Birth of Modernism during the Interwar Period

As an aftermath of the Great War, a growing tension and depression in society with social order, manifested in artistic works in every source which strictly rejected the old practice. Young painters like Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse were causing a shock with their rejection of traditional perspective as the means of structuring paintings something that any of impressionists before had taken. In 1907, as Picasso was painting “Demoiselles d'Avignon”, Oskar Kokoschka was writing “Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen”, the first Expressionist play made in 1909, and Arnold Schoenberg was composing his “String Quartet No.2”, his first composition "without a tonal center". In 1911, Kandinsky painted “Bild mit Kreis" which he later called the first abstract painting. In 1913, a Russian composer, Igor Stravinsky, working in Paris for Sergei Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, composed “The Rite of Spring” for a ballet, choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky that depicted human sacrifice. 

These developments, during the interwar years of 1914 to 1939, began to give a new meaning to what was termed "modernism": It embraced discontinuity, rejecting smooth change in everything from biology to fictional character development and filmmaking. It allowed disruption, rejecting or moving beyond simple realism in literature and art, and rejecting or dramatically altering tonality in music. 

It is considered to be the most significant architectural development in the interwar period. The designed world in which we live was largely created by Modernism, which is best identified as a loose collection of ideas that developed suddenly in different countries rather than as a single movement. The unadorned, geometric forms, abstracted shapes, and bold colors of Modernist art and design are notable, seen in everything that surround us and behind all this looks and forms of Modernism are set some radical ideas and conditions. 

Writers like Dickens and Tolstoy, painters like Turner, and musicians like Brahms were not radicals or "Bohemians", but were instead valued members of society who produced art that gave to society, even when critiquing its less desirable aspects. As a reaction for the unprecedented violence and destruction of World War I, these artists searched for ways to create a better world through art and design. 

The interwar period it’s not considered technologically as a great innovative period because the big inventions as the electric light bulb, the automobile, the airplane, the skyscraper, the radio, and the telephone appeared formerly World War I. It is greatly considered a time of development and dispersal giving rise to widespread use of modern technologies. Modernism includes remarkable art movements of the interwar period like Dadaism (1916 – 1924), Bauhaus (1919 – 1933), Art Deco (1920 – 1935) and Surrealism (1920 - 1935). The most paradigmatic movement during this time was Dada or Dadaism Dada, an informal international movement, with participants in Europe and North America. The beginnings of Dada correspond to the outbreak of World War I. The movement was a protest against the bourgeois nationalist and colonialist interests, which many Dadaists believed were the main cause of the war, and against the cultural and intellectual conformity in art and in society that corresponded to the war. 

Many Dadaists believed that the reason' and logic of bourgeois capitalist society had led people into war. They expressed their rejection of that ideology in artistic expression that appeared to reject logic and supports chaos and irrationality. George Grosz, a artist, recalled that his Dadaist art was intended as a protest against this world of mutual destruction.

Lucia Valdivia