Modernism wanted a sacred center—then watched it crack
Early twentieth-century modernism prized experiment, abstraction, and subjective experience across literature, art, music, and architecture. It answered secularization, science, industry, and the shock of World War I by rejecting tradition—yet still ached for a metaphysical center that W. B. Yeats warned could not hold.
Scholars describe a self-conscious break with inherited forms: collage and parody instead of creation from nothing; stream-of-consciousness, montage, atonality, modern dance, and new urban planning. Roger Griffin frames an ethos of “the temporality of the new,” a drive to restore sublime order against modernity’s fragmenting secular canopy—linking Expressionism, Futurism, psychoanalysis, utopian architecture, and even wartime self-sacrifice as bids to become history’s makers rather than its victims.
Philosophically, David Hume’s eighteenth-century scepticism haunts the project: we never perceive causes, only constant conjunctions, and the self dissolves into a bundle of perceptions. That de-centred self echoes in Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and The Waves. Picasso’s 1907 Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and 1911 The Poet refuse a single viewer’s vantage, synthesizing multiple angles on a flat plane. Modernist metaphors turn unnatural—Eliot’s evening “like a patient etherized upon a table”—while Wallace Stevens poems alternately grant and revoke nature’s meaning.
Gerald Graff saw modernism carrying Romanticism’s torch against bourgeois order, yet modernists denied art was a clean window onto metaphysical truth; it should disrupt the viewer’s stance instead. Edward Hopper’s 1942 Nighthawks, tagged Modernism at the Art Institute, paints three diner customers and a server under electric glow, inspired by a Greenwich Avenue café yet invented as solitude—“the loneliness of a large city.” Ivan Albright’s 1943–44 Picture of Dorian Gray, made for the 1945 Wilde film, literalizes moral decay in Technicolor horror amid a black-and-white movie—modern unease rendered as rotting paint.
Source: Modernism
