Nietzsche's role in the emergence of Modernism as an artistic movement is generally seen by commentators as crucial, since art as imitation of reality was radically called into question by Nietzsche's philosophy:

It is clear that Nietzsche's radical scepticism about ‘truth’ and his emphasis on the role of language in constructing it (‘all that exists consists of interpretations’; ‘What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms’) – what philosophers term his ‘perspectivism’ – provided a theoretical underpinning for formal experimentation in all the arts, especially those that broke away from mimesis or realism in any conventional sense. Whether many Modernist writers – at least among writers in English – were significantly influenced by what Nietzsche called his ‘tragic philosophy’ is more doubtful. If one looks at the best known Modernists – T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf – there is little sign of major Nietzschean influence beyond the general effect of his philosophical undermining of mimetic conceptions of art. Certainly none of these writers could be persuasively described as proponents of Nietzschean philosophy, especially of the doctrine of the will to power and the radical conclusions Nietzsche drew from it.