section_path: Modernism emerges/Attacks on early modernism
section_name: Attacks on early modernism
paragraph_text: Attacks on early modernism
  
  Modernism's stress on freedom of expression, experimentation, radicalism, and primitivism disregards conventional expectations. In many art forms this often meant startling and alienating audiences with bizarre and unpredictable effects, as in the strange and disturbing combinations of motifs in Surrealism or the use of extreme dissonance and atonality in modernist music. In literature this often involved the rejection of intelligible plots or characterization in novels, or the creation of poetry that defied clear interpretation. Within the Catholic Church, the specter of Protestantism and Martin Luther was at play in anxieties over modernism and the notion that doctrine develops and changes over time.
  
  From 1932, socialist realism began to oust modernism in the Soviet Union, where it had previously endorsed Russian Futurism and Constructivism, primarily under the homegrown philosophy of Suprematism.
  
  The Nazi government of Germany deemed modernism narcissistic and nonsensical, as well as "Jewish" (see Antisemitism) and "Negro". The Nazis exhibited modernist paintings alongside works by the mentally ill in an exhibition entitled " Degenerate Art ". Accusations of "formalism" could lead to the end of a career, or worse. For this reason, many modernists of the post-war generation felt that they were the most important bulwark against totalitarianism, the " canary in the coal mine ", whose repression by a government or other group with supposed authority represented a warning that individual liberties were being threatened. Louis A. Sass compared madness, specifically schizophrenia, and modernism in a less fascist manner by noting their shared disjunctive narratives, surreal images, and incoherence.