,
Fallingwater,
Mill Run, Pennsylvania (1937). Fallingwater was one of Wright's most famous private residences (completed in 1937).
1901 to 1930 (1905–1911) by
Modernist architect Josef Hoffmann '', 1910,
Art Institute of Chicago ,
The Poet, 1911,
Oil on canvas,
Peggy Guggenheim Collection.
Proto-Cubism was an early development within modernism that tended to present its subject from multiple points of view. Out of the collision of ideals derived from Romanticism and an attempt to find a way for knowledge to explain that which was as yet unknown, came the first wave of modernist works in the opening decade of the 20th century. Although their authors considered them to be extensions of existing trends in art, these works broke the implicit understanding the general public had of art: that artists were the interpreters and representatives of bourgeois culture and ideas. These "modernist" landmarks include the atonal ending of
Arnold Schoenberg's
Second String Quartet in 1908, the Expressionist paintings of
Wassily Kandinsky starting in 1903, and culminating with his first abstract painting and the founding of the
Blue Rider group in
Munich in 1911, and the rise of
fauvism and the inventions of Cubism from the studios of
Henri Matisse,
Pablo Picasso,
Georges Braque, and others, in the years between 1900 and 1910. An important aspect of modernism is how it relates to tradition through its adoption of techniques like reprise, incorporation, rewriting, recapitulation, revision, and parody in new forms. ,
View from the Dunes with Beach and Piers, Domburg, 1909, oil and pencil on cardboard,
Museum of Modern Art, New York City
T. S. Eliot made significant comments on the relation of the artist to tradition, including: [W]e shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of [a poet's] work, may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously. However, the relationship of modernism with tradition was complex, as literary scholar Peter Child's indicates: "There were paradoxical if not opposed trends towards revolutionary and reactionary positions, fear of the new and delight at the disappearance of the old,
nihilism and fanatical enthusiasm, creativity, and despair." An example of how modernist art can apply older traditions while also incorporating new techniques can be found within the music of the composer
Arnold Schoenberg. On the one hand, he rejected traditional
tonal harmony, the hierarchical system of organizing works of music that had guided musical composition for at least a century and a half. Schoenberg believed he had discovered a wholly new way of organizing sound based on the use of
twelve-note rows. Yet, while this was indeed a wholly new technique, its origins can be traced back to the work of earlier composers such as
Franz Liszt,
Richard Wagner,
Gustav Mahler,
Richard Strauss, and
Max Reger. In the world of art, in the first decade of the 20th century, young painters such as
Pablo Picasso and
Henri Matisse caused much controversy and attracted great criticism with their rejection of traditional
perspective as the means of structuring paintings, though the Impressionist
Claude Monet had already been innovative in his use of perspective. In 1907, as Picasso was painting ,
Oskar Kokoschka was writing
Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen (
Murderer, Hope of Women), the first Expressionist play (produced with scandal in 1909), and Arnold Schoenberg was composing his String Quartet No.2 in F sharp minor (1908), his first composition without a tonal center. A primary influence that led to Cubism was the representation of three-dimensional form in the late works of
Paul Cézanne, which were displayed in a retrospective at the 1907
Salon d'Automne. In Cubist artwork, objects are analyzed, broken up, and reassembled in an abstract form; instead of depicting objects from one viewpoint, the artist depicts the subject from a multitude of viewpoints to represent the subject in a greater context. Cubism was brought to the attention of the general public for the first time in 1911 at the
Salon des Indépendants in Paris (held 21 April – 13 June).
