Pre-WWI Modernism

Some of the difficulties we had in developing a paragraph were answering the focus question of what is different. We chose to focus on the art piece Les Demoiselles by Picasso. We thought it would easy to describe how it was different from what art normally looks like. However, we were only doing that, and not describing why the art was different during the Pre-WWI time as Professor Armstrong pointed out. We came up the key period concepts of the attempt to break from the ideas that shape society and structural patterns are distorted and even irrational. While we came up with a good amount of facts we didn’t actually articulate them into a paragraph. Here are the basic ideas we came up with: The reason for the attempt to break from ideas that shape society could come from the anxious feeling artists were getting due to the rapid growth of technological achievements and the sense of impending doom. Picasso was representing woman very differently from conventional art at the time in that their bodies and faces were somewhat distorted. The structural pattern of the piece is also different from that of the time because it seems very flat compared to the art styles. The rejection of previous forms and the intense distortion expressed the anxious feeling of the time. We could definitely compare this to the short story by Kafka, In the Penal Colony. Kafka’s short story is unusual short story which breaks from the ideas that shape society and it had distorted pattern of thought. These key period concepts could also work for the Schoenberg piece of music Moonfleck which really breaks from traditional structure with its atonality meaning it having no key center. The 12 tone system of which gives equal importance to all the notes and breaks from the idea of society of music only is having 5 tones. The anxious feeling during the time could contribute to people wanting to be able to express themselves with more notes.
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