Modernism

Modernism was a broad movement across the arts, roughly from the late nineteenth century through the mid twentieth, marked by a deliberate break with inherited academic tradition and a search for new forms suited to a rapidly industrializing and urbanizing world. In painting and sculpture it encompassed a rapid succession of styles that abandoned illusionistic representation in favor of abstraction and formal experiment. In architecture it rejected historical ornament in favor of function expressed openly through new materials such as steel and reinforced concrete. In music it extended tonal harmony toward its breaking point and, in some composers, abandoned it altogether. In film, a medium modernism found already young, directors including Akira Kurosawa brought techniques of fragmented narrative, subjective viewpoint, and formal rigor associated with modernist sensibility to international acclaim in the decades after the Second World War. Because Modernism spans so many art forms and national traditions with differing timelines, historians treat it less as a single style than as a shared attitude toward tradition and innovation, expressed differently from one art form to the next.