Jean Metzinger,
Albert Gleizes,
Henri Le Fauconnier,
Robert Delaunay,
Fernand Léger and
Roger de La Fresnaye were shown together in Room 41, provoking a 'scandal' out of which Cubism emerged and spread throughout Paris and beyond. Also in 1911,
Kandinsky painted
Bild mit Kreis (
Picture with a Circle), which he later called the first abstract painting. In 1912, Metzinger and Gleizes wrote the first (and only) major Cubist manifesto,
Du "Cubisme", published in time for the Salon de la
Section d'Or, the largest Cubist exhibition to date. In 1912 Metzinger painted and exhibited his enchanting
La Femme au Cheval (Woman with a Horse) and
Danseuse au Café (Dancer in a Café). Albert Gleizes painted and exhibited his
Les Baigneuses (The Bathers) and his monumental
Le Dépiquage des Moissons (
Harvest Threshing). This work, along with
La Ville de Paris (
City of Paris) by
Robert Delaunay, was the largest and most ambitious Cubist painting undertaken during the pre-war Cubist period. ,
Promenade, 1913,
Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus,
Munich In 1905, a group of four German artists, led by
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, formed
Die Brücke (The Bridge) in the city of
Dresden. This was arguably the founding organization for the
German Expressionist movement, though they did not use the word itself. A few years later, in 1911, a like-minded group of young artists formed
Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) in Munich. The name came from
Wassily Kandinsky's
Der Blaue Reiter painting of 1903. Among their members were
Kandinsky,
Franz Marc,
Paul Klee, and
August Macke. However, the term "Expressionism" did not firmly establish itself until 1913. Richard Murphy also comments: "[The] search for an all-inclusive definition is problematic to the extent that the most challenging Expressionists," such as the novelist
Franz Kafka, poet
Gottfried Benn, and novelist
Alfred Döblin were simultaneously the most vociferous anti-Expressionists. What, however, can be said, is that it was a movement that developed in the early 20th century mainly in Germany in reaction to the dehumanizing effect of industrialization and the growth of cities, and that "one of the central means by which Expressionism identifies itself as an avant-garde movement, and by which it marks its distance to traditions and the cultural institution as a whole is through its relationship to realism and the dominant conventions of representation." There was a concentrated Expressionist movement in early 20th-century German theater, of which
Georg Kaiser and
Ernst Toller were the most famous playwrights. Other notable Expressionist dramatists included
Reinhard Sorge,
Walter Hasenclever,
Hans Henny Jahnn, and
Arnolt Bronnen. They looked back to Swedish playwright
August Strindberg and German actor and dramatist
Frank Wedekind as precursors of their
dramaturgical experiments.
Oskar Kokoschka's
Murderer, the Hope of Women was the first fully Expressionist work for the theater, which opened on 4 July 1909 in
Vienna. The extreme simplification of characters to mythic
types, choral effects, declamatory dialog and heightened intensity would become characteristic of later Expressionist plays. The first full-length Expressionist play was
The Son by Walter Hasenclever, which was published in 1914 and first performed in 1916. Futurism is another modernist movement. In 1909, the Parisian newspaper
Le Figaro published
F. T. Marinetti's first manifesto. Soon afterward, a group of painters (
Giacomo Balla,
Umberto Boccioni,
Carlo Carrà,
Luigi Russolo, and
Gino Severini) co-signed the
Futurist Manifesto. Modeled on Marx and
Engels' famous "
Communist Manifesto" (1848), such manifestos put forward ideas that were meant to provoke and to gather followers. However, arguments in favor of geometric or purely abstract painting were, at this time, largely confined to "little magazines" which had only tiny circulations. Modernist primitivism and pessimism were controversial, and the mainstream in the first decade of the 20th century was still inclined towards a faith in progress and liberal optimism. , 1913,
En Canot (Im Boot), oil on canvas, , exhibited at Moderni Umeni,
S.V.U. Mánes, Prague, 1914, acquired in 1916 by
Georg Muche at the Galerie
Der Sturm, confiscated by the Nazis circa 1936–1937, displayed at the
Degenerate Art show in Munich, and missing ever since
Abstract artists, taking as their examples the Impressionists, as well as
Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) and
Edvard Munch (1863–1944), began with the assumption that color and
shape, not the depiction of the natural world, formed the essential characteristics of art.
Western art had been, from the
Renaissance up to the middle of the 19th century, underpinned by the logic of
perspective and an attempt to reproduce an illusion of visible reality. The arts of cultures other than the European had become accessible and showed alternative ways of describing visual experience to the artist. By the end of the 19th century, many artists felt a need to create a new kind of art that encompassed the fundamental changes taking place in technology, science and philosophy. The sources from which individual artists drew their theoretical arguments were diverse and reflected the social and intellectual preoccupations in all areas of Western culture at that time.
