Rise of modernism

Modernism was a broad movement in art, literature, music and architecture that broke with traditional forms in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It responded to rapid industrialisation, urban growth, new science and the shock of the First World War, and its guiding idea was to make things new. In painting it produced Cubism and abstraction through artists such as Pablo Picasso, and in literature it appeared in the experimental work of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot. In music Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg broke with older conventions, and in architecture Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus favoured plain forms, concrete, steel and glass. Its influence continued through the century until challenged by postmodern ideas.

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