Modernism

Modernism was an early 20th-century movement in literature, visual arts, performing arts, and music that emphasized experimentation, abstraction, and subjective experience. It also touched on philosophy, politics, architecture, and social issues. Modernism focused on breaking away from old traditions and ways of thinking.

The modernist movement began in the late 19th century as a response to big changes in Western culture, like secularization and the rise of science. It was shaped by new technological innovation, industrialization, and cities growing larger. Events like World War I also influenced it. Modernism brought new ways of expressing ideas through art, such as abstract art, literary stream-of-consciousness, cinematic montage, and modernist architecture.

Modernism questioned old ideas about reason and rejected the thought that art had to be completely new. Instead, it used techniques like collage and reprise. Artists also thought a lot about how art is made and what materials are used. Some people say modernism later evolved into late modernism or high modernism, and then postmodernism came, which had different ideas from modernism.

Overview and definition

Modernism was a cultural movement that changed arts and ideas. It focused on new ways of thinking and doing things. Modernists believed in using new methods and ideas to improve life. They wanted to look at old ways of thinking and find better solutions.

This movement was also seen as a way to make progress in society. It encouraged people to use experiments, science, and technology to create and shape the world. Different areas like art, music, and even politics were all part of this big change.

Modernism, Romanticism, Philosophy and Symbol

Literary modernism is often described with a line from W. B. Yeats: "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold" (in "The Second Coming"). Modernists often look for a deep meaning but feel it slipping away. (Postmodernism, in contrast, embraces this loss, questioning old ideas about truth and meaning, like Jacques Derrida’s work on deconstruction.)

Philosophically, this feeling comes from the ideas of David Hume, who said we can’t really know if one event causes another, or fully understand ourselves. So, modernism is driven by a wish for deep truths, even though it feels like those truths are impossible to grasp. Some modernist books, like Heart of Darkness or The Great Gatsby, have characters who think they’ve discovered big truths, but the stories themselves often show these ideas as uncertain or simple.

Modernism often moves away from the detailed, realistic style of the 1800s. Instead, it tries to show things in new ways. For example, Picasso’s painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon doesn’t show what things look like from just one angle, but from several at once, creating a flat, two-dimensional view. Modernism can be seen as a continuation of romanticism, which also searched for deep meanings about life and nature, but modernism often feels these meanings are hard or impossible to find.

Modernism also changes how symbols and meanings are used. While some earlier writers saw nature and symbols as having clear meanings, modernists often feel these meanings are unclear or impossible to fully understand. This can lead to strange and unusual comparisons in their writing, like comparing an evening sky to something unusual.

Origins and early history

Modernism began in the early 1900s as a movement in art, literature, music, and more. It focused on trying new things, showing feelings and thoughts in unusual ways, and thinking about deep ideas.

Modernism grew from earlier art styles that fought against strict rules and old ways of thinking. Artists and writers wanted to show how people really see and feel, not just how things look. They believed that each person sees the world differently, so art should show these different views.

The Industrial Revolution brought big changes like trains and factories. These changes made life faster and more complicated, which influenced how artists thought and created. Some famous artists and writers began to explore new ways to show their ideas, leading to the start of modernism.

Modernism emerges

See also: Cubism, Expressionism, Modernism (music), Twentieth-century English literature, and American modernism

1901 to 1930

Out of the mix of ideas from Romanticism and efforts to understand the unknown, the first wave of modernist works began in the early 1900s. These works challenged what people generally expected from art. They showed that artists could explore new ways of expressing ideas beyond traditional styles. Important examples include the unique ending of Arnold Schoenberg's Second String Quartet in 1908, the expressive paintings of Wassily Kandinsky starting in 1903, and the rise of movements like fauvism and Cubism led by artists such as Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and Georges Braque.

One key part of modernism was how it built on older traditions while also using new methods. Writers and artists often looked back at the past but also pushed boundaries in new ways.

T. S. Eliot talked a lot about how artists relate to the past, noting that even the most personal parts of a poet's work can be influenced by earlier writers.