Wassily Kandinsky,
Piet Mondrian, and
Kazimir Malevich all believed in redefining art as the arrangement of pure color. The use of photography, which had rendered much of the representational function of visual art obsolete, strongly affected this aspect of modernism. Modernist
architects and designers, such as
Frank Lloyd Wright and
Le Corbusier, believed that new technology rendered old styles of building obsolete. Le Corbusier thought that buildings should function as "machines for living in", analogous to cars, which he saw as machines for traveling in. Just as cars had replaced the horse, so modernist design should reject the old styles and structures inherited from
Ancient Greece or the
Middle Ages. Following this
machine aesthetic, modernist designers typically rejected decorative motifs in design, preferring to emphasize the materials used and pure geometrical forms. The skyscraper is the archetypal modernist building, and the
Wainwright Building, a 10-story office building completed in 1891 in
St. Louis, Missouri, United States, is among the
first skyscrapers in the world.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's
Seagram Building in New York (1956–1958) is often regarded as the pinnacle of this modernist high-rise architecture. Many aspects of modernist design persist within the mainstream of
contemporary architecture, though previous dogmatism has given way to a more playful use of decoration, historical quotation, and spatial drama. ,
Pedestal Table in the Studio 1922, an early example of
Surrealism In 1913—which was the year of philosopher
Edmund Husserl's
Ideas, physicist
Niels Bohr's quantized atom,
Ezra Pound's founding of
imagism, the
Armory Show in New York, and in
Saint Petersburg the "first futurist opera",
Mikhail Matyushin's
Victory over the Sun—another Russian composer,
Igor Stravinsky, composed
The Rite of Spring, a ballet that depicts
human sacrifice and has a musical score full of dissonance and primitive rhythm. This caused an uproar on its first performance in Paris. At this time, though modernism was still "progressive", it increasingly saw traditional forms and social arrangements as hindering progress and recast the artist as a revolutionary, engaged in overthrowing rather than enlightening society. Also in 1913, a less violent event occurred in France with the publication of the first volume of
Marcel Proust's important novel sequence
À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–1927) (
In Search of Lost Time). This is often presented as an early example of a writer using the
stream-of-consciousness technique, but Robert Humphrey comments that Proust "is concerned only with the reminiscent aspect of consciousness" and that he "was deliberately recapturing the past for the purpose of communicating; hence he did not write a stream-of-consciousness novel." Stream of consciousness was an important modernist literary innovation, and it has been suggested that
Arthur Schnitzler (1862–1931) was the first to make full use of it in his short story "Leutnant Gustl" ("None but the brave") (1900).
Dorothy Richardson was the first English writer to use it, in the early volumes of her
novel sequence Pilgrimage (1915–1967). Other modernist novelists that are associated with the use of this narrative technique include
James Joyce in
Ulysses (1922) and
Italo Svevo in
La coscienza di Zeno (1923). However, with the coming of the Great War of 1914–1918 (World War I) and the
Russian Revolution of 1917, the world was drastically changed, and doubt was cast on the beliefs and institutions of the past. The failure of the previous status quo seemed self-evident to a generation that had seen millions die fighting over scraps of earth: before 1914, it had been argued that no one would fight such a war, since the cost was too high. The birth of a machine age, which had made major changes in the conditions of daily life in the 19th century had now radically changed the nature of warfare. The traumatic nature of recent experience altered basic assumptions, and a realistic depiction of life in the arts seemed inadequate when faced with the fantastically surreal nature of
trench warfare. The view that mankind was making steady moral progress now seemed ridiculous in the face of the senseless slaughter, described in works such as
Erich Maria Remarque's novel
All Quiet on the Western Front (1929). Therefore, modernism's view of reality, which had been a minority taste before the war, became more generally accepted in the 1920s. In literature and visual art, some modernists sought to defy expectations mainly to make their art more vivid or to force the audience to take the trouble to question their own preconceptions. This aspect of modernism has often seemed a reaction to
consumer culture, which developed in Europe and North America in the late 19th century. Whereas most manufacturers try to make products that will be marketable by appealing to preferences and prejudices,
high modernists reject such consumerist attitudes to undermine conventional thinking. The art critic
Clement Greenberg expounded this theory of modernism in his essay
Avant-Garde and Kitsch. Greenberg labeled the products of consumer culture "
kitsch", because their design aimed simply to have maximum appeal, with any difficult features removed. For Greenberg, modernism thus formed a reaction against the development of such examples of modern consumer culture as commercial
popular music,
Hollywood, and advertising. Greenberg associated this with the revolutionary rejection of capitalism. Some modernists saw themselves as part of a revolutionary culture that included political revolution. In Russia after the 1917
Revolution, there was indeed initially a burgeoning of avant-garde cultural activity, which included
Russian Futurism. However, others rejected conventional politics as well as artistic conventions, believing that a revolution of
political consciousness had greater importance than a change in political structures. But many modernists saw themselves as apolitical. Others, such as
T. S. Eliot, rejected mass popular culture from a conservative position. Some even argue that Modernism in literature and art functioned to sustain an
elite culture that excluded the majority of the population. The word "surrealist" was coined by
Guillaume Apollinaire and first appeared in the preface to his play
Les Mamelles de Tirésias, which was written in 1903 and first performed in 1917. Major surrealists include
Paul Éluard,
Robert Desnos,
Max Ernst,
Hans Arp,
Antonin Artaud,
Raymond Queneau,
Joan Miró, and
Marcel Duchamp. By 1930, modernism had won a place in the political and artistic establishment, although by this time modernism itself had changed.
