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Modernist ProjectThe modernist project was a collaborative and ongoing series of artistic and cultural innovations instigated by avant-garde artists beginning in 19th Century Europe. See modernism. In painting, Gustave Courbet began to paint scenes of modern life and autobiography rather than historical narratives. In music Debussy, Ravel and Faur created Impressionistic, expressive melodies that reflected basic forces of nature and urban life. Later innovations included such phases as Cubism, Serial music, the highly symbolic Modern dance of Martha Graham, and the theatrical spectacles staged by Stravinsky, Diaghilev and Nijinsky. Many of these art works were subversive quasi-political rebellions against the bourgeoisie. Intellectuals took recourse to the burgeoning field of psychology to fuel such movements as Dada and Surrealism, commenting on the insanity of World War I among other crises. American fine art culture was relatively quiet between World Wars I and II, but with the rise of the Nazis many European modernists fled to the United States, bringing the ideas of the Bauhaus and a dedication to formalism and abstraction to American campuses and artists. Economic pressures and aspirations also fueled this shift of the art world center from Paris to New York, leading to the American dominance of the field for some decades. However, even as America produced its first generation of art world stars, the increasingly formal and universal aspirations of the modernist avant-garde were showing exhaustion. The extremes of Pop and Minimal art seemed to critique and repudiate modernist ideals with an assertion of a new and different aesthetic not wedded to innovation, rigor or even seriousness, which came to be called postmodernism.
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