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Revision as of 18:32, 11 February 2003 by Paul Barlow (talk | contribs) (major rewrite (more later))(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)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 often 'primitivism'. In many art forms this often meant startling and even alienating audiences with bizarre and unpredicable 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 intelligable plots or characterisation in novels, or the creation of poetry that defied clear interpretation.
It should be noted that there is some academic disagreement about the actual definition of the term 'Modernism'.