Arnold Schoenberg or Schönberg was an Austrian-American composer, music theorist, painter, teacher, and writer. Among the first modernist composers to write music of dense motivic relations saturating the musical texture, he propounded concepts like developing variation, the emancipation of the dissonance, and the "unity of musical space".
Schoenberg in Los Angeles, c. 1948
Arnold Schönberg in Payerbach, 1903
Schönberg Family, a painting by Richard Gerstl, 1907
Arnold Schoenberg by Egon Schiele, 1917
Modernism is an early 20th-century movement in literature, visual arts and music, that emphasized experimentation, abstraction and subjective experience. Philosophy, politics and social issues were also aspects of the movement which sought to change how 'human beings in a society interact and live together'. The modernist movement emerged during the late 19th century in response to significant changes in Western culture, including secularization and the growing influence of science. It is characterized as a rejection of tradition and a hunt for newer, more original means of cultural expression. Modernism was influenced by widespread technological innovation, industrialization and urbanization, as well as cultural and geopolitical shifts that occurred after World War I. Artistic movements and techniques associated with modernism include abstract art, stream of consciousness in literature, cinematic montage, atonal and twelve-tone music and modernist architecture and urban planning.
Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907). This proto-cubist work is considered a seminal influence on subsequent trends in modernist painting.
Frank Lloyd Wright, Solomon Guggenheim Museum completed in 1959
Eugène Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People, 1830, a Romantic work of art
A Realist portrait of Otto von Bismarck. Modernist artists largely rejected Realism.