The end of modernity: when is it due?

Here’s a question that’s been troubling me for a while. It’s about modernity. When does it end, exactly?

I mean, in principle we know when it starts. Technically, it’s now, isn’t it? Modernity is about the present.

But just when does it stop being modern? 

In any case, the notion that it starts now isn’t quite right, in practice, because modernity lasts a while. Which means it started before now. I mean, modern times probably include the war in Iraq and Obama’s presidency, don’t they? Eighteenth-century specialists, of which I was once one, reckon the modern era started back then, with what we call the Enlightenment. 

Oh, wow. Enlightenment. In the age of Trump and Putin, doesn’t that conjure up a sense of nostalgia?

Why, even fashion, which has to be about the most ephemeral of human preoccupations, lasts at least a season, and since it takes a year for a season to come around again, that might mean it lasts a whole year. Except, of course, that no true fashionista would be caught wearing last summer’s swimming garb while on this summer’s beach.

Actually, fashion can even last longer than that. There are things called ‘timeless fashions’. I don’t really know how long ‘timeless’ is supposed to be in this context, but I reckon it must be up to two or three years at least. An eternity in that world.

But here’s the bit I don’t get. When will modern art stop being called modern art?

Salvador Dalí's Figure at a window

I mean, take a piece I particularly like, such as Salvador Dalí’s Figure at a Window. The model, one he used several times in the 1920s, is his sister Anna Maria. It’s a wistful painting, calm and but suffused with beauty, using the shadiness inside the room as just the framework needed for the light outside.

It dates from 1925.

Somehow, with its near-realist treatment of the subject, you might wonder whether it’s truly modern art. But Dalí is generally regarded as an outstanding figure of the movement. In any case, to be fair, this painting's not entirely realist. I freely admit that I didn’t spot this until it was pointed out to me, but the window has only one casement: the one on the left is missing, and the other one wouldn't on its own close the window. Dalí sacrificed strict realism to structure, to the aesthetic balance of the whole composition. And he was right, because it works.

Figure at a Window hangs not far from another painting in the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, one that belongs much more obviously to the modern-art idiom. That’s A World, by Ángeles Santos. 

A World by Ángeles Santos

She also painted another favourite of mine, The Gathering, which I wrote about in another post.

The Gathering, also by Ángeles Santos

What attracts me most in her work is the verve and originality with which she painted before Franco seized power and established his dictatorship. From then until the end of her life, she went back to far more conventional painting, talented but without the extraordinary power of A World. So much is happening in that huge picture, done when she was still only 17, full of movement and purpose, of busy-ness and energy. You look at the detail and you can see what’s going on in each area and yet, taken together, it’s entirely surrealist (look at the train running into the tunnel, in the lower left segment of the central portion: are those really railway tracks running out?).

It's dated 1929. Just four years after the Dalí. And only fifteen after a series of paintings that bowled me over when I first saw them at the age of 16, in 1969. By Claude Monet, they form his Water Lilies of 1914. They hang in specifically designed rooms in the basement of the Orangerie museum in Paris, so that you can stand and be surrounded by them. They helped me understand the word ‘Impressionist’: I had the impression of being inside a lily pond, but without getting wet. 

Claude Monet, Water Lilies at sunset
Part of the Water Lilies series

Impressionism is definitely a nineteenth-century movement, even if these particular paintings were done in the twentieth. 

But only fourteen years later, in 1925, Dalí produces Figure at a Window that is officially ‘modern’, even though, striking as it is, it still feels far more conventional than, say, the pride of the Reina Sofía museum’s collection, Picasso’s Guerníca. 

Pablo Picasso, Guerníca

Even more to the point, when I first saw Monet's Water Lilies, they were 55 years old. And not considered modern. Guerníca is now 85 years old. A World is 93 years old. Figure at a Window is 97 years old.

So here’s my question: how come they’re modern when The Water Lilies already weren’t, over half a century ago? Back then, the Monet was a lot more recent than those other three are now. 

Is it time to come up with a different name for the art of that period?

Formerly Modern Art? Doesn’t have much of a ring to it, does it? And can you imagine New York’s world-famous Museum of Modern Art, MoMA, becoming MoFMA?

Do you perhaps have a better suggestion?