Brave new world: Modernism in Europe (1900-39)

Overview: modernism and the machine age#

FoundationPearson Edexcel 9HT0 Paper 2 (Modernism in Europe)DfE GCE History of Art subject content

Modernism in Europe, 1900-39

Fig. 1The rapid succession of modernist movements, from Fauvism and Cubism through Futurism, Dada and the Bauhaus to Surrealism and modernist architecture.

Modernism names the radical transformation of art in the early twentieth century, roughly 1900 to 1939, in which European artists broke decisively with the tradition of naturalistic representation that had governed Western art since the Renaissance, and reinvented the very language of painting, sculpture and architecture. In a single generation, art moved from depicting the visible world to fragmenting it (Cubism), to abandoning representation altogether (abstraction), to picturing the unconscious (Surrealism), and to reimagining the building from first principles (modernist architecture). This was the most rapid and fundamental change in the history of Western art, and the period is best understood as a succession of bold, experimental movements.

The context was a world being transformed by modernity itself - by industry, the machine, the city, new technologies (the motor car, aircraft, cinema, mass production), new science (relativity, the new physics) and new ideas about the mind (Freud and the unconscious). Artists felt that a world so utterly changed demanded a new art, and many embraced the machine age with excitement, seeking forms expressive of speed, dynamism, the machine and the modern city; others responded to modernity's dislocations and anxieties. The First World War (1914-18) cut across the period, shattering confidence and provoking both the anti-art revolt of Dada and, later, the retreat into the unconscious of Surrealism.

The overarching story is the movement away from representation, which can be traced as a series of steps. Post-Impressionism had already loosened art's tie to appearances; the Fauves freed colour from description; the Cubists fragmented form and abandoned the single fixed viewpoint; and artists such as Kandinsky and Mondrian took the final step into pure abstraction, in which a painting need not depict anything at all but can be an arrangement of colour, line and form in its own right. Understanding modernism means grasping this progressive liberation of the elements of art - colour, form, line - from the task of representing the visible world.

Modernism was also, crucially, self-conscious and theoretical, driven by manifestos, movements and the idea of the avant-garde inherited from the nineteenth century. The period is organised into a rapid succession of named movements - Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Dada, De Stijl, Surrealism and more - each typically launched with a manifesto or programme, gathered around a group of artists, and advanced through exhibitions and little magazines. This is why the period is best learned movement by movement: each has a distinct aim, a set of formal characteristics, and key artists and works, and much of the analysis consists in identifying and comparing them.

Finally, modernism extended beyond the fine arts into architecture and design, where it produced an equally radical revolution. Rejecting historical ornament and styles, modernist architects such as those of the Bauhaus and Le Corbusier sought a new architecture expressive of the machine age - functional, rational, stripped of ornament, using new materials (steel, reinforced concrete, glass) and new forms. The period thus spans a total remaking of the visual world, from the Cubist canvas to the abstract painting, from the readymade to the dream image, and from the ornamented past to the white, functional modernist building. The sections that follow examine the movements, Cubism in depth, abstraction and Surrealism, modernist architecture, and modernism's relation to society.

Worked example

Tracing the move away from representation

Show how a sequence of modernist movements progressively abandons naturalistic representation.

Freeing colour
Fauvism (from 1905) frees colour from description, using pure, non-naturalistic colour for its own expressive sake - a first break with representing appearances truthfully.
Fragmenting form
Cubism (from 1907) fragments objects and abandons the single fixed viewpoint, showing multiple aspects at once - form itself is remade, not copied.
Reaching abstraction
Kandinsky and Mondrian take the final step into pure abstraction, where the painting depicts nothing external but is an arrangement of colour, line and form in its own right.
Conclude
Across these steps the elements of art are progressively liberated from representing the visible world - the defining trajectory of modernism.

Result: A sequence from Fauvism to Cubism to abstraction is traced as the progressive liberation of art's elements from representation - modernism's central story.

