Name: Ranjan P. Velari
Class: M.A. Sem. 3
Paper no.: 9 (The Modernist Literature)
Year: 2014-16
Enrollment No.:14101032
Email Id: ranjanvelari@gmail.com
Guidance: Dr. Dilip Barad
Submitted to: Smt.S.B. Gardi
Department of
English
M.K. Bhavnagar
University
Major Movements of the Modern Age
Introduction:
Modern art period around was
1860s and 1970s, and it includes artistic movement into style and
philosophy of the art. In modern art abstraction is more important. Modern
sculpture and architecture are emerged at the end of the 19th
century. Modern art can be traced back to the enlightenment, and even to the 17th
century. The important modern art critic Clement Greenberg, for instance,
called Immanuel Kant “the first real modernist” but also drew a distinction:
“The Enlightenment criticized from the outside… Modernism criticizes from the
inside.”
The pioneers of modern art were
Romantics, Realists and Impressionists. By the late 19th century,
additional movements which were to be influential in modern art had begun to
emerge: post-Impressionism as well as symbolism.
Impressionism:
Impressionism was arguably practiced by Renoir, Monet, Degas, Manet and
Sisley. General view of impressionism expressed in a vision of beauty: cafes,
villages, boulevards, salons and theatres all expressed a joy of life, wholeness
and radiance by impressionists. It is the essence of realism because its aim
was to paint a specific object at a specific moment, to capture the effect of
light and color at an instant time.
Impressionism’s unit of color
was the brushstroke, which was challenged by George Seurat (1859-1891).
Seurat's views were based on scientific studies of color and perception which
had shown that local vision or perception has a halo, a haze of color surrounding
it. He turned to a kind of 'pointillism' (because of its 'points' or dots) or
'divisionism'.
Cubism:
Cubist paintings were nearly all still life’s even though the cubists
rarely used nature, preferring to paint human or constructed objects. All
painting had obeyed the principle of 'one-point perspective', it means seeing
and painting an object from one position. In terms of the object, art is a
two-dimensional medium, but it is usually trying to represent three-dimensional
space. In the painting, the paint of focus and centre of vision can move
between foreground and background as a person's point of interest shifts while
scanning over the object.
Cubists like, Pablo Picasso
(1881-1973) and Georges Braque (1882-1963) trying to suggest
that there is always several sides to the object, may be from five or six
angles.
In Virginia Woolf's novel 'To the Lighthouse' (1927), she uses the
example of Lily Briscoe's painting as an image of how art, which is, in many
ways, opposed to reason, shapes chaos using form.
Cubism, or rather the ideas of
collage and multiple perspective, suggested to writers now ways of constructing
both narrative and 'character' as composites, as not singular but an assembly
of fragments. For Picasso, Africa represented the possibility of regeneration
from outside.
Futurism:
Futurism, largely an Italian movement, was the invention of Fillippo
Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944), who published the first 'Futurist Manifesto'
in 'Le Figaro' in 1909 as a preface to his volume of poems. Another
futurist, Francis Picabia (1879-1953), proclaimed, like the Russian
poet Vladimir Mayakovsky (1894-1930), who declared that all existing art
should be destroyed, that all previous art was dead. The futurists generally
appeared to the world as fanatics.
Futurism stood for a complete
break with tradition and the exploration of new forms, new subjects and new
styles, all in keeping with the advent of mechanistic age. The principles of
futurism were dynamism, the cult of the speed and machine, rejection of the
past and the glorification of patriotism and war.
Expressionism:
Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1953) was prominent impressionist of
Expressionism. The most well-known expressionist painter is Edvard Munch
(1863-1944), who said in a phrase that encompasses the philosophy of
expressionism:
"Nothing
is small, nothing is great. Inside us are worlds."
Like Freud, Munch saw the self as
a battleground between desire and social constraint, between id and superego.
Unlike the impressionist painters concentrated more on shadows than light, on
the sinister effects of shade and dark, the qualities of nightmare and
alienation. Passages of Joyce's Ulysses, especially the 'Night town'
section, and of Woolf's The Waves (1931) are reminiscent of
expressionist techniques, but Frantz Kafka (1883-1924) is the most European
expressionist novelist.
Surrealism:
Surrealism movement best popularized the work
of Salvador Dali. In literature, automatic writing and
stream-of-consciousness came closest to being influenced by this kind of
approach. Andre Breton wrote the Surrealist Manifesto in 1924, in which he
praised Sigmund Freud’s notion of the unconscious. Surrealism movement was an attempt to capture the mind's deepest and
most unconscious aspects in painting. The surrealists saw the unconscious as a
source of creative energy, Breton defined surrealism as 'psychic automatism' of
the human mind.
Pre-Raphaelite:
Pre-Raphaelite was a group of English painters, poets and critics,
founded in 1848 by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel
Rossetti. The group’s intention was to reform art by
rejecting mechanistic approach.
