Modernity New Zealand — Auckland Art Gallery Seeking Modernity 2014
Written by Sophie van der Linden
The period from 1860 to 1960 was a time of profound transformation in the world of art, with the emergence of avant-garde groups eager to explore different approaches to color, form, composition and art materials. The light-filled delicacy of Impressionism looked demure against the bold colors and dynamic brush-strokes of the Fauves and Post-Impressionists, and the fractured world of the Cubists.
Seeking Modernity features examples of European modern art by international artists including Henry Moore, Barbara Hepburn and Roderick O’Conor, alongside key works by New Zealand expatriates Frances Hodgkins and Francis McCracken.
The University of Auckland Faculty of Arts - SOCIOL - 102
Becoming Modern:
The Origins & Consequences of Modernity 2014 Semester One, 2014—City Campus
Secularism, democracy, industrialization, urbanization, and rapid social change are key characteristics of the ‘Modern’ era. This course examines the foundations of the modern experience, which includes analyzing the intellectual, economic, and political developments that contributed to its formation. In particular, the course analyses Renaissance humanism, the Reformations, the age of explorations, the Enlightenment, the rise of capitalism, industrialization, and the democratic revolutions, including the French Revolution. artsfaculty.auckland.ac.nz/
Modernity 1500—1900 Modernity refers to a post-medieval period that was marked by a move away from Feudalism, towards; Capitalism Industrialisation Secularisation (less identification with religious values) Rationalisation (refers to the replacement of traditional values as motivators for behaviour in society, with rational calculated ones.
Capitalism
Industrialisation
Secularisation
(less identification with religious values)
Rationalisation
(refers to the replacement of traditional values as motivators for behaviour in society, with rational calculated ones.)
Charles Baudelaire (1821—1867 a French poet and essayist is credited with coining the term modernity to designate the fleeting ephemeral experience of life in an urban metropolis.
The French Revolution and Modernity
Historians generally use the date of the French Revolution’s beginning, 1789, to indicate the birth of modern France. If we are to believe this starting point, then key features of a modern society would seem to be:
The fall of absolute monarchy:
At age 15, in May 1770, Louis XVI married the 14 year-old Habsburg Archduchess Marie Antoinette, his second cousin once removed, in an arranged marriage. Louis XVI was guillotined in the Palace de la Revolution. His wife, Marie Antoinette, met the same fate nine months later, on October 16, 1793.
The attempt to separate church & state affairs: The Roman Catholic Church was generally against the Revolution, which had turned the clergy into employees of the state and required they take an oath of loyalty to the nation (through the Civil Constitution of the Clergy). On 2 November 1789, Catholic Church property that was held for purposes of church revenue was nationalized.
The triumph of reason in public matters over principles of faith and tradition.
Modernity would make way for scientific progress and technological advancement.
Modernity hence would embrace the creation of an efficient, rational economy, the adoption of the rule of law and of democratically elected public representatives as opposed to hereditary claims to power.
Modernity would require a new definition of roles for women and children in the public and private sphere. To give expression to all these new forms and ways of being, would also require the emergence of innovative and modern styles of communication in the visual, symphonic and material arts.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s well-known description in “La Nouvelle Héloïse” of the French capital as “the city in the world in which fortunes are most unequal, and in which reign at the same time the most sumptuous elegance and the most deplorable misery.”
What this suggests is that France showed, before several other countries did, the unsustainable nature of European society. It’s rough balance between king and nobility and its class system with the clergy and other classes installed in hereditary (or at least unchallengeable) positions of power.
If France was Europe’s collective future, it showed that such a future was riddled with contradictions. In my mind, we are very much living in the shadow of the French Revolution and all the excesses and innovations that it played with.
In France under the Old Regime, the States-General or Estates-General, was a legislative assembly of the different classes (or estates) of French subjects. It had a separate assembly for each of the three estates, which were called
and dismissed by the king. It had no true power in its own right—unlike the English parliament it was not required to approve royal taxation or legislation— instead it functioned as an advisory body to the king, primarily by presenting petitions from the various estates and consulting on fiscal policy. The Estates-General met intermittently until 1614 and rarely afterwards, but was not definitively dissolved until after the French Revolution.