Typical mistakes

Treating 'modern art' as one thing rather than a rapid succession of distinct movements, each with its own aim and characteristics.
Missing the underlying story - the progressive move away from representing the visible world toward fragmentation, abstraction and the unconscious.

Active revision

List the main movements of 1900-39 in rough order and, for each, name one aim or characteristic; then explain in a sentence the overall move away from naturalistic representation.

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: Pearson Edexcel Level 3 Advanced GCE in History of Art (9HT0) specification (Pearson Edexcel)

The movements: Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism#

StandardPearson Edexcel 9HT0 Paper 2 (Modernism: the movements)DfE GCE History of Art subject content

The modernist movements

Fig. 2The modernist movements, each a distinct route away from naturalism: Fauvism (colour), Expressionism (emotion), Cubism (fragmented form), Futurism (dynamism), Dada (anti-art), Surrealism (the unconscious) and abstraction.

The early modernist period is a rapid succession of movements, and the surest way to master it is to learn each movement's aim, formal characteristics and key figures, so that you can identify and compare them. The first wave, in the years before the First World War, includes Fauvism and Expressionism (the liberation of colour and emotion), Cubism (the fragmentation of form, treated in depth in the next section) and Futurism (the celebration of speed and the machine). Each is a distinct response to the pressures of modernity, and together they demolished the naturalistic tradition within about a decade.

Fauvism, which erupted at the Paris Salon d'Automne of 1905 (where a critic called the artists 'les fauves', the wild beasts), was the first movement to free colour completely from its descriptive role. Its leader, Henri Matisse (1869-1954), used pure, intense, non-naturalistic colour - a face striped with green, a sky in scarlet - for its own expressive and decorative power, so that colour, not accurate depiction, carried the emotional and structural weight of the picture. Fauvism was short-lived as a group, but its liberation of colour was a decisive step toward modern art, and Matisse pursued the expressive power of colour and simplified form throughout a long career.

Expressionism, developing especially in Germany, used the distortion of form and colour to convey intense emotion and inner states rather than outward appearances. The Dresden group Die Brucke (founded 1905) and the Munich group Der Blaue Reiter (founded 1911, around Kandinsky and Franz Marc) painted with harsh, non-naturalistic colour, jagged or heightened forms and raw emotional force, expressing anxiety, spiritual longing or the intensity of modern experience. Expressionism made the communication of feeling, through deliberate distortion, the purpose of art - a current that runs deep through the whole modern period and connects to the earlier example of Van Gogh.

Futurism, launched in Italy in 1909 with the poet Marinetti's manifesto, was the movement that embraced the machine age most fervently, celebrating speed, dynamism, technology, the motor car and the energy of the modern city, and violently rejecting the art of the past. Futurist painters and sculptors sought to represent movement and dynamism themselves - the sensation of speed, of a body or machine in motion - through fragmented, repeated and force-lined forms. Umberto Boccioni's striding bronze figure 'Unique Forms of Continuity in Space' (1913) is the classic image of Futurist dynamism, a body seemingly remade by its own forward motion. Futurism shows modernism's excited, and sometimes aggressive, embrace of modernity.

For analysis, these movements should be identified by their distinct aims and characteristics and compared. Ask what each movement does with the elements of art and to what end: Fauvism liberates colour for expression; Expressionism distorts form and colour to convey emotion; Cubism fragments form and multiplies the viewpoint; Futurism represents dynamism and the machine. Being able to recognise a movement from a work's characteristics - and to explain how it breaks with naturalism in its own particular way - is the core skill of the period, and comparing the movements brings out the different routes modernism took away from representation.

Worked example

Identifying a movement from its characteristics

Explain how you would identify a Fauvist work and distinguish it from an Expressionist one.

Fauvist colour
Look for pure, intense, non-naturalistic colour used for its own decorative and expressive power - bright, joyful, arbitrary hues organising the whole picture (Matisse).
Expressionist distortion
Look for distortion of form and harsh, often anxious colour used to convey intense inner emotion - jagged shapes, heightened feeling, spiritual or psychological unease (Die Brucke, Der Blaue Reiter).
The shared break
Both liberate colour from description and reject naturalism, so both look non-naturalistic at first glance.
The distinction
But Fauvism uses freed colour chiefly for expressive-decorative harmony, while Expressionism drives distortion and colour toward raw emotion and anxiety - aim distinguishes them.

