John Ruskin 1819-1900: art historian, he wrote Modern Painters and concluded modern painters aren't as good as ancient civilisations
Paris 1900, the centre of modernity until New York in the 1950's. Mass cities evolving, people condensed.. urbanisation
'Trottoir Roullant' - electric moving walkway
Life becomes regulated, accelerated especially with factory labour, forcing people to be more productive but less personal. Time becomes standardised thanks to transport around the world, communication advances with the invention of the telephone.
The world becomes physically and psychologically conquerable.
Process of Secularisation: turn away from God, turn towards science, technology, rationality.
Caillebotte- 'Paris on A Rainy Day' 1877
Haussmanisation
Paris 1950's+ = a new Paris.
Old Paris architecture destroyed to make way for new wider streets, making it easier to bring in troops, more controllable: a form of social control, the centre becomes an expensive M.C and upper class zone.
Manet- The Balcony (1868)
Least connected family
Birth of psychiatry out of the concern that the rapid change of life would drive people insane.
The city creates new forms of social behaviours.
Seurat- Isle de la Grande Jatte (1886)- anti-expressive system of putting dots on a page using RGB, presents people like robots, painted laboriously with this method of painting dots.
Degas -Absinthe Drinker (1876)
Negative view of modernisation; shows someone drinking away their sorrows. Compositionally reminsicent of photography as it looks more like a snapshot than a story older paintings.
Manet- Bar at the Folies Bergere (1881)
Birth of popular entertainment, women's sexuality become a new form of entertainment
Kaiserpanorama 1883
Slides, sometimes landscapes, sometimes sexual imagery. Symbolises alienation, people experiencing the world through technology rather than actually experiencing things directly. Semi- collective yet individualised.
Max Nordau - Degeneration 1892
He predicted that by the end of the 20th century everyone would be bombarded with news, to be constantly called to the telephone, to live half their life in a railway carriage and "know how to find their ease in the midst of a city inhabited by millions."
The Lumiere brothers first films scared people initially who thought the video of a train projected on the big screen may come out the screen and crush them.
Modernism emerges out of the subjective responses of artists/ designers to; modernity.
Alfred Stieglitz In the New York Central Yards (1905) - photography is born and threatens painting as a use of recording the world. Therefore art has to change, to be more about the emotive and psychological, so new forms of modern culture change the rules of the game.
Spirals- Oscar Fischinger
Abstract and purely representative, plays on the new discoveries of sight, colour seen through b&w etc.
Picasso- Les Demoiselles D'Avignon
Rupture of spacial experience is representative of the modern, isn't threatened by photography, threat of the modern with dizzying sensory overload.
James Joyce 'Ulysses', last ten pages 'yes' is featured every other word and has no punctuation. This is expressive and positive.
The term modern is not a neutral term- it suggests novelty and improvement.
'Modernity' 1750-1960
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