modern art - History, Art movements and artist groups

A term used widely but imprecisely to refer to all the ‘progressive’ movements in 19th–20th-c art. Accounts vary: some consider Goya the first modern artist; others prefer Manet. What is agreed is that towards the end of the 19th-c a number of artists, including Cézanne, Gauguin, van Gogh, Ensor, and Munch, challenged in various ways the traditional approach to painting based on such notions as naturalistic figure-drawing and Renaissance perspective. Their innovations inspired the younger generation around 1904–5 (in Paris, Rouault, Matisse, Picasso; in Dresden, Kirchner, Heckel, Schmitt-Rottluff). Picasso and Braque developed Cubism (1906–8), the most widely influential of all modern movements. The Blaue Reiter group in Munich pushed further away from imitation (1912–14), and a purely abstract art soon emerged in the hands of Kandinsky and Klee. In Moscow in 1917 Malevich developed a totally abstract art which he called ‘Suprematism’. By 1916 a nihilist reaction known as ‘Dadaism’ was already emerging in Zürich; it attacked all artistic values, but itself contributed to the ideas of the early Surrealists, who launched their first manifesto in Paris in 1924.

(Recent art production is more often called Contemporary art or Postmodern art). Modern art refers to the then new approach to art where it was no longer important to represent a subject realistically — the invention of photography had made this function of art obsolete.

History

Roots in the 19th century

By the late 19th century, several movements which were to be influential in modern art had begun to emerge: Impressionism, centered around Paris, and Expressionism, which first emerged in Germany. These traits: establishment of a working method integral to the art, establishment of a movement or visible active core of support, and international adoption, would be repeated by artistic movements in the Modern period in art. Also, artist groups like de Stijl and Bauhaus were seminal in the development of new ideas about the interrelation of the arts, architecture, design and art education. The 1950s and 1960s saw the emergence of Abstract Expressionism, Pop art, Op art and Minimal art; in the late 1960s and the 1970s, Land art, Performance art, Conceptual art and Photorealism emerged. Since the 1970s, new media art has become a category in itself, with a growing number of artists experimenting with technological means such as video art. People complained that modern art was indistinguishable from non-art (such as a solid-coloured canvas, a pile of assorted objects, random cacophony (in the case of music) or, in the case of performance art, a mentally ill person). Much of the work produced could only be appreciated by other artists, or could not be understood without reading the artist's statement, a text that explained what the art "meant". Modern art may have received a boost from an unlikely quarter: the Nazis set up public exhibitions to mock modern art as "degenerate", and when it became popular to eschew any behaviour that was similar to that of the Nazis, censorship and intolerance decreased throughout the Western world.

Art movements and artist groups

(Chronological with representative artists listed.)

End of 19th century

Romanticism (the Romantic movement) - Francisco de Goya, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres Realism - Gustave Courbet Impressionism - Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley Post-impressionism - Georges Seurat, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri Rousseau Symbolism - Gustave Moreau, Odilon Redon, James Ensor Les Nabis - Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard, Félix Vallotton Important pre- or proto-modern sculptors: Aristide Maillol, Auguste Rodin

Early 20th century (before WWI)

Art Nouveau and national variants (Jugendstil, Modern Style, Modernisme) - Alphonse Mucha, Gustav Klimt, In Architecture and Design: Otto Wagner, Wiener Werkstätte, Josef Hoffmann, Adolf Loos, Koloman Moser Expressionism - Oskar Kokoschka, Edvard Munch, Emil Nolde Fauvism - André Derain, Henri Matisse, Maurice de Vlaminck Die Brücke - Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Der Blaue Reiter - Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc Cubism - Georges Braque, Juan Gris, Fernand Léger, Pablo Picasso Orphism - Robert Delaunay, Jacques Villon Futurism - Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà Russian avant-garde - Kasimir Malevich, Natalia Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov De Stijl - Theo van Doesburg, Piet Mondrian Sculpture: Henri Matisse, Constantin Brancusi Photography: Pictorialism, Straight photography

Between WWI and WWII

Exploration of the fantastic - Marc Chagall Pittura Metafisica - Giorgio de Chirico, Carlo Carrà Dada - Jean Arp, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Francis Picabia, Kurt Schwitters New Objectivity - Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, George Grosz Meanwhile, in France, artists like Henri Matisse, Amedeo Modigliani, Pablo Picasso and Chaim Soutine were part of a regression from the pre-WWI experimentation. Surrealism - Jean Arp, Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, René Magritte, André Masson, Joan Miró Constructivism - Naum Gabo, László Moholy-Nagy, El Lissitzky, Kasimir Malevich, Alexander Rodchenko, Vladimir Tatlin Bauhaus - Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee Sculpture: Alexander Calder, Alberto Giacometti, René Iché, Henry Moore, Pablo Picasso Scottish Colourists - Francis Cadell, Samuel Peploe, Leslie Hunter, John Duncan Fergusson

After WWII

Abstract expressionism - Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock Art brut - Adolf Wölfli, Hans Krüsi, Benjamin Bonjour, Alois Wey Arte Povera - Luciano Fabro, Mario Merz, Marisa Merz, Michelangelo Pistoletto Color field painting - Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko COBRA - Pierre Alechinsky, Karel Appel, Asger Jorn Dau-al-Set - First art movement after World War II founded in Barcelona by poet/artist Joan Brossa. Included Antoni Tàpies, Enrique Tábara, Antonio Saura Hard-edge painting - Ellsworth Kelly, Kenneth Noland, Ronald Davis Land art - Christo, Richard Long, Robert Smithson Les Automatistes - Claude Gauvreau, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Pierre Gauvreau, Fernand Leduc, Jean-Paul Mousseau, Marcelle Ferron Minimal art - Alexander Calder, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Richard Serra Postminimalism - Eva Hesse, Bruce Nauman, Lyrical Abstraction - Ronnie Landfield, Sam Gilliam Neo-figurative art - Fernando Botero, Antonio Berni Neo-expressionism - Georg Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer, Francesco Clemente New realism - Christo, Yves Klein, Pierre Restany Op art - Victor Vasarely Outsider art - Ignacio Carles-Tolrà, Adam Dario Keel, Ulrich Bleiker, John Elsass Photorealism - Chuck Close, Duane Hanson Pop art - Richard Hamilton, David Hockney, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol Postwar European figuration: Francis Bacon, Jean Dubuffet, Alberto Giacometti, René Iché, Marino Marini, Henry Moore Shaped canvas - Frank Stella Soviet art - Alexander Deineka, Alexander Gerasimov, Ilya Kabakov, Dubossarski & Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris documenta, five-yearly exhibition of modern and contemporary art, Kassel, Germany Guggenheim Museum, Berlin, Bilbao, Las Vegas, New York, Venice High Museum, Atlanta, Georgia Moderna Museet,Stockholm Museo Antropologico y de Arte Contemporaneo, Guayaquil, Ecuador Museo de Arte Moderno, México D.F. Museum Ludwig, Cologne Museum of Modern Art, New York Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam SMAK, Gent, Belgium Tate Modern, London Venice Biennial, Venice Walker Art Center, Minneapolis Whitney Museum of American Art,New York