what is the modern art essay

What is Modern Art — Definition, History and Examples

• Art Styles Explained
• Art History Timeline
• Renaissance
• Neoclassicism
• Naturalism vs Realism
• Romanticism
• Art Nouveau
• Kinetic Art
• Post Impressionism
• Primitivism
• Abstract Expressionism
• Avant Garde
• Conceptual Art
• Constructivism Art
• Expressionism
• Harlem Renaissance
• Magical Realism
• Suprematism
• Contemporary Art
• Installation Art
• Photorealism
• Performance Art

D o you ever look at a painting in a modern art museum and wonder “what am I looking at?” We’ve all experienced that moment when we want to know more about the unusual artwork we’re seeing.  Modern artwork is mysterious and thought-provoking, making it an exciting form of expression for artists around the world. But what is modern art exactly, where did it come from, and why do so many people love it? In this blog post, we’ll explore these questions to help you understand the nature of modern art better.

TYPES OF ART STYLES

Art styles explained & art history timeline.

• Avant-Garde
• Post-Impressionism

What is Modern Art Movement?

First, let’s define modern art.

The concept of modern art can seem elusive at first. Before we dive into its history and important artists, let’s look at the modern art definition.

MODERN ART DEFINITION

What is modern art.

Modern art is an art movement that emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It was characterized by a shift away from traditional styles to a more abstract, experimental approach to creating works of art. Major modern art movements include Impressionism, Expressionism, Cubism, Fauvism, Dadaism and Surrealism. Influential modernist artists include Pablo Picasso, Wassily Kandinsky, Salvador Dalí and Marcel Duchamp. Modern artwork has had a lasting impact on the development of visual culture and continues to influence contemporary art today.

Characteristics of Modern Art:

• Use of vibrant colors and bold brushstrokes
• Abstract, expressive forms and shapes
• Exploration of new concepts such as movement, time, and space
• Rejection of mainstream values and traditional techniques

This article is part of our ongoing series on Art Styles . You can also refer to our Art History Timeline post to help place this movement in context.

What is Modern Art Influenced By?

History of modern art.

Now that we’ve covered the modern art definition it’s important to clarify that the history of modern artwork is a complex and ever-evolving narrative. It began in the late 19th century as a revolt against academic artistic conventions, which championed realism and classicism. 

Led by pioneering artists such as Claude Monet, Paul Cezanne, Vincent van Gogh, and Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso. This movement sought to eliminate traditional rules around painting in favor of more experimental approaches to art-making. 

What is modern art and where did it begin? For some great insight on how art evolved into modern art and how and why artists began pushing the limits of the form, check out this video by Nerdwriter1. 

How Art Arrived At Jackson Pollock

To reiterate the video above, artists like Monet and Van Gogh influenced the push toward abstraction and away from realism. These works led to an influx of abstract styles such as Cubism, Fauvism, and Surrealism which had lasting effects on visual culture. 

For example, Cubism was one of the first modern art movements, emerging in the early 20th century. It was a radical departure from traditional painting techniques, with its emphasis on abstract compositions and geometric forms. 

Les Femmes d'Alger (Version "O"), 1955 by Pablo Picasso

Artists such as Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque painted with this technique, seeking to blur distinctions between objects and represent them in a new way, challenging conventional understanding of visual representation. This desire was at the core of modern art.

Today modern art continues to influence contemporary art across all mediums from painting, sculpture and installation through to digital media and performance art.

While each movement has its own distinguishing characteristics and qualities, there is a thread that flows through each modern art movement. Its practitioners sought to push the boundaries of traditional art-making techniques and explore new ways of expressing feelings and ideas through visual media. Let’s take a deeper dive into some of the most important modern art movements in art history and some examples of modern art from each. 

Types of Modern Art

Impressionism.

Impressionism was an art movement that began in France in the late 19th century. It is characterized by its focus on capturing the effects of light and atmosphere, and emphasizes accurate depictions of specific times of day and season. Artists employed brilliant colours, thick brush strokes, high chroma, and vivid light-dark contrasts to create their works. 

Water lilies (1916-1919) by Claude Monet  •  Examples of modern art

Impressionists reacted against traditional academic painting styles and sought to capture fleeting moments or impressions of reality. Famous impressionists such as Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley are renowned for their unique vision and approach to painting.

