break dancing

yesterday's post, on the imagist movement in poetry, said, "As part of the modernist movement, away from the sentimentality and moralizing tone of nineteenth-century Victorian poetry, imagist poets looked to many sources to help them create a new poetic expression." 1

Pictorialism and Photo-Secession was the movement in photo- graphy which sealed the break from older photographic traditions and opened a new world of possibilities for the camera arts. 2

In central and Eastern Europe, the titles Jugendstil (youth style) and Secession style both suggested a sudden and refreshing break from earlier design conventions. 3

The welcome fresh- ness and free- dom of Art Nouveau's treatment of natural and floral themes amounted to a dramatic break from the era's dominant classical and revival styles, which drew their inspiration from the past and used natural designs sparingly and rigidly, if at all. 4

What some people called decadent, others called modern. The Fauve painter Andre Derain complained that "we are the mushrooms on ancient dunghills."




But the dunghills produced the art and literature of the modern age, with their deliberate and unprecedented break from history and tradition. 5





and music, and dance, and philosophy, and fashion..... all of the movements of the next to last fin-de-siecle are described as "a break from" something.




i begin to think of all japonisme, perhaps all social movement at all, as being at heart, essentially, generation gap restructuring.