Result: Fauvism and Expressionism are distinguished by aim - liberated colour for harmony versus distortion for emotion - demonstrating identification of movements by their characteristics.

Typical mistakes

Confusing the movements or their leading figures, or blurring their distinct aims into a vague 'modern art'.
Describing the works without naming the movement's specific characteristics and how it breaks with naturalism.

Active revision

For Fauvism, Expressionism and Futurism, name a key artist or work and state in a sentence what the movement did with colour, form or movement, and how it broke with naturalism.

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: GCE AS and A level subject content for history of art (Department for Education)

Cubism in depth#

StandardPearson Edexcel 9HT0 Paper 2 (Modernism: Cubism)DfE GCE History of Art subject content

The development of Cubism

Fig. 3The development of Cubism: from Cezanne's structure and non-Western sources, through the threshold of 'Les Demoiselles', to Analytic and then Synthetic Cubism with collage.

Cubism, developed by Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and Georges Braque (1882-1963) in Paris from around 1907-08, is the single most influential and revolutionary movement of the period - the invention that most completely overthrew the Renaissance system of representation and opened the way to all later modern art. Its fundamental innovation was to abandon the single fixed viewpoint and the illusion of a coherent space that had governed Western painting since linear perspective, and to represent objects as fragmented, analysed and reassembled on the flat surface, showing multiple aspects and viewpoints of a thing simultaneously. Cubism did not copy how an object looks from one place; it reconstructed the object as an idea, from many angles at once.

Cubism grew directly out of the example of Cezanne, whose late work had treated nature as an ordered structure of colour planes and analysed its underlying geometry, and out of the encounter with the simplified, expressive forms of Iberian and African sculpture. These sources come together in Picasso's 'Les Demoiselles d'Avignon' (1907), a large, shocking canvas of five angular nude women, their bodies fractured into sharp planes and some faces derived from African masks - a violent break with naturalistic beauty and coherent space that is usually taken as the threshold of Cubism (and of modern art). From it, Picasso and Braque developed the new language systematically over the following years, working so closely that their pictures of the time are hard to tell apart.

Cubism is usually divided into two phases, and knowing the distinction is important. Analytic Cubism (roughly 1908-12) 'analysed' objects into fragmented, faceted planes, showing multiple views at once, in a shallow, ambiguous space and a restricted, near-monochrome palette of browns and greys, so that the object almost dissolves into a shimmering structure of overlapping facets. Synthetic Cubism (from about 1912) reversed the process, 'synthesising' or building up images from simpler, flatter, brighter shapes, and - crucially - introduced collage and papier colle, pasting real materials (newspaper, wallpaper, chair-caning) onto the canvas. This was itself revolutionary: it broke the boundary between painting and the real world and questioned what a picture is made of.

The consequences of Cubism for the meaning of a picture were profound and worth drawing out. By fragmenting the object, showing it from many viewpoints, flattening the space and finally pasting real materials onto the surface, Cubism insisted that a painting is not a window onto an illusory space (the Renaissance conception) but a flat, made object - an arrangement of forms and materials on a surface, constructing rather than copying reality. This reconception of the picture as a constructed object, rather than an illusion of the visible world, is the deepest legacy of Cubism, and it underlies almost all subsequent modern art, from abstraction to collage to construction.

For analysis, a Cubist work should be read for its fragmentation, its multiple viewpoints, its treatment of space and, where present, its use of collage. Identify how the object is broken into planes and shown from several angles at once; how the space is flattened and made ambiguous, denying a single coherent viewpoint; whether the work is Analytic (faceted, near-monochrome, dissolving) or Synthetic (flatter, brighter, built up, with collage); and how all this reconceives the picture as a constructed object rather than an illusion. Recognising Cubism's break with perspective and its influence on everything after is central to understanding the whole modern period.

