Modernism
Art, music and literature deliberately break with inherited form.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 23 years
- Known to
- ± 2 years
- Era
- Industrial, Holocene
Picasso's Demoiselles in 1907 fractures the picture plane; Stravinsky's Rite of Spring causes a riot in 1913; Joyce, Woolf and Eliot abandon linear narrative and conventional verse. The break is self-conscious and programmatic — Pound's instruction was to make it new — and it is inseparable from the collapse of nineteenth-century confidence that the First World War completed.