The period from 1910 to 1950 was the age of modernism in literature, art, and music. James Joyce’s Ulysses, T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land (both published in 1922), and the experiments by Pablo Picasso, Duke Ellington, and Arnold Schönberg defined the aesthetic of the first half of the twentieth century in defiance of artistic developments from the Renaissance to nineteenth-century realism. The modernist emphasis was on “abstract” form rather than on theme and on a new nonlinearity rather than on traditional artistic development and execution. Artists and writers increasingly wished to represent the sense of speed and motion that trains, trolleys, automobiles, and other means of modern transportation made widely available. Modernists were also interested in adapting techniques of nonwestern art and of the new formal language of film. These trends supported the “experimental,” detached, and often difficult quality of modernism that took different shape in the various movements (the many “isms”) that emerged in the course of the century. Amazingly, what started as the fringe enterprise of a few radical artists at the beginning of the century who set out to “defamiliarize,” to “alienate” their small audiences, and what appeared as if it would be replaced by a second wave of realism in the 1930s (when Gertrude Stein bought work by such painters as Christian Bérard, Pavel Tcheletchew, or Francis Rose), became the dominant expression of Western art by the 1950s.

Looking back at modernism, the Harvard University critic Harry Levin marveled at the fact that “The Picasso” could have become the name of an apartment building in New York, and his Columbia University colleague Lionel Trilling wondered what had changed to make modernism teachable in so many colleges and schools around the United States.