Twentieth-century art—and what it became asmodern art—began withmodernism in the late nineteenth century.[1]
Nineteenth-century movements ofPost-Impressionism (Les Nabis),Art Nouveau andSymbolism led to the first twentieth-century art movements ofFauvism in France andDie Brücke ("The Bridge") in Germany. Fauvism in Paris introduced heightened non-representational colour into figurative painting. Die Brücke strove for emotionalExpressionism. Another German group wasDer Blaue Reiter ("The Blue Rider"), led byKandinsky inMunich, who associated theblue rider image with a spiritual non-figurative mystical art of the future. Kandinsky,Kupka,R. Delaunay andPicabia were pioneers ofabstract (or non-representational) art.Cubism, generated byPicasso,Braque,Metzinger,Gleizes and others rejected the plastic norms of theRenaissance by introducing multiple perspectives into a two-dimensional image.Futurism incorporated the depiction of movement and machine age imagery.Dadaism, with its most notable exponents,Marcel Duchamp, who rejected conventional art styles altogether by exhibitingfound objects, notably aurinal, and tooFrancis Picabia, with hisPortraits Mécaniques.
Parallel movements in Russia wereSuprematism, whereKasimir Malevich also created non-representational work, notably a black canvas. TheJack of Diamonds group withMikhail Larionov was expressionist in nature.
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Dadaism precededSurrealism, where the theories ofFreudian psychology led to the depiction of the dream and the unconscious in art in work bySalvador Dalí.Kandinsky's introduction ofnon-representational art preceded the 1950s AmericanAbstract Expressionist school, includingJackson Pollock, who dripped paint onto the canvas, andMark Rothko, who created large areas of flat colour. Detachment from the world of imagery was reversed in the 1960s by thePop Art movement, notablyAndy Warhol, where brash commercial imagery became a Fine Art staple. The majority of his art served as a critique of American consumer culture and its obsession with celebrity and wealth.[2] Warhol also minimised the role of the artist, often employing assistants to make his work and using mechanical means of production, such assilkscreen printing. Another pop artist, Keith Haring, used cartoons and graffiti as a means of political activism, fighting against the stigma surrounding gay men and drug addicts during the 1980 AIDS epidemic.[3] This marked a change fromModernism toPost-Modernism.Photorealism evolved from Pop Art and as a counter to Abstract Expressionists.
Subsequent initiatives towards the end of the century involved a paring down of the material of art throughMinimalism, and a shift toward non-visual components withConceptual art, where the idea, not necessarily the made object, was seen as the art. The last decade of the century saw a fusion of earlier ideas in work byJeff Koons, who made large sculptures fromkitsch subjects, and in theUK, theYoung British Artists, where Conceptual Art, Dada and Pop Art ideas led toDamien Hirst's exhibition of ashark in formaldehyde in a vitrine.
Media related to20th-century art at Wikimedia Commons| Premodern (Western) |
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