The relationship between the modernismartistic and the First World War is notorious, given that modernist artists managed, years before the war broke out in 1914, capture the ruin of the euphoric climate and belief in the progress of Western civilization that marked the call belleseason.
from the euphoria of belleseason to decay
We know that the call belleseason (“Bela Época”, in French) was the period that covered the decades of 1870 to 1900 and was characterized by great optimism in the material development of the Western world. Important technological inventions such as the telegraph, telephone, cinema, photography, locomotives and steamships, among many others, they enabled greater global integration and a large population boom, causing the birth of call "societyinpastas”. However, this euphoric mood had its contrasts.
The same type of technological modernization that benefited practical life in large urban centers was also employed in the invention of new and sophisticated weapons, which would be used in
FirstWar – event that led to belleseason to total decay. The triumph of "reason" and "science" thus suffered from the irrationality of disputes racial, nationalist and ideological of various shades, which would lead to the catastrophe and destruction of the war. It was in this atmosphere that the artistic phenomenon known as modernism.Artistic vanguards and ruptures
The artists of modernism, who organized themselves into avant-garde groups, such as the cubism, O surrealism, O expressionism, O abstractionism, O futurism it's the Dadaism, sought to assimilate the atmosphere of decay mentioned above and expose, each in its own way, the type of artistic product that would correspond to that atmosphere. With its paintings, sculptures and collages, the Spanish pabloPicasso, for example, the biggest representative of the cubism, sought to produce a type of art in which the forms of people and objects were presented in a decomposed way, as if they had been cut into pieces and glued together in a disorderly way.
Other artists like saviorfrom there, WassilyKandinsky, Edwardmunch and Giacomoballa, linked to surrealism, abstractionism, expressionism and futurism, respectively, sought to offer the same type of “deformation of forms”, both in painting and in sculpture. in the field of song It's from ballet, it was no different. Musicians like ArnoldSchönberg, inventor of dodecaphonic music (of “twelve tones” instead of seven notes), broke with the traditional hierarchy of classical music. the Russian ballet, from diaghilev and Nijinsky, accompanied by the dissonant music of Stravinsky, also looked for the same effect of rupture with classical ballet, characterized by the lightness and delicacy of the gestures.
The most acidic and scathing criticism of the atmosphere of decay in the belleseason came with the Dadaism (graduated in 1916, in the middle of the war), from Tristan Tzara, Hugo Ball and Hans Arp. These artists went beyond the break with classical forms and tried to inaugurate the moment of “end of art”, or a “anti-art”, which implied the complete destruction of the capacity for orderly representation of reality through any artistic expression – poetry, theater, painting, etc.
As the researcher Márcio Hagihara emphasizes:
[…] The Dada group (1916-23) initially organized in Zurich in the Cabaret Voltaire reiterated hostility to the established social order, continuing the avant-garde model. Dada's negativity extended to two levels: destruction within the social sphere and discontinuity in the structures of semantic and artistic languages. The mottos were the destruction of clarity, coherence and logical analysis. […] For the Dadaists, logic and rationality were destructive and misleading, the truth was expressed from nature, which according to the Dadaist conception, would be chaotic and spontaneous and unstable. [1]
The fruits of these modernist currents would be generated in the period between the First and Second World Wars. The way of understanding reality through art would never be the same after the First World War.
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GRADES
[1] HAGIHARA, Márcio. The negative ethos and avant-garde art. Masters dissertation. Department of Sociology at UnB, 2007. P. 91.
By Me. Cláudio Fernandes
Source: Brazil School - https://brasilescola.uol.com.br/guerras/modernismo-primeira-guerra-mundial.htm