Page 13 - summer 22

MODERN PARADISE

SESSION TWO

• The Modernist Revolutionaries
Picasso, Kandisky, Schoenberg, Joyce, Eliot, Le Corbusier, Eisenstein

What was the Modernist revolution?
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Modernism grew out of the accelerating pace and intensity of early 20 century
urban life. The Modernists wanted to portray its subjective experience - its speed, its
dislocation and fragmentation, its simultaneous rush of images - by challenging the
fundamental conventions that governed the arts. Thus, instead of such basics as
narrative, poetic form, perspective, representation and tonality, they experimented
with radical innovations such as stream of consciousness, allusion, cubism,
abstraction and atonality.

To put it more simply, plotless novels, fragmented poems, paintings without subjects,
music without harmony, and, a little later, buildings without decoration designed as
machines for living. This then was the birth of modernism, which defined art and
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culture in the first half of the 20 century art and was influential long after that. How
we define Modernism is another matter; for now, we can call it what the Modernists
did.

Who the iconic Modernists were
Modernism was created by a core group of half a dozen artists, writers, composers
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and architects in less than two decades at the start of the 20 century.

Pablo Picasso 1881-1973; Spanish painter and sculptor
• Iconic work: Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907)

James Joyce 1882-1941; Irish novelist
• Iconic work: Ulysses (1922)

T.S. Eliot (Thomas Stearns) 1888-1965; American-born Anglicised poet
• Iconic work: The Waste Land (1922)

Arnold Schoenberg 1874-1951; Austrian-born, later Americanised, composer
• Iconic work: Second String Quartet op. 10, with soprano (1905)

Wassily Kandinsky 1866-1944; Russian painter, pioneer of abstraction