Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Etymology
Origin of modernist
Explanation
An artist who belonged to a 19th- and 20th-century art movement that rejected old ideas and styles was called a modernist. Virginia Woolf is one example of a modernist writer. The philosophy behind modernist art and writing was basically that the old Victorian ways of expressing artistic vision weren't keeping up with the changes in society. Modern industry, the growth of cities, and reactions to World War I were all factors that affected modernists' break with the old style. Modernist painters included the Impressionists (like Manet and Monet). Philosopher Immanuel Kant, psychologist Sigmund Freud, and composer Arnold Schoenberg are all also considered to be modernists.
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
A violinist who covered music from 1925 to 1947, she was a modernist with her finger on the pulse of the times and stood in refreshing contrast to the fussy East Coast male critics.
From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 25, 2026
Milton and Lyman Stewart were religious zealots who were horrified by the encroachment of modernist ideas on society.
From Salon ● Aug. 13, 2026
George Balanchine, the great modernist choreographer, forbade his male dancers to wear long hair or beards.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 3, 2026
Old Westminster set up outdoor igloos during the pandemic, then replaced them with a modernist village of A-frame “cabanas.”
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 27, 2026
The nearest thing classical music had to a genuine political dissident in the 1930s was the Hungarian modernist Bela Bartok.
From "The Story of Music" by Howard Goodall
In other words, bringing in East Coast modernists like Kelly and Johnson risked a public outcry.
From Los Angeles Times ● Nov. 25, 2025
Peggy Guggenheim’s new art gallery, which opened on West 57th Street in 1942, exposed New Yorkers to the work of refugee European modernists and fostered the careers of then-unknown American artists such as Jackson Pollock.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 17, 2025
Although his own buildings sometimes faced a backlash from critics who thought post-modernism belonged firmly in the 1980s, he maintained that the modernists had been wrong to throw away the history books.
From BBC ● Sep. 29, 2025
The artist Robert Motherwell was a bridge between continents: at once a spokesman for the New York School and a conduit for the theories of European modernists.
From New York Times ● Oct. 3, 2023
Recently he has been declared the first of the modernists since he attempted to rationalize religious mysteries.
From The Popes and Science The History of the Papal Relations to Science During the Middle Ages and Down to Our Own Time by James J. Walsh
Random Word
Spin the wheel and learn a new word!
Get a wordDefinitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
