MODERNISM: Modern generally refers to the art which focused on modern

life (politics, landscape, peasants, cities) which followed the collapse of

court culture and its system of history painting.
It is the system of art which made artistic form itself into the only important
component of art. Modernism was the system which justified the search for
a "pure" or "essential" artistic form reducing each medium (painting,
sculpture, architecture) to its most pure, "true" formal elements as seen very
clearly in Constructivism and International Style architecture.
It scornfully rejected traditional representation as "false" and outmoded
It rejected all contemporary mass culture as a low-class kitsch, a vulgar,
commercialized, thoughtless, superficial world of commodities.

Modern Architecture CRISIS IN MODERNIST

The word modernism 1960-70 is known as crisis in modernism.
in building design A key year was 1968, which witnessed the Tet Offensive, the
was first used in assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, and
America during the street demonstrations throughout the capitals of Europe.
Modernism gave way to "Contemporary Art" - meaning "art
1880s to describe of the present era".
skyscraper designed Schools of "postmodernist art" advocate a new set of
by the Chicago aesthetics characterized by a greater focus on medium and
School of style. For instance, they emphasize style over substance and
Architecture place much greater importance on artist-communication
(1880-1910) with the audience.
 MODERNISM IN ARCHITECTURE (1920 - 1950)
MODERNISM is a global architecture and design movement emerged in the 1920s as a
response to accelerated industrialization and social changes. Pursuing 'order' and
'universals' in architecture, modernism utilized new materials and advanced technology
and rejected old, traditional, historical ideas and styles, and ornamentation. Modernism
emphasized function, simplicity, and rationality, and created new forms of expression
with a new aesthetic such as Mies, Barcelona Pavilion, Barcelona

The new aesthetic The modernist motto

resulted in modern ''A house is a machine
buildings characterized for living in'', stated by
by: Le Corbusier in 1921,
clean lines refers to a building
simple geometric having the purity of
shapes ( pure cubic form of a well-
forms) designed machine
ribbon windows and an architecture
flat roofs that is functional as
functional, flexible machine parts. This
open interior spaces 'machine aesthetic
with plain exposed defines one of the
structures central concepts of
VILLA SAVOYE modernism.
 BAUHAUS MODERNISM (1917 - 1933)

Modernism in architecture grew from The

Bauhaus, a German architecture and design
school established in 1919 by Walter Gropius
along with Mies, Marcel Breuer, Wassily
Kandinsky, and Paul Klee. Bauhaus combined
art with technology, crafts with industrial
production to revitalize design for everyday life.

Because, for Bauhaus architects, the 'new

machine age' demanded a new way of living
and a new architecture with new materials as
reinforced concrete, steel, and glass. They
believed their design principles (simplicity,
rationality, functionality and universality) would
change the world. Modern architecture was a
better architecture thus the solution for a better
life. Gropius, Bauhaus, Dessau
 ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM
Expressionist architecture was individualistic
and in many ways abstain from aesthetics.
Distortion of form for an emotional effect.
Subordination of realism to symbolic or stylistic
expression of inner experience.
An underlying effort at achieving the new,
original, and visionary.
Profusion of works on paper, and models, with
discovery and representations
of concepts more important than pragmatic
finished products.
Often hybrid solutions, irreducible to a single
concept.
Themes of natural romantic phenomena, such
as caves, mountains, lightning, crystal and rock
formations.
Uses creative potential of artisan craftsmanship.
Tendency more towards the gothic than
the classical. Expressionist architecture also
tends more towards the Romanesque and
the rococo than the classical.
Conception of architecture as a work of art.
 CUBISM
Cubism offered a new focus on pure pictorial structure. Cubist Art and
Architecture does not share the same characteristic of dealing with geometrical
shapes and forms. Often Cubist Artists painted abstract objects, as dissected
geometrical shapes. Often buildings, based on Cubist principles, are designed
as geometrical interlocking shapes or quite simply as a single geometrical
shape.

Subtle colours
dominate the
design, with one or
two colours
prominent.
Villa savoye
Le Corb
 THE FIRST CRISIS OF A MODERNISM IN THE 1960s
By the early 1960s, American elites used modernist aesthetics to proclaim the
United States as the most technologically advanced, progressive, powerful, and
democratic nation in the free world. Modernism, especially in corporate and
civic architecture, had become inseparable from a new American nationalism and
pride.
The first major show of this kind, The New American Painting, was created and
funded by MOMA and toured eight European countries in 1958-9. It consisted
wholly of Abstract Expressionists.
American attacks on all modern art as "communistic".
Polish artists to move from a Stalinist "socialist realism" to an Abstract
Expressionism derived from Pollock, MOMA even organized a big show of these
Polish modernist artists and hailed their shift to Abstract Expressionism as a
triumph of American cultural and political ideals over Communism.
some "easier" artists like the Impressionists, Post- Impressionists, and Fauves
(especially Matisse) achieved a remarkable success which eventually penetrated
into every social level regardless of class or educational level. More difficult
modernist art like Cubism, Constructivism, abstract Surrealism, and Abstract
Expressionism never achieved any comparable success. These movements
remained "popular" chiefly among urban elites.
 SURREALISM
Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best
known for its visual artworks and writings. Artists painted unnerving, illogical
scenes with photographic precision, created strange creatures from everyday
objects and developed painting techniques that allowed the unconscious to
express itself. Its aim was to resolve the previously contradictory conditions of
dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality. Surrealism
developed out of the Dada activities during World War I and the most important
center of the movement was Paris.

