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American culture
- In United States: The visual arts and postmodernism
  …the idea of the “postmodern,” and in no sphere has the argument been as lively as in that of the plastic arts. The idea of the postmodern has been powerful in the United States exactly because the idea of the modern was so powerful; where Europe has struggled with…
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choreography by Brown
- In Trisha Brown
  Reclassified as a postmodern choreographer, she presented such pieces as Glacial Decoy (1979), which featured a backdrop of black-and-white photos by Robert Rauschenberg; Set and Reset (1983), with costumes and film clips by Rauschenberg and a score by Laurie Anderson; and If You Couldn’t See Me (1994), a…
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dance
- In dance: Postmodernism
  ” During the 1960s and ’70s a new generation of American choreographers, generally referred to as postmodernist choreographers, took some of Cunningham’s ideas even further. They also believed that ordinary movement could be used in dance, but they rejected the strong element of virtuosity in…
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graphic design
- In graphic design: Postmodern graphic design
  By the late 1970s, many international architectural, product, and graphic designers working in the Modernist tradition thought that the movement had become academic and lost its capacity for innovation. Younger designers challenged and rejected the tenets of Modernism and questioned the “form-follows-function”…
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industrial design
- In industrial design: Postmodern design and its aftermath
  In the mid- to late 1970s, architects around the world began to question the validity of minimal Modernist architecture and design as providing the universal solution to all environments. There was a renewed appreciation of history and historic details and…
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modern art
- In Western painting: Modernism and postmodernism defined
  …of notions of Modernism and postmodernism. Before embarking on a historical survey, it will therefore be useful to sketch out the implications of these key terms.
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architecture

In International Style
…’80s and became known as postmodernism.
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In Western architecture: Postmodernism
The 1960s were marked by dissatisfaction with the consequences of the Modernist movement, especially in North America, where its failings were exposed in two influential books, Canadian Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) and American Robert Venturi’s Complexity and…
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Graves
- In Michael Graves
  …the principal figures in the postmodernist movement.
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Johnson
- In Philip Johnson
  …for his role in defining postmodernist architecture.
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ornaments
- In ornament
  …with the advent of the Post-Modernist architectural movement, that the unadorned functionalism of the International Style was moderated to permit a modest use of ornament, including classical motifs.
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Stern
- In Robert A.M. Stern
  ) American postmodern architect whose buildings incorporate a variety of historical styles.
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Stirling
- In Sir James Stirling
  …a rather playful variant of postmodernism, making use of unconventional building axes, complex geometric shapes, and brightly coloured decorative elements. His New State Gallery, or Neue Staatsgalerie (1977–84), in Stuttgart, Germany, a combination of classicism and geometric abstraction, is considered by many to be his finest achievement. Among his other…
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Venturi
- In Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown
  …the eclectic movement known as postmodernism.
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literatures

American literature
- In American literature: New fictional modes
  One response was the postmodern novel of William Gaddis, John Barth, John Hawkes, Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, Paul Auster, and Don DeLillo—technically sophisticated and highly self-conscious about the construction of fiction and the fictive nature of “reality” itself.
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English literature
- In English literature: Fiction
  (Such eclecticism, sometimes called “postmodern,” also showed itself in other kinds of fiction in the 1980s. Julian Barnes’s A History of the World in 101/2 Chapters [1989], for example, inventively mixes fact and fantasy, reportage, art criticism, autobiography, parable, and pastiche in its working of fictional variations…
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French literature
- In French literature: Postmodernism
  Thought and sensibility at the end of the century were in thrall to postmodernism, which has been variously described as a radical attack on all authoritarian discourse and a return to conservatism by the back door. Jean-Franƈois Lyotard’s La Condition postmoderne (1979; The Postmodern…
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German literature
- In German literature: Postmodernism
  In the last decades of the 20th century, German literature was influenced by international postmodernism, a movement that combined heterogeneous elements in order to appeal simultaneously to a popular and a more sophisticated readership. Parody, pastiche, and multiple allusions to other types of cultural…
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Latin American literature
- In Latin American literature: The modern essay
  …from the modern to the postmodern. The line of demarcation is not clear. Postmodern literature avails itself of most of the techniques introduced by modern literature, particularly self-consciousness of its own status as literature. The difference, perhaps, is that postmodern literature does not aspire to be profound or pretend that…
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Russian literature
- In Russian literature: Post-Soviet literature
  A Russian form of postmodernism, fascinated with a pastiche of citations, arose, along with various forms of radical experimentalism. During this period, readers and writers sought to understand the past, both literary and historical, and to comprehend the chaotic, threatening, and very different present.
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