Modern Art Movements

Cubism is an avant-garde art movement that emerged in the early twentieth century. Pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, it sought to challenge traditional notions of perspective and representation by abstracting forms and reducing them to their most basic shapes. 

 "La Roche-Guyon" (1909) by Georges Braque 

Cubism broke down objects into interlocking planes, creating a fragmented view of reality that challenged viewers to see things differently. Today, cubist works continue to inspire creators to experiment with visual expression in unorthodox ways.

Types of Modern Art Movements

Fauvism is a style of painting that emerged in early twentieth century France. Characterized by bright, expressive colours and simplified forms, it was pioneered by Henri Matisse and André Derain.

André Derain's 'The Turning Road, L'Estaque (1906)

Fauvist works often use shock and contrast to capture the emotional intensity of a subject, emphasizing vivid hues over realism. By focusing on intense colour combinations, Fauve artists conveyed their own unique perspectives on the world around them.

Related Posts

• A Guide to Western Art Movements →
• What is Avant Garde Art Movement?  →
• What is Contemporary Art — Definition & Examples →

Modern Art History

Surrealism is an art movement that emerged in the early twentieth century, characterized by dreamlike imagery and fantastical scenes. It was pioneered by artists such as Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst and Joan Miró, and draws heavily on Freudian psychoanalytic theory. 

Roots (1943) by Frida Kahlo  •  Examples of modern art

By combining subject matter from everyday life with elements of fantasy, surrealist works create a unique visual space where the subconscious comes to life. Surrealism continues to inspire creators to explore the depths of their imagination and represent them through conscious expression.

Types of Modern Art movements

Abstract Expressionism is a style of painting that emerged in post-World War II America. Pioneered by artists such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning, this movement emphasized the artist's emotional and psychological state over representational representation. 

No. 14, 1960 by Mark Rothko

By combining colour, line and form, Abstract Expressionist works explore the depths of human experience through abstract aesthetic techniques. Through its dynamic brushstrokes and symbolic forms, Abstract Expressionism strives to capture the innermost emotions of the painter.

What is Modern Art Pop Art?

Pop Art is a visual art movement that originated in the 1950s and gained massive popularity during the 1960s. It combines elements of popular culture, such as advertisements, comic books, and everyday objects, with abstract art techniques to create a unique aesthetic. 

Pop Art celebrates kitsch and popular culture, challenging traditional artistic conventions and subverting hierarchies of taste. Artists such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein are considered to be primary figures of the movement who pushed it from an underground phenomenon to a global one.

Tree of Life (1985) by Keith Haring

While modern artwork may have its roots in traditional artistic conventions, it often seeks to expand our understanding of what art is and can be – from exploring the intangible depths of our unconscious minds to celebrating popular culture or challenging existing social norms. 

Modern art continues to be a major influence on contemporary art, in both its formal and conceptual approaches. These artists pushed boundaries of what could be considered "art" while challenging viewers to look at the world differently.

Explore More Styles and Movements

This was just one of many fascinating segments of art history. There are many eras, styles, artists, and movements to discover. Let's continue our study by choosing the next stop on your way to becoming an art aficionado. Below you can visit our  Art Styles Index , our  Art History Timeline , or choose an individual movement.

Showcase your vision with elegant shot lists and storyboards.

Create robust and customizable shot lists. Upload images to make storyboards and slideshows.

Learn More ➜

Wow! sharing such a nice info.

Can I have the citations for this?

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

• Pricing & Plans
• Product Updates
• Featured On
• StudioBinder Partners
• The Ultimate Guide to Call Sheets (with FREE Call Sheet Template)
• How to Break Down a Script (with FREE Script Breakdown Sheet)
• The Only Shot List Template You Need — with Free Download
• Managing Your Film Budget Cashflow & PO Log (Free Template)
• A Better Film Crew List Template Booking Sheet
• Best Storyboard Softwares (with free Storyboard Templates)
• Movie Magic Scheduling
• Gorilla Software
• Storyboard That

A visual medium requires visual methods. Master the art of visual storytelling with our FREE video series on directing and filmmaking techniques.

We’re in a golden age of TV writing and development. More and more people are flocking to the small screen to find daily entertainment. So how can you break put from the pack and get your idea onto the small screen? We’re here to help.

