Painting In The Twentieth Century

painting in the twentieth century

No painter could better serve as a representative of the endless variety and experimentation of twentieth-century painting than the versatile and immensely productive Pablo Picasso (1881-1973).

A native Spaniard and adopted Frenchman, Picasso painted in many styles and periods. For example, the paintings of his “blue period” in the early 1900s, with their exhausted and defeated people, had a melancholy, lyrical quality that reflected the

Literature In The Twentieth Century

literature in the twentieth century

Twentieth-century writers surprised the prophets of doom. Poetry remained, for the most part, what it had become in the late nineteenth century: difficult, cerebral, and addressed to a small audience.

An occasional poet broke from the privacy of limited editions to wide popularity; representative was the attention given to T. S. Eliot (1888-1965). His difficult yet moving symbolic poem, “The Waste Land,” or his invocation to “The Hollow Men,” which closed with the lines

This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper

Modern Literature and the Arts

modern literature and the arts

As societies became more and more literate, reading matter changed, becoming both simpler and much cheaper and also more complex and symbolic in its more elite expressions.

This was true of painting and the other arts as well. A wider gulf opened between those who read, or viewed, for entertainment and those who sought information, analyses, or complexity of emotional expressions.

Twentieth Century Science

twentieth century science

In the twentieth century each science, and each branch of each science, continued its ever more intense specialization. Cooperation among pure scientists, applied scientists, engineers, bankers, business people, and government officials produced exponential increases.

Historicism In The Twentieth Century

historicism in the twentieth century

Probably the most widespread philosophical movement of the century developed on the margin of formal philosophy and the social sciences. This movement is called historicism—the attempt to find in history an answer to those ultimate questions of the structure of the universe and of human fate that the philosopher has always asked.

Philosophy In The Twentieth Century

philosophy in the twentieth century 1

A philosophy known as existentialism developed from such nineteenth-century sources as Nietzsche and the Danish theologian Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), who assailed the dehumanizing effects of the increasingly materialistic society of his day. In such works as Fear and Trembling (1843) and Either/Or (also 1843), he argued that Christian truth was not to be found in churches but in experiencing extreme human conditions through the act of existence.

Sociology and Political Science In The Twentieth Century

sociology and political science in the twentieth century

In the social sciences, the twentieth century continued to question its inheritance of faith in the basic reasonableness and goodness of human nature. In fact, some social scientists found the term human nature to be so all-embracing as to make no sense.

The specific programs and values of twentieth-century thinkers in this broad field were very varied. Yet most of them had a sense of the subtlety, the complexities, the delicacy—and the toughness and durability—of the forces that bind human beings together in society but also hold them apart.

Psychology In The Twentieth Century

psychology in the twentieth century

Taking its cue from psychology, the twentieth century has put its emphasis on the role of the unconscious in human thought and action, on the non-rationality of much human behavior. Foremost among the thinkers responsible for this emphasis was Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), a physician trained in Vienna in the rationalist medical tradition of the late nineteenth century.

Modern Thought About Human Nature

modern thought about human nature

In the latter part of the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth century, a number of fields of inquiry became professionalized, and those who mastered these fields had a major impact on elite thought and indirectly on popular public opinion.

Foremost among these fields were psychology, history, political science, sociology, and philosophy. All but the last subject had direct influence on the shaping of public policy.

The Modernity of History

the modernity of history

Societies reveal much about themselves in what they choose to take pride in—what they consciously preserve from their past and from their environment. Societies also reveal much about themselves in what they exclude, as when history until recently passed over the underclasses in near-silence or neglected the role of women in national development.

Twentieth Century Thought and Letters

twentieth century thought and letters

History is constantly changing. So, too, is the way that we view history. Obviously, history extends forward in time, each day bringing new events that make a mockery of any attempt to survey the entire historical past of any one culture, much less of all cultures, or of all Western civilization.