However, modernism had a complex relationship with tradition. Some artists were very eager to break old rules, while others were more cautious about change.

In music, Arnold Schoenberg moved away from traditional ways of organizing sound but still drew ideas from earlier composers like Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner.

In painting, artists like Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse caused debate by moving away from traditional ways of showing depth in paintings. This was similar to how Claude Monet had already experimented with perspective earlier.

Cubism, led by artists such as Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, and Henri Le Fauconnier, showed objects from many angles at once. This style first gained attention in 1911 in Paris.

Expressionism, especially in Germany, reacted against the harsh effects of industrialization and city life. Playwrights like Georg Kaiser and Ernst Toller used simplified characters and intense storytelling.

Futurism, starting in 1909 with a manifesto by F. T. Marinetti, celebrated new technology and change. Artists like Giacomo Balla and Umberto Boccioni embraced bold, forward-looking styles.

Modernist architects like Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier believed that new technologies made old building styles unnecessary. They focused on simple shapes and materials, as seen in skyscrapers like the Wainwright Building and later the Seagram Building.

With World War I and the Russian Revolution, the world changed dramatically. The horrors of war made people question old beliefs. Art began to reflect these new, often unsettling realities.

Modernism continued to grow in the 1930s. Arnold Schoenberg explored new musical techniques, Pablo Picasso created powerful anti-war art like Guernica, and James Joyce pushed literary boundaries with Finnegans Wake. Modernist ideas also started to appear in everyday culture, such as in magazines and logos.

The rise of new technologies like electricity and the automobile changed daily life. Marxism also influenced many modernist thinkers during this time.

Modernist literature flourished with works by Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner. Playwrights like Eugene O'Neill and Bertolt Brecht brought new depth to theater.

In the Soviet Union, modernism faced challenges as socialist realism became the favored style. Composers like Dimitri Shostakovich and Alban Berg navigated these changes.

In Germany, modernist artists like Arnold Schoenberg and Béla Bartók had to flee as the Nazi regime rose to power. Many moved to the United States.

Painting in Europe was shaped by Surrealism, Cubism, and Expressionism. Artists like Henri Matisse and Piet Mondrian continued to explore new ways of seeing.

In America, artists like Grant Wood and Edward Hopper focused on realistic scenes of everyday life, capturing both the beauty and loneliness of modern urban and rural settings.

The modernist movement continued to evolve, influencing many areas of culture and art.

After 1945

See also: Late modernism and Abstract Expressionism

While a book called The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature says modernism ended around 1939 for British and American writing, when modernism ended and postmodernism started has been debated just as much as when Victorian times turned into modernism. Some think modernism ended in the 1930s, except for visual and performing arts, but for music, one writer notes that modernism "seemed to be a spent force" by the late 1920s, but after World War II, a new group of composers—Boulez, Barraqué, Babbitt, Nono, Stockhausen, Xenakis—brought modernism back to life. In fact, many modernist writers lived into the 1950s and 1960s, though they generally weren’t creating major works anymore. The term "late modernism" is sometimes used for modernist works published after 1930. Among the modernists (or late modernists) still publishing after 1945 were Wallace Stevens, Gottfried Benn, T. S. Eliot, Anna Akhmatova, William Faulkner, Dorothy Richardson, John Cowper Powys, and Ezra Pound. Basil Bunting, born in 1901, published his most important modernist poem, Briggflatts in 1965. Also, Hermann Broch’s The Death of Virgil was published in 1945 and Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus in 1947. Samuel Beckett, who died in 1989, has been called a “later modernist.” Beckett, rooted in the Expressionist tradition of modernism, created works from the 1930s to the 1980s, including Molloy (1951), Waiting for Godot (1953), Happy Days (1961), and Rockaby (1981). The words “minimalist” and “post-modernist” have also described his later works. The poets Charles Olson (1910–1970) and J. H. Prynne (born 1936) are among the writers in the second half of the 20th century who have been called late modernists.

