Modernism
Modernism is a highly complex cultural phenomenon which has generated a variety of differing opinions and an immense critical literature. The notion of the "modern" has undergone various semantic shifts and definitions, mainly due to the sensibility of each age, yet the word has always retained a particular pertinence in characterizing a feeling of novelty, of change and historical evolution. For American expatriate writer Gertrude Stein Modernism was a sort of "inevitable art," the only "composition" appropriate to the new disposition of time and space in which people lived in the early part of the twentieth century. However it is defined, it is clear that Modernism was an extraordinary combination of often contradictory aspects: the futuristic and the nihilistic, the revolutionary and the conservative, the naturalistic and the symbolistic, the romantic and the classical. It was a celebration of a technological age, the so-called "Age of the Machine" and a condemnation of it, a faithful acceptance of any new, exciting cultural expression and the excuse for fearful and anxious reactions in face of it. The term has often included many artistic movements which originated mostly in Europe (Impressionism, Expressionism, Futurism, Cubism, Symbolism, Imagism etc.), but soon became truly international, often sharing a tendency towards abstraction and a refusal of realism.
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