Worked example

Analysing Cubist fragmentation

Analyse how an Analytic Cubist portrait breaks with the Renaissance system of representation.

Multiple viewpoints
The head and figure are broken into faceted planes that show several viewpoints at once - front and profile together - abandoning the single fixed viewpoint of perspective.
Flattened, ambiguous space
The planes overlap in a shallow, ambiguous space with no coherent recession, so the illusion of a deep, unified space is denied.
Restricted palette
A near-monochrome palette of browns and greys focuses attention on the analysis of form rather than colour or likeness, and the object almost dissolves into its facets.
The reconception
The picture no longer offers a window onto an illusion but presents the object reconstructed from many angles on a flat surface - reality constructed, not copied.

Result: The Analytic Cubist work is analysed through multiple viewpoints, flattened space and restricted palette - Cubism's overthrow of the Renaissance window made concrete.

Typical mistakes

Describing Cubism vaguely as 'geometric' without the key idea of multiple simultaneous viewpoints and the abandonment of a single fixed perspective.
Confusing the Analytic and Synthetic phases, or missing the revolutionary significance of collage in breaking the picture-as-window.

Active revision

Analyse a Cubist work for how it fragments its object and shows multiple viewpoints, decide whether it is Analytic or Synthetic, and explain how it treats the picture as a made object rather than a window.

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: Pearson Edexcel Level 3 Advanced GCE in History of Art (9HT0) specification (Pearson Edexcel)

Abstraction and Surrealism#

StandardPearson Edexcel 9HT0 Paper 2 (Modernism: abstraction and Surrealism)DfE GCE History of Art subject content

Abstraction versus Surrealism

Fig. 4Abstraction and Surrealism: opposite answers to modernism's freedom - abstraction abandons imagery for pure form; Surrealism keeps imagery but turns it to the dream - both rejecting naturalistic depiction.

Two of the most important destinations of modernism lie in opposite directions from the fragmentation of Cubism: the complete abandonment of representation in abstraction, and the turn inward to the unconscious and the dream in Surrealism. Setting them side by side is instructive, because abstraction pursues pure form and often order and the spiritual, while Surrealism keeps recognisable imagery but deploys it to picture the irrational world of the mind - two very different answers to the question of what art should do once it need no longer copy the visible world.

Abstraction - art that does not represent the external world at all, but consists of arrangements of colour, line, shape and form in their own right - was the logical end of modernism's liberation of the elements of art, and it was reached around 1910-13 by several artists independently. Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), a leading figure, moved toward pure abstraction in the belief that colour and form could express spiritual and emotional truths directly, like music, without depicting anything (he set out this view in his book 'Concerning the Spiritual in Art', 1911). Abstraction thus completed the modernist trajectory: the painting became fully autonomous, an object of pure form and colour answerable to nothing outside itself.

Abstraction took very different forms, and a key contrast is between the expressive and the geometric. Kandinsky's early abstraction is lyrical and expressive - free, energetic swirls of colour and line conveying feeling and spiritual states. By contrast, the geometric abstraction of Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) and the Dutch De Stijl movement (founded 1917) sought a universal, rational, harmonious order: Mondrian reduced painting to a grid of straight black lines and rectangles of the three primary colours plus white, black and grey (Neo-Plasticism), aiming at a pure, balanced, impersonal order beyond the accidents of the visible world. Expressive versus geometric abstraction is a distinction worth carrying, and it recurs throughout modern art.

Surrealism, launched in Paris in 1924 with Andre Breton's manifesto, took the opposite path, seeking to liberate the unconscious mind and to picture the world of dreams, desire and the irrational. Drawing on Freud's theories of the unconscious, and growing out of the anti-rational revolt of Dada, the Surrealists explored chance, automatism (spontaneous, uncontrolled making) and the dream image. One strand produced meticulously painted, illusionistic dream-scenes of impossible and uncanny juxtapositions - Salvador Dali's melting watches in 'The Persistence of Memory' (1931), Rene Magritte's uncanny riddles; another pursued abstract or biomorphic automatism (Joan Miro, Max Ernst). Surrealism kept representation but turned it to the irrational, making the unconscious the subject of art.