More recently, the term “late modernism” has been changed by at least one writer to mean works written after 1945, not 1930. With this meaning comes the idea that the beliefs of modernism changed a lot because of World War II, especially the Holocaust and the dropping of the atom bomb.

The years after the war left the capitals of Europe in chaos, with a need to rebuild both money and buildings and to reorganize politics. In Paris (the old center of European culture and the art world), the scene for art was a disaster. Important collectors, art sellers, and modernist artists, writers, and poets fled Europe for New York and America. The surrealists and modern artists from every cultural center in Europe had escaped the Nazis to find safety in the United States. Many who didn’t escape died. A few artists, notably Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Pierre Bonnard, stayed in France and survived.

The 1940s in New York City marked the rise of American Abstract Expressionism, a modernist movement that mixed ideas from Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Surrealism, Joan Miró, Cubism, Fauvism, and early modernism learned from great teachers in America like Hans Hofmann and John D. Graham. American artists benefitted from having Piet Mondrian, Fernand Léger, Max Ernst and the André Breton group, Pierre Matisse’s gallery, and Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery The Art of This Century, along with other things.

Paris, however, got back much of its shine in the 1950s and 1960s as the center of a machine art growth, with both leading machine art sculptors Jean Tinguely and Nicolas Schöffer moving there to start their careers—and this growth, because of the technology-focused nature of modern life, might have a very lasting effect.

Theatre of the Absurd

The term “Theatre of the Absurd” is used for plays, mostly by Europeans, that show the belief that human life has no meaning or purpose and therefore all communication breaks down. Logical structure and argument give way to irrational and illogical speech and its final result, silence. While there are important earlier examples, including Alfred Jarry (1873–1907), the Theatre of the Absurd is generally seen as starting in the 1950s with the plays of Samuel Beckett.

A critic named Martin Esslin made up the term in his 1960 essay “Theatre of the Absurd.” He linked these plays to a broad theme of the absurd, similar to how Albert Camus uses the word in his 1942 essay, The Myth of Sisyphus. The Absurd in these plays takes the form of people’s reaction to a world that seems to have no meaning, and/or people as puppets controlled or threatened by invisible outside forces. Though the term is used for a wide range of plays, some features appear in many of them: broad comedy, often like vaudeville, mixed with scary or tragic images; characters stuck in hopeless situations forced to do repeated or meaningless actions; dialogue full of clichés, wordplay, and nonsense; plots that circle back or are wildly big; either making fun of or rejecting realism and the idea of the “well-made play”.

Playwrights often linked to the Theatre of the Absurd include Samuel Beckett (1906–1989), Eugène Ionesco (1909–1994), Jean Genet (1910–1986), Harold Pinter (1930–2008), Tom Stoppard (1937-2025), Alexander Vvedensky (1904–1941), Daniil Kharms (1905–1942), Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–1990), Alejandro Jodorowsky (born 1929), Fernando Arrabal (born 1932), Václav Havel (1936–2011) and Edward Albee (1928–2016).

Pollock and abstract influences

During the late 1940s, Jackson Pollock’s new way of painting changed the possibilities for all contemporary art that came after him. In some ways, Pollock realized that the journey to making a work of art was just as important as the artwork itself. Like Pablo Picasso’s new ideas in painting and sculpture in the early 20th century through Cubism and built sculpture, Pollock changed the way art is made. His move away from regular painting and tradition was a freeing signal to the artists of his time and to all who came later. Artists realized that Jackson Pollock’s process—putting unstretched raw canvas on the floor where it could be attacked from all four sides using artistic and industrial materials; dripping and throwing lines of paint; drawing, staining, and brushing; using images and non-images—basically blew art-making past any earlier limits. Abstract Expressionism generally grew and developed the ideas and possibilities available to artists for creating new works of art.

