Twentieth-century art ?and what it became as modern art ?began with modernism in the late nineteenth century. ^[1]

Overview [ edit ]

Nineteenth-century movements of Post-Impressionism ( Les Nabis ), Art Nouveau and Symbolism led to the first twentieth-century art movements of Fauvism in France and Die Brucke ("The Bridge") in Germany. Fauvism in Paris introduced heightened non-representational colour into figurative painting. Die Brucke strove for emotional Expressionism . Another German group was Der Blaue Reiter ("The Blue Rider"), led by Kandinsky in Munich , who associated the blue rider image with a spiritual non-figurative mystical art of the future. Kandinsky, Kupka , R. Delaunay and Picabia were pioneers of abstract (or non-representational) art. Cubism , generated by Picasso , Braque , Metzinger , Gleizes and others rejected the plastic norms of the Renaissance by introducing multiple perspectives into a two-dimensional image. Futurism incorporated the depiction of movement and machine age imagery. Dadaism , with its most notable exponents, Marcel Duchamp , who rejected conventional art styles altogether by exhibiting found objects , notably a urinal , and too Francis Picabia , with his Portraits Mecaniques .

Parallel movements in Russia were Suprematism , where Kasimir Malevich also created non-representational work, notably a black canvas. The Jack of Diamonds group with Mikhail Larionov was expressionist in nature.

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  Henri Matisse , Woman with a Hat , 1905
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  Andre Derain , Charing Cross Bridge, London, 1906, National Gallery of Art , Washington, DC.
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  Pablo Picasso , Les Demoiselles d'Avignon , 1907
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  Georges Braque , Le Viaduc de L'Estaque (Viaduct at L'Estaque) , 1908
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  Jean Metzinger , Le gouter (Tea Time) , 1911, Philadelphia Museum of Art . Andre Salmon dubbed this painting "The Mona Lisa of Cubism"
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  Albert Gleizes , Le Chemin, Paysage a Meudon , Paysage avec personnage , 1911
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  Marcel Duchamp , Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 , 1912, Philadelphia Museum of Art
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  Wassily Kandinsky Composition VII , 1912
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  Franti?ek Kupka , Amorpha, Fugue in Two Colors , 1912
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  Robert Delaunay , Le Premier Disque , 1912?13
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  Giorgio de Chirico , Love Song 1914, Museum of Modern Art
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  Kasimir Malevich , Black Square , 1915

Dadaism preceded Surrealism , where the theories of Freudian psychology led to the depiction of the dream and the unconscious in art in work by Salvador Dali . Kandinsky's introduction of non-representational art preceded the 1950s American Abstract Expressionist school, including Jackson Pollock , who dripped paint onto the canvas, and Mark Rothko , who created large areas of flat colour. Detachment from the world of imagery was reversed in the 1960s by the Pop Art movement, notably Andy Warhol , where brash commercial imagery became a Fine Art staple. The majority of his art served as a critique of American consumer culture and its obsession with celebrity and wealth. ^[2] Warhol also minimised the role of the artist, often employing assistants to make his work and using mechanical means of production, such as silkscreen printing . Another pop artist, Keith Haring, used cartoons and graffiti as a means of political activism, fighting against the stigma surrounding gay men and drug addicts during the 1980 AIDS epidemic. ^[3] This marked a change from Modernism to Post-Modernism . Photorealism evolved from Pop Art and as a counter to Abstract Expressionists.

Subsequent initiatives towards the end of the century involved a paring down of the material of art through Minimalism , and a shift toward non-visual components with Conceptual art , where the idea, not necessarily the made object, was seen as the art. The last decade of the century saw a fusion of earlier ideas in work by Jeff Koons , who made large sculptures from kitsch subjects, and in the UK , the Young British Artists , where Conceptual Art, Dada and Pop Art ideas led to Damien Hirst 's exhibition of a shark in formaldehyde in a vitrine .

Some important movements [ edit ]

See also [ edit ]

References [ edit ]

External links [ edit ]

• Media related to 20th-century art at Wikimedia Commons