modernism

[mod-er-niz-uhm]

noun

1. modern character, tendencies, or values; adherence to or sympathy with what is modern.

2. a modern usage or characteristic.

3. (initial capital letter)

   1. the movement in Roman Catholic thought that sought to interpret the teachings of the Church in the light of philosophic and scientific conceptions prevalent in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: condemned by Pope Pius X in 1907.

   2. the liberal theological tendency in Protestantism in the 20th century.

4. (sometimes initial capital letter),  a deliberate philosophical and practical estrangement or divergence from the past in the arts and literature occurring especially in the course of the 20th century and taking form in any of various innovative movements and styles.

modernism

/ ˈmɒdəˌnɪzəm /

noun

1. modern tendencies, characteristics, thoughts, etc, or the support of these

2. something typical of contemporary life or thought

3. a 20th-century divergence in the arts from previous traditions, esp in architecture See International Style

4. (capital) RC Church the movement at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries that sought to adapt doctrine to the supposed requirements of modern thought

Other Word Forms

• antimodernism noun
• modernistic adjective
• modernist noun
• modernistically adverb

Word History and Origins

Origin of modernism¹

First recorded in 1730–40; modern + -ism

Example Sentences

“I always feel people become more themselves when they’re in their house,” Reinsve tells me on a cloudless autumn morning at Hollyhock House, Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1921 premonition of California modernism.

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Virginia depicted herself and her husband Leonard “lying crushed under an immense manuscript of Gertrude Stein’s”—and so, literary modernism’s eccentric pioneer was rejected by its suavest representative.

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But after settling in Manhattan in 1918, she quickly became a leading light in American modernism—and fell in love with skyscrapers.

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His “Credo” for chorus and orchestra, which capped the program proper on Thursday, recalls both Handel’s “Zadok the Priest,” the anthem traditionally associated with British coronations, and edgy mid-20th-century European modernism.

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The question of where to donate the art came next, and Jane said there weren’t many places that came into play when she was looking for institutions with a long-standing commitment to Germanic modernism.

Read more on Los Angeles Times

Related Words

• modernization