Modernism continues: 1930–1945 Modernism continued to evolve during the 1930s. Between 1930 and 1932 composer
Arnold Schoenberg worked on
Moses und Aron, one of the first operas to make use of the twelve-tone technique,
Pablo Picasso painted in 1937
Guernica, his cubist condemnation of
fascism, while in 1939
James Joyce pushed the boundaries of the modern novel further with
Finnegans Wake. Also by 1930 modernism began to influence mainstream culture, so that, for example,
The New Yorker magazine began publishing work, influenced by modernism, by young writers and humorists like
Dorothy Parker,
Robert Benchley,
E. B. White,
S. J. Perelman, and
James Thurber, amongst others. Perelman is highly regarded for his humorous short stories that he published in magazines in the 1930s and 1940s, most often in
The New Yorker, which are considered to be the first examples of
surrealist humor in America. Modern ideas in art also began to appear more frequently in commercials and logos, an early example of which, from 1916, is the famous
London Underground logo designed by
Edward Johnston. One of the most visible changes of this period was the adoption of new technologies into the daily lives of ordinary people in Western Europe and North America. Electricity, the telephone, the radio, the automobile—and the need to work with them, repair them and live with them—created social change. The kind of disruptive moment that only a few knew in the 1880s became a common occurrence. For example, the speed of communication reserved for the stock brokers of 1890 became part of family life, at least in middle class North America. Associated with urbanization and changing social mores also came smaller families and changed relationships between parents and their children. logo designed by
Edward Johnston. This is the modern version (with minor modifications) of one that was first used in 1916. Another strong influence at this time was
Marxism. After the generally primitivistic/irrationalism aspect of pre-World War I modernism (which for many modernists precluded any attachment to merely political solutions) and the
neoclassicism of the 1920s (as represented most famously by
T. S. Eliot and
Igor Stravinsky—which rejected popular solutions to modern problems), the rise of
fascism, the
Great Depression, and the march to war helped to radicalize a generation.
Bertolt Brecht,
W. H. Auden,
André Breton,
Louis Aragon, and the philosophers
Antonio Gramsci and
Walter Benjamin are perhaps the most famous exemplars of this modernist form of Marxism. There were, however, also modernists explicitly of 'the right', including
Salvador Dalí,
Wyndham Lewis, T. S. Eliot,
Ezra Pound, the Dutch author
Menno ter Braak and others. Significant modernist literary works continued to be created in the 1920s and 1930s, including further novels by
Marcel Proust,
Virginia Woolf,
Robert Musil, and
Dorothy Richardson. The American modernist dramatist
Eugene O'Neill's career began in 1914, but his major works appeared in the 1920s, 1930s and early 1940s. Two other significant modernist dramatists writing in the 1920s and 1930s were
Bertolt Brecht and
Federico García Lorca.
