What Is Modern Art? A Guide to Modern Art History

The term "modern art" describes works by painters and sculptors from the 1860s through the 1970s. Modern art coincides with the modern era—an artistic period in visual art, music, theater, and literature that began around the turn of the twentieth century. Although modern art varies greatly by time period, region, and individual artist, most works push beyond the realist, narrative art that was popular in Western culture prior to the mid-nineteenth century.

Art movements encompassed in the umbrella term "modern art" include:

• Impressionism: Impressionism was the artistic movement that paved the way for art in the modern era, beginning in the mid-1800s. Impressionist painters observed the world, then transformed their impression of what they saw into poetic, abbreviated, colorful images.
• Fauvism: Fauvism describes the style of painting adopted by a group of French painters, just after the turn of the twentieth century. Fauvist art was boldly colorful and anti-naturalistic in style, actively going against the conventions of traditional art.
• Dada: Dada was an artistic and literary movement in Europe and the United States that began in the early twentieth century in the midst of the cultural and social upheaval following World War I. Dadaism mocked and antagonized the conventions of art itself, emphasizing the illogical, irrational, and the absurd—as evidenced by French artist Marcel Duchamp’s readymades.
• Cubism: Cubism is an avant-garde style of painting and sculpture that originated in the early twentieth century which sought to challenge realistic form and perspective. It is perhaps best exemplified by the work of Pablo Picasso.
• Abstract expressionism: The abstract expressionist art movement emerged in mid-twentieth-century New York City. Rooted in spontaneous, emotional paintings, the movement encompassed two major styles: action painting and color field painting.
• Surrealism: Surrealism was an avant-garde art movement that emerged in the 1920s and sought to release human creative potential from the restrictions of reality or rationalism. In the visual arts, surrealism often juxtaposes unexpected images together in absurd and mysterious ways meant to channel dreams, hallucinations, nightmares, or simply the artist’s imagination.
• Minimalism: Minimalism developed in the United States in the late 1950s and early 1960s as a response to the previous decade’s abstract expressionist movement. It emphasizes extreme simplicity, focusing on clean lines, minimal color, and basic shapes.
• Pop art: Pop art was an avant-garde modern art movement in the mid-twentieth century that emerged in the United States and Britain. Pop artists borrowed and appropriated images from mass media and popular culture, including Hollywood films, newspaper advertisements, comic books, and cartoons.
• Op art: Optical art, commonly known as op art, is a visual art form that uses non-representational geometric patterns and colors to create an illusion of movement, such as warping, flashing, or after-images.

Modern painting begins with the rise of impressionism among European painters.

• Impressionism in Paris: Starting in the 1860s and 1870s, impressionists such as Gustave Courbet, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir rose to prominence with works prioritizing their perspective rather than photorealism.
• Post-impressionist evolution: Shortly after, post-impressionist artists including Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec used starker forms and experimented with two-dimensional perspectives.
• Multiple movements of the early 1900s: The dawn of the twentieth century brought movements like analytic cubism (led by Georges Braque, Juan Gris, and Pablo Picasso), futurism (Umberto Boccioni), fauvism (led by Henri Matisse and André Derain), symbolism, and expressionism (with works by Wassily Kandinsky and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff). Abstract painting by the likes of Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, and Robert Delaunay also gained favor during this era.
• Connection with other artistic movements: These movements coincided with the modern era in music, literature, and poetry, which arose around 1900. Thus, when some critics refer to “modern art,” they may be referring to art from this specific time period, as opposed to art that embraces the aesthetics of modernism.
• Modern art post-WWI: In the 1920s and ’30s, modern art movements included surrealism (led by Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, and Marc Chagall), bauhaus (whose adherents included abstract pioneer Kandinsky), de stijl (Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg), Dada (Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst), and social realism (highlighted by artists like Diego Rivera).
• WWII reshaped art: The global upheaval of World War II shook the art world, reorienting its epicenter from European cities to New York and Los Angeles. Artists such as Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock delved into full abstract art, while Mark Rothko, Helen Frankenthaler and others explored the limits of minimalism.
• Visual art meets performance: Visual art became more entwined with performance thanks to the Fluxus movement. Artists such as Joseph Beuys and Nam June Paik turned everyday objects (such as sleds and televisions) into museum pieces.

By the 1970s, the long era of modern art had given way to new movements. Art became increasingly self-aware, intentionally blurring the line between artist and viewer. This movement is broadly known as postmodern art.

The era of modern art spans over a century and encompasses hundreds of movements, dozens of nations, and countless individual artists. Still, several characteristics tend to unify modern art.

1. 1. Emphasis on abstraction: With the exception of scattered realist movements, most modern art favors abstraction. This ranges from the geometric deconstructions of cubists like Braque and Picasso, to the lyrical abstraction of Ronnie Landfield and Dan Christensen.
2. 2. Stark, simple forms: In contrast with the florid ornamentation of baroque, neoclassical, and romantic art, most works of modern art draw employ simpler forms with strong color and geometric shape. Countless modern artists created densely complex artworks, but their core building blocks were often simple and even two-dimensional.
3. 3. Art as a statement: In contrast with earlier artists, who often used painting and sculpture to promote religion, revisit mythology, or celebrate the human form, modern artists often used their work to make statements. Some tackled world events and the political issues of their time, while others reflected on contemporary society. In many cases, artists drew inspiration from the present day rather than delving into the past.

The modern art movement has provided art lovers with over a century of great painters, sculptors, illustrators, and architects. A sampling includes:

1. 1. Claude Monet: The father of impressionism and one of the most influential of early modern artists.
2. 2. Georges Seurat: A French pointillist who created coherent images using tiny dots of paint on the canvas.
3. 3. Pablo Picasso: A Paris-based Spanish painter who was instrumental in the development of cubism, but also embraced political themes as his homeland was besieged by civil war.
4. 4. Raymond Duchamp-Villon: A French artist who brought the cubist movement to the world of sculpture.
5. 5. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: A German artist who clashed with the Nazis and formed the expressionist collective Die Brücke ("The Bridge").
6. 6. Giacomo Balla: A leader in the Italian futurist movement who found ways to express motion through brushstrokes.
7. 7. Alexander Rodchenko: A Russian constructivist who was skilled as a painter, sculptor, and graphic designer. His innovations in graphic design shaped the medium for decades to come.
8. 8. Robert Rauschenberg: A mid-twentieth-century neo-Dadaist and abstract expressionist who specialized in mixed media, combining oil paint, silkscreen, and various tactile objects.
9. 9. Henry Moore: An English sculptor famed for his bronzes of reclining women.
10. 10. Andy Warhol: The American founder of pop art who used lithography and repurposed media to challenge assumptions about the boundaries between pop culture and museum-worthy art.

Many museums display robust modern art collections, including the Tate Modern in London, the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the East Wing of the National Gallery in Washington, DC.

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