Intellectual posturing is the new black. Every designer from Bond Street to Primark is name checking artists and authors while parading their latest rags down a catwalk on fashionably emaciated coathangers – all of which are careful to be seen out and about with a suitably avant-garde poetry volume perched in a pocket, to twitter on about their adoration of Matisse and Picasso and to lean muse-like against their wide eyed guitarists and mop-haired front men.

Art is In. Well, not really. Arty is in. Arty as in kohl eyes and floaty tops and being casually dishevelled, gracefully wasted, as in writing moaning poetry on myspace. The finer points of Turner’s use of light, of Burroughs’s spontaneous prose style or the emotions behind Fauvism are in no way grasped by any of the people previously mentioned. But who cares? Blagging seems enough to get you through – why put in the effort and passion needed to really grasp an idea when you can pass yourself of as fashionably cultured with this series of easy guides?

As you’ve probably picked up by my rather acerbic tone, I’m not particularly happy about any of this blagging. A massive culture junkie, I get furiously bored when I have to stop dead mid conversation upon realising that the limit of a companion’s knowledge of Kerouac is red and black checked shirts. So. I’ll break each movement down into relatively easy to grasp snippets, whizz through the bigger names and major works. But I’ll try, at the same time, to be a bit deeper than the average blagger. Not for any snobbish intellectual reasons – that’s the worst attribute of high culture. But because the books, paintings, sculptures and ideas in each of these movements really all can enrich your lives at another level than impressing a potential lay. And also, I want someone to talk to.

I’m going to start with Modernism. The main reason for this is that Modernism is a brilliant blagging tool. It covers more or less all of twentieth century art. Picasso, Pollock, Woolf, Dylan, Duchamp, Brecht, Warhol – all modernists. Oh they all hang round in various groups – the Cubists, the Surrealists, the Dadaists, the Pop Artists – but they are all Modernists. This is because Modernism isn’t so much an art movement as a way of thinking. The second reason that I am starting with this is because Modernism is all about being pissed off with mainstream attitudes. I feel a great affinity with Modernist artists.

The beginnings of Modernism are difficult to pinpoint, but it is almost exclusively, as I’ve said, confined to the twentieth century. It didn’t just explode into being in 1900, however. Its roots can be traced back to the first half of the nineteenth-century with Romanticism’s emphasis on the subjective personal experience.

By the end of the century, this had given way to an overwhelming emphasis on objective reality. Subjective and personal impressions were considered, to put it bluntly, pretentious bullshit. Reason, system and logic became the basis of society. History and civilisation meant progress, and progress was good.

Unsurprisingly these idiotic ideas came under increasing attack. Darwin’s Theory of Evolution completely undermined religious certainty. Marx’s Communist Manifesto undermined the stability of civilisation itself. The 1870s marked the first starting points of Modernism. The world was undergoing rapid industrialisation due to steam power. Everything looked different. Cast iron bridges and buildings were springing up all over the place. The Eiffel tower broke all previously known limits on manmade structures.

Yet the traditional art establishment and society’s elite still valued paintings such as Constable’s Hawain, which, in my opinion, and the opinion of the Modernists, is just… well a massive pile of rubbish, basically. Reality itself was coming into question. At the end of the nineteenth century, a new school of thought began to make itself known. Previous norms were pushed aside entirely, not simply viewed in light of contemporary thoughts. If restrictions on humanity and the reality in which it existed were changing, then art too would have to change. Many artists at this point were influenced by well known genius-cum-nutter Sigmund Freud. Freud put forward that reality was perceived through the mind’s play of basic instincts and drives, which were often subconscious (the most infamous of these drives was the “everyone wants to shag their Mum or Dad” theory – oh to be a fly on the wall the Christmas after he came up with that one).

This was a massive shift in thought. Previously it had been thought that reality imposed itself upon the individual. Modernism recognised that things were the other way round. According to Modernism, the individual imposes their own views and experiences upon reality. Artists, writers and musicians all started to well – do what they wanted. They experimented with any way of representing their subject other than what tradition dictated. Bear in mind that the traditional method of painting before all this had been Constablesque – the Impressionists were about as radical as it got.

And then along comes work like this Fauvist piece by Wassily Kandinsky:

Artists began to focus on expressing the emotions of the subjective soul discussed by Freud rather than an objective reality. Writers likewise broke with the tradition of out and out realism and sought new ways of expression. Look at this passage from James Joyce’s Ulysses compared to, say, the stupidly overrated Pride and Predjudice.

“It soared, a bird, it held its flight, a swift pure cry, soar silver orb it leaped serene, speeding, sustained, to come, don’t spin it out too long long breath he breath long life, soaring high, high resplendent, aflame, crowned, high in the effulgence symbolistic, high, of the ethereal bosom, high, of the high vast irradiation everywhere all soaring all around about the all, the endlessnessnessness…”

“Occupied in observing Mr. Bingley’s attentions to her sister, Elizabeth was far from suspecting that she was herself becoming an object of some interest in the eyes of his friend. Mr. Darcy had at first scarcely allowed her to be pretty; he had looked at her without admiration at the ball; and when they next met, he looked at her only to criticise. But no sooner had he made it clear to himself and his friends that she hardly had a good feature in her face, than he began to find it was rendered uncommonly intelligent by the beautiful expression of her dark eyes.”

Your browser may not support display of this image.Traditional methods of form and structure were completely rejected. Look up and you’ll see how Kandinsky has completely rejected all forms of artistic structure. That painting represents nothing which can be seen in the real world. Yet it still represents something we can all relate to – inner emotion. Joyce, meanwhile, rejects all rules of grammar and sentence construction yet he manages to represent the world far more brilliantly than Austen ever could.

Unfortunately mainstream society didn’t quite seem to realise this. Artists and philosophers recognised that a shift in society had occurred. The average man on the street didn’t. That is until the dawn of the First World War, when news images of war-torn scenes of destruction became ubiquitous.

Bears more of a resemblance to the abstracts of modernism than Constable’s gentle Haywain, doesn’t it? The First World War, for many people, marked a break with anything that had gone before. Never before had so many died for so little, and never before had so many died in such horrific ways. The horrors of shrapnel wounds, trench foot, mustard gas and machine guns were experienced for the first time, and the world would never be the same again. Realism was bankrupt when faced with the illogical and fantastic nature of warfare.

Modernism was the art movement which represented this new world best. The rebellious and tradition bashing nature of Modernist art was embraced. From here on in, Modernism exploded. Any art movement you can think of in the past 80 years has had Modernism as its root. Cubism, Dadaism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Installation Art – everything everything everything. It’s impossible to grasp the zaniness of some of these movements without understanding that their basis is the rebellious and subjective nature of Modernism. Without understanding Modernism, for example, it’s impossible to grasp why a urinal is considered art.

But it is. Probably. I’ll continue to look at the movements Modernism inspired throughout the next few weeks.

Modernism in a Nutshell:

Say: “Duchamp’s Urinal/Kandinsky’s rejection of form/Joyce’s rejection of literary convention (delete as applicable) reflects the changed nature of society and the belief that all reality is subjective, and that any mode of expression is relevant, as long as it expresses.”

“Modernism’s defining characteristic is a rejection of tradition.”

Read: Ulysses, James Joyce; Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf; On The Road, Jack Kerouac

Look at: Fountain, Marcel Duchamp; Composition No. 10, Piet Mondrian. Le Guitarist, Pablo Picasso; Andy Warhol

Listen to: Desolation Row, Bob Dylan