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How would you describe the impact of the First World War on modernist visual practices?

The aesthetic phenomenon of Modernism, wide-reaching as that term is, can be historically defined as a period that began around 1860, with Manet generally accepted as the first Modernist painter, and came to an end around 1940 – although the murky cross-over between modernism and post-modernism, and the ubiquitous nature of both terms, means that some historians see Modernism stretching to the 1970s.

The term applies retrospectively to a wide range of movements, including Futurism, Dada and Cubism, which broadly sought to distance themselves from the values and stylistics of Classicism. In a general aesthetic sense, modern art is often concerned with essential properties of the potential of colour and flatness, and over time a fading interest in subject matter can be witnessed. In fact, in a more specific sense, Modernism can be seen to refer not just to a style or styles of art, but to the philosophy of art as well.

From a historical viewpoint, Modernism can be seen as the reaction of art – at least of the progressive artist – to the post-industrial world, a world in which the machine came to be as prominent and ubiquitous as man, and indeed it was in the largest European metropolises, where the tensions of social modernity were most prominent, that the earliest incarnations of Modernism in art appeared.
However Modernism is a wide and watered down term, associated with a myriad of differing, and often opposing movements. What draws them together is that they respond to the same situations of the modern world, of the industrialisation of society and the cataclysmic watershed of the First World War.
Christopher Witcombe talks of the period of enlightenment in the 18th century, which preceded the advent of Modernism:

“Progressive 18th-century thinkers believed that the lot of humankind would be greatly improved through the process enlightenment, from being shown the truth. With reason and truth in hand, the individual would no longer be at the mercy of religious and secular authorities which had constructed their own truths and manipulated them to their own self-serving ends. At the root of this thinking is the belief in the perfectibility of humankind.”
According to Witcombe, the roots of modernism lie in the ideals of the Enlightenment, and this is where we can see the new roles of the artist begin to take shape. Essentially, the overarching goal of Modernism, of modern art, has been “the creation of a better society” . But as we shall see, the moralistic idealism of the Enlightenment was not the preferred form for the Modernist movement, which was dragged through the m...


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