Two modernisms

Kumar defines modernism as an intellectual, cultural and artistic revolt against modernity. Yet modernism itself, especially as expressed in architecture, was complex and racked with internal contradictions: “It could denounce the ‘inauthentic’ present in the name of the future, as in Futurism and Constructivism; and it could with equal force do so in the name of the past, as in the appeal to a time of lost wholeness in the novels of Proust, or to a former ‘organic community’ in the poetry of T. S. ELiot (not to mention in much, especially German, social theory of the time. It could attack reason and science, as in Dadaism and Surrealism, and it could embrace them with passion, as in Malevich’s Suprematism and the de stijl and Bauhaus movements. It could at once reject modern technology and the industrial way of life, as in the primitivist painting of Henri Rousseau and the novels of D. H. Lawrence, and at the same time glory in them, as in Futurism and modernist architecture. It could celebrate the life of the modern city, as in much of the painting and architecture of the time, and equally find there desolation, isolation, and alienation, as in Munch’s paintings and the writings of Joyce and Eliot. It aimed to life art and culture out of history, to make them timeless; and it simultaneously claimed that its works were the most intensely living expressions of its own, modern, times.” In art, “cubism was both a critique of modernity and a fascinated exploration of modern, scientific, ways of seeing.”

In short, “Modernism, like Romanticism, had a split soul. But the split was deeper and more neurotic, as befitted a fin-de-siecle mood.”