Seurat's "A Sunday Afternoon On the Island of La Grande Jette"
and "Nude Descending a Staircase" by Marcel Duchamp
Among the many art historians and theorists who have made an attempt to determine the means and methods by which the artistic term "modernism" is developed, is Sandro Bocola (1999) in The Art of Modernism: Art, Culture and Society from Goya to the Present Day, which concludes that "modernism" is a trend in art that rejected "historicism" and "classicism" and became an art that "mirrors the scientific revolution. The trailblazing discoveries of psychoanalysis and the new physics, the effect of technological and industrial progress, (44).
In the terms of macro-history that spans the centuries of art, "Modern" art usually refers to a period that typically encompasses the 1860s and lasts to the 1970s and this term is the most common description used to describe the style and the ideology of art produced during that era. It is this more specific use of modern that is intended when people speak of modern art. "The term modernism is also used to refer to the art of the modern period. More specifically, modernism can be thought of as referring to the philosophy of modern art" (Bocola 44).
When used in that sense, and also in the sense of Bocola,
"modernism" refers to the creative strategy (or strategies) of the artists who choose to let their art reflect the mood or the temper of the times.
Bocola goes further, arguing that the resulting dynamics
are echoed in artistic efforts to. . .visualize and express the invisible foundations of reality. The artist of modernism move farther and farther away from visible appearances; step by step, but inexorably, they push forward fundamentals and universals, to universal being, and thereby evolve two basic forms of representation that reflect the above-mentioned developments: structure and energy (Bocola 44).
In this paper, we shall argue that the two artist...