The other Abstract Expressionists followed Pollock’s breakthrough with new breakthroughs of their own. In a way, the inventions of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, Philip Guston, Hans Hofmann, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, Robert Motherwell, Peter Voulkos and others opened the gates to the variety and range of all the art that followed them. Re-examinations of abstract art by art historians such as Linda Nochlin, Griselda Pollock and Catherine de Zegher critically show, however, that leading women artists who made major new ideas in modern art had been left out of official stories of its history.

International figures from British art

Henry Moore (1898–1986) became Britain’s leading sculptor after World War II. He was best known for his semi-abstract huge bronze sculptures that are found around the world as public art. His shapes are usually abstracts of the human body, often showing mother-and-child or lying figures, usually hinting at the female body, except for a time in the 1950s when he sculpted family groups. These sculptures are usually pierced or have empty spaces.

In the 1950s, Moore began getting more important jobs, including a lying figure for the UNESCO building in Paris in 1958. With many more public works of art, the size of Moore’s sculptures grew a lot. The last three decades of Moore’s life continued in a similar way, with several big exhibitions around the world, notably a famous show in the summer of 1972 in the grounds of the Forte di Belvedere overlooking Florence. By the end of the 1970s, there were about 40 shows a year featuring his work. On the campus of the University of Chicago in December 1967, 25 years to the minute after the team of scientists led by Enrico Fermi achieved the first controlled, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction, Moore’s Nuclear Energy was shown. Also in Chicago, Moore honored science with a large bronze sundial, locally named Man Enters the Cosmos (1980), which was made to recognize the space exploration program.

The “London School” of realistic painters, including Francis Bacon (1909–1992), Lucian Freud (1922–2011), Frank Auerbach (1931–2024), Leon Kossoff (1926–2019), and Michael Andrews (1928–1995), have gotten worldwide recognition.

Francis Bacon was an Irish-born British realistic painter known for his bold, strong and emotionally intense pictures. His painted but abstracted figures usually appear alone in glass or steel geometric cages against plain, plain backgrounds. Bacon began painting in his early 20s but worked only sometimes until his mid-30s. His big break came with the 1944 triptych Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion which made him famous as a uniquely bleak observer of the human condition. His work can be roughly described as sequences or changes on a single idea; starting with the 1940s male heads alone in rooms, the early 1950s shouting popes, and mid to late 1950s animals and lone figures hanging in geometric structures. These were followed by his early 1960s new versions of the crucifixion in the triptych format. From the mid-1960s to early 1970s, Bacon mainly made very caring portraits of friends. After the death of his lover George Dyer in 1971, his art became more personal, inner-looking, and worried about themes and ideas of death. During his life, Bacon was both criticized and praised equally.

Lucian Freud was a German-born British painter, best known for his thickly painted portraits and figure paintings, who was widely seen as the leading British artist of his time. His works are known for their deep looking and for their often uncomfortable look at the relationship between artist and model. According to William Grimes of The New York Times, “Lucien Freud and his friends changed figure painting in the 20th century. In paintings like Girl with a White Dog (1951–1952), Freud used the picture language of traditional European painting for an anti-romantic, direct style of portraiture that took off the sitter’s social mask. Ordinary people—many of them his friends—stared wide-eyed from the canvas, open to the artist’s harsh inspection.”

After Abstract Expressionism

Main articles: Post-painterly abstraction, Color field, Lyrical abstraction, Arte Povera, and Process art

In abstract painting during the 1950s and 1960s, several new directions like hard-edge painting and other forms of geometric abstraction began to appear in artist studios and in radical modern art circles as a reaction against the personal nature of Abstract Expressionism. Clement Greenberg became the voice of post-painterly abstraction when he put together an important show of new painting that traveled to big art museums across the United States in 1964. Color field painting, hard-edge painting, and lyrical abstraction came out as radical new directions.