D. H. Lawrence's ''
Lady Chatterley's Lover'' was privately published in 1928, while another important landmark for the history of the modern novel came with the publication of
William Faulkner's
The Sound and the Fury in 1929. In the 1930s, in addition to further major works by Faulkner,
Samuel Beckett published his first major work, the novel
Murphy (1938). Then in 1939 James Joyce's
Finnegans Wake appeared. This is written in a largely
idiosyncratic language, consisting of a mixture of standard English
lexical items and
neologistic multilingual puns and
portmanteau words, which attempts to recreate the experience of sleep and dreams. In poetry T. S. Eliot,
E. E. Cummings, and
Wallace Stevens were writing from the 1920s until the 1950s. While
modernist poetry in English is often viewed as an American phenomenon, with leading exponents including Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot,
Marianne Moore,
William Carlos Williams,
H.D., and
Louis Zukofsky, there were important British modernist poets, including
David Jones,
Hugh MacDiarmid,
Basil Bunting, and
W. H. Auden. European modernist poets include
Federico García Lorca,
Anna Akhmatova,
Constantine Cavafy, and
Paul Valéry. , Dublin, by Marjorie FitzGibbon The modernist movement continued during this period in
Soviet Russia. In 1930 composer
Dimitri Shostakovich's (1906–1975) opera
The Nose was premiered, in which he uses a
montage of different styles, including
folk music,
popular song and atonality. Among his influences was
Alban Berg's (1885–1935) opera
Wozzeck (1925), which "had made a tremendous impression on Shostakovich when it was staged in Leningrad." However, from 1932
socialist realism began to oust modernism in the Soviet Union, and in 1936 Shostakovich was attacked and forced to withdraw his 4th Symphony. Alban Berg wrote another significant, though incomplete, modernist opera,
Lulu, which premiered in 1937. Berg's
Violin Concerto was first performed in 1935. Like Shostakovich, other composers faced difficulties in this period. In Germany
Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) was forced to flee to the U.S. when Hitler came to power in 1933, because of his modernist atonal style as well as his Jewish ancestry. His major works from this period are a
Violin Concerto, Op. 36 (1934/36), and a
Piano Concerto, Op. 42 (1942). Schoenberg also wrote tonal music in this period with the Suite for Strings in G major (1935) and the
Chamber Symphony No. 2 in E minor, Op. 38 (begun in 1906, completed in 1939). In painting, during the 1920s and 1930s and the
Great Depression, modernism was defined by Surrealism, late Cubism,
Bauhaus,
De Stijl,
Dada, German Expressionism, and modernist and masterful color painters like
Henri Matisse and
Pierre Bonnard as well as the abstractions of artists like
Piet Mondrian and
Wassily Kandinsky which characterized the European art scene. In Germany,
Max Beckmann,
Otto Dix,
George Grosz and others politicized their paintings, foreshadowing the coming of World War II, while in America, modernism is seen in the form of
American Scene painting and the
social realism and
Regionalism movements that contained both political and social commentary dominated the art world. Artists like
Ben Shahn,
Thomas Hart Benton,
Grant Wood,
George Tooker,
John Steuart Curry,
Reginald Marsh, and others became prominent. Modernism is defined in Latin America by painters
Joaquín Torres-García from Uruguay and
Rufino Tamayo from Mexico, while the
muralist movement with
Diego Rivera,
David Siqueiros,
José Clemente Orozco,
Pedro Nel Gómez and
Santiago Martínez Delgado, and
Symbolist paintings by
Frida Kahlo, began a renaissance of the arts for the region, characterized by a freer use of color and an emphasis on political messages. Diego Rivera is perhaps best known by the public world for his 1933 mural,
Man at the Crossroads, in the lobby of the RCA Building at
Rockefeller Center. When his patron
Nelson Rockefeller discovered that the mural included a portrait of
Vladimir Lenin and other communist imagery, he fired Rivera, and the unfinished work was eventually destroyed by Rockefeller's staff.
Frida Kahlo's works are often characterized by their stark portrayals of pain. Kahlo was deeply influenced by indigenous Mexican culture, which is apparent in her paintings' bright colors and dramatic symbolism. Christian and Jewish themes are often depicted in her work as well; she combined elements of the classic religious Mexican tradition, which were often bloody and violent. Frida Kahlo's Symbolist works relate strongly to surrealism and to the
magic realism movement in literature. Political activism was an important piece of David Siqueiros' life, and frequently inspired him to set aside his artistic career. His art was deeply rooted in the
Mexican Revolution. The period from the 1920s to the 1950s is known as the Mexican Renaissance, and Siqueiros was active in the attempt to create an art that was at once Mexican and universal. The young
Jackson Pollock attended the workshop and helped build
floats for the parade. During the 1930s, radical
leftist politics characterized many of the artists connected to surrealism, including
Pablo Picasso. On 26 April 1937, during the
Spanish Civil War, the
Basque town of
Gernika was
bombed by Nazi Germany's Luftwaffe. The Germans were attacking to support the efforts of
Francisco Franco to overthrow the Basque government and the Spanish Republican government. Pablo Picasso painted his mural-sized
Guernica to commemorate the horrors of the bombing. During the
Great Depression of the 1930s and through the years of World War II, American art was characterized by social realism and
American Scene painting, in the work of
Grant Wood,
Edward Hopper,
Ben Shahn,
Thomas Hart Benton, and several others.
