modern art
modern art, art created from the 19th cent. to the mid-20th cent. by artists who veered away from the traditional concepts and techniques of painting, sculpture, and other fine arts that had been practiced since the Renaissance (see Renaissance art and architecture). Nearly every phase of modern art was initially greeted by the public with ridicule, but as the shock wore off, the various movements settled into history, influencing and inspiring new generations of artists.
See also photography, still.
Origins of Modern Art
In the second half of the 19th cent. painters began to revolt against the classic codes of composition, careful execution, harmonious coloring, and heroic subject matter. Patronage by the church and state sharply declined at the same time that artists' views became more independent and subjective. Such artists as
Courbet,
Corot and others of the
Barbizon School,
Manet,
Degas, and
Toulouse-Lautrec chose to paint scenes of ordinary daily and nocturnal life that often offended the sense of decorum of their contemporaries.
Impressionism
Monet,
Renoir, and
Pissarro, the great masters of
impressionism, painted café and city life, as well as landscapes, working most often directly from nature and using new modes of representation. While art had always been to a certain extent abstract in that formal considerations had frequently been of primary importance, painters, beginning with the impressionists in the 1870s, took new delight in freedom of brushwork. They made random spots of color and encrusted the canvas with strokes that did not always correspond to the object that they were depicting but that formed coherent internal relationships. Thus began a definite separation of the image and the subject. The impressionists exploited the range of the color spectrum, directly applying strokes of pure pigment to the canvas rather than mixing colors on the palette. In sculpture, dynamic forms and variations of impressionism were created by
Rodin, Renoir, Degas, and the Italian Medardo
Rosso.
Nineteenth-Century Painting after Impressionism
In the 1880s,
Seurat and
Signac developed the more detailed and systematic approach of neoimpressionism, while
Van Gogh and
Gauguin, using bold masses, gave to color an unprecedented excitement and emotional intensity (see
postimpressionism). At the same time,
Cézanne painted subtler nuances of tone and sought to achieve greater structural clarity. Flouting the laws of perspective, he extracted geometrical forms from nature and created radically new spatial patterns in his landscapes and still lifes. Other important innovations of the late 19th cent. can be seen in the starkly expressionistic paintings of the Norwegian Edvard
Munch and the vivid fantasies of the Belgian James
Ensor. In the 1890s the
Nabis developed pictorial ideas from Gauguin, while sinuous linear decorations were produced throughout Europe by the designers of
art nouveau.
The Isms of Early Twentieth-Century Art
From the early 20th cent. color reigned supreme and invaded the contours of recognizable objects with the brilliant patterns of
fauvism (1905–8), dominated by
Matisse and
Rouault in France, the
orphism of Robert
Delaunay and Frank
Kupka, and the explosive hues of the German group Die
Brücke, which included such practitioners of
expressionism as
Kirchner and
Nolde.
Kandinsky transformed (c.1910) color into a completely abstract art absolutely divorced from subject matter. The fauvists and expressionists shared an appreciation of the pure and simplified shapes of various examples of primitive art, an enthusiasm that was generated by Gauguin and extended to
Picasso,
Brancusi,
Modigliani,
Derain, and others.
Cubism
About 1909 the implications of Cézanne's highly organized yet revolutionary spatial structures were expanded by Picasso and
Braque, who invented an abstract art of still lifes converted into shifting volumes and planes.
Cubism, developed by the artists of the
school of Paris, went through several stages and had an enormous influence on European and American painting and sculpture. In sculpture its notable exponents included Picasso,
Duchamp-Villon,
Lipchitz,
González, and
Archipenko, who began to realize the possibilities of convex and concave volumes. Cubism was absorbed in Italy by the exponents of
futurism (c.1909–c.1915) and in Germany by the
Blaue Reiter group (1911–14); both these movements were cut short by the advent of World War I. Fauvism and cubism were introduced by members of the
Eight to a generally shocked American audience in the
Armory Show of 1913, and from then on Americans began to participate significantly in the development of modern art (see
American art).
Geometric Abstraction
At roughly the same time as cubism was developing, Russia made extraordinary contributions to the current of nonfigurative art. The sculptors Naum
Gabo and Antoine
Pevsner joined the movement known as
constructivism (c.1913–c.1921), and the painter Casimir
Malevich founded
suprematism (1913). In Holland members of the
Stijl group (1917–31), including
Mondrian and Theo van
Doesburg, created a disciplined, nonobjective art. These Russian and Dutch developments in the second decade of the 20th cent. were applicable to many varieties of art and industrial design, and their principles converged in the teachings of the
Bauhaus in the 1920s. Kandinsky, the highly imaginative Paul
Klee, and the American Lyonel
Feininger were among the celebrated exponents of the Bauhaus.
Other Modes of Modern Art
A more fanciful sort of modern art was created by Jean
Arp, Marcel
Duchamp, and Kurt
Schwitters in the irreverent manifestations of the
Dada movement. Dada artists devised “ready-mades” and
collage objects from diverse bits of material. The movement was linked with Freudianism in the 1920s, producing the wild imagery of
surrealism and
verism, as seen in the paintings of Salvador
Dalí, Yves
Tanguy, Max
Ernst, and Joan
Miró. The 1920s also saw the beginning of an art of social protest by exponents of
new objectivity, among them George
Grosz, Otto
Dix, and Max
Beckmann. With the rise of
fascism and the
Great Depression of the 1930s, the protest increased in intensity. The Mexicans
Orozco,
Rivera, and
Siqueiros painted murals in which the human figure was made monumental and heroic (see
Mexican art and architecture).
Postwar Modern Art and the Rejection of Modernism
The development of a new American art movement was held in abeyance until after World War II, when the United States took the lead in the formation of a vigorous new art known as
abstract expressionism with the impetus of such artists as Arshile
Gorky, Jackson
Pollock, and Willem
de Kooning. Action painting, as the movement was also known, made its impact felt throughout the world in the 1950s. A number of notable developments were led by artists associated with these and other New York school artists. As the influence of abstract expressionism waned in the 1960s, artists came to question the very philosophy underlying modernism. A vast variety of new movements and styles came to dominate the art world that, in the aggregate, can now be seen to mark the beginnings of artistic
postmodernism and the post-midcentury shift from modern to
contemporary art.
Modern Sculpture
In sculpture the explorations of Julio González led to abstract configurations of welded metal that can be seen in the works of Americans such as David Smith, Theodore Roszack, Seymour Lipton, and Herbert Ferber. This tradition has been a lasting one, and contemporary examples of large abstract compositions of welded metal can be found in the work of many later sculptors, including Mark di Suvero and Beverly Pepper.
Alexander Calder largely stood apart from other modernist sculptors with his brightly colored mobiles and stabiles, which have since been widely influential, as in the large, brightly colored sculpture of Albert Paley. Meanwhile, the early-20th-century tradition of Brancusi's organic abstract forms was inventively exploited in midcentury by Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth in England and by Jean Arp in France, while the Swiss Alberto Giacometti and the Italians Giacomo Manzù and Marino Marini each achieved a distinctive sculptural style. Later 20th-century sculpture has followed the patterns of the various postmodern art movements and is described in the article on contemporary art.
Bibliography
See A. H. Barr, Jr., ed., Masters of Modern Art (1954); R. Rosenblum, Cubism and Twentieth-Century Art (1967); H. H. Arnason, History of Modern Art (1968); W. Haftmann et al., Art since Mid-Century (2 vol., tr. 1972); D. Hall and P. Wykes, Anecdotes of Modern Art (1989); G. Hughes and P. Blom, Nothing but the Clouds Unchanged: Artists in World War I (2014).
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