• Making It: From Pre-Production to Screen
• VFX vs. CGI vs. SFX — Decoding the Debate
• What is a Freeze Frame — The Best Examples & Why They Work
• TV Script Format 101 — Examples of How to Format a TV Script
• Best Free Musical Movie Scripts Online (with PDF Downloads)
• What is Tragedy — Definition, Examples & Types Explained
• 2 Pinterest

Summary of Modern Art

Modern art represents an evolving set of ideas among a number of painters, sculptors, photographers , performers, and writers who - both individually and collectively - sought new approaches to art making. Although modern art began, in retrospect, around 1850 with the arrival of Realism , approaches and styles of art were defined and redefined throughout the 20 th century. Practitioners of each new style were determined to develop a visual language that was both original and representative of the times.

Overview of Modern Art

The rapid growth of industry and the progress of technology propelled artists to represent the world in new and innovative ways. The result was an art that took on new colors, alternative forms, emotional expressions, and experiments in abstraction.

The Important Artists and Works of Modern Art

Impression, Sunrise

Artist: Claude Monet

In this seminal work of modern art, Monet's loose handling of paint and his focus on light and atmosphere within the landscape scene are all key characteristics of Impressionism, which is widely considered the first fully modern movement. Monet's use of abstraction evokes what the artist sensed or experienced while painting the scene, which was a highly unusual approach for a painter to adopt at the time. The title of the work, Impression, Sunrise not only provided critics with the name that the movement would later receive, but also conveys the transitory, fleeting and subjective nature of the painting. It is Monet's visual impression of what he observed during that sunrise.

Oil on canvas - Musée Marmottan Monet

The Large Bathers

Artist: Paul Cézanne

The Large Bathers is one of the finest examples of Cézanne's exploration of the theme of the modern, heroic nude within a natural setting. The series of nudes are arranged into a variety of positions, like objects in a still life, under the pointed arch formed by the intersection of trees and the sky. Cézanne was attempting a departure from the Impressionist motifs of light and natural effect and instead composed this scene as a series of carefully constructed figures, as if creating sculpture with his paintbrush. He was more concerned with the way the forms occupied space than with recording his visual observations. This destruction of regular illusionism and the radical foray into increased abstraction is considered an important precursor to Cubism.

Oil on canvas - The Philadelphia Museum of Art

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon

Artist: Pablo Picasso

For Les Demoiselles d'Avignon , Picasso gathered inspiration from a variety of sources, including African tribal art, Expressionism, and the Post-Impressionist paintings of Paul Cézanne. Assimilating these seemingly disparate sources in one piece was a new approach to art making and conveys just how much artists' perspectives expanded with the rise of modernism. The painting originally raised significant controversy for its depiction of a brothel scene and for the jagged, protruding, and abstract forms used to depict the women. It is also widely considered the artwork that launched the Cubism movement. The multiplicity of styles incorporated within this work - from Iberian sculpture referenced in the women's' bodies to the sculptural deconstruction of space derived from Cézanne - not only represent a clear turning point in Picasso's career, but make the painting an incredibly distinct achievement of the modern era.

Oil on canvas - The Museum of Modern Art, New York City

Artist: Marcel Duchamp

Duchamp's invention of the readymade - a manufactured, found object divorced from its utilitarian purpose and presented in a new way as art - helped redefine what constituted a work of art within the modern era. Henceforth, a unique work of art no longer required the act of creation by the artist or visual evidence of the artist's hand in its production, the artist merely needed to designate the work as art for it to be considered as such. Duchamp's Fountain is a mass-produced porcelain urinal, turned on its back and inscribed with the name R. Mutt, a combination of a plumbing company name and a comic. By using an everyday, prefabricated object Duchamp forced the viewer to reconsider the definition of art and who makes that definition. This work in particular, and other readymades, were major influences on the later movements of Pop art, which focused on combining low and high art, and Conceptualism, wherein the idea behind the artwork is as important as the final object.

Porcelain - The Philadelphia Museum of Art

The Persistence of Memory

Artist: Salvador Dalí

This iconic Surrealist painting naturalistically depicts an otherworldly landscape where time is a series of melting watches surrounded by swarming ants that hint at decay, an organic process which held great fascination for Dalí. He sought to portray "images of concrete irrationality," bringing haunting dreamscapes, like this allegorically empty space where time has no power, out of the subconscious mind and onto the canvas. Dalí's celebrated and vivid imagination, his fascination with dream imagery and metaphor, and his exploration into the human subconscious all follow the key characteristics of the Surrealism movement in the early-20 th century.