Nighthawks (1942) is a painting by Edward Hopper that portrays people sitting in a downtown diner late at night. It is not only Hopper's most famous painting, but one of the most recognizable in American art. The scene was inspired by a diner in
Greenwich Village. Hopper began painting it immediately after the
attack on Pearl Harbor. After this event there was a large feeling of gloominess over the country, a feeling that is portrayed in the painting. The urban street is empty outside the diner, and inside none of the three patrons is apparently looking or talking to the others but instead is lost in their own thoughts. This portrayal of modern urban life as empty or lonely is a common theme throughout Hopper's work.
American Gothic is a painting by
Grant Wood from 1930 portraying a
pitchfork-holding farmer and a younger woman in front of a house of
Carpenter Gothic style, it is one of the most familiar images in 20th-century
American art. Art critics had favorable opinions about the painting; like
Gertrude Stein and
Christopher Morley, they assumed the painting was meant to be a satire of rural small-town life. It was thus seen as part of the trend towards increasingly critical depictions of rural America, along the lines of
Sherwood Anderson's 1919
Winesburg, Ohio,
Sinclair Lewis's 1920
Main Street, and
Carl Van Vechten's
The Tattooed Countess in literature. However, with the onset of the Great Depression, the painting came to be seen as a depiction of steadfast American pioneer spirit. The situation for artists in Europe during the 1930s deteriorated rapidly as the Nazis' power in Germany and across Eastern Europe increased.
Degenerate art was a term adopted by the
Nazi regime in Germany for virtually all modern art. Such art was banned because it was un-German or
Jewish Bolshevist in nature, and those identified as degenerate artists were subjected to sanctions. These included being dismissed from teaching positions, being forbidden to exhibit or to sell their art, and in some cases being forbidden to produce art entirely.
Degenerate Art was also the title of an exhibition, mounted by the Nazis in
Munich in 1937. The climate became so hostile for artists and art associated with modernism and
abstraction that many left for the Americas. German artist
Max Beckmann and scores of others fled Europe for New York. In New York City a new generation of young and exciting modernist painters led by
Arshile Gorky,
Willem de Kooning, and others were just beginning to come of age. Arshile Gorky's portrait of someone who might be Willem de Kooning is an example of the evolution of
Abstract Expressionism from the context of figure painting, Cubism and Surrealism. Along with his friends de Kooning and
John D. Graham, Gorky created biomorphically shaped and abstracted figurative compositions that by the 1940s evolved into totally abstract paintings. Gorky's work seems to be a careful analysis of memory, emotion and shape, using line and color to express feeling and nature.
Attacks on early modernism ,
The fate of the animals, 1913, oil on canvas. The work was displayed at the exhibition of
"Entartete Kunst" ("degenerate art") in
Munich,
Nazi Germany, 1937. Modernism's stress on
freedom of expression, experimentation,
radicalism, and
primitivism disregards conventional expectations. In many art forms this often meant startling and alienating audiences with bizarre and unpredictable effects, as in the strange and disturbing combinations of motifs in Surrealism or the use of extreme
dissonance and atonality in modernist music. In literature this often involved the rejection of intelligible plots or characterization in novels, or the creation of poetry that defied clear interpretation. Within the
Catholic Church, the specter of
Protestantism and
Martin Luther was at play in anxieties over modernism and the notion that doctrine develops and changes over time. From 1932,
socialist realism began to oust modernism in the Soviet Union, The Nazis exhibited modernist paintings alongside works by the
mentally ill in an exhibition entitled "
Degenerate Art". Accusations of "formalism" could lead to the end of a career, or worse. For this reason, many modernists of the post-war generation felt that they were the most important bulwark against totalitarianism, the "
canary in the coal mine", whose repression by a government or other group with supposed authority represented a warning that individual liberties were being threatened. Louis A. Sass compared madness, specifically
schizophrenia, and modernism in a less fascist manner by noting their shared disjunctive narratives, surreal images, and incoherence. == After 1945 ==