Editing Modernism (section)

=== Romanticism and realism ===
{{See also|Romanticism|Realism (art movement)}}
Modernism developed out of Romanticism's revolt against the effects of the [[Industrial Revolution]] and [[bourgeois]] values. Literary scholar [[Gerald Graff]], argues that, "The ground motive of modernism was criticism of the 19th-century bourgeois social order and its world view; the modernists, carrying the torch of Romanticism."{{efn| name=Barth79Replenishment|The ground motive of modernism, Graff asserts, was criticism of the 19th-century bourgeois social order and its world view. Its artistic strategy was the self-conscious overturning of the conventions of bourgeois realism ... the antirationalist, antirealist, antibourgeois program of modernism ... the modernists, carrying the torch of Romanticism, taught us that linearity, rationality, consciousness, cause and effect, naïve illusionism, transparent language, innocent anecdote, and middle-class moral conventions are not the whole story.<ref>Barth (1979) quotation</ref>}}<ref name="Graff73">{{cite periodical |author-link=Gerald Graff |last=Graff |first=Gerald |title=The myth of the postmodernist breakthrough |periodical=[[TriQuarterly]] |volume=26 |date=Winter 1973 |pages=383–417}}</ref><ref name="Graff75">{{cite periodical |author-link=Gerald Graff |last=Graff |first=Gerald |title=Babbitt at the abyss: The social context of postmodern American fiction |periodical=[[TriQuarterly]] |volume=33 |date=Spring 1975 |pages=307–337}}</ref>

[[File:LenbachFürstBismarck1895.jpg|thumb|upright=0.8|left|[[Franz von Lenbach]], ''Fürst Otto von Bismarck'', 1895. A [[Realism (arts)|realist]] portrait of [[Otto von Bismarck]] during his retirement. Modernist artists largely rejected realism.]]
While [[J. M. W. Turner]] (1775–1851), one of the most notable landscape painters of the 19th century, was a member of the [[Romantic movement]], his pioneering work in the study of light, color, and atmosphere "anticipated the French [[Impressionists]]" and therefore modernism "in breaking down conventional formulas of representation; though unlike them, he believed that his works should always express significant historical, mythological, literary, or other narrative themes."<ref>{{cite encyclopedia |url=https://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/610274/J-M-W-Turner |title=J.M.W. Turner |encyclopedia=Encyclopædia Britannica |date=25 May 2023 |access-date=23 June 2022 |archive-date=30 January 2010 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100130101931/http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/610274/J-M-W-Turner |url-status=live }}</ref>
However, the modernists were critical of the Romantics' belief that art serves as a window into the nature of reality. They argued that since each viewer interprets art through their own subjective perspective, it can never convey the ultimate metaphysical truth that the Romantics sought. Nonetheless, the modernists did not completely reject the idea of art as a means of understanding the world. To them, it was a tool for challenging and disrupting the viewer's point of view, rather than as a direct means of accessing a higher reality.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Josipovici |first=Gabriel |title=The world and the book: a study of modern fiction |date=1994 |publisher=Macmillan |isbn=978-0-333-60901-9 |edition=3rd |location=Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire |chapter=Chapter 7: Modernism and Romanticism}}</ref>

Modernism often rejects 19th-century realism when the latter is understood as focusing on the embodiment of meaning within a naturalistic representation. Instead, some modernists aim at a more 'real' realism, one that is uncentered. For instance, [[Pablo Picasso|Picasso's]] 1907 [[Proto-Cubism|Proto-Cubist]] painting ''[[Les Demoiselles d'Avignon]]'' does not present its subjects from a single point of view, instead presenting a flat, two-dimensional [[picture plane]]. ''The Poet'' of 1911 is similarly decentered, presenting the body from multiple points of view. As the [[Peggy Guggenheim Collection]] comments, "Picasso presents multiple views of each object, as if he had moved around it, and synthesizes them into a single compound image."<ref>The painting is in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. See: https://www.guggenheim-venice.it/en/art/works/the-poet/ {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230805145510/https://www.guggenheim-venice.it/en/art/works/the-poet/ |date=5 August 2023 }}.</ref>

Modernism, with its sense that "things fall apart," is often seen as the [[apotheosis]] of Romanticism. As August Wilhelm Schlegel, an early German Romantic, described it, while Romanticism searches for metaphysical truths about character, nature, [[Conceptions of God|higher power]], and meaning in the world, modernism, although yearning for such a metaphysical center, only finds its collapse.<ref>Schlegel, as an early German romantic, declared, "Only when striving toward truth and knowledge can a spirit be called a philosophical spirit". [https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aesthetics-19th-romantic/ See '19th Century Romantic Aesthetics' in ''Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy'']. The idea of Romanticism as an internalized quest is commonplace. Harold Bloom, for instance, has written extensively on Romanticism as 'The Internalisation of Quest-Romance' in ''Romanticism and Consciousness'', New York: Norton, 1970, pp.3–24.</ref>