Autumn Rhythm (Number 30)

Artist: Jackson Pollock

Through the development of his "drip" style of painting, and thedelicate dance executed in the process of creating the work, Jackson Pollock helped define the idea of Action Painting. With these paintings, Pollock - one of the most famous Abstract Expressionists - discovered a new abstract, visual language for his unconscious that moved beyond the Freudian symbolism of the Surrealists. He broke up the rigid, shallow space of Cubist pictures, replacing it with a dense web of lines and forms, like an unfathomable galaxy of stars. In some respects this work evokes both Impressionism and Surrealism, in the loose, gestural application of the paint and the unconscious nature of the expression laid down on the canvas.

Enamel on canvas - The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

Artist: Jasper Johns

Flag , Johns' first major work, broke away from the emotionally driven style of the Abstract Expressionists by portraying a recognizable, everyday object, which according to Johns is "seen but not looked at." Although the work is representational, the painting is also abstract in its many textures, layers, and materials, including strips of newspaper painted over with encaustic, and the tactile brush strokes that create a painterly, expressive surface. Johns turns a flag, a three-dimensional object, into a two-dimensional painting. This practice of appropriating familiar objects recalled the practices of the earlier Dadaists, particularly Marcel Duchamp, who revolutionized modern art with the readymade. Johns' approach with his Flag paintings renewed interest in Dada and was as an important precursor to Pop art particularly through his use of everyday, mass-produced objects.

Encaustic, oil, and collage on fabric mounted on plywood, three panels - The Museum of Modern Art, New York City

Marilyn Diptych

Artist: Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol completed this work (the first of many devoted to Marilyn Monroe) shortly after the actress's untimely death in August 1962. The image of Monroe, which Warhol recycled and used for all his Marilyn silkscreen paintings, was taken from a publicity shot originally used for the film Niagara . Not dissimilar from Warhol's motifs of Campbell's soup cans or Brillo boxes, the artist stacks and repeats the same image of Monroe here as if she were a consumer product in a grocery store. By juxtaposing the bright colors with monochrome in the diptych, Warhol alludes to her mortality. Though Warhol was a great admirer of the actress, he acknowledged in this and similar works that celebrity was itself a consumer product. Marilyn Diptych is designed as both a tribute to the late icon and a harsh commentary on how we had come to treat these pop cultural icons in the modern era.

Silkscreen ink on synthetic polymer paint on canvas - The Museum of Modern Art, New York City

One Ton Prop (House of Cards)

Artist: Richard Serra

One Ton Prop presages Serra's mature works, where gravity, weight, counterforce, sinuous movement, and other physical and visual properties are embodied by steel. This sculpture, consisting of four rolled sheets of lead propped on each other, is less a visual exercise for the viewer and more of an intellectual one, obliging one to contemplate the physical properties that allow the piece to remain upright rather than collapse. The unprecedented complexity of such a work is fairly typical of post-minimal sculpture, which relied upon a variety of visual sources and theories for inspiration. While One Ton Prop embodies certain principles of Minimalism, Conceptualism, and even Dada, it is generally referred to as Process art because the process of its construction is inherent and apparent in the final work. The multiplicity of sources and possible styles is typical of the pluralist contemporary world, and the contemporary art that goes with it.

Lead antimony, four plates - The Museum of Modern Art, New York City

Definition of Modern Art

Modern art is the creative world's response to the rationalist practices and perspectives of the new lives and ideas provided by the technological advances of the industrial age that caused contemporary society to manifest itself in new ways compared to the past. Artists worked to represent their experience of the newness of modern life in appropriately innovative ways. Although modern art as a term applies to a vast number of artistic genres spanning more than a century, aesthetically speaking, modern art is characterized by the artist's intent to portray a subject as it exists in the world, according to his or her unique perspective and is typified by a rejection of accepted or traditional styles and values.

The Beginnings of Modern Art

Classical and early modern art.

The centuries that preceded the modern era witnessed numerous advancements in the visual arts, from the humanist inquiries of the Renaissance and Baroque periods to the elaborate fantasies of the Rococo style and the ideal physical beauty of 18 th -century European Neoclassicism . However, one prevalent characteristic throughout these early modern eras was an idealization of subject matter, whether human, natural, or situational. Artists typically painted not what they perceived with subjective eyes but rather what they envisioned as the epitome of their subject.

