<P> In the arts and letters, two important approaches developed separately in France . The first was Impressionism, a school of painting that initially focused on work done, not in studios, but outdoors (en plein air). Impressionist paintings demonstrated that human beings do not see objects, but instead see light itself . The school gathered adherents despite internal divisions among its leading practitioners, and became increasingly influential . Initially rejected from the most important commercial show of the time, the government - sponsored Paris Salon, the Impressionists organized yearly group exhibitions in commercial venues during the 1870s and 1880s, timing them to coincide with the official Salon . A significant event of 1863 was the Salon des Refusés, created by Emperor Napoleon III to display all of the paintings rejected by the Paris Salon . While most were in standard styles, but by inferior artists, the work of Manet attracted tremendous attention, and opened commercial doors to the movement . The second French school was Symbolism, which literary historians see beginning with Charles Baudelaire (1821--67), and including the later poets, Arthur Rimbaud (1854--91) Une Saison en Enfer (A Season in Hell, 1873), Paul Verlaine (1844--96), Stéphane Mallarmé (1842--98), and Paul Valéry (1871--1945). The symbolists "stressed the priority of suggestion and evocation over direct description and explicit analogy," and were especially interested in "the musical properties of language ." Cabaret, which gave birth to so many of the arts of modernism, including the immediate precursors of film, may be said to have begun in France in 1881 with the opening of the Black Cat in Montmartre, the beginning of the ironic monologue, and the founding of the Society of Incoherent Arts . </P> <P> Influential in the early days of modernism were the theories of Sigmund Freud (1856--1939). Freud's first major work was Studies on Hysteria (with Josef Breuer, 1895). Central to Freud's thinking is the idea "of the primacy of the unconscious mind in mental life," so that all subjective reality was based on the play of basic drives and instincts, through which the outside world was perceived . Freud's description of subjective states involved an unconscious mind full of primal impulses, and counterbalancing self - imposed restrictions derived from social values . </P> <P> Friedrich Nietzsche (1844--1900) was another major precursor of modernism, with a philosophy in which psychological drives, specifically the "will to power" (Wille zur Macht), was of central importance: "Nietzsche often identified life itself with' will to power', that is, with an instinct for growth and durability ." Henri Bergson (1859--1941), on the other hand, emphasized the difference between scientific, clock time and the direct, subjective, human experience of time . His work on time and consciousness "had a great influence on twentieth - century novelists," especially those Modernists who used the stream of consciousness technique, such as Dorothy Richardson, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf (1882--1941). Also important in Bergson's philosophy was the idea of élan vital, the life force, which "brings about the creative evolution of everything ." His philosophy also placed a high value on intuition, though without rejecting the importance of the intellect . </P> <P> Important literary precursors of modernism were Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821--81), who wrote the novels Crime and Punishment (1866) and The Brothers Karamazov (1880); Walt Whitman (1819--92), who published the poetry collection Leaves of Grass (1855--91); and August Strindberg (1849--1912), especially his later plays, including the trilogy To Damascus 1898--1901, A Dream Play (1902) and The Ghost Sonata (1907). Henry James has also been suggested as a significant precursor, in a work as early as The Portrait of a Lady (1881). </P>

What is the most significant semiotic shift in the visual language of art that modernism saw