By the late 1960s however, postminimalism, process art and Arte Povera also came out as new ideas and movements that included both painting and sculpture, through lyrical abstraction and the post-minimalist movement, and in early conceptual art. Process art, as inspired by Pollock, let artists try out and use a wide range of style, content, material, placement, sense of time, simple shapes, and real space. Nancy Graves, Ronald Davis, Howard Hodgkin, Larry Poons, Jannis Kounellis, Brice Marden, Colin McCahon, Bruce Nauman, Richard Tuttle, Alan Saret, Walter Darby Bannard, Lynda Benglis, Dan Christensen, Larry Zox, Ronnie Landfield, Eva Hesse, Keith Sonnier, Richard Serra, Pat Lipsky, Sam Gilliam, Mario Merz and Peter Reginato were some of the younger artists who appeared during the time of late modernism that marked the high point of the art of the late 1960s.

Pop art

Main article: Pop art

In 1962, the Sidney Janis Gallery put on The New Realists, the first big pop art group show in an uptown art gallery in New York City. Janis put the show in a 57th Street storefront near his gallery. The show had a big effect on the New York School as well as the larger worldwide art world. Earlier in England in 1958 the term “Pop Art” was used by Lawrence Alloway to describe paintings linked with the consumerism of the post World War II era. This movement turned away from Abstract Expressionism and its focus on the inner thoughts and feelings to favor art that showed everyday material culture, advertising, and the symbols of the mass production age. The early works of David Hockney and the works of Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi (who made the breaking new work I was a Rich Man’s Plaything, 1947) are seen as key examples in the movement. Meanwhile, in the downtown scene in New York’s East Village 10th Street galleries, artists were creating an American version of pop art. Claes Oldenburg had his storefront, and the Green Gallery on 57th Street began showing the works of Tom Wesselmann and James Rosenquist. Later Leo Castelli showed the works of other American artists, including those of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein for most of their careers. There is a link between the wild works of Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, the rebellious Dadaists with a sense of humor, and pop artists like Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, and Roy Lichtenstein, whose paintings copy the look of Ben-Day dots, a method used in business drawing.

Minimalism

Main articles: Minimalism, Minimal music, Postminimalism, and 20th-century Western painting

Minimalism describes movements in many kinds of art and design, especially visual art and music, where artists want to show the essence or identity of a subject by taking away all extra shapes, features, or ideas. Minimalism is any design or style where the simplest and fewest parts are used to make the biggest effect.

As a special movement in the arts, it is linked with developments in post–World War II Western art, most strongly with American visual arts in the 1960s and early 1970s. Well-known artists linked with this movement include Donald Judd, John McCracken, Agnes Martin, Dan Flavin, Robert Morris, Ronald Bladen, Anne Truitt, and Frank Stella. It comes from the simplifying parts of modernism and is often seen as a reaction against Abstract Expressionism and a bridge to Post minimal art practices. By the early 1960s, minimalism became an abstract movement in art (with roots in the geometric abstraction of Kazimir Malevich, the Bauhaus and Piet Mondrian) that turned away from the idea of personal and feeling-based painting, the complicated surfaces of Abstract Expressionism, and the emotional mood and arguments in the world of action painting. Minimalism said that extreme simplicity could catch all the wonderful representation needed in art. Minimalism is seen either as a first step to postmodernism, or as a postmodern movement itself. In the last way, early Minimalism led to advanced modernist works, but the movement partly gave up this path when some artists like Robert Morris moved in a new direction toward the anti-form movement.

Hal Foster, in his essay The Crux of Minimalism, looks at how much Donald Judd and Robert Morris both agree with and go past Greenbergian modernism in their published ideas of minimalism. He says that minimalism isn’t a “dead end” of modernism, but a “change in direction toward postmodern practices that are still being worked on today.”

Minimal music

The words have grown to cover a movement in music that uses repetition and repeating as in the works of La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and John Adams. Minimalist compositions are sometimes called systems music. The term “minimal music” is usually used to talk about a style of music that grew in America in the late 1960s and 1970s; and that was first linked with the composers. The minimalism movement first included some composers, and other less known starters included Pauline Oliveros, Phill Niblock, and Richard Maxfield. In Europe, the music of Louis Andriessen, Karel Goeyvaerts, Michael Nyman, Howard Skempton, Eliane Radigue, Gavin Bryars, Steve Martland, Henryk Górecki, Arvo Pärt and John Tavener.

