modernist

A modernist, in general, is an adherent of modernism, a broad cultural, artistic, and intellectual movement that emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Modernists sought to break with established conventions and to reflect the new realities of a rapidly urbanizing and industrial world. The term can describe people who champion modernist aesthetics as well as works produced within the movement in literature, art, architecture, music, and film from roughly the 1890s to the 1940s.

Historical background: Modernism grew from responses to modern life, including industrialization, rapid social change, and new theories in science and psychology. It often confronted traditional subjects and techniques, experimented with form, and embraced abstraction, fragmentation, or stream of consciousness.

Key features: rejection of historical pastiche; emphasis on perception, subjectivity, and the experience of modern life; formal innovation such as free verse, nonlinear narratives, atonality; in architecture, simplified forms and functional design.

Notable figures: in literature, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, T. S. Eliot; in art, Pablo Picasso, Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian; in architecture, Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe; in music, Arnold Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky.

Legacy and reception: Modernism profoundly influenced later art and critical theory, but faced criticism for elitism and detachment from everyday life; after World War II, some modernist aims shifted into late modernism and various postmodern currents.