Every new cultural figure wants to bring inhis work is something completely original and, of course, dreams of leaving an indelible mark on the history of mankind. But the search for new artistic forms and meanings, for some reason, always led the creators to rework traditions. Moreover, it is well known that artistic culture is the product of the intellectual and spiritual labor of man in the conditions of contemporary social reality. Thus, until the end of 19 Art. each artist and writer tried to create the New while experiencing the influence of the Present and the Past. Thus, in words, proclaiming the Future, in fact, they actually turned their backs on it. The modernists decided to put an end to this absurdity - they completely repudiated the past and present in order to create something that had never happened before.
Society reacted to an attempt to destroy traditional artistic methods with aggressive attacks on modernists.
At the beginning of the twentieth centurythe appearance in art salons of blatantly strange works provoked a reaction of sharp indignation among connoisseurs. The famous Spanish philosopher H. Ortega y Gasset explained this by the fact that the art of modernism is unpopular in its essence. Moreover, it is anti-popular.
What is modernism?In painting, the desire for innovation gave rise to three areas: cubism (appeared in France, but always associated with the name of the Spaniard Picasso), futurism (persistently and scandalously promoted in Italy) and abstractionism (as a virus brought from Russia to Germany by Vasily Kandinsky).
Demonstrative and aggressive rejection of anytraditions and conventions were proclaimed by Vladimir Mayakovsky, who naively considered his creative work to be an absolute innovation. However, did he have the right to claim originality? After all, he wrote his confused, stumbling poems with the help of ordinary words! Hugo Ball, the founder of Dadaism, who read meaningless verses from ... sounds on stage, was far more progressive against the background of such self-proclaimed geniuses.
Numerous and varied modernistCurrents arose in different years, in different countries. They were not associated with national traditions and did not have international significance. Modernism in literature has become a reaction to the inhumanity of a new civilization. Modernist artists and writers believed that their manifestos, brought to life, would change the world.
Many different trends (Imagism, Acmeism, Expressionism, Surrealism, Constructivism, Existentialism) were united only by one - the antirealistic creative method.
Modernism in literature is a hellish mixture of the denial of humanistic values with the display of the formal signs of the vital activity of organisms endowed with consciousness.
In addition, each of the innovators considered himself the most important creator of the New. In the struggle for the ideals of modern art, cultural figures of that time openly violated the principles of common sense.
Modernism in literature is James Joyce, EugeneIonescu, Jean-Paul Sartre, Hermann Hesse and many other authors who sang ode to the absurdity of life, pretending that everyone lives only to die tomorrow, no, no, too pretentious word, much more precisely will sound like: imperceptibly to die and rot as worm.
It is enough to read the short novel “The Transformation” by Franz Kafka in order to get a clear idea of the creative method and ideology of modernism. Retell the plot in a nutshell.
A man wakes up in his bed andhe discovers that he is a giant woodlouse, and now we must somehow continue to live in his family, despite the fact that his relatives have a clear disgust and hatred for him, and even attempt to kill. But he looks like a wood lice only outside - a tender human heart beats inside, the soul is torn from pain, the brain cannot comprehend all the hopelessness and catastrophicity of what happened.
Such is modernism in literature, accusing society of complete moral and mental decay.
Modernist currents, for all theirdiversity, equally treat the relationship of art and reality, as well as form and content. Art is more important than reality, art creates itself and exists for itself, art - this is life. And life is all art, sorry for the absurd statement, it is rather death, the process of dying. Accordingly, the form is more important than the content.
Modernism entered the cultural field, plowedprevious generations (trying to grow in the new social conditions, the grain of ancient tradition, the seeds of the romantic heritage of the Middle Ages), in order to fill the uneven fatty black earth furrow, giving birth to non-original ideas, durable, impermeable and clean asphalt Absolutely New Art.
The confusion of concepts, the rejection of the ideals of the past, the overthrow of authorities and the abandonment of everything traditional leads to the fact that modernism has exhausted all sources of novelty.
Gradually, in the fight with the old, new artbegan to destroy itself. The asphalt of modernism was not so strong. The sprouts of postmodernism, which have absorbed all the power of the soil that generates any art - the history of human civilization, began to break through its expanse.
Modernism and postmodernism differ only in thosethat the latter does not seek to destroy the past (after all, this is impossible). It simply fixes the transition from creativity (as the birth of something fundamentally new) to design (as the only possible form of artistic activity).
Сегодняшний художник, писатель, поэт, будучи highly educated and well-informed, he perfectly understands that the images generated by his fantasy are the essence of quotations. And he, by and large, has no right to claim the authorship of his works: all the plots, motifs, and artistic means cannot be called original, because they have already been used in previous cultural epochs. The author only adds a new picture from old materials.