For analysis, abstraction and Surrealism should be read as opposed but related answers to modernism's freedom from representation. Analyse an abstract work for how it arranges colour, line and form without depicting anything, and whether it is expressive (Kandinsky) or geometric and ordered (Mondrian, De Stijl); analyse a Surrealist work for how it uses recognisable but irrationally combined imagery to evoke the dream and the unconscious. Both reject the naturalistic depiction of the visible world - one by abandoning imagery altogether, the other by turning imagery to the irrational - and comparing them clarifies the range of what modern art became once the old task of representation was set aside.

Worked example

Comparing two answers to representation

Compare how a Mondrian abstraction and a Dali Surrealist painting each respond to the freedom from representing the visible world.

Mondrian's abstraction
Mondrian abandons imagery altogether, reducing the painting to a grid of black lines and rectangles of primary colour, seeking a pure, universal, harmonious order beyond the visible world.
Dali's Surrealism
Dali keeps meticulous, illusionistic imagery but combines it irrationally - melting watches in a dream landscape - to picture the uncanny logic of the unconscious.
The shared rejection
Both reject the naturalistic depiction of the everyday visible world that had governed art since the Renaissance.
The opposite routes
But Mondrian answers modernism's freedom by pure abstract order, Dali by turning representation toward the dream - two opposed destinations of the same liberation.

Result: Mondrian and Dali are compared as pure order versus the dream - opposite answers to modernism's freedom from representation, clarifying the range of modern art.

Typical mistakes

Treating all abstraction as the same, missing the key contrast between expressive (Kandinsky) and geometric (Mondrian, De Stijl) abstraction.
Describing Surrealism as merely 'weird' rather than as a systematic exploration of the unconscious and the dream drawing on Freud.

Active revision

Compare an abstract work (a Kandinsky or Mondrian) with a Surrealist one (a Dali or Magritte), analysing how each responds to modernism's freedom from representing the visible world.

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: GCE AS and A level subject content for history of art (Department for Education)

Modernist architecture: the Bauhaus and Le Corbusier#

StandardPearson Edexcel 9HT0 Paper 2 (Modernism: architecture)DfE GCE History of Art subject content

The modernist building

Fig. 5The modernist building on Le Corbusier's Five Points: the volume raised on pilotis, a flat roof garden, a horizontal ribbon window and a free facade - function and the machine aesthetic replacing ornament.

Modernism transformed architecture as radically as it transformed painting, producing between the wars a new architecture that rejected historical ornament and styles in favour of function, rationality and the forms of the machine age. This 'Modern Movement', later called the International Style, replaced the columns, ornament and historical dress of traditional architecture with clean, undecorated forms, flat roofs, white or glass surfaces, and an aesthetic of pure, functional geometry. It was made possible by new materials and structural methods - steel and reinforced-concrete frames and large sheets of glass - that freed the building from load-bearing walls, and it was driven by the conviction that a new age demanded a new, honest, functional architecture.

The guiding principle was that form should follow function, and that ornament was dishonest or superfluous. Modernist architects held that a building's form should express its structure and purpose truthfully, without disguising them under historical ornament, and that beauty would arise from fitness, proportion and the clean expression of function and materials. Le Corbusier's famous formulation that 'a house is a machine for living in' (from his book 'Vers une architecture', 1923) captures the spirit: the building was to be conceived rationally, like a well-designed machine, efficient and stripped of everything inessential. This was a moral as well as an aesthetic programme, promising a rational, healthy, modern way of life.

The German Bauhaus, the most influential school of modern art and design, was founded by the architect Walter Gropius in Weimar in 1919 (later moving to Dessau, where Gropius designed its celebrated building of 1925-26). The Bauhaus sought to unite art, craft and industrial technology, and to design well-made, functional, unornamented objects and buildings for the modern age and for mass production - from furniture and typography to whole buildings. Its glass-walled, asymmetrical, functional Dessau building embodied the new architecture, and its teachers (including Kandinsky and Klee) and ideas spread modernist design across the world, especially after the school was closed by the Nazis in 1933 and its members emigrated.

