Modern Times - The 20th Century and Early Modernism

Thinking Photography
The 20th Century & Early Modernism

The early 20th century was marked by an appearance of revolutionary ideas and schools of thought. All were trying to cope with the new world which was ushered in, world which needed order and structure and new ways of understanding how things work. 

This meant that the relationship between man and machine was growing ever wider. A need for human intervention in the mechanical age was on the decline with advancements in technologies. Instrumental to its school of thought was Albert Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity (1905), addressing physics in terms of space, time (dilation – ‘the elapsed time between two events’) and light. Einstein's special theory of relativity generalises Galileo's principle of relativity - that all uniform motion was relative, and that there is no absolute and well-defined state of rest. This theory took place of  Newtonian notions of absolute space and time, by stating that time and space are perceived differently to us in the sense that measurements of length and time depend on the motion of the viewer. It yields the equivalence of matter and energy.

Cubism was a 20th Century art movement that revolutionised European paintings and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music and literature. 

Main Influences of Cubism:

- Tribal Art

-Paul Cezanne

- Paul Gauguin

- Henri Matisse 

-Pablo Picasso

These artist were inspired by the raw power and simplicity of the primitive art of those foreign cultures that were being presented to them.

Other mediums influenced by the early 20th century were those of ballet, such as Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, (french: Le Sacre du Printemps) and is a ballet with music by the Russian composer which was first performed in 1913. 

Dada (1915 – 1922), were an anti establishment group who rejected all rational thought and ideas, thinking it was this logic that had led to WW1. It begun were in Switzerland then moving on to Berlin, Cologne, Paris and finally New York. Dadaism used many forms of art including literature, photography, film, sculpture and assemblage. In 1916, Dada established regular meetings at an underground club in Paris’s red light district.