Page "Modernism" Paragraph 15

Historians, and writers in different disciplines, have suggested various dates as starting points for modernism.

William Everdell, for example, has argued that modernism began in the 1870s, when metaphorical ( or ontological ) continuity began to yield to the discrete with mathematician Richard Dedekind's ( 1831 – 1916 ) Dedekind cut, and Ludwig Boltzmann's ( 1844 – 1906 ) statistical thermodynamics.

Everdell also thinks modernism in painting began in 1885-86 with Seurat's Divisionism, the " dots " used to paint " A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.

" On the other hand Clement Greenberg called Immanuel Kant ( 1724 – 1804 ) " the first real Modernist ", though he also wrote, " What can be safely called Modernism emerged in the middle of the last century — and rather locally, in France, with Baudelaire in literature and Manet in painting, and perhaps with Flaubert, too, in prose fiction.

( It was a while later, and not so locally, that Modernism appeared in music and architecture ).

" And cabaret, which gave birth to so many of the arts of modernism, may be said to have begun in France in 1881 with the opening of the Black Cat in Montmartre, the beginning of the ironic monologue, and the founding of the Society of Incoherent Arts.