Postminimalism

In the late 1960s, Robert Pincus-Witten made up the term “postminimalism” to talk about minimalist-derived art which had content and meaning that minimalism turned away from. The term was used by Pincus-Witten for the work of Eva Hesse, Keith Sonnier, Richard Serra and new work by earlier minimalists Robert Smithson, Robert Morris, Sol LeWitt, Barry Le Va, and others. Other minimalists, including Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Carl Andre, Agnes Martin, John McCracken and others, kept making late modernist paintings and sculpture for the rest of their careers.

Since then, many artists have taken on minimal or post-minimal styles, and the word “postmodern” has been linked to them.

Collage, assemblage, installations

Main articles: Collage, Assemblage (art), and Installation art

Connected to Abstract Expressionism was the idea of mixing made items with artist materials, moving away from older rules of painting and sculpture. The work of Robert Rauschenberg shows this trend. His “combines” of the 1950s were early examples of pop art and installation art, and used mixtures of big real objects, including stuffed animals, birds and business photographs. Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Larry Rivers, John Chamberlain, Claes Oldenburg, George Segal, Jim Dine, and Edward Kienholz were among important starters of both abstract and pop art. Making new rules of art-making, they made it okay in serious modern art groups to include very different materials in their works. Another starter of collage was Joseph Cornell, whose more personal-sized works were seen as new because of both his personal symbols and his use of found objects.

Neo-Dada

Main article: Neo-Dada

In 1917, Marcel Duchamp sent in a urinal as a sculpture for the first show of the Society of Independent Artists, which was to be held at the Grand Central Palace in New York. He said his goal was for people to look at the urinal as if it were a work of art because he said it was a work of art. This urinal, named Fountain, was signed with the fake name “R. Mutt”. It is also an example of what Duchamp would later call “readymades”. This and Duchamp’s other works are usually called Dada. Duchamp can be seen as a forerunner to conceptual art, other famous examples being John Cage’s 4′33″, which is four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence, and Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing. Many conceptual works say that art is the result of the viewer seeing an object or action as art, not the natural qualities of the work itself. In choosing “an ordinary thing of life” and making “a new idea for that object”, Duchamp asked people to see Fountain as a sculpture.

Marcel Duchamp famously stopped doing “art” to play chess. Avant-garde composer David Tudor made a piece, Reunion (1968), written together with Lowell Cross, that has a chess game in which each move sets off a light effect or film. Duchamp and Cage played the game at the first showing.

Steven Best and Douglas Kellner see Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns as part of the change, influenced by Duchamp, between modernism and postmodernism. Both used pictures of ordinary objects, or the objects themselves, in their art, while keeping the abstract and painted actions of high modernism.

Performance and happenings

Main articles: Performance art, Happening, and Fluxus

During the late 1950s and 1960s artists with many different interests began stretching the limits of modern art. Yves Klein in France, Carolee Schneemann, Yayoi Kusama, Charlotte Moorman and Yoko Ono in New York City, and Joseph Beuys, Wolf Vostell and Nam June Paik in Germany were starters of art based on doing things. Groups like The Living Theatre with Julian Beck and Judith Malina worked with sculptors and painters to make worlds, greatly changing the way people and performers relate, especially in their piece Paradise Now. The Judson Dance Theater, located at the Judson Memorial Church, New York; and the Judson dancers, notably Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, Elaine Summers, Sally Gross, Simonne Forti, Deborah Hay, Lucinda Childs, Steve Paxton and others; worked with artists Robert Morris, Robert Whitman, John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, and engineers like Billy Klüver. Park Place Gallery was a center for music shows by electronic composers Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and other well-known performance artists, including Joan Jonas.

