Module Information

‘A generation that had gone to school on horse-drawn streetcars now stood under the open sky in a landscape where nothing remained unchanged but the clouds and, beneath those clouds, in a force field of destructive torrents and explosions, the tiny, fragile human body’. Writing in 1936, Walter Benjamin thusly evokes an experience of twentieth-century modernity as one of bewildering, violent, and comprehensive change. The modern individual stands mute and vulnerable amidst the chaos of mechanized war, industrialised capitalism, economic depression, authoritarian political oppression, urbanism, consumerism, and mass media.

These explosions and torrents shattered and swept away centuries of tradition, in art, as elsewhere: the modern artist faced the unnerving, invigorating opportunity to remake art in the image of the modern, and the modern in the image of their art. This module investigates the rich polyphony of artistic responses to the challenge of being modern.

Week-by-week we will examine the key artists, movements, and contexts for understanding art in the early twentieth century. The topics covered will address the various ways in which artists responded to the challenge of being modern. These topics will evolve over time in response to the coordinator's research and the latest developments in the field. As an indication, we will examine '-isms' including Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Surrealism, and Constructivism; broader artistic developments such as abstraction, avant-gardism, and self-criticism; and the historical forces that made the modern world (such as urban alienation, mass production and standardisation, the birth of mass media, ideas of progress and utopia, mechanised production and war, the spread of rational calculation, and technological change).

Taking a 'flipped learning' approach, students will read essential texts and watch pre-recorded lectures (1 hour per week, inclusive of activities) as guided independent study. Classroom time (1 hour per week) will be divided between student-led Q&A and discussion about the lectures and in-depth seminar-style discussion of important texts. Each student will also have a 1:1 tutorial for tailored feedback and guidance for their essay.