4069206420220012
👉Sem : 2
👉Paper Name : History of 20th Century Literature
👉Paper no. : 110
👉Paper Code : 22403
Submitted to : S. B. Gardi Department of English
👉Email: goswamiupasna339@gmail.com

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Key Points
● What is Modernism?
● Historical Context
● Characteristic of Modernist Art
● The Function of Art in Modernism
● The legacy of Modernism
● Conclusion

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● What is Modernism?
Modernism is a literary and artistic movement that began in
the late 19th century and departed from previous traditional
and classical forms of art and literature. It is a global
movement where creatives radically produced new imagery,
mediums, and means to best portray modern life. The
movement not only was embraced by literature but art,
music, architecture and other fields of thinking.

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Historical Context-
Modernism was born out of a time of great societal upheaval caused
by industrialisation, modernisation and the first World War.
WW1 (1914–1918) shattered the concept of progress to many,
resulting in fragmentation in both content and structure. The ideals
of the Enlightenment claimed that new technology would bring
progress to humans: technological advances would improve society
and quality of life. Yet this was destroyed by WW1, as technological
advances simply increased the mass destruction of life. The war
resulted in the disillusionment of society and a deep pessimism of
human nature; themes picked up by Modernism such as in the poem
'The Waste Land' (1922) by T. S. Eliot.

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What we call "Modern Art" lasted for an entire century and involved
dozens of different art movements, embracing almost everything from pure
abstraction to hyperrealism; from anti-art schools like Dada and Fluxus to
classical painting and sculpture; from Art Nouveau to Bauhaus and Pop
Art. So great was the diversity that it is difficult to think of any unifying
characteristic which defines the era.But if there is anything that separates
modern artists from both the earlier traditionalists and later
postmodernists, it is their belief that art mattered. To them, art had real
value
Characteristic of Modernist Art

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Modern artists were the first
to develop collage art, assorted
forms of assemblage, a variety
of kinetic art (inc mobiles),
several genres of photography,
animation (drawing plus
photography) land art or
earthworks, and performance
art.
New Types of Art

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Modern painters affixed objects
to their canvases, such as
fragments of newspaper and
other items. Sculptors used
"found objects", like the
"readymades" of Marcel
Duchamp, from which they
created works of Junk art.
Assemblages were created out
of the most ordinary everyday
items, like cars, clocks, suitcases,
wooden boxes and other items
Use of New
Materials

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.Movements of modern art
like Fauvism,
Expressionism and Colour
Field painting were the
first to exploit colour in a
major way.
Expressive
Use of
Colour

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Chromolithography was
invented by the poster artist
Jules Cheret, automatic drawing
was developed by surrealist
painters, as was Frottage and
Decalcomania. Gesturalist
painters invented Action
Painting. Pop artists introduced
"Benday dots", and silkscreen
printing into fine art.
New
Techniques

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The Function of Art
in Modernism
Important intellectual precursors of modernism, in this sense, are
thinkers who had questioned the certainties that had supported traditional
modes of social
organization, religion, and morality, and also traditional ways of conceiving
the human self..Important intellectual precursors of modernism, in this
sense, are
thinkers who had questioned the certainties that had supported traditional
modes of social
organization, religion, and morality, and also traditional ways of conceiving
the human self.
“At the heart of the Modernist aesthetic lay the conviction that the
previously sustaining
structures of human life, whether social, political, religious, or artistic, had
been either destroyed
or shown up as falsehoods or fantasies” (Baym, 2012)

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Few points of Modernist Art and Literature
● Seeing that Modernism focuses on art as it stands, it distances from social
conventional concerns; therefore, Modernist art does not serve religion, morality and
the like.
● Modernist art and literature are not to deal with a person “whose interests are of a
material and commonplace nature, and whose mentality is formed of the stock ideas
and conventional ideals of his or her group and time” (Nabokov, 1981). In short, art
in Modernism has got more to do with Intellectualism rather than vulgarity and
Philistinism. As T. S. Eliot (1916) said, “it is obvious that we can no more explain a
passion to a person who has never experienced it than we can explain light to the
blind”.
● Art, per se, is of high significance insofar as it is used as subject matter of a
Modernist work at times. That is to say art is mainly at the service of art in
Modernism.
● The extent to which truth, whether or not as a transcendental signified, plays role in
literary shots of Modernists is of a great significance for author.

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The legacy of Modernism
Nonetheless, A Homemade World offers a reader the chance to brood
about the legacy of modernism since, even by Kenner's estimation, the
movement has run its course. One can see its energies evolving out of the
nineteenth-century's notions of the poet as visionary and the purpose of
art as expanding awareness. Since Diderot and the eighteenth century,
the nature of the awareness has been shifting from moral and aesthetic
frameworks to a concept of experience-as-experience. The sub-
jective/objective dichotomy of Alfred North Whitehead's Science
and the Modern World ( 1 925), for example, consists in determining not
the purpose of man but if reality lies in a subject's ability to involve
himself in or divorce himself from experience. Teleology gives way to an
Existentialism in which neither the Good nor the Beautiful has any
absolute subjective basis. In the case of modernism, the "new" becomes
the "good" and contains the seeds of its own destruction as surely as a built-in
obsolescence of machinery.

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In Modernist sense, an artistic work is assessed and praised for its aesthetic
characteristics.
For a Modernist artist specially a high one, being a conformist has neither
meaning nor value.
After all the previous literary movements and schools, Modernism came to realize
that art itself
needs a lot of care and attention. A High Modernist, James Joyce put a step
further and paved the
way for art to be at the center of literary focus.
Conclusion

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“Canaday Center.” The University of Toledo,
https://www.utoledo.edu/library/canaday/guidepages/Modernism2.html.
On the Function of Art in Modernism - Researchscholar.co.in.
http://www.researchscholar.co.in/downloads/72-tohid-asadi.pdf.
“Modern Art (C.1870-1970).” Modern Art: History, Characteristics,
Movements, http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/modern-art.htm.
The Legacy of Modernism - JSTOR.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/40546909.
Work cited

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Thank you!