These performances were meant as a new kind of art mixing sculpture, dancing, and music or sound, often with people taking part. They were marked by the simple ideas of Minimalism and the free making-up and feeling of Abstract Expressionism. Pictures of Schneemann’s shows of pieces meant to shock the audience are sometimes used to show these kinds of art, and she is often seen doing her piece Interior Scroll. But, following modernist ideas about performance art, it goes against the rules to show pictures of her doing this piece, because performance artists don’t want their work shown in other ways. The performance itself is the art. So, other kinds of pictures, videos, stories or other ways can’t truly show performance art; performance is quick, changes, and personal, not for capturing; showing performance art in other ways picks certain points in space or time or has the natural limits of each kind of picture. The artists say that recordings don’t show the kind of art that performance is.

During the same time, various modern artists made Happenings, secret and often sudden and unplanned gatherings of artists and their friends and family in different places, often using silly actions, costuming, sudden nakedness, and different random or seemingly unconnected things. Well-known makers of happenings included Allan Kaprow—who first used the word in 1958, Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, Red Grooms, and Robert Whitman.

Intermedia and multimedia

Main article: Intermedia

Another idea in art linked with postmodernism is using many different kinds of art together. Intermedia is a word made by Dick Higgins to talk about new art kinds along the lines of Fluxus, concrete poetry, found objects, performance art, and computer art. Higgins was the publisher of the Something Else Press, a concrete poet married to artist Alison Knowles and a fan of Marcel Duchamp. Ihab Hassan includes “Intermedia, the mixing of kinds, the confusing of areas,” in his list of the marks of postmodern art. One of the most common kinds of multimedia art is using video and TV screens, called video art. While the idea of mixing many arts into one art is very old, and has come back now and then, the postmodern kind is often mixed with performance art, where the clear story is taken away, and what is left are the special messages of the artist or the idea of their action.

Fluxus

Main article: Fluxus

Fluxus was started and loosely set up in 1962 by George Maciunas (1931–1978), a Lithuanian-born American artist. Fluxus starts from John Cage’s 1957 to 1959 Experimental Composition classes at The New School for Social Research in New York City. Many of his students were artists working in other kinds of art with little or no history in music. Cage’s students included Fluxus founding members Jackson Mac Low, Al Hansen, George Brecht and Dick Higgins.

Fluxus pushed a “do it yourself” way of making art and liked simple things over hard things. Like Dada before it, Fluxus had a strong feeling against business and an anti-art feeling, turning away from the normal market-driven art world for an art-centered creative way. Fluxus artists liked to use whatever things they had, and either made their own work or worked together with their friends.

Andreas Huyssen says attempts to call Fluxus postmodernism are “either the main key to postmodernism or the finally unexplainable art movement—as if, postmodernism’s secret.” Instead he sees Fluxus as a major Neo-Dadaist part of the modern art world. It didn’t mark a big new step in art methods, though it did show a fight against “the controlled culture of the 1950s, in which a mild, tamed modernism worked as an idea support to the Cold War.”

Avant-garde popular music

Main article: Avant-garde music

Modernism had a hard relationship with popular kinds of music (both in style and thinking) while saying no to popular culture. Even so, Stravinsky used jazz styles in his works like “Ragtime” from his 1918 theater work Histoire du Soldat and 1945’s Ebony Concerto.

In the 1960s, as popular music started to matter more in culture and began to ask questions about its place as business fun, musicians began to look to the post-war modern art for ideas. In 1959, music maker Joe Meek recorded I Hear a New World (1960), which Tiny Mix Tapes’s Jonathan Patrick calls a “big moment in both electronic music and avant-pop history [...] a group of dreamy pop little stories, decorated with dubby sounds and tape-twisted sound strings" which would be mostly ignored at the time. Other early Avant-pop works included the Beatles’s 1966 song "Tomorrow Never Knows", which mixed ideas from musique concrète, modern art music, Indian music, and electro-acoustic sound changing into a 3-minute pop song, and the Velvet Underground’s mixing of La Monte Young’s minimalist and drone music ideas, beat poetry, and 1960s pop art.

