Modernism

I have had an introduction to modernism through reading the first 55 pages of our modernism book. It has given me some deeper understanding about what modernism is. Reading this has built onto the small intro to modernism we had in the Postmodern book. What I gathered is that modernism came about through all the changes and new-ness that was happening in the world at the time. It said that modernism is a lot about technology and revolution and the idea of time as a stream. The world was entering into modernity and this coincided with the modernism movement. One of the forerunners and most easily recognized modernist was Pablo Picasso who started painting people with exaggerated form that were very deconstructed and flat. He was also one of the first people to head the idea that for something to be modern it must have no relationship to anything outside of the thing itself. For one to gather meaning from a modern painting you need to only look at the image and not drawl from any other knowledge. This is what I found to be one of the important criteria to recognize a modern work. In the book they also talked about the idea of time being a part of something. Art was no longer about a landscape or a recreation of a space but about a moment in time. This was evident with the introduction of movie film. Most of the films were train films where the camera was placed on a train and the train was moving through time and space. All of these things are important to modernism but they are not the only things that are important as I am sure we will find out through reading the rest of the book.