Old and New in Modernist Art

Abstract

This chapter examines the paradoxy of Old and New in the visual arts from the perspective of a weekly magazine—The New Agethat appeared in the crucial years from 1910 to 1914. Excerpts from The New Age present the voices of artists and critics as they argued about what should be the proper art for modern culture—along with images of the works they were discussing. The critical vocabulary of modernism began with the visual arts, and was to some extent adopted by literary artists and critics. Writers like Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford, for example, borrowed the term Impressionism to describe their own literary work, and Virginia Woolf was discussing Cézanne with her sister and Roger Fry even as she began her own career as a novelist.