Modernism

Modernism is a broad artistic paradigm of the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries that united the drive to renew the language of art radically, to break with the academic tradition and to find forms consonant with the experience of the modern human being. Its engine was a belief in innovation, the autonomy of art and the intrinsic value of artistic form, and its motto was Ezra Pound's call to "make it new." Modernism is not a single style but a genealogical tree of movements: Post-Impressionism, Symbolism, Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism, Expressionism, abstraction, Suprematism, Constructivism, Surrealism and Dada. Their common features are a departure from mimetic depiction toward stylization and abstraction, attention to the medium itself (the flat surface, colour, texture), experiment with form, fragmentation and reflection on the language of art. Its pivotal figures are Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian. Ukrainian Modernism is a powerful and distinctive phenomenon: Kazimir Malevich with Suprematism, Oleksandr Bohomazov, Aleksandra Exter, the school of the Boichukists led by Mykhailo Boichuk, which fused Byzantine monumentality with the avant-garde, the graphic art of Heorhii Narbut and the architecture of Ukrainian Art Nouveau. In a wider sense Modernism embraced architecture (Functionalism, the Bauhaus), design, literature and music, affirming the image of the artist as innovator. Its era ends in the second half of the twentieth century, giving way to postmodernism, which cast doubt on the modernist faith in progress, originality and the grand narrative ambition of art.