20th century art and culture Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

20th century art and nuance - Essay ExampleHistory of art, along with history of science and philosophy, endeavors to record and interpret the ship canal in which human consciousness perceives and makes grit of itself and the world around it. Ethical principles and cultural values that informed the information of Western civilization are deeply rooted in its classical origins and, therefore, in its heavy trust on the rationalist school of thought. Classicism, rationalism and humanism - the concept that can be regarded as a derivative of the first two - non only defined the path of Western culture, but alike ensured this cultures extreme openness and perceptivity towards other cultures and non-Western schools and systems.This heritage of rationalist philosophy and humanist ethics ensured that in a complex historical situation the 20th century art drew its strength and ambition from the same humanistic principles and managed to sustain an essentially positive and optimistic vi ew of the oncoming cultural changes, brought on by industrial and social revolutions. On the examples of broad(prenominal) modernism in poetry, Cubism in painting and foreign Style in architecture this essay will attempt to demonstrate the continuity inside rationalist and humanist tradition that modern and postmodern Western art displayed. This continuity manifests itself, firstly, in acknowledging the historical sense within modernism, in claiming the indebtedness of the tonic art to classicism and tradition. Secondly, it expresses itself in questioning the nature of theatrical and emergence of non-realist schools and movements as a consequence of applying rationalist tools of scientific knowledge to specifically dainty ways of cognition. Thirdly, this continuity is reflected in challenging aestheticist ideas, in growing popularity of instrumentalist theories of art and in the idea of artistic engagement which has undeniable affinity with the concept of humanism. And lastly, t he evidence of such continuity can be found in relatively recent phenomena of internationalization and globalization that affected all postmodern art and invited its interpretation as ultimately, universally humanist. The first half of the 20th century is often perceived as a prison term of breaking away from tradition, a time of explosive growth of avant-garde schools and movements, a time when new means of representation were being adopted to reflect revolutionary changes in science, technology and societal structures. These movements, in spite of their belonging to different spheres of art, literature and music, came to be known under a common name of modernism. It is not easily realised and admitted that modernism, for all its innovative spirit and love of experimentation, was fully consequential, if not predictable. It did not muster out of nothing it grew out of a certain tradition and emerged within the paradigm of rationalist and humanist values.An adequate first example to support our argument is T.S. Eliot, a poet who was also one of the first theorists of high modernism. Eliots poetry is highly innovative in form and style it bears all characteristics of high modernism (fragmentation, intertextual allusions, rejection of traditionalistic forms and rhyme) at the same time it explicitly states its regard for classicism and tradition. Eliot expressed this regard in his germinal essay Tradition and the Individual Talent, written in 1919The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence the historical sense compels a man to write not and with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. (Eliot, 38)In the poem Mr Appolinax, part of his most renowned collection, Prufrock and Other Observations, Eliot makes frequent use of classic al allusions and conveys the sense of modernism being enclosed within the timelessness