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).

modern art. An imprecise term that can be used purely chronologically to designate any art produced in present and recent times, but which is usually applied more specifically to art that is consciously in tune with the progressive attitudes and beliefs of those times—the ‘spirit of the age'. In the second sense, modern art is characterized by the questioning or abandoning of traditional techniques, subjects, or ideas, and in common parlance today the phrase often suggests the kind of painting and sculpture that reactionaries (or normal people, depending on the point of view) find unintelligible or lacking in skill (an exhibition of cartoons about modern art held at the Tate Gallery, London, in 1973 was entitled ‘A Child of Six Could Do It', in reference to the sort of slighting remark that is often made about such work).

There is no general agreement on when modern art can be regarded as starting. As with contemporary art, the question is complicated by the fact that the point from which we view the issue is constantly moving forward in time, so that the term ‘modern’ has to be considered relatively rather than absolutely (the first citation of the phrase ‘modern art’ in the Oxford English Dictionary is from the Art Journal in 1849). From today's standpoint, however, the beginnings of modern art are usually placed within the period from the mid-19th century to the First World War, although some critics like to trace its antecedents and analogues further and further back (the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London opened in 1947 with an exhibition called ‘40 Years of Modern Art’ and followed it with one entitled ‘40,000 Years of Modern Art'; for the earliest of all such antecedents see OBJET TROUVÉ). Three key events in French art in the mid-19th century are often taken as notional starting-points: the first occurred in 1855, when Gustave Courbet (1819–77) expressed his unconventionality and hatred of authority by organizing a pavilion of his own paintings at the Paris Universal Exhibition; the second was the Salon des Refusés in 1863, when artists whose work had been rejected by the official state Salon arranged their own show; and the third was the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874.

Art historians who have preferred to go further back in time for their starting point include Sheldon Cheney in his book The Story of Modern Art (1941, revised edn., 1958) and John Canaday in his Mainstreams of Modern Art (1959, 2nd edn., 1981). Cheney writes in his foreword that ‘I have accepted here the broadest traditional usage of the term “modern art” as covering the course of creative invention since about 1800'. Canaday begins his first chapter with the words ‘Where does modern art begin? … Modern art begins nowhere because it begins everywhere. It is fed by a thousand roots, from cave-paintings twentyfive thousand years old to the spectacular novelties of last week's exhibitions.’ However, he chooses to begin his own account at virtually the same point as Cheney—with the generation of the French Revolution, specifically the paintings of Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825). In a more recent book with the same title as Cheney's, Norbert Lynton's The Story of Modern Art (1980, revised edn., 1989), the author begins his account in earnest in the 1890s, but in his opening paragraph he remarks that ‘The essential change of direction had already happened in the eighteenth century'. He sums up the main elements of this change as follows: ‘loss of faith in the classical tradition as the guide to excellence, abetted by the passion for historical studies which proved that tradition to be itself a complex of contradictory models; growing self-consciousness about style, compounded by the new idea that art is a matter of self-expression, the artist now being expected to find his own motivation and reveal it in the subject-matter and in the manner of his art'.

In his Modern European Art (1972), Alan Bowness presents a well-argued case for regarding 1863 as ‘the most convenient date from which to begin any history of modern painting', considering the question as much in terms of the growing independence of artists as in terms of style. He sees the Salon des Refusés as an event of far-reaching importance, partly because of the way in which ‘it undermined the prestige of the Salon, in the eyes both of the public and of the artists. It is hard now to appreciate the dominant role played in the mid-19th century by the Paris Salon, or the Royal Academy in England, or similar bodies elsewhere. Their large mixed annual exhibitions provided the normal channel for the public exposure of artists' works. There were no alternatives, and for an artist to say he was not going to exhibit at the Salon was rather like an artist today saying he does not believe in selling his work, or would have nothing to do with museums. But after the Salon des Refusés the situation was never the same. Artists began to arrange their own exhibitions, as the Impressionists, for example, did in 1874; and, more significantly, the activities of the art dealers increased rapidly in importance. Very quickly there emerged the pattern familiar in advanced capitalist countries today, where the dealer acts as the artist's agent, administering his business affairs, and organizing the public exhibition of his work.’ Bowness also considers that Edouard Manet (1832–83), the most discussed artist at the Salon des Refusés, was ‘thinking in a new way about art—a way, moreover, which is recognizably modern'. This modernity lies in the self-awareness of his pictures, which often seem to be more concerned with the act of painting than with the ostensible subject. It is their freedom from the traditional literary, anecdotal, or moralistic associations of painting that has caused him to be regarded as one of the pioneers of modern art.

Roger Fry recognized the great importance of Manet when he gave the title ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’ to the landmark exhibition he organized in London in 1910. To many critics, the Post-Impressionists provide as good a starting-point as any for indicating the beginnings of modern art, for it was they and other artists of their generation who first seriously undermined the traditional assumption that painting and sculpture were concerned with recognizably representing natural appearances (the Museum of Modern Art, New York, implicitly supports this view, for its collections go back to about 1880, as do the beginnings of Post-Impressionism). However, it was not until the early 20th century that the idea of art as the imitation of nature was completely overthrown, so critics who regard this factor as an essential component of modern art prefer to place its origins in the extraordinarily fertile period from about 1905 up to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. This decade saw the birth of a number of radical ‘isms', notably Cubism, Expressionism, and Fauvism, in which natural appearances were distorted beyond anything that had been seen in the 19th century, and also the development of abstract art, in which representation was abandoned altogether. Soon afterwards, in 1915, there was born another radical movement, Dada, that went beyond stylistic innovation and began questioning the nature and validity of art. This type of questioning has become one of the keynotes of avant-garde art in the 20th century, and many critics therefore see the ten-year span from 1905 (the debut of Fauvism) to 1915 (the first stirrings of Dada) as the period in which the foundations of modern art—as the term is now understood—were laid. Kurt Rowland, for example, writes: ‘The first quarter of the twentieth century witnessed an artistic revolution without equal in the history of art. In an unbelievably short time many new ideas and styles were originated and followed to their conclusion so that the succeeding generation found it difficult to make any significant additions to them. The years leading up to the First World War may be described as the most explosive: even a perfunctory look at the works of this period confirms that the principles of modern art, architecture and design—and therefore the manner in which today we experience and approach our environment—were laid down before 1914’ (A History of the Modern Movement: Art, Architecture, Design, 1973).