ABSTRACT
The term ‘modernity’, historically, carries with it proliferating meanings which none the less centre around the theme of ‘the deformations of a one-sidedly rationalized everyday praxis’ evoking ‘the need for something equivalent to the unifying power of religion’. G. Simmel gave concrete historical and psychological content to the concept of modernity by illustrating how specific socio-cultural trends are connected with the inner needs and responses of individuals. One central manifestation of the trend reflected in twentieth-century aesthetic modernisms such as expressionism and surrealism towards the use of abstraction explicitly involved the drive to signify, through artistic means, ‘something of a higher order of things’ and even the ‘proximity of the divine’. C. Baudelaire, in fusing the aesthetic experience of modernity with the historical, had found that the art of modernity embodied both ‘the transient, the fleeting, the contingent’ and ‘the eternal and the immutable’.