Giorgio de Chirico's Hammer and Sickle Building Subway station.

The Red Tower (1913),
Guggenheim Museum
The Problem of Success THE PROBLEM OF SUCCESS
A number of factors came together here to make this the first crisis for modernism.
These included the following.
The two decades which followed World War II (1945-65) was an unprecedented
period of economic growth in American history. This remarkable economic
expansion produced huge new pools of excess capital in search of suitable luxury
objects for investment.
As a rapidly expanding, international museum culture took more and more Old
Master paintings permanently off the art market, modern art inevitably became
increasing attractive to market forces.
The growing institutional success of modernism at the high level of major
museums, academic institutions, and political patronage at every level made
modernist painting and sculpture even more attractive to the large pools of excess
capital present in major business centers.
Paradoxically, modernism had to reach a certain widespread success before its
proverbial autonomy was threatened. And this only took place in the 1960s
it had defined itself as a universal cultural, a spiritual "aristocracy" of lofty aesthetic
sensibility available to all humanity and supposedly speaking for all human
aspirations with a universal language of aesthetic form. Yet by the 1960s,
modernist at was increasingly reduced to the compromised plaything of an old-
fashioned economic aristocracy, a display of class available primarily to economic
 To sum up, it makes sense to see how excess modern capital
caught up in anxieties about itself in an increasingly uniform,
mass-produced, commercial world, eagerly sought out
unique, hand-crafted, high culture objects endowed with a
conspicuously "individual" vision tied to pure, lofty, "timeless"
significance.
While the excess capital of the modern market economy was
by no means the only larger economic and social factor in the
rise of modernist art, it helped produce the unique luxury
culture of modernism as a villa-like refuge from its own
modern anxieties while simultaneously displaying its own high
social and economic class.
 THE COLLAPSE OF THE AVANT-GARDE
Avant-garde is a nineteenth-century French military term which refers to the
forward attack unit. As a central term within modernism, it expressed
modernist hostilities to popular taste and morality and the notion of a single,
coherent, original cutting-edge of art. Each avant-garde was a new, leading
movement building on and critiquing its predecessors.

The notion of an avant-garde was thus inseparable from modernism's own

history of modern art as a coherent, Paris-New York succession of leading,
innovative movements.

Here was a linear, hermetically sealed history of style outside all social,
political and economic history, a formalist history of modern art running from
Impressionism to Post-Impressionism and Symbolism, Fauvism, Expressionism,
Cubism, Constructivism, Surrealism, up to the triumph of (American) Abstract
Expressionism.

Avant-gardes yielded to a plurality of different movements: Earth Art and Site

Art, Pop Art, Minimalism, Conceptual Art, and Happening Art.
 POP ART
Pop Art is the clearest possible symptom of a crisis within modernism.
Pop Art sought out the most commercial, mass-produced, kitchy,
pornographic, mundane objects & images and made art out of them.
Pop art demolished the whole modernist culture of uniqueness, of unique
sensibilities and unique images, and replaced it with a new, distinctly
modern image which suggested the end of the authority of modernism.

A Modernist Art Beyond the Traditional Object: The other solution of 1960s
artists to the growing commoditization, trivialization, and prostitution of
modernist art was to get rid of the art object, or at least the traditional art
object, and thus preserve art from the market economy with its fetishizing
search for objects.

Happening Art: 1960s such as Happening Art eliminated the art object and
replaced it with temporary, theatrical happenings which could only be
recorded second hand on camera or film.

Conceptual Art: Much though not all Conceptual Art which sprang up in the
1960s and 1970s offered a different variation on the same idea by
replacing art objects with artistic problems and questions.
 MINIMALISM
The goal of Minimalist art was to raised issues and intellectual problems
about art itself instead of "expressing" human feelings or creating sensual
objects.
By avoiding any materials, techniques and formal shapes tied to sensuality,
elegance, and decoration, Minimalism tried to purge art of the physical
qualities which made it attractive to collectors and which allowed earlier,
high-minded modernist visions to become objects of luxury decoration and
social class.

EARTH ART (1967-80)

Earth Art was site art located outdoors in landscape settings.
Not all works of Earth Art fled to the desert to engage the natural
surroundings in any coherent manner. In those works which were
geared toward the surrounding landscape, the isolation of Earth art
worked to guarantee a solitary viewing experience of "untouched"
nature celebrated in so much landscape painting since the Romantics.
Since seeing a work of Earth Art required an enormous pilgrimage
taking the viewer into a remote and silent wilderness, the experience
presumably acquired a uniqueness and lasting impact distinct from the
countless, mundane experiences and perceptions of everyday life,
aesthetic and otherwise.