Modernist literature, originated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and is characterised by a self-conscious separation from traditional ways of writing in both poetry and prose fiction writing. Modernism experimented with literary form and expression, as exemplified by Ezra Pound's maxim to "Make it new." This literary movement was driven by a conscious desire to overturn traditional modes of representation and express the new sensibilities of the time. The immense human costs of the First World War saw the prevailing assumptions about society reassessed, and much modernist writing engages with the technological advances and societal changes of modernity moving into the 20th century. In Modernist Literature, Mary Ann Gillies notes that these literary themes share the "centrality of a conscious break with the past", one that "emerges as a complex response across continents and disciplines to a changing world".
Modernist literature scholar David Thorburn saw connections between literary style and impressionist painters such as Claude Monet. Modernist writers, like Monet's paintings of water lilies, suggested an awareness of art as art, rejected realistic interpretations of the world and dramatized "a drive towards the abstract".
Modernism is an early 20th-century movement in literature, the visual arts and music, emphasizing experimentation, abstraction, and subjective experience. Philosophy, politics and social issues, are 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 the hunt for newer and 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.