A couple of weeks ago a colleague and friend of mine in the music school asked if I would come to his graduate seminar on 20th century American composers and give a talk about Modernism. Sort of an introduction. Talk about what it was, how it began, how people thought about it then and maybe think of it now. I haven’t taught my history of Modernism seminar in the history department for several years and I really miss it, so I jumped at the chance.
Modernism is one of the movements everybody talks about, even though there’s a wide range of opinions and assumptions about just what it is. The word itself is often misused as a synonym for contemporary. But Modern (with a capital M) and contemporary don’t mean the same thing.
To understand Modernism, in part you have to understand the intentions of the artist and these might not always be obvious. But you have to trust that the artist wants to express something substantive. That's not all. If he or she is a modernist, whether a composer or a painter or a poet, they're going to want to create in a certain way that is in accordance with the convictions of modernism itself.
A lot of people ask me what is Modernism? In response to that here’s a question for you that gets at the heart of how I think about Modernism: Can you imagine thinking about Modernism without thinking about art? Could you describe it without recourse to art?
Ok, here goes. At its foundation, Modernism doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with art at all. Rather, it’s a way of looking at the world; it’s more like a philosophy: one that holds that the new and the experimental have a worth in and of themselves that exceeds the value of tradition. Modernism emphasizes dynamism over stasis. It holds that trying something new is qualitatively better than repeating something old. As a movement, it’s an episode in the history of ideas. I think that’s what catches the attention of the historian in me.
Modernism becomes antiauthoritarian because it arrays itself against the forces that insulate and perpetuate the way things always have been. With some artists it can be personal. In 1950, Jackson Pollock said that the only art teacher he ever had “drove his kind of realism at me so hard I bounced right into non-objective painting.” For others, it's pushing back at convention. At what’s apparently understood to be the limits of what art can do or be.
One of the things I tell my students that seems to click with them is that what they know of as Modern art is a manifestation of Modernism. It just so happens that art is one of the clearest ways that Modernism manifests itself. But not the only way.