Modernism and its Aesthetics Dr Judith Findlay What

Modernism and its Aesthetics Dr. Judith Findlay

What is Modernism? Modernism is, perhaps, the one great idea of the twentieth century – the one original idea that is impossible to discover in preceding ages and, indeed, is even now alien in most contemporary cultures outside Western Europe and North America.

• Modernism: the positive rejection of the past and the blind belief in the process of change, in the idea that progress though time equates with cultural progress; in the cult of individuality, originality and selfexpression.

• The availability of the necessary technology and materials. • The desire to make Modernism manifest.

• As the modernist architect Corbusier said: • ‘Form follows function’

Style becomes minimal.

• Subjective aesthetics come into play so that services and parts are arranged in a pleasing manner, and certain elements are manufactured in more expensive materials for aesthetic effect.

• In short, the building, artifact, object, image becomes a theatrical demonstration of its functional ideal.

• One of the major artistic events of the twentieth century was the appearance of abstraction as a real alternative to figurative art.

• Like museums, galleries, aesthetics, and the term Art, Art History is an invention of modernity.

• Early modern art is a magnificent representation of this organic, progressive, self-reflective order that structures early modern disciplines. The story of modern Art, until the beginning of the twentieth century is one of gradual development, from realistic, illusionistic representations to more abstract, “ideal” images.