The “ache of modernism” registered convulsive social transformations of the process of modernity as they crested in the fin de siècle. Early in the twentieth century, artists began embracing the future as provocation to a new artistic reckoning. In the process they rejected inherited protocols of presentation and representation. At the same time, they responded affirmatively to the challenges of new media, particularly cinema. But recursions from the distant past, like the commedia dell’arte, proved equally influential. These combined sources of replenishment from past and future inspired modernists in all the arts to assume an acrobatic attitude, affirming art as athletic prerogative commensurate with such popular enterprises as vaudeville and slapstick comedy in cinema.