Le Corbusier (1887-1965) was the most influential individual modernist architect, and his 'Five Points of a New Architecture' (1927) codified the new language: the building raised on pilotis (slender columns) freeing the ground beneath; the flat roof used as a garden terrace; the free plan (interior walls placed freely, since the frame, not the walls, bears the load); the horizontal ribbon window running across the facade; and the free facade (the outer wall, freed from bearing load, treated as a light skin). His Villa Savoye (1928-31) at Poissy realises all five points as a pure, white, floating box on pilotis - the manifesto of the new architecture built, and one of the defining images of modernism.

For analysis, a modernist building should be read for its functional, machine-age aesthetic and its rejection of historical ornament, and against the traditional architecture it replaced. Identify the new forms and materials (the frame structure, pilotis, flat roof, ribbon windows, glass and concrete, the absence of ornament); the principle of form following function and the honest expression of structure; and the aspiration to a rational, modern way of life. Contrasting a modernist building (Villa Savoye, the Bauhaus) with an ornamented, historically styled building of the previous century is a clear way to demonstrate the architectural revolution of modernism.

Worked example

Analysing a modernist building

Analyse how Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye (1928-31) embodies the principles of modernist architecture.

The new forms
A pure, white, box-like volume floats above the ground on slender pilotis, with a flat roof used as a terrace and long horizontal ribbon windows band the facade - the Five Points made concrete.
New materials and structure
A reinforced-concrete frame bears the load, freeing the interior walls (the free plan) and the outer wall (the free facade), which becomes a light skin rather than a support.
Function over ornament
There is no historical ornament or applied decoration; the building is conceived rationally, 'a machine for living in', its beauty arising from proportion, function and clean geometry.
The contrast
Set against an ornamented, historically styled nineteenth-century house, the villa shows the whole modernist revolution - function, honesty and the machine aesthetic replacing ornament and historical dress.

Result: Villa Savoye is analysed as the Five Points realised - pilotis, free plan, ribbon windows, roof garden, free facade - demonstrating the principles of modernist architecture.

Typical mistakes

Describing modernist buildings only as 'plain' without the principles behind them (form follows function, honesty of structure, the machine aesthetic, new materials).
Confusing the Bauhaus (a school of art and design) with a single building or style, or misattributing the Five Points.

Active revision

Analyse a modernist building (Villa Savoye or the Bauhaus) for its forms, materials and functional principles, and contrast it with an ornamented, historically styled nineteenth-century building.

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: Pearson Edexcel Level 3 Advanced GCE in History of Art (9HT0) specification (Pearson Edexcel)

Modernism and society: the avant-garde, manifesto and utopia#

AdvancedPearson Edexcel 9HT0 Paper 2 (Modernism: art and society)DfE GCE History of Art subject content

The avant-garde and society

Fig. 6Modernism's engagement with society: the manifesto and the movement reaching the public through exhibitions; the Bauhaus linking art to industry to shape everyday life; Dada revolting after the war.

Modernism was not only a revolution in artistic form but a movement with intense relations to modern society, politics and everyday life, and understanding these relations completes the period. The modernist avant-garde inherited from the nineteenth century the idea of art as an advance guard, ahead of and often at odds with society, and it pushed this idea to new heights of self-consciousness: art was to change not only how the world was seen but, for many, how it was lived. The period's art must therefore be understood in relation to its ambitions for society - to renew perception, to build a rational new world, or to overturn a bankrupt order.

The characteristic modern vehicles of this were the movement, the manifesto and the exhibition. Modernism organised itself into named movements, each typically launched with a manifesto - a public declaration of aims and often of hostilities - and advanced through group exhibitions, little magazines and provocations. The Futurist Manifesto (1909), the Surrealist Manifesto (1924) and many others were as much a part of the movement as the artworks, and the whole apparatus of the avant-garde - the group, the manifesto, the shocking exhibition, the succession of ever-more-radical positions - became the standard way modern art was made and made public. This is why the period is learned as a sequence of programmatic movements.

