modernist ideas

Arnold Schoenberg and his followers invented an atonal music which, rather like cubist painting, refused to coordinate the work by reference to central tonal organizing points, so that the hierarchy of chordal relationships that had ruled for centuries had been abandoned, and a new freedom of association between sounds had been invented.

As Schoenberg and others rewrote the previously accepted tonal grammar of music, so Mondrian and his colleagues sought a syntax for painting that would be independent of local mimesis, and yet, like Schoenberg's music, close to a "more fundamental reality."

For the modernists, the canon of past art is always available for reinterpretation, imitation, and even parody or pastiche. 'To me there is no past and future in art', said Picasso.

Like a daily newspaper, the paradigm of cubism, and the idea of the city, is the site of simultaneous happenings which we can only juxtapose with one another.

- Christopher Butler