ABSTRACT
The twenty-five years before the First World War were an era of triumphant intellectual innovation whose consequences would echo across the twentieth century. The pre-1914 era was one of rapid and intense progress in the natural and physical sciences, whether in the formulation of new scientific theories or in the perfection and demonstration of older ones, in the attainment of striking research results or in the technological and engineering application of this research. Research into microbes and causes of infectious disease followed along the lines set down in the 1870s and 1880s by Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch. Scholars and critics have argued endlessly about how to define artistic modernism and postmodernism, what separates and distinguishes the two, and in what era these two artistic movements flourished. Artistic modernism, as is suggested in the text, arose from the search for new artistic forms and styles adequate to represent the reality of the modern world.