The First World War (1914-18) was the great rupture in modernism's relation to society, and it provoked one of the most extreme responses in the whole history of art. Dada, arising in neutral Zurich around 1916 among artists appalled by the mechanised slaughter, was an anti-art movement that attacked the very idea of art, reason and the culture that had led to the war, using nonsense, chance, provocation and the readymade (Marcel Duchamp's presentation of an ordinary manufactured object - most notoriously a urinal titled 'Fountain', 1917 - as art) to overturn every assumption about what art is. Dada shows modernism turning against society and against art itself in disgust at a civilisation in ruins - and its questioning of the nature of art would echo for the rest of the century.

Much modernism was also driven by utopian and social hopes, seeking to remake the everyday world for the better - nowhere more than in design and architecture. The Bauhaus aimed to unite art with industry and to design well-made, functional, affordable objects and buildings for ordinary people in the machine age, believing that good modern design could improve everyday life; De Stijl and the Russian avant-garde likewise linked their new visual languages to visions of a rational, harmonious new society. Modernist architecture promised healthy, rational housing and cities for the modern age. This utopian, socially transformative impulse - art and design not as luxury but as the shaping of a better modern life - is a defining strand of the period.

For analysis, and to close the period, a modernist work should be read not only for its form but for its relation to modern society and its ambitions. Ask how the work responds to the modern world (embracing the machine age, protesting the war, seeking to build a new order); how it uses the avant-garde apparatus of movement, manifesto and provocation; and what social hope or critique it carries. Understanding modernism means grasping that its formal revolution was bound up with a conviction that art could and should transform how the modern world is seen and lived - an ambition that gives the whole 'brave new world' of the period its urgency, and that connects its abstract forms to the real history of its age.

Worked example

Reading modernism's social ambition

Explain the two opposite ways modernism related to society, using Dada and the Bauhaus.

Dada's revolt
Arising in Zurich around 1916 in disgust at the mechanised slaughter of the First World War, Dada attacked art, reason and the culture that produced the war, using chance, nonsense and the readymade to overturn every assumption about art.
The Bauhaus's hope
The Bauhaus, by contrast, sought to build a better modern world, uniting art with industry to design functional, affordable, well-made objects and buildings for ordinary people in the machine age.
The shared conviction
Both believed art must engage the modern world and its crises, not stand apart as decoration - the avant-garde ambition to transform how the world is seen and lived.
The opposite directions
One turned against art and society in disgust; the other tried to remake everyday life for the better - modernism's destructive and constructive relations to society.

Result: Dada and the Bauhaus are read as modernism's opposite social responses - revolt and utopia - showing that the period's formal revolution was bound up with ambitions for society.

Typical mistakes

Analysing modernist works only as form, ignoring their intense relations to modern society, politics and everyday life.
Missing the two opposite social responses - Dada's disgusted revolt after the war and the constructive, utopian hopes of the Bauhaus and modernist architecture.

Active revision

Choose a modernist work or movement and explain its relation to modern society - its response to the machine age or the war, its use of manifesto and exhibition, and any social hope or critique it carries.

Active recall

Recall the key points — then reveal.

Sources: GCE AS and A level subject content for history of art (Department for Education)

Key points

Tracing the move away from representation

Key points

Identifying a movement from its characteristics

Key points

Analysing Cubist fragmentation

Key points

Comparing two answers to representation

Key points

Analysing a modernist building

Key points

Reading modernism's social ambition

Sources

Brave new world: Modernism in Europe (1900-39)

Key points

Tracing the move away from representation

Key points

Identifying a movement from its characteristics

Key points

Analysing Cubist fragmentation

Key points

Comparing two answers to representation

Key points

Analysing a modernist building

Key points

Reading modernism's social ambition

Sources