The first World War had a dual effect: first, the traumatic shattering of confidence in all the traditions that had gone before. But second, and more positively, there was an exhilaration in the breakdown of the old certainties. Out of fragmentation and loss came the opportunity to see the world afresh, to decide on new codes, forms and tastes, to paint the new century onto a blank canvas (this was particularly true in Russia and Ireland, where revolutions occurred during the war).
The post-war experimentalism that flourished in the arts was articulated in the 1920s as modernism. Cubism had already led the way, breaking up the contrived notion of still life. Here was a truer and more vivid representation of what science had revealed: humans are made up of tiny volatile particles, and our perceptions are partial, subjective and distorted, more likely to be driven by unconscious urges and fantasies than by the frames of logic. Heisenberg's "uncertainty principle" of 1927 stated that no one law or principle governs all phenomena.
A similar trend prevailed in literature: Proust's enormous novel, A la Recherche du Temps perdu, was about the inability of memory to reconstruct a solid past. Freed from the ties of the objective perspective pursued by Victorian novelists, narrative experimentation flourished, most notably in the stream-of-consciousness technique of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce.
The increasing recognition of photography as an art form in its own right also pushed visual artists to pursue the abstract and experimental, as no artist could compete with the camera when it came to naturalistic representation. This contributed to a liberating realisation among modernists that art is self-sufficient and need not serve any representative function.
While modernism was sometimes obscure and elitist (or even deliberately silly, as in Dada), in spirit it was democratic. Symbols and material from the world of popular culture were incorporated into works of art. For example, Joyce's Ulysses (see Book of the Decade) is peppered with advertising jingles, newspaper reports and popular ballads. It was considered important to engage and validate all experience (hence we get the small details of Bloom's day, from feeding the cat to evacuating his bowels).
Modernism was also influenced by technology, adopting geometrical shapes and machine images. The new architecture was characterised by the functional style of engineering. Modernists took anything that had not been adulterated by conventional politeness as their inspiration - including the art of children and the insane, and the art of primitive cultures. This last - embraced with enthusiasm by Picasso - had been brought to their attention by colonial expansion into Asia, Africa and South America. They were also inspired by fantasies, dreams and the unconscious, another pre-civilised realm highlighted by Freud, which was particularly of interest to the Surrealists, most notably Salvador Dali.
The alienation of man from his environment - an effect not only of the war but also of modern urban life - was a popular theme in the fiction of Franz Kafka and in T.S. Eliot's long poem The Waste Land. Composers such as Stravinsky were also aware of a lack of harmony between the human individual and his social environment, and sought to express this using atonality and dissonance in their music. For the modernists, the past was there to be satirised - "debunked" was the popular word for it - but also to be ransacked for anything that might be usefully pasted together to fill the shell-shocked vaccuum created by the war.
The Waste Land is full of quotes and references to Shakespeare, Dante, Beaudelaire, Webster, Sappho, St Augustine, and more, as the exhausted poet seeks to inject meaning into the emptiness and chaos of modern life ("these fragments I have shored against my ruin").
Modernism was eventually followed by the postmodernism of the 1960s and 1970s, which shared certain key characteristics: the recycling of earlier texts; a self-conscious tendency to draw attention to its own artistic strategies; and a concern with medium and technique (as much if not more so than with substance and content). Postmodernism - more diffuse, more prone to poke fun at its own game - never quite achieved the same anarchic impact or memorable genius.
