The term “Modernism” refers toan international movement which involved Western literature, music, the visual arts and the cinema in the first decades of the 20th century. The horror of the war had shaken the certainties of the pre-war society, which were replaced by a sense of disillusionment and fragmentation. The Modernists expressed the desire to break with the past and find new fields of investigation, such as urbanisation, technology war, speed and mass communication.
All artistic forms of Modernism share several common features: -the intentional distortion of shapes, as in the Cubist paintings of the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso; -the breaking down of limitations in space and time and the radical disruption of the linear flow of narrative or conventional verse; -the emphasis on subjectivity, on how perception takes place rather than on what the is perceived; -the use.of allusive language and the development of the multiple association of words; -the intensity of the isolated 'moment or “image” to provide a true insight into the nature of things; -the importance of unconscious as well as conscious life;