Summarising the Modern text

The first decade of the twentieth century artist began trying to create something new moving old techniques further on and advancing common technology. They used old nineteenth century machines and began transforming them into something innovative, by doing this they would be able to move art into a direction which would potentially change the way in which we view it. Modernity was a form of experience an awareness to change and of an adaption to change, this was moved further on by the artists of the avant-garde and art had become thoroughly internationalized. Art moved on to be something of expression and these was showed by current movements such as futuristic and cubism drawings, these were highly influenced by urban modernity other artists such as Kirschner and Boccioni remained legible and diverse even through the pressures of the change. The question that people were beginning to pose was what does cubism mean? How people were thinking of it and reading it became an area of conflict. The autonomous decoration of a surface, penetration below a surface appearance to the constraints of ‘true reality’ ; a modern Realism of ‘conception’ transforming the terms, but none the less retaining critical interest. Two artists named Corbet and Kartian transcended into creating art which was to be called idealism in which a picture could achieve what language could not. This was a representation of ding an sich; a Nietzschean imposition of new beauty, moulding the masses to the artists own truth. These were canvassed within the five years of the emergence and of a recognisably new style around 1910. The problem to autonomous art to a wider social change has remained constitutive of all ambitious art in the modern period. Cubism marked a turning point, a hinge , as it were, between the modern art of the nineteenth Century and what was to become the condition of modern art in the twentieth.









Harrison, C and Wood, P. (eds.) (1997) 'Art In Theory: 1900-90', Oxford, Blackwell, pp. 125-9