Modernism and Postmodernism

Mark Gertler painted this in 1916 and it depicts the circular and mechanical aspects of World War both on the homefront and on the battlefield.

Gertler, Mark. The Merry-Go-Round . 1916. Tate Gallery, London. www.tate.org.

“Composition VII” is a groundbreaking abstract painting by Wassily Kandinsky, completed in 1913, and is often considered one of his most important and complex works. Though the painting is abstract, Kandinsky associated it with complex themes like Resurrection, Judgment Day, the Flood, and the Garden of Eden. 
In Composition IIV, Kandinsky rejects the constraints of traditional art, similar to how Imagists broke from Victorian poetics. Kandinsky wanted to express pure feeling through color,…

Published in the April 1913 issue of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” embodies the Imagist ideal. The poem is only 14 words long and creates a clear and concise image of a subway. 

The apparition of these faces in the crowd: 

Petals on a wet, black bough.

 In true Imagist fashion, Pound avoids narrative, rhyme, and exposition and instead presents a single, clear image. It embodies the Imagist ideals of economy, clarity, and concentrated imagery. Imagist poetry is a reaction to excessive ornamentation,…

Blast, a modernist journal, was created by Wyndham Lewis alongside writers such as Ezra Pound in 1914. Its explosive cover – bold BLAST lettering set against a magenta background– serves as a visual manifesto rejecting the ornate traditions of the Victorians and Romantics. Blast promoted Vorticism, a movement born from Imagism in literature and Cubism/Futurism in visual arts. The Vorticism movement (and its literary counterpart Imagism) sought to reject tradition and the standardized, polite systems of the time by focusing on clear and precise imagery. The image is a…