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ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 166

Contemporary Cultural Theory

‘modernism’ was itself essentially an umbrella concept, used to
refer to a whole series of early twentieth-century artistic move-
ments, each of which sought in one way or another to challenge
the predominantly ‘realist’ conventions of nineteenth-century
European art. Where realist art had aimed at verisimilitude, that
is, at the appearance of fidelity to ‘real’ life, modernist art tended
to celebrate the materiality of its own existence as art, and hence
its distance and difference from the real. Examples of modernist
movements include Impressionism, Expressionism, Futurism,
Dadaism and Surrealism. There is no consensus as to the date of
modernism’s beginnings: one standard academic text suggests
1890 (Bradbury & McFarlane, 1976); more interestingly, Virginia
Woolf nominated December 1910 (Woolf, 1966, p. 321). But it is
clear that the initial modernist impetus was a product of the late
nineteenth century. This new modernism was characterised above
all by its aesthetic self-consciousness, by a formalist experi-
mentalism that recurred in painting and drama, poetry and
music, the novel and sculpture. Some accounts also stress the
importance of an avant-garde conception of the artist, where
the role of the intellectual is understood as that of cultural leader,
moving ahead of the wider society, much like the revolutionary
vanguard in the Leninist view of politics. For the avant-garde, art
stood in opposition to the dominant ‘bourgeois’ culture, as an
essentially ‘adversarial’ force, aspiring to a positively ‘redemp-
tive’ social function.
Bradbury and McFarlane see the presence of such cultural
avant-gardes as integral to high modernism (Bradbury & McFar-
lane, 1976, p. 29). But Peter Bürger, Professor of Comparative
Literature at the University of Bremen, takes issue with this
conflation of modernism and the avant-garde, arguing for a more
complex model of the avant-garde as a movement within and in
some respects against modernism, rather than as coextensive with
it (Bürger, 1984, p. 22). However we resolve such differences, it
is clear that both modernist high culture in general and the avant-
garde in particular were products of a specific geographical
location as well as of a specific historical time. They were both
creations of the great cities of continental Europe: Berlin and
Vienna, Moscow and St Petersburg, above all Paris (cf. Bradbury,

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