Word.ws English Dictionary

high modernism

high modernism noun: a form of modernity prevalent during the 1950s and 1960s, characterized by an unfaltering confidence in science and technology as means to reorder the social and natural world.

Noun

high modernism (uncountable)

  1. A form of modernity prevalent during the 1950s and 1960s, characterized by an unfaltering confidence in science and technology as means to reorder the social and natural world.
    • It is not just that the borders between high and low have begun to blur significantly after high modernism in the West, bringing some critics to misread the Latin American boom novel as a kind of postmodernism avant la lettre […]2005, Peter Brooker, Andrew Thacker, editors, Geographies of Modernism: Literatures, Cultures, Spaces, Taylor & Francis, →ISBN, page 11
    • The idea that silence suits serious art goes back to the age of high modernism in the 1950s. It is hard to imagine Mark Rothko calling an exhibition "Daddy, I Want to Be a Jewish Artist" or indeed calling it anything at all. His paintings have plain titles such as Red on Maroon.2013 September 25, Jonathan Jones, “Dissecting the Exploding Whale: why do modern art shows have odd names?”, in The Guardian
    Synonyms:
    high modernity

Synonyms of high modernism

Questions about high modernism

What does high modernism mean?
High modernism means a form of modernity prevalent during the 1950s and 1960s, characterized by an unfaltering confidence in science and technology as means to reorder the social and natural world.
What part of speech is high modernism?
High modernism is a noun.

Words near high modernism in the dictionary

  1. high mass
  2. high masses
  3. high memory area
  4. High Middle Ages
  5. high milling
  6. high modernism
  7. high modernity
  8. high muckamuck
  9. high muckamucks
  10. high muckety-muck
  11. high muckety-mucks

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: high modernism (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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