while not directly impacted by the First World War, would only rise to mainstream
prominence as a direct consequence of it. Without the outbreak of war and the subsequent
explosion of Russian society his influence on the modernist movement in wider Europe may
never have materialized.
Fundamentally, the First World War was something that deeply scarred all the
combatant nations. It was inevitable that visual language would have to adjust to the new
reality that the end of the war beckoned. Although I have only engaged with a small
selection of the art that modernism has created, each work represents a facet of the new
ways that the world of art would respond to the changing world. Art is, by its nature, a
reflection of reality. The reality that people found themselves in after the war was
inextricably changed by it, is only natural for art to reflect that change. The rebellion that
manifested itself within society after and during the war was often not constrained to the
canvas and camera. Russia, as stated earlier, fell into Civil War due to the Great War, and its
consequences were apparent across Russian society. Contrastingly, the government of
Germany almost fell to a series of uprisings before ultimately being consumed by fascism.
The war gave a Casus Belli for the artist to declare war on art itself. Modernism, as a
movement, began before the war yet found its acceptance in the post-war period. Those
who witnessed it were angry at the society that allowed it to happen. Many were frustrated
by all that had been sacrificed for victory, or sacrificed for defeat. The post-war apathy,
moreover, was often faced by those who could not understand because they had not seen it
firsthand. This societal feeling was the catalyst that enabled people to comprehend the
often-undecipherable realm of the new visual language that modernism aimed to create.
Without the widespread trauma of the war, Modernism would never have attained the
mainstream status it enjoyed in the post-war period.
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