1. Visual Art, Music, and Literature
Modernism in the Arts
Visual Art, Music, and Literature

2. Characteristics of Modern Visual Art
No illusion of reality
Manet’s The Fifer
In contrast, remember David’s Oath of the Horatii

3. Characteristics of Modern Visual Art (cont.)
Many more “isms”—different schools
Cubism Expressionism
Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
Van Gogh’s The Starry Night

4. Characteristics of Modern Visual Art (cont.)
New subject matter—often very personal, sometimes objectionable
Chaim Soutine, Flayed Ox

5. Characteristics of Modern Music
Reaction against overblown emotionality of late Romantic music
Break from traditional sense of tonality (“home base”)
Example: Debussy Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun
Impressionism

6. Characteristics of Modern Music (cont.)
Stretching the traditional sounds of music (tone color)
Primitivism
Stravinsky The Rite of Spring (ballet)
John Cage
Sonata II for prepared piano
4’33”

7. Characteristics of Modern Literature
Radically disrupt linear flow of the narrative
Stream of consciousness
Woolf: “Examine an ordinary mind on an ordinary day.”
Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury

8. Characteristics of Modern Literature (cont.)
Fragmented characters
“Heroes” as alienated outsiders
Special concern with language/narrative technique

9. Characteristics of Modern Literature (cont.)
Difficult or academic texts
The Waste Land (need I say more?!)
Shocking images/ surrealism
Often open endings—little resolution