the tldr

The short version of the story of how modernism drifted into postmodernism: the modernists got religion.

You see this, most obviously, in the transition of (primarily German/Austrian) Dada to (primarily French) Surrealism.  Breton's Surrealism makes a certain vague, uncomfortable space open for mysticism and religion (specifically Christianity, specifically Catholicism, specifically French Catholicism), and most of the French Surrealists just fell right into it.  (New Age spirituality, this specific kind of Catholicism, psychoanalysis, Frenchness... ultimately these are all just different names for the same thing.)  Artaud was profoundly, deeply religious and mystical in his own way.  Remedios Varo is an even clearer example.  Max Ernst was "converted" so to speak, from the earlier Dada to this more religious and spiritual surrealism.  Salvador Dali took this to a cartoonish extreme, as usual.  Even Bataille had a religious side, in his own way.  (This is not to say that there weren't any religious people who were involved in Dada - but their religion was irrelevant to the Dada movement.  It wasn't opposed to religion, it was simply orthogonal to it.  It was a purer, clearer expression than the tangle of surrealism.)

I don't really like talk of "the postmodern era" or "the postmodern condition," yadda yadda yadda.  But if we wanted to put a date on the beginning of postmodernism, it would be some time before 1949, before Stalin's famous meeting with Enver Hoxha.  There are a few different accounts of this conversation, and exactly what was said, but usually, the general interpretation seems to be that Stalin told Hoxha to respect the religion(s) of the general public, or at least not to attack religion on the religious level directly (it is fine to say that the clergy are corrupt, for instance - that they are involved in economic or political corruption - but don't attack the religion itself of the religious).  I say "before" because undoubtedly Stalin had already come to this conclusion himself before articulating it to Hoxha - probably either during the failed German revolution, the rise of fascism, or the development of nuclear weapons - three key moments in the development of postmodernism.  You could call it the defeat of the left, and Stalin's internalization of that defeat.

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