Ortega y Gasset's explanation of the difference between traditional and modern art as an analogy between focusing on the garden or the glass and frame when looking out a window is both useful and frustratingly off the mark (10). True, Seurat's pointillistic surface and James Joyce's stream of consciousness passages can be seen as alterations of the glass. But the why of their art had much less to do with the surface than with the internal impetus to creative self-expression on their own terms, which is the essential modernist aesthetic outlook.
Because of the overwhelming quantity of people and potential experiences in a city, according to Georg Simmel in the Metropolis and Mental Life (1903), personal expression becomes the last refuge of authentic identity.
Where quantitative increase of value and energy has reached its limits, one seizes on qualitative distinctions, so that, through taking advantage of the existing sensitivity to differences, the attention of the sochal world can, in some way, be found for oneself. This leads ultimately to the strangest eccentricities, to specifically metropolitan extravaganzas of self-distanciation, or caprice, of fastidiousness, the meaning of which is no longer to be found in the content of such activity itself but rather to its being a form of 'being different' -- of making oneself noticeable (58).
I would quibble with the idea that the so-called 'content' of these artists' work is not meaningful, but in general this is a better explanation of their extremely individualistic vision, as well as that of the legions of other artists active on both sides of the Atlantic from the end of World War I. That war was one of the crucibles from which modernism sprang, although its origins had been percolating at least since the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution and the Romantic era.
The Renaissance was the first period in Western history when man began to take measure of himself beyond ...