New Materials in 20th-century Art - Early 20th Century

Early 20th Century

The advent of Modernism and Modern Art in the first decades of the 20th century inspired artists to test and transcend the boundaries and the limitations of the traditional and conventional forms of art making in search of newer forms and in search of new materials. The innovations of painters like Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat, Henri de Toulouse Lautrec, and the French Symbolists provided essential inspiration for the development of modern art by the younger generation of artists in Paris and elsewhere in Europe. Henri Matisse and other young artists revolutionized the Paris art world with "wild", multi-colored, expressive, paintings that the critics called Fauvism. Henri Rousseau, Pablo Picasso, Giorgio De Chirico, Amadeo Modigliani, Marc Chagall, Robert Delaunay and scores of young artists in Paris made their first modern paintings venturing toward abstraction and other new ways of formulating figurative, still-life and landscape imagery.