THE CULTURAL AND INTELLECTUAL CLIMATE OF MODERNISM

ROYAL EXCHANGE, LONDON, 1904

PABLO PICASSO, LES DEMOISELLES DAVIGNON, 1907

LONDON MOTOR BUS

ROUTINE
He had been for many years cashier of a private bank in Baggot Street. Every morning he came in from Chapelizod by tram. At midday he went to Dan Burke's and took his lunch - a bottle of lager beer and a small trayful of arrowroot biscuits. At four o'clock he was set free. He dined in an eatinghouse in George's Street where he felt himself safe from the society of Dublin's gilded youth and where there was a certain plain honesty in the bill of fare. His evenings were spent either before his landlady's piano or roaming about the outskirts of the city. His liking for Mozart's music brought him sometimes to an opera or a concert: these were the only dissipations of his life. James Joyce, A Painful Case in Dubliners

OCTOBER 25, 1929 AMERICAN STOCKMARKET COLLAPSES MOST IMPORTANT FINANCIAL NEWS STORY OF THE FIRST HALF OF THE 20TH CENTURY

LA BELLE POQUE 1890 - 1914

E. M. FORSTERS HOWARDS END - 1910

THE SCREAM EXPRESSIONISM 1893 Edvard Munch - 15 years before the term was invented
"I was walking along the road with two friends. The sun set. I felt a tinge of melancholy. Suddenly the sky became a bloody red. I stopped, leaned against the railing, dead tired. And I looked at the flaming clouds that hung like blood and a sword over the blue-black fjord and city. My friends walked on. I stood there, trembling with fright. And I felt a loud, unending scream piercing nature."

Erich Heckel, Geschwister (Siblings), 1913 Source of German Expressionism Dresden

Organized in 1905, Die Brcke (The Bridge) was a rebel artist group established in Dresden, Germany by four young architecture students, including Erich Heckel.
For these artists, the young embodied the process of change and were central to the identity of Brcke artists themselves, who advocated in their art free-form individualism, creativity, spirituality, and independence from officially sponsored, established art organizations.

DER BLAUE REITER (THE BLUE RIDER) GROUP MUNICH, GERMANY 1911-1914

ITALIAN FUTURISM 1909-1914 We rebel against that spineless worshipping of old canvases, old statues and old bric-abrac, against everything which is filthy and wormridden and corroded by time. We consider the habitual contempt for everything which is young, new and burning with life to be unjust and even criminal. Filippo Marinetti, Manifesto of the Futurist Painters, 1910

Marcel Duchamps Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912) and the Machine Aesthetic
Successive superimposed images, similar to stroboscopic motion photography A visual expression of what Henry Adams called the twentieth century multiplicity, showing elements of both Cubist (fragmentation) and Futurist (dynamism) styles
Duchamp submitted the painting to the 1913 Armory Show in New York City where Americans, accustomed to naturalistic art, were scandalized. Julian Street, an art critic for The New York Times wrote that the work resembled an explosion in a shingle factory"

THE ARMORY SHOW NEW YORK, 1913

First Impressionist Exhibition Grafton Gallery, London, November 8 to Jan 15 1910

IGOR STRAVINSKY THE FIRE BIRD (1910), PETROUSHKA (1912), RITE OF SPRING (1913)
Whether Stravinsky's music be permanent or ephemeral I do not know; but it did seem to transform the rhythm of the steppes into the scream of the motor horn, the rattle of machinery, the grind of wheels, the beating of iron and steel, the roar of the underground railway, and the other barbaric cries of modern life; and to transform these despairing noises into music. T. S. Eliot

THE NEW METROPOLITAN TYPE

The psychological basis of the metropolitan type of individuality consists in the intensification of nervous stimulation which results from the swift and uninterrupted change of outer and inner stimuli. // Lasting impressions, impressions which differ only slightly from one another, impressions which take a regular and habitual course and show regular and habitual contrasts all these use up, so to speak, less consciousness than does the rapid crowding of changing images, the sharp discontinuity in the grasp of a single glance, and the unexpectedness of onrushing impressions. These are the psychological conditions which the metropolis creates. Georg Simmel, The Metropolis and Mental Life, 1903

FRAGMENTATION COLLAGE / MONTAGE

THE NEW DESTINATION THE READER

Thus is revealed the total existence of writing: a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author. The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a texts unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted. // Classic criticism has never paid any attention to the reader; for it, the writer is the only person in literature. We are now beginning to let ourselves be fooled no longer by the arrogant antiphrastical recriminations of good society in favour of the very thing it sets aside, ignores, smothers, or destroys; we know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author. - Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author, 1968

THANK YOU!

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