This movement greatly influenced
by nature and these painters used great detail to show the natural world using
bright and sharp focus techniques on a white canvas. Pre-Raphaelites were fixed
on portraying things with near-photographic precision, though with a
distinctive attention to detailed surface-patterns, their worry was devaluated
by many painters & critics.
Transcendentalism:
Transcendentalism is an American literacy, political & philosophical
movement of the early 19th century, centered Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Other important transcendentalists were Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller,
Amos Bronson Alcott, Frederic Henry Hedge and Theodore Parker. They were critics
of their contemporary society for its unthinking conformity &urged that
each person find in Emerson’s words, “an original relation to the universe.”
Dark Romanticism:
Dark Romanticism is a literacy subgenre centered on the writers Edgar
Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. Dark Romantics emphasized
human fallibility and proneness to sin and self-destruction, as well as the
difficulties inherent in attempts at social reform.
Realism:
Realism in the arts is represent subject matter truthfully without
artificiality and avoiding artistic conventions, exotic and supernatural
elements. In the visual arts, illusionistic realism is the accurate depiction
of perspective and the light and color. Realism also called naturalism, mimesis
or illusionism.
Naturalism:
Naturalism is to suggest that social conditions, heredity and
environment and force in shaping human character. This is literary movement was
an outgrowth of literary realism in mid 19th century France and
elsewhere. Naturalistic works exposed the dark harshness of life, including
poverty, racism, violence, corruption etc.
Symbolism:
Symbolism period
was late 19th century movement of French, Russian and Belgian in
poetry and other arts. The term “symbolism” is derived from the word “symbol”
which derives from the Latin “symbolum”, a symbol of faith. Symbolism was a
reaction in favor of spirituality, the imagination and dreams. Symbolists
believed that art should represent absolute truths that could only be described
indirectly. Symbolist poems were attempts to evoke, rather than primarily to
describe; symbolic imagery was used to signify the state of the poet’s soul.
In fact, Edgar Allan Poe, the renowned critic, poet and short story
writer of America, pioneered Symbolism in poetry. His famous poems The Raven,
Ulalume, Lenore, The Haunted Palace etc. are full of abundant symbols, which he
used with great artistic excellence. Famous French symbolists
Baudelaire, Mallarme, Rimbaud, Hart Crane, Ezra Pound and others have
been indebted to him. A symbolist uses words,
“to describe a
mode of literary expression in which words are used to suggest states of mind
rather than for their objective, representational or intellectual content.”
Stream
of Consciousness:
Stream of Consciousness term
was coined by William James in 1980 in his ‘The Principles of Psychology’.
In literary criticism, stream of conscious, also known as interior monologue,
is a narrative mode or devise that depicts the thoughts and feelings which pass
through the mind. This movement is usually associated with modernist novelists
in the first part of the 20th century, the most famous use of the
technique came in 1922, with the publication of James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’.
Dadaism:
Dadaism was an art
movement of the European avant-garde in the early 20th century. The
term anti-art, a precursor to Dada, was coined by Marcel Duchamp around 1913.
Dada activities included public gatherings, demonstrates, and publication of
art literary journals: passionate coverage of art, politics and culture. Dada
was an informal international movement with participants in Europe and North
America.
Dadaism was founded in Zurich in
1916 by Tristan Tzara with the avowed object of perverting and demolishing the
tenets of art, philosophy and logic. Many Dadaists believed that the ‘reason’
and ‘logic’ of bourgeoisie capitalist society had led people into war. They
expressed their rejection of that ideology in artistic logic and embrace chaos
and irrationality. The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature,
poetry, art theory, theatre and graphic design and concentrated its anti-war
through rejection of the prevailing standards in art through anti-cultural
works.
Imagism:
The poetical movement, known as
Imagism, was a reaction against Romanticism, especially Georgian poetry. The
Georgians lived in a world of fantasy and discarded the sordid realities of
life. They lacked modernism. The Imagist Movement flourished from 1910 and
1918. Its first anthology, Des Imagists was published in 1914 with Ezra Pound,
the distinguished American poet, as editor. Imagism was 20th century
movement that favored precision of imagery and clear, sharp language. It is the
first organized modernist literary movement in English language. The imagists
rejected the sentiment and discursiveness typical of much Romantic and
Victorian poetry. Imagism is its attempts to isolate a single image to reveal
its essence.
Conclusion:
In short, it is an
artistic and cultural movement. These art movements’ presents various aspects
of paintings and throughout we come to know about the mind of the painter.
Paintings were not seen as direct way but hidden messages were given by
painters. For example, movement like stream of consciousness shows inner aspect
of human being. It depends upon psychological level of a person.
Works Cited
Childs, Peter. Modernism.
USA & Canada: Routledge, 2008.
Nayar, Pramod K. A Short History Of English Literature.
n.d.
wikipedia.
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