Notes on Modernist Art

MODERNIST ART is not to be identified with art of avant-garde. For avant-garde painters-I think of dadaists, and of Duchamp-have not always been modernists in art and contemporary avant-garde (in part descended from them) is defiantly anti-modernist. Indeed, this is so conspicuously case that, pending suggestion of something more informative, term post-modern has come to describe them. Still less is modernist art to be identified with contemporary art. Neither Dr. Zhivago nor The Leopard is a modernist novel and Edward Hopper is not a modernist painter. This will establish, at once, that finest contemporary art need not be modernist. Nevertheless, from time of Mallarm6, and more especially from period just before World War I when tonality was suspended and cubism invented, to eve of World War II, modernism was great movement in arts. Even after war it was responsible for many superb works: one has only to think of late Matisse, Stravinsky-Balanchine Agon, or Mies' Seagram Building to see this. But this time was, already, a period of consolidation and when we come to Borges, Boulez, and Morris Louis we know that we are approaching end of something, though of something great. The idea of modern, especially as it has been elaborated in classical sociology, by no means provides key to idea of modernism in arts. But something like its distinction between traditional and modern society as elaborated in, say, distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, finds expression in such critical doctrines as Eliot's theory of dissociation of sensibility and Benjamin's of decline of aura. Then, too, such sociological themes as decline of traditional religion, rise of science and technology, growth of bureaucracy and of urban civilization, spread of anomie and sense of rootlessness, are themselves inevitably treated in modern literature. It would be tedious to review developments from the death of God to encounter with an Unreal City in order

Art · Art history · Art, Politics, and Modernism · Philosophy