Curated playlist
Modernism
- T. S. EliotT. S. Eliot compared an evening sky to a patient on a surgical table.
- Modern danceModern dance began when artists rejected ballet's corsets and pointe shoes. Isadora Duncan danced barefoot instead.
- James JoyceJames Joyce's novel Ulysses was banned for obscenity in the UK and US, yet copies were smuggled.
- Post-ImpressionismPost-Impressionism was a name no painter ever asked for. Critic Roger Fry picked the vaguest label he could find.
- PostmodernismThe word postmodern first appeared in print in 1870, in a painter's note about style.
- SurrealismSurrealism announced itself with a fistfight in October 1924. Two rival leaders came to blows over the word.
- ModernismPicasso's 1907 painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon refuses to show its subjects from a single point of view.
- ExistentialismSartre publicly embraced the label existentialism in a packed 1945 Paris lecture. He had earlier rejected it.
- Buddhist modernismIn 1893, two men in Chicago offered Western listeners a Buddhism stripped of gods, cosmology, and ritual.
- Avant-gardeAvant-garde began as a French army term for scouts sent ahead of the main force. Later it described artists.