Discuss how modernity has influenced the practice of artists- Pablo Picasso;Jackson Pollock and Josef Albers

Essay by nano_23College, UndergraduateA, October 2003

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Modernism is a general term applied retrospectively to the wide range of experimental and avant-garde trends in the literature and other arts of the early 20th century. Modernist art is characterized chiefly by a rejection of 19th Century traditions and of their consensus between artist and audience: conventions of realism ... or traditional meter. Modernist artists tended to see themselves as an avant-garde, disengaged from bourgeois values, and disturbed their audience by adopting complex and difficult new forms and styles. The defining parameter of greatness to Modernism is "has it ever been done before," "is it totally original where there is no derivation from any former schools of art," "does it outrage," "does it expand the definition of what can be called art?".The avant-garde modernist artists consciously rejected tradition, the avant-garde artist saw themselves at the head of a new tradition and they looked to the future. the modernist belief in the freedom of expression has manifested itself in art through claims to freedom of choice in subject matter and to freedom of choice in style (i.e.

in the choice of brushstroke and colour).Artists began to seek freedom not just from the rules of academic art, but from the demands of the public. Soon it was claimed that art should be produced not for the public's sake, but for art's sake. It was also a ploy, another deliberate affront to bourgeois sensibility which demanded art with meaning or that had some purpose such as to instruct, or delight, or to moralize, and generally to reflect in some way their own purposeful and purpose-filled world. In the late 19th century, we find art beginning to be discussed by critics and art historians largely in formal terms which effectively removed the question of meaning and purpose from consideration. From now on, art...