Modern Art
Out of the naturalist ethic of Realism grew a major artistic movement, Impressionism. The Impressionists pioneered the use of light in painting as they attempted to capture light as seen from the human eye. Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, were all involved in the Impressionist movement. As a direct outgrowth of Impressionism came the development of Post-Impressionism. Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat are the best known Post-Impressionists.
Following the Impressionists and the Post-Impressionists came Fauvism, often considered the first "modern" genre of art. Just as the Impressionists revolutionized light, so did the fauvists rethink color, painting their canvases in bright, wild hues. After the Fauvists, modern art began to develop in all its forms, ranging from Expressionism, concerned with evoking emotion through objective works of art, to Cubism, the art of transposing a three-dimensional reality onto a flat canvas, to Abstract art. These new art forms pushed the limits of traditional notions of "art" and corresponded to the similar rapid changes that were taking place in human society, technology, and thought.
Surrealism is often classified as a form of Modern Art. However, the Surrealists themselves have objected to the study of surrealism as an era in art history, claiming that it oversimplifies the complexity of the movement (which they say is not an artistic movement), misrepresents the relationship of surrealism to aesthetics, and falsely characterizes ongoing surrealism as a finished, historically encapsulated era. Other forms of Modern art (some of which border on Contemporary art) include:
- Abstract expressionism
- Art Deco
- Art Nouveau
- Bauhaus
- Color Field painting
- Conceptual Art
- Constructivism
- Cubism
- Dada
- Der Blaue Reiter
- De Stijl
- Die Brücke
- Body Art
- Expressionism
- Fauvism
- Fluxus
- Futurism
- Happening
- Surrealism
- Lettrisme
- Lyrical Abstraction
- Land Art
- Minimalism
- Naive art
- Op art
- Performance art
- Photorealism
- Pop art
- Suprematism
- Video art
Time Period: First half of the 20th century
Read more about this topic: Western Art History
Famous quotes containing the words modern art, modern and/or art:
“To say the word Romanticism is to say modern art—that is, intimacy, spirituality, color, aspiration towards the infinite, expressed by every means available to the arts.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)
“The ancients of the ideal description, instead of trying to turn their impracticable chimeras, as does the modern dreamer, into social and political prodigies, deposited them in great works of art, which still live while states and constitutions have perished, bequeathing to posterity not shameful defects but triumphant successes.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“But sometimes everything I write
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot,”
—Robert Lowell (1917–1977)