Among the many trends and movements of the 20th century there are several leading and fundamental ones, especially modernism, which was practiced as a philosophical and aesthetic movement, declared itself in contemporary art that uses new forms and means of expression corresponding to the realities of the 20th century. Modernism gave rise to a complex set of attitudes toward the world and a special understanding of the world based on a combination of elements of European culture and trends. The very perception of man and the world, proposed by modernism, conflicted with the whole structure of his thinking and the preceding philosophy. Not only ideas of space, time, matter, motion have changed, but also ideas about ways of development of the world, the role of the mind in the knowledge of objective reality.
When studying this phenomenon, every author puts forward their ideas about the appearance of modernism, which suggests the mobility of its chronological framework. But, as noticed by many scholars, modernism of the 19th-20th centuries is profoundly different from the modernist era of modern times. If we understand modernism as a worldview, focused on the denial of the traditional foundations, the chronological framework of modernism will not be crucial.
It was modernism in the narrow sense with its tendencies, the strengthening of which has led to the emergence of a new cultural trend, postmodernism. Modernism and postmodernism are a kind of reflection of the crisis of Western civilization and its spiritual culture. You can speak about common philosophical and ideological bases of these areas, which are based on the ideas of Kant about the limited cognitive capacity of the mind, on irrational voluntarism of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, on Bergson’s intuitionism, phenomenology of Husserl, and Freud’s psychoanalysis.
Postmodernism as a modern attitude was a kind of protest against the fact, the polemic against modernism and at the same time a kind of summarizing and rethinking. In modernism there was a certain projection of the future; postmodernism didn’t have such attitude towards the future. Modernists when subjecting to radical critique reality turned to transcendental in search of the true ideal; rejecting the realities of the present world, they were looking for and creating patterns of the world. If modernism was aimed at searching certain and unshakable foundations, postmodernism was focused on everyday life, radical pluralism, and uncertainty.
Among the many trends and movements of the 20th century there are several leading and fundamental ones, especially modernism, which was practiced as a philosophical and aesthetic movement, declared itself in contemporary art that uses new forms and means of expression corresponding to the realities of the 20th century.