Courses

Modernism, the most significant aesthetic movement of the twentieth century, found expression across a range of forms.  While participants and critics associated the movement with innovation and the disruption of traditional aesthetic conventions, there is considerable dispute today about what modernism was. For example, did it focus on internal formal qualities or did it explore and disrupt the boundaries of disciplines, calling for the dissolution of art itself?  Was it involved with fragmentation or pastiche (qualities now often associated with postmodernism), or did it seek to attain a new form of aesthetic unity or order, which in turned imposed new compositional constraints?  Was it concerned with “truth” and “essence” or rather with multiple realities and appearances?  Was it elitist in its formal abstraction and experimentation, or was it democratic and populist in its engagement with everyday life and mass culture?