Late period

Main article: Late modernism

The going on of Abstract Expressionism, color field painting, lyrical abstraction, geometric abstraction, minimalism, abstract illusionism, process art, pop art, postminimalism, and other late 20th-century modern art moves in both painting and sculpture went on through the first ten years of the 21st century and made new big directions in those kinds of art.

At the turn of the 21st century, well-known artists such as Sir Anthony Caro, Lucian Freud, Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Agnes Martin, Al Held, Ellsworth Kelly, Helen Frankenthaler, Frank Stella, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, James Rosenquist, Alex Katz, Philip Pearlstein, and younger artists including Brice Marden, Chuck Close, Sam Gilliam, Isaac Witkin, Sean Scully, Mahirwan Mamtani, Joseph Nechvatal, Elizabeth Murray, Larry Poons, Richard Serra, Pat Lipsky, Joel Shapiro, Tom Otterness, Joan Snyder, Ross Bleckner, and others kept making important and influencing paintings and sculptures.

Modern architecture

Many buildings in Hong Kong and Frankfurt have been inspired by Le Corbusier and modern design, and his style is still used as an idea for buildings around the world.

Modernism in Asia

See also: Santiniketan: The Making of a Contextual Modernism and Hanshinkan Modernism

In Asia, the idea of modernism began to appear in the early 20th century. Writers and artists in Japan, China, and India started exploring new ways to create art and literature, influenced by ideas from Europe.

In Japan, famous writers like Kawabata Yasunari, Nagai Kafu, and Jun'ichirō Tanizaki wrote stories that felt very modern. Photographers and poets also embraced these new styles. One important architect, Kenzō Tange, mixed traditional Japanese design with modern ideas to create buildings around the world.

In China, writers known as the New Sensationists focused on new feelings and beauty in their stories. In India, a group of artists called the Progressive Artists' Group blended Indian traditions with modern European styles.

Modernism in Africa

Modernist ideas were important for writers in Africa as they fought for freedom from colonial rule. Writers like Rajat Neogy, Christopher Okigbo, and Wole Soyinka used these ideas to express their independence from old systems of unfair treatment and new governments after colonialism ended.

Relationship with postmodernism

See also: New Sincerity and Post-postmodernism

By the early 1980s, a new movement called postmodernism started to grow in art and building design. It used many different styles and ideas. In music and writing, postmodernism began even earlier. Some say it started in the 1970s for music, and in books, it took over from modernism around 1939. But these dates can vary a lot because some people think modernism and postmodernism are really just two sides of the same idea.

Modernism was a big movement that touched on many parts of culture. Postmodernism, on the other hand, was more focused and grew from ideas about society and politics. Over time, though, the word "postmodernism" came to mean any activities from the 20th century that looked back at and changed ideas from modernism.

Postmodern thinkers believe that trying to define modernism clearly will always lead to problems. This is because postmodernism questions whether there can ever be one true answer to anything. Modernists had many different ways to think about truth, while postmodernists often say that truth might not even exist in a way we can understand.

In a smaller way, not everything from modernism is also postmodern. Only the parts of modernism that focused on reason and progress were truly modernist.

Some modernists did not like postmodernism and started something called remodernism. They wanted to bring back the positive ideas from early modernism instead of the more cynical views of postmodern art.

Criticism of late modernity

In the 20th century, many parts of the world adopted ways of making and selling lots of goods quickly and cheaply. This time period is called "late or high modernity." Some thinkers began to question these changes.

One writer, Jürgen Habermas, wrote about how society was changing. Another, George Ritzer, talked about how fast food culture grew everywhere. Modernist styles also showed up in movies and music. Over time, modernist design became common in everyday life, often linked to ideas of a space age future.

By 2008, some believed that modernism had changed so much that it was no longer a radical movement but had become part of everyday tradition. Others saw these changes as the start of something called postmodernism. Some artists and thinkers felt that modernism missed important ideas about wholeness and spirituality.