ABSTRACT
Revolutionary, extreme and apocalyptic, European Modernism utilised the form of the manifesto elevating it in many cases to an Art form to express its total and absolute claims. The prophetic, romantic style of Friedrich Nietzsche and the Symbolists gives way to that of the more iconoclastic and forceful manifesto. Worringers manifesto, as it is a short theoretical model he proposes, was to be for the first decade of the twentieth century what Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy was for the last decade of the previous century. The Mask, whether admittedly or not, aligns itself with contemporary journals/manifestos as it not only sets out to redefine its medium, but, at the same time, encapsulates it within the broader claims of a grand theory. The periodicals/manifestos that The Mask best contrasts with in this area, exhibiting the two diametrically different schools of Modernism, are mainly German ones.
