Modern Times - The 20th Century and Early Modernism

The early twentieth century was marked by a succession 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. Man became integrated with machine.

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.

Einstein not only widened the postulate of relativity, but added the second postulate that all observers will always measure the speed of light to be the same no matter what their state of uniform linear motion.

This theory overthrows Newtonian notions of absolute space and time by the stating that time and space are perceived differently in the sense that measurements of length and time intervals depend on the motion of the observer. It yields the equivalence of matter and energy, as expressed in the mass-energy equivalence formula E = mc2, where c is the speed of light in a vacuum...


Futurism  an Italian avant-garde art movement that took speed, technology and modernity as its inspiration, futurism portrayed the vast range of character of 20th century life, glorifying war, violence, the machine age and the growth of fascism.

The movement was at its strongest from 1909, when poet Filippo Marinetti's first manifesto of futurism appeared, until the end of the world war 1. The idea of futurism came first, before artists found a means to express it.

  early 1900s version of photoshop

Marinetti's manifesto printed on the front page of the french paper le figaro, was bombastic - "set fire to the library shelves.....flood the museums" - suggested his ability to shock the public.

Painters in the movement did however have a more serious intent beyond Marinetti's bombast. The car, the plane, the industrial town were all legendary for them, because they represented the technological triumph of people over nature.

Vorticism a short lived British literary and artistic movement (1912-15), influenced by cubism and futurism and led by Wyndham Lewis. Lewis believed that paintings should reflect the complexity and rapid change of the modern world; he painted in a harsh, angular, semi-abstract style. The last Vorticist exhibition was held in 1915.
The aim was to build up 'a visual language as abstract as music' and make use of the machine form, which reflected a real view of the world to artists as forms of nature.
Its manifesto appeared in the publication Blast in June 1914, of which only one other issue was produced in 1915. Some well-known artists have association with the movement including Henri Gaudier Brzeska, William Roberts, Edward Wadsworth and David Bomberg. World war 1 halted the activity of Vorticism, but a number of Lewis's associates were later prominent in the London Group.



Cubism was a 20th Century art movement that revolutionises European paintings and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music and literature. Analytic Cubism, was radical and influential, it initially developed as a short but significant art movement between 1908 and 1911 in France. Its second phase Synthetic Cubism, the movement spread and remained vital until around 1919, when Surrealist movement gained popularity.
The main influences are said to have been Tribal Art and the work of Paul Cezanne. During the 1890s Paul Gauguin led the way, and artists like Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso in the early days of the 20th Century were inspired by the raw power and simplicity of the so-called primitive art of those foreign cultures.



Dada blasted onto the scene in 1916 with great enthusiasm, rowdy, brazen and assaulting. Its visions were said to be shocking and its language explosive. The artists were responding to the violence and trauma of world war , and to the shock of modernity more generally, by developing shock tactics of their own. They scoffed at the convential definition of artistic media, expanding it to include the stuff of modern life - newspapers, magazines, food wrappers, light bulbs and so on. They altered perceptions of what constituted a work of art by blurring boundaries between art and life.

Many defined Dada as "anti - art" - a term that Dadaists themselves used. Art, the Dadaists believed, should not be an escape from daily events, but rather it should make visible the violence, chaos, and hypocrisies of contemporary life.

Dada emerged in Zurich, a city neutral and safe for European artists opposed to the war. The most important centres of Dada were Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York and Paris.


Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, commonly refered to by its original French title, Le Sacre du printemps is a ballet with music by the Russian composer which was first performed in 1913. While the Russian title literally means "Sacred Spring", the English title is based on the French title under which the work was premiered, although sacre is more precisely translated as "consecration". It has the subtitle "Pictures from Pagan Russia".

 The Rite of  Spring was composed between 1912 and 1913 for Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. Roerich was an integral part of the creation of the work, drawing from scenes of historical rites for inspiration; Stravinsky referred to the work-in-progress as "our child". After going through revisions almost up until the very day of its first performance, it was premiered on May 29, 1913 at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees in Paris and was conducted by Pierre Monteux. Stavinsky wouls later write that a better translation to English would have been " The Coronation of Spring".