[Unit 2 Authors] [Unit 2 Links] [Unit 2 Text] [Up]
By 1930, Modernism had entered popular culture with "The Jazz Age" and the increasing urbanization of populations, it had begun making systematic challenges to previous art and ideas, and was beginning to be looked to as the source for ideas to deal with the host of challenges faced in that particular historical moment. Modernism was, by this point, increasingly, represented in academia and was developing a self-conscious theory of its own importance. Another strong influence at this time was Marxism. After the generally primitivistic/irrationalist aspect of pre-World War One Modernism, which for many modernists precluded any attachment to merely political solutions, and the neoclassicism of the 1920s, as represented most famously by T.S. Eliot and Igor Stravinsky - which rejected popular solutions to modern problems - the rise of Fascism, the Great Depression, and the march to war helped to radicalise a generation. The Russian Revolution was the catalyst to fuse political radicalism and utopianism, with more expressly political stances. Bertolt Brecht, Auden, Andre Breton, Louis Aragon and the philosophers Gramsci and Walter Benjamin are perhaps the most famous exemplars of this Modernist Marxism. This move to the radical left, however, was neither universal, nor definitional. There is no particular reason to associate Modernism, fundamentally, with 'the left' and, in fact, many Modernists were explicitly of 'the right' (for example, Wyndham Lewis, W.B. Yeats, Arnold Schoenberg, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, the Dutch author Menno ter Braak and many others). One of the most visible changes of this period is the adoption of objects of modern production into daily life, electricity, the telephone, the automobile - and the need to work with them, repair them and live with them - created the need for new forms of manners, and social life. (Source)