• style or movement in the arts that aims to depart significantly from classical and traditional forms.

• modern character or quality of thought, expression, or technique.

• ​stylistic qualities of art:

• 1. style 
  2. shape 
  3. color 
  4. line 
  5. contrast 
  6. movement 
  7. balance 
  8. tone 
  9. texture 

Modernism 

main exponents and artists

Pablo Picasso

In his paintings, Picasso used color as an expressive element, but relied on drawing rather than subtleties of color to create form and space. He sometimes added sand to his paint to vary its texture

History of modernism

• Modernism describes an array of cultural movements rooted in the changes in Western society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
• The term covers a series of reforming movements in art, architecture, music, literature and the applied arts which emerged during this period. It is a trend of thought that affirms the power of human beings to create, improve, and reshape their environment, with the aid of scientific knowledge, technology or practical experimentation.
• Modernism encouraged the re-examination of every aspect of existence, from commerce to philosophy, with the goal of finding that which was 'holding back' progress, and replacing it with new, progressive and therefore better, ways of reaching the same end. 

POSTMODERNISM

• An emphasis on fragmented forms, discontinuous narratives, and random-seeming collages of different materials.
• narratives are confusing, before they used to be much simpler.
• In film, there would be a simplistic story line, such as a boy meeting a girl however now the story lines are much more unique and complex which make you think e.g. inception.
• A rejection of the distinction between "high" and "low" or popular culture, both in choice of materials used to produce art and in methods of displaying, distributing, and consuming art.

difference between modernism and postmodernism

modernism is what happened to art and philosophy in the early 20th century.  It was a reaction to technology and science, against the cultural norms that had come before.  It's most clear in art, which introduced non-realistic forms of painting like impressionism. 

I associate "postmodernism" most closely with its philosophical expressions, trying to puzzle out the nature of "meaning" and discovering that in many ways meaning is more arbitrary than had previously been thought.