Download or read book The Pulse of Modernism written by Robert Michael Brain and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2015-03-02 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robert Brain traces the origins of artistic modernism to specific technologies of perception developed in late-nineteenth-century laboratories. Brain argues that the thriving fin-de-siècle field of “physiological aesthetics,” which sought physiological explanations for the capacity to appreciate beauty and art, changed the way poets, artists, and musicians worked and brought a dramatic transformation to the idea of art itself.