Make It New

Abstract

Ezra Pound’s oft-cited 1934 slogan “Make It New” has long served as an unofficial mantra of modernism. But exhortations to artistic renovation had provided a steady background to modern art and literature for several decades by then. For many it meant starting from scratch, an initiative notably prominent after the First World War as many envisioned a new world, a new order displacing nationalist predation with cosmopolitan internationalism. Paeans to the new accelerated after the war, tautological, euphoric, feeding on a momentary energy reflecting not only new forms but a new form of life. After 1929 that optimism was countered by rival applications, booster slogans like the New Deal and the New Germany, as the aesthetic avowal of the new came under assault from reactionary political tendencies.