Age of Modernism and Art

The modern era arrived with the dawn of the industrial revolution in Western Europe in the mid-19 th century, one of the most crucial turning points in world history. With the invention and wide availability of such technologies as the internal combustion engine, large machine-powered factories, and electrical power generation in urban areas, the pace and quality of everyday life changed drastically. Many people migrated from the rural farms to the city centers to find work, shifting the center of life from the family and village in the country to the expanding urban metropolises. With these developments, painters were drawn to these new visual landscapes, now bustling with all variety of modern spectacles and fashions.

A major technological development closely-related to the visual arts was photography. Photographic technology rapidly advanced, and within a few decades a photograph could reproduce any scene with perfect accuracy. As the technology developed, photography became increasingly accessible to the general public. The photograph conceptually posed a serious threat to classical artistic modes of representing a subject, as neither sculpture nor painting could capture the same degree of detail as photography. As a result of photography's precision, artists were obliged to find new modes of expression, which led to new paradigms in art.

The Artist's Perspective and Modern Art

In the early decades of the 19 th century, a number of European painters began to experiment with the simple act of observation. Artists from across the continent, including portraitists and genre painters such as Gustave Courbet and Henri Fantin-Latour , created works that aimed to portray people and situations objectively, imperfections and all, rather than creating an idealized rendition of the subject. This radical approach to art would come to comprise the broad school of art known as Realism .

Also early in the 19 th century, the Romantics began to present the landscape not necessarily as it objectively existed, but rather as they saw and felt it. The landscapes painted by Caspar David Friedrich and J.M.W. Turner are dramatic representations that capture the feeling of the sublime that struck the artist upon viewing that particular scene in nature. This representation of a feeling in conjunction with a place was a crucial step for creating the modern artist's innovative and unique perspective.

Early Abstraction and Modern Art

Similarly, while some artists focused on objective representation, others shifted their artistic focus to emphasize the visual sensation of their observed subjects rather than an accurate and naturalistic depiction of them. This practice represents the beginnings of abstraction in the visual arts. Two key examples of this are James McNeill Whistler's Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket (1874) and Claude Monet 's Boulevard des Capucines (1873). In the former, the artist couples large splatters and small flecks of paint to create a portrait of a night sky illuminated by fireworks that was more atmospheric than representational. In the latter, Monet provides an aerial view of bustling modern Parisian life. In portraying this scene, Monet rendered the pedestrians and cityscape as an "impression," or in other words, a visual representation of a fleeting, subjective, and slightly abstracted, perspective.

Modern Art Themes and Concepts

Modern artists.

The history of modern art is the history of the top artists and their achievements. Modern artists have strived to express their views of the world around them using visual mediums. While some have connected their work to preceding movements or ideas, the general goal of each artist in the modern era was to advance their practice to a position of pure originality. Certain artists established themselves as independent thinkers, venturing beyond what constituted acceptable forms of "high art" at the time which were endorsed by traditional state-run academies and the upper-class patrons of the visual arts. These innovators depicted subject matter that many considered lewd, controversial, or even downright ugly.

The first modern artist to essentially stand on his own in this regard was Gustave Courbet , who in the mid-19 th century sought to develop his own distinct style. This was achieved in large part with his painting from 1849-1850, Burial at Ornans , which scandalized the French art world by portraying the funeral of a common man from a peasant village. The Academy bristled at the depiction of dirty farm workers around an open grave, as only classical myths or historical scenes were fitting subject matter for such a large painting. Initially, Courbet was ostracized for his work, but he eventually proved to be highly influential to subsequent generations of modern artists. This general pattern of rejection and later influence has been repeated by hundreds of artists in the modern era.

Modern Art Movements

The discipline of art history tends to classify individuals into units of like-minded and historically connected artists designated as the different movements and "schools." This simple approach of establishing categories is particularly apt as it applies to centralized movements with a singular objective, such as Impressionism , Futurism , and Surrealism . For example, when Claude Monet exhibited his painting Impression, Sunrise (1872) as part of a group exhibition in 1874, the painting and the exhibition as a whole were poorly received. However, Monet and his fellow artists were ultimately motivated and united by the criticism. The Impressionists thus set a precedent for future independently minded artists who sought to group together based on a singular objective and aesthetic approach.

