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1 Art & Artists in the Ancient World and Middle Ages 2 Art & Artists in the Renaissance 3 Art & Artists in the Academies 4 Art & Artists and Modernism
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ART & ARTISTS: Modernism and Politics |
THIRD PART of a FIVE-PART ESSAY on MODERNISM
In the period between World War One and World War Two, progressive modernism continued to pursue its goals, but now often in association with other forces.
Progressive artists actively supported political revolution. Pablo Picasso, for example, joined the communist party in 1944, as did many other artists. The Russian Revolution seemed at the time, and for a long time after, to be the answer to the progressive modernist's dream. Marxist communism was the boldest attempt to create a better society, adopting not a political democracy like the United States, but an economic democracy wherein all were economically equal.
The ideas of Karl Marx infused the Surrealist movement which saw itself as promoting, in the words of Salvador Dali, "a revolution in consciousness." Communism offered the vision of universal freedom predicated on freedom of ideas, and progressive modernist artists in the imaginative freedom of their works exemplified or encouraged this freedom.
Under Josef Stalin, however, this freedom was sharply curtailed. Modernism persisted, however, but in a state-manipulated controlled form. This same form, generally called social Realism, also flourished at the other end of the political spectrum in Hitler's Nazi Germany.
We might describe the art of later Communism and Fascism as a revival of the goals and values of conservative modernism.
World War One left progressive modernism dazed and confused; World War Two was a blow that only in later decades do we see as having been mortal. World War Two effectively destroyed the spirit of modernism. After Auschwitz, Theodor Adorno asks if any art has a right to exist. The Nazi holocaust reduced the modernist dream to ashes. The Germans, after all, were a civilized people who had actively participated in the modernist enterprise from the beginning.
The basic Enlightenment assumption that art improves people warranted serious re-examination. It was claimed (and is still claimed in some circles) that from the study of art comes a moral education all by itself. Further exposure to and learning about art only served to improve the student further. But, does art improve people?
Artists, art historians, curators, critics, to mention a few are in contact with art everyday; are they noticeably different, better, than anyone else who hasn't studied art?
As we have seen, the Enlightenment pictured the human race as engaged in an effort towards universal moral and intellectual self-realization. It was believed that reason allowed access to truth, and knowledge of the truth would better mankind. These tenets were fundamental to the notion of Modernism, the goal of which was the creation of a new world order.
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MODERNISM (continued)
- The Roots of Modernism
- Modernism and Art for Art's Sake
- Modernism and Politics (this page)
- Modernism and Postmodernism
- Modernism and the End of Art
INTRODUCTION (continued):
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1.
- The Roots of Modernism
- Modernism and Art for Art's Sake
- Modernism and Politics (this page)
- Modernism and Postmodernism
- Modernism and the End of Art
Art & Artists in the Ancient World and Middle Ages
2. Art & Artists in the Renaissance
3. Art & Artists in the Academies
4. Art & Artists and Modernism
Back to the first page of the Introduction