In the first 10 years of the 20th century, a rapidly escalating political tension and a distrust of and anger toward the social order began to permeate much of European society. For many progressives, the Great War presented an almighty coming together of man and machine in the most morbid possible way, a futile mechanised massacre, which contrasted bitterly with the Modernist treatment of the role of the machine in beauty, and its faith in technology. In the decade after the war, artists began envisioning a world where the war had acted as the catalyst for change.


An element or substance out of which something can be made or composed.

Voir les partenaires de The Conversation France. A distinctive or characteristic manner of expression. ... WWI helped usher in the modernist movement. They had been eyewitnesses to the horror of the war and how this had damaged the bodies of its victims.

Jean (Hans) Arp,

We see this in Langston Hughes’ poetry; in “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” he heralds Africa as source of creativity and cultural grounding: Unlike the emerging literati of the Lost Generation, blacks, for the most part, weren’t angst-ridden over a post-war world devoid of meaning: they had never internalized the myth of America as a shining “city upon a hill.” For them, the war brought no end or loss, no disillusionment or void.

Registered office: Venture House, Cross Street, Arnold, Nottingham, Nottinghamshire, NG5 7PJ. Theories of Modern Art Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968 and 1989.

To record on film or video using a movie camera (verb). By the 1930s, Modernism had entered the Jazz Age, and labels such as “modern” or “hyper-modern” began to proliferate, and the term Modernism began to lose its resonance, like butter scraped across too much toast.
The progressives, on the other hand were “critical of institutions as restrictive of individual liberty”[3].

She equates biblical destruction with the destruction of the war. Moreover, every artistic manifestation was a form of didactic interaction with social and historical change. So the First World War represented a huge failure of the previous status quo, culminating in the most excruciating and fruitless deaths of millions across the world.

In the art community, this growing unease can be seen in the trend toward a radical simplification of previous stylistics, and in some cases, complete rejection of previous practice. As Christopher Witcombe says, “The First World War, at once, fused the harshly mechanical geometric rationality of technology, with the nightmarish irrationality of myth”[4]. From 1916 until the mid-1920s, artists in Zurich, New York, Cologne, Hanover, and Paris declared an all-out assault against not only on conventional definitions of art, but on rational thought itself. In the war’s aftermath, racial tensions heightened – a reflection of this mood.

Over ten million died as a result of the First World War. At the root of this thinking is the belief in the perfectibility of humankind.”[1]. The movement rejected …

Organized to commemorate the centennial of World War I, World War I and the Visual Arts features more than 130 works—mainly works on paper—drawn from The Met collection and supplemented with select loans. So whilst the conservatives wished to continue existing institutions and favoured a gradual development, progressives criticised ruling institutions and searched for radical upheaval. The artistic community took it upon itself to lead the way, as it were, in the post-war society, given the catastrophic failure of many public institutions.