modernisms

Modernisms refers to a broad family of art, literature, architecture, music, and design movements that emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as a deliberate break with established conventions. The term highlights the plurality of approaches grouped under modernism, which varied by country and discipline but shared a common interest in experimentation, formal innovation, and responses to modern industrial life.

Across disciplines, modernisms sought to depict subjective experience, challenge traditional representational forms, and question the role of art in society. Visual arts moved toward abstraction, fragmentation, and new spatial logics with movements such as Impressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Expressionism, Dada, and Surrealism. Literature experimented with stream of consciousness, unreliable narration, and dislocation of plot. Music expanded beyond tonal harmony toward atonality and new systems, as seen in the works of Schoenberg and later composers. Architecture and design embraced new materials and techniques, with movements like the International Style, Bauhaus, and Art Deco influencing form and function. In cinema, early modernists experimented with montage, visual stylization, and narrative ambiguity.

The modernisms unfolded unevenly across Europe, the Americas, and beyond from roughly the 1880s to the 1930s, and they overlapped with broader social and political changes, including urbanization, wartime upheaval, and debates over tradition versus modernization. Although later critics sometimes labeled modernism as a historical phase, its emphasis on reinvention continued to shape subsequent art and theory.