Modernism VS Postmodernism

Modernism was a rebellious and radical attitude that started between 1890-1970. The attitude was about rejecting European culture that was too fixated with their image rather than change. It completely changed how the modern world viewed life, art , politics, and science. Modernism is considered to be both an art movement and a philosophical movement, which isn't shocking since both go hand in hand. The factors that really pushed this new way of thinking was the environment people were living in. World War 1 just ended, cities were growing at a rapid pace, and societies as a whole were becoming more industrial. Religion also didn't fit in with the way modernists conducted their lives; Enlightenment thinking that was so popular in Europe was heavily rejected.

Modernism in art allowed artists to express their feelings and ideas, to create fantasy worlds and abstractions rather than just have art imitating real life. All the movements that were apart of modernism were impressionism, postimpressionism, fauvism, cubism, futurism, constructivism, dada-ism, surrealism, expressionism, abstract expressionism, and the list goes on.

Sonia Terk, who later is known as Sonia Delaunay, married painter Robert Delaunay and together they created a theory of color that they named simultanism. Robert wound up getting majority od the credit for it and Sonia put a pause on her artistic work in order to support him and her son. "Without Sonia, Robert Delaunay might have been just another Parisian paint slinger. After his death, in 1941, she went on to paint again and have museum exhibitions of her own", (Guerrilla Girls, 61).

Sonia Delaunay, Market in Minho, 1915

Sonia Delaunay, Yellow Nude, 1908

Pan Yuliang lived in China during a time when painters worked in traditional styles using ink. She was very attracted to Western-style oil painting and loved individual expression. Her earliest work are nudes of herself by using a mirror, while also dabbling in portraits and still lives. Yuliang was respected for being the first woman in China to paint in a Western European style.  Later in life, she became a professor at the National Central University in Nanjing but because of her past being sold into prostitution, the University shamed her. Fleeing to Paris, she was able to live her life how she wanted as a artist and express herself freely without anyone's judgement.

Pan Yuliang, Bathing Nudity, 1958

So what comes after such a groundbreaking important phase in art? Postmodernism started around 1970 and is the direct rejection to everything that modernism represents. One of the ideologies that was rejected was that "art" is something "special" which should be "elevated from" popular taste. The more the world changes, art changes too. Postmodernism led to decades of different new kinds of experimentation with art like conceptual art, performance art, installation art and created movements like Deconstructivism and Projection art. Art becomes overall less formal and artists have the liberty to do whatever they want.

Postmodernism is a reflection of the disillusionment people during that time felt with life and also having to deal with the breaking down of old values. Modern art was always seen as unattainable if the artist was not white nor male nor apart of the elite. That is why postmodern art celebrates feminist and minority artists. Even though postmodern art rejects big ideas, it has big ideas of its own. One of them being, "all types of art are equally valid", like Fountain by Marcel Duchamp for example. Or like Ana Mendieta, a Latina woman artist who made sculptures of her body in nature.

Ana Mendieta was born in Havana, Cuba in the year 1948. Mendieta was born into a wealthy family, but was sent away to the United States because of her father's work against Fidel Castro. In the United States, she was raised in orphanages and foster homes until in 1966 her mother and brother arrived from Cuba. Her start in the art world was when she studied at the University of Iowa and met many New York artists. Mendieta later moved to New York after she finished her education in Iowa. Her work became conceptual and performance based, the staged events were documented by photographs and that too became her artwork. In a gallery named AIR, opened by all women artists, she held her first solo show in 1978. Mendieta's most famous work is her Silueta series, where she would lay down, have her body outlined in the ground, then putting flowers, stones, or sticks around it. Her work is very postmodern because it goes against the traditional way of making art. It pushes the boundaries to what art is and can be, to the way the audience takes it in and interprets the message behind the art.

Ana Mendieta, Silueta Sangrienta, 1975

Ana Mendieta, Imagen de Yagul, 1973

Work Cited:
Guerrilla Girls (1998). The Guerrilla Girls' Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art. New York, NY: Penguin Books