N Y C   A R C H I T E C T U R E   O F F I C E

Modern art is the aesthetic of the French third estate; part of a larger project to make the Ancien Regime disappear off the face of the earth. The Ancien Régime which consisted of the First Estate, the clergy, the Second Estate, the nobles, and the Third Estate, the peasants and bourgeoisie. Immediately after the Reign of Terror,  after the estates of the realm, the three estates, or the order of The of Estates General of 1789 was abolished by the Third Estate composed of commoners forming the National Assembly by inviting the other two estates to join. This event marked the outbreak of the French Revolution. Modernity, buoyed by ideas of efficiency, reason, and the industrial revolution made possible around 1850 that artists no longer respect centuries of the established classical order-culture, aesthetics, and political structures. The certainties of the established order were jettisoned, and history was erased. The program was to expunge and annihilate the past making it impossible for it to rise again. They embraced abstraction and stream of consciousness, the 12-tone scale. To this end, they embraced the opaque picture plane, I'magism and free verse, the anti-novel, primary colors, and anything new.  Artists united by an avant-garde that challenged conventions, representation was forbidden.  I will argue that the arrival of modernism in the late 19th Century is a philosophical, economic, and political project rather than a materialist or artistic one.  Fundamentally, the genesis of modernism is the reaction to the prohibition of the Third Estate of attending the "États Généraux de 1789" [the Estates General of 1789] by locking the door of the assembly. The commoners' Third Estate was urban and rural and composed 98% of France's population. It would become the estates general immediately and later in the 20th century the modern movement.  Modernism is a socialist aesthetic. The economic and social order of the three estates prior to this time had been a long-standing order of social and economic hierarchy in Europe from the Middle Ages until the 1800s. In modernism perspective and deep space are abolished as is all narrative and most decoration.  It has been mentioned elsewhere that architecture was traditionally made of space rather than now just being in space. The walls in the new architecture forever float and are conceptually transparent, translucent, and weightless, multi-color planes. The modern artist invented abstraction.

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