OUGD401 - Study Task 2 - Finding Research Sources

Study task 2 involved using books from the library to find out what the definition of Modernism is. Out of the few books we selected, these two were the most informative. The books were 'Introducing Modernism - Chris Rodrigues and Chris Garratt' and 'Modern Art - Richard R. Brettell'

When searching for books on Modernism, I found that no book would give you a direct answer. The books all assume that you know what modernism is and start evaluating artists work straight away. This was quite time consuming and tedious and we spent over 45 minutes trying to find what modernism actually is. In the end, through pages of reading, we did find a brief overview of what the art movement actually is. I personally found that books can be extremely valuable in some areas of research however, for this particular task, a quick Internet search would have been much less time consuming.

In the end I found that Modernism was mainly started by the upraise of technology around the start of the 20th century and that the use of steam trains, the camera, and the change in industry around the Victorian era was very influential on the direction of artwork and culture being produced at that time.  People started to stop painting kings and life portraits and started to use cubes and abstract geometric shapes as the main components of their work. It was because of this boom in technology that everything related to art in anyway such as architecture or fashion changed so drastically. Some of the researched book pages which I studied in order to write this brief evaluation from are located below.