The States or the Estates signify the assembly of the (feudalistic) representatives of the estates of the realm, called together for purposes of legislation or deliberation. In the first estate were the Roman Catholic clergymen, the second estate was composed of the nobility, and the third estate was composed of the bourgeoisie and the peasants.
As the Estates General prepared to meet, there was a general consensus of high hope amongst all concerned Frenchmen. As yet, no one was talking about revolution. The Estates General met at Versailles on May 5, 1789 and there ensued an immediate stalemate over procedure. The nobility argued that the three Estates meet separately and vote as individual bodies. Since the First and Second Estates were the privileged orders, they would stand together against the Third Estate, 2 votes to 1. The Third Estate recognized this and instead proposed to the nobility and clergy that all members of the Three Estates would meet as one body and vote by head. This is an important consideration. The First and Second Estates were composed of 300 delegates each. But the Third Estate consisted of more than 600 solidly middle class deputies from the ranks of government officials, lawyers, merchants, property owners and other professionals. Since the Third Estate had the support of liberal minded priests and members of the nobility, they were almost assured of a majority.
On June 10, 1789, the Third Estate broke the stalemate. They invited the First and Second Estates to join them. Some of the more liberal-minded members of the nobility and clergy did in fact come over, but the stalemate continued. On June 17, 1789, the Third Estate began the French Revolution by declaring itself a National Assembly. This was a profoundly revolutionary act indeed. Days later, now locked out of their meeting hall, the Third Estate moved to a tennis court and took the OATH OF THE TENNIS COURT, which stated that they would not disband until a constitution had been drafted.
Louis ordered the National Assembly to disband immediately. A Declaration sent to the Third Estate from Louis on June 23 expressed the following demand:
The King wishes that the ancient distinction of the three Orders of the State be preserved in its entirety, as essentially linked to the constitution of his Kingdom; that the deputies, freely elected by each of the three Orders, forming three chambers, deliberating by Order . . . can alone be considered as forming the body of the representatives of the Nation. As a result, the King has declared null the resolutions passed by the deputies of the Order of the Third Estate, the 17th of this month, as well as those which have followed them, as illegal and unconstitutional . . . .
The Third Estate, stood by their solemn oath and refused to yield to Louis’ demands.
In an effort to reach some kind of compromise, on June 27, Louis ordered the clergy and nobility to join the Third Estate. Of course, some members of both Estates had already done so but the vast majority refused. I suppose Louis figured that he could control the Third Estate if it were simply a part of a larger body, but his plan clearly back-fired. The Third Estate would not compromise and the First and Second Estate would not conceive of lowering themselves to the same collective body as the Third Estate. Instead, the nobility joined with Louis against the National Assembly. Louis went on to order the army to station themselves near Paris and Versailles, just in case. Although not one shot had yet been fired, the French Revolution had begun.
Links en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Estates historyguide.org/intellect/lecture12a.html khanacademy.org/humanities/history/1600s- “The innate dynamism of the modern economy, and of the culture that grows from this economy, annihilates everything that it creates--physical environments, social institutions, metaphysics ideas, artistic visions, moral values--in order to create more, to go on endlessly creating the world anew. This drive draws all modern men and women into its orbit, and forces us all to grapple with the question of what is essential, what is meaningful, what is real in the maelstrom in which we move and live.”
Berman goes on to describe his own experience of modernity growing up the Bronx in the late 40’s. Overnight, from out of nowhere, the idyllic Jewish & Irish neighbourhoods of his youth were torn apart by “an immense expressway, unprecedented in scale, expense and difficulty of construction.” Worse, he continues, this was done on the back of the very values of the dispossessed. To oppose the destruction of their homes was to oppose progress.” To oppose “bridges, tunnels, expressways, housing developments, power dams, stadia, cultura meaningful again, when we ourselves hardly find them so.
“In All That is Solid Melts into Air,” I define modernism as any attempt by modern men and women to become subjects as well as objects of modernization, to get a grip on the modern world and make themselves at home in it. . . . They are moved at once by a will to change--to transform both themselves and their world- -and by a terror of disorientation and disintegration, of life falling apart. To be modern is to live a life of paradox and contradiction, a life characterized by the uninterrupted disturbances of all social relations, everlasting uncertainty and agitation which have been part of modernity for two hundred years.
“If we think of modernism as a struggle to make ourselves at home in a constantly changing world, we will realize that no mode of modernism can ever be definitive.”