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The movement known as Modernism began in the late 19th century, reached its "pinnacle" in the period of 1910-30. It tried to radically redefine various artforms. Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Marcel Proust, and Franz Kafka are all considered to be leading lights within the literary 'wing' of this movement. Composers such as Schoenberg and Stravinsky represent Modernism in music. Artists such as Picasso, Matisse, Mondrian and the Surrealists represent the visual arts, while architects and designers such as Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe brought Modernist ideas into everyday city life.

The central characteristic of Modernism is its rejection of tradition. It emphasises the return of the arts to their fundamental characteristics, as though beginning from scratch. This dismissal of tradition also involved the rejection of conventional expectations. Hence Modernism often stresses freedom of expression, experiment, radicalism, and even 'primitivism'. In many art forms this often meant startling and alienating audiences with bizarre and unpredictable effects. Hence the strange and disturbing combinations of motifs in Surrealism, or the use of extreme dissonance in Modernist music. In literature this often involved the rejection of intelligible plots or characterisation in novels, or the creation of poetry that defied clear interpretation.

Many Modernists believed that by rejecting tradition they could discover radically new ways of making art. Schoenberg believed that by ignoring harmony (the relationship between consonance and dissonance) he had discovered a wholly new way of organising sound, based in the use of twelve-note rows. This is known as serial music. Abstract artists began with the assumption that colour and shape were the essential characteristics of art, not the depiction of the natural world. Kandinsky, Mondrian and Malevich all believed that art could be redefined as the arrangement of pure colour. This particular aspect of Modernism was strongly affected by the invention of photography, which had rendered the representational function of visual art obsolete. However these artists also believed that by rejecting the depiction of material objects they were helping art move from a materialist to a spiritualist phase of development. In music

Other Modernists had more pragmatic views. That was especially prevalent in design. Modernist architects and designers believed that new technology rendered old styles of building obsolete. Le Corbusier thought that buildings should be ‘machines for living in’, analogous to cars, which were machines for travelling in. Just as cars had replaced the horse, so Modernist design should reject the old styles and structures in inherited from Ancient Greece or the Middle Ages. Car manufacturers did not try to make their machines resemble horses, so why should designers still use Classical motifs? Following this ‘machine aesthetic’ Modernist designers typically rejects decorative motifs in design, preferring to emphasise the materials used, and pure geometrical forms. The archetypal Modernist building-type was the ‘skyscraper’, such as Mies’s Seagram Building in New York. Modernist design of houses and furniture also typically emphasised simplicity and clarity of form, open-plan interiors, and the absence of ‘clutter’.

In other arts such pragmatic considerations were less important. In literature and visual art some Modernists sought to defy expectations mainly in order to make their art more vivid, or to force the audience to take the trouble to think ‘outside the box’ of their preconceptions. This aspect of Modernism has often been seen as a reaction to consumer culture, which developed in Europe and America in the late nineteenth century. Whereas most manufacturers try to make products that will be marketable by appealing to people’s preferences and prejudices, Modernists rejected such consumerist attitudes in order to undermine conventional thinking. This theory of Modernism was expounded by the art critic Clement Greenberg in his essay ‘’Avant Garde and Kitsch’’. Greenberg labelled the products of consumer culture ‘kitsch’, because they were designed simply to have maximum appeal, with any ‘difficult’ features removed. For Greenberg, Modernism was thus a reaction ‘’against’’ the development of such examples of modern consumer culture as commercial popular music, Hollywood, and advertising. Greenberg associated this with a revolutionary rejection of Capitalism.

It is certainly true that many Modernists saw themselves as part of a revolutionary culture: one that included political revolution. However, many rejected conventional politics as well as artistic conventions, believing that a revolution of consciousness was more important than a change in political structures. Many Modernists were apolitical, only concerned with revolutionising their own field of endeavour. Others, such as T.S. Eliot, rejected mass popular culture from a Conservative position. Indeed it can be argued that Modernism in literature and art functioned to sustain an elite culture from which the majority of the population were excluded. Indeed Modernism was rejected by the Soviet Communist government because it was deemed elitist, and by the Nazi government in Germany because it was deemed to be narcissistic and nonsensical. The Nazis exhibited Modernist paintings alongside works by the mentally ill in an exhibition entitled ‘Degenerate Art’.

In fact Modernism only flourished in consumer/Capitalist societies, despite the fact that its proponents often rejected consumerism itself. However, Modernism began to merge with consumer culture in the post-war years, especially during the 1960s. In Britain a youth sub-culture even called itself ‘Modernists’, though usually shortened to Mods.