This practice of grouping artists into movements is not always completely accurate or appropriate, as many movements or schools consist of widely diverse artists and modes of artistic representation. For example, Vincent van Gogh , Paul Gauguin , Georges Seurat and Paul Cézanne are considered the principal artists of Post-Impressionism , a movement named so because of the artists' deviations from Impressionist motifs as well as their chronological place in history. Unlike their predecessors, however, the Post-Impressionists did not represent a cohesive movement of artists who united under a single ideological banner. Furthermore, the case can be made that some artists do not fit into any particular movement or category. Key examples include the likes of Auguste Rodin , Amadeo Modigliani , and Marc Chagall . Despite these complications, the imperfect designation of movements allows the vast history of modern art to be broken down into smaller segments separated by contextual factors that aid in examining the individual artists and works.

The Avant-Garde and The Progression of Modern Art

The avant-garde is a term that derives from the French "vanguard," the lead division going into battle, literally advance guard, and its designation within modern art is very much like its military namesake. Generally speaking, most of the successful and creative modern artists were avante-gardes. Their objective in the modern era was to advance the practices and ideas of art, and to continually challenge what constituted acceptable artistic form in order to most accurately convey the artist's experience of modern life. Modern artists continually examined the past and revalued it in relation to the modern.

Modern, Contemporary, and Postmodern Art

Generally speaking, contemporary art is defined as any form of art in any medium that is produced in the present day. However, within the art world the term designates art that was made during and after the post-Pop art era of the 1960s. The dawn of Conceptualism in the late 1960s marks the turning point when modern art gave way to contemporary art. Contemporary art is a broad chronological delineation that encompasses a vast array of movements like Earth art , Performance art , Neo-Expressionism , and Digital art . It is not a clearly designated period or style, but instead marks the end of the periodization of modernism.

Postmodernism is the reaction to or a resistance against the projects of modernism, and began with the rupture in representation that occurred during the late 1960s. Modernism became the new tradition found in all the institutions against which it initially rebelled. Postmodern artists sought to exceed the limits set by modernism, deconstructing modernism's grand narrative in order to explore cultural codes, politics, and social ideology within their immediate context. It is this theoretical engagement with the ideologies of the surrounding world that differentiates postmodern art from modern art, as well as designates it as a unique facet within contemporary art. Features often associated with postmodern art are the use of new media and technology, like video, as well as the technique of bricolage and collage , the collision of art and kitsch, and the appropriation of earlier styles within a new context. Some movements commonly cited as Postmodern are: Conceptual art , Feminist art , Installation art and Performance art .

Useful Resources on Modern Art

• Modern Art Movements All major modern art movements, as well as a number of related styles and tendencies
• Modern Art Artists Comprehensive guide to the most important modern and contemporary artists
• The Progression of Modern Art This timeline displays the major trends and movements in modern art
• Top Modern Art Works This timeline is a guide to the 50 most important and groundbreaking works of art from the modern era
• The Shock of the New By Robert Hughes
• Art Since 1900 Our Pick By Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin Buchloh
• Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics By Herschel B. Chipp, Peter Selz, Joshua C. Taylor
• Art in Theory, 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas Our Pick By Charles Harrison and Dr. Paul J. Wood, eds.
• Defining Modern Art: Selected Writings of Alfred H. Barr, Jr. By Alfred Hamilton Barr, Irving Sandler, Amy Newman
• The Tradition of the New By Harold Rosenberg
• The Theory of the Avant-Garde By Renato Poggioli, Gerald Fitzgerald
• The Meanings of Modern Art By John Russell
• Museum of Modern Art's Library and Archives MoMA's physical and online archives provide among the world's most comprehensive surveys of modern and contemporary art
• The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Collection The SFMoMA collection features 30,000 works, with interactive educational resources for special topics in modern art
• Modern Art Notes Modern art and Contemporary art blog by Tyler Green
• Uncertainty: Modernity and Art Our Pick Episode from "This is Civilisation" British series
• Great Museums: In Our Time: The Museum of Modern Art Our Pick
• The Contemporary and the Historical Our Pick By Donald Kuspit / Artnet.com
• Modernist Painting By Clement Greenberg
• African Influences in Modern Art By Denise Murrell / Department of Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University
• Art, Philosophy, and the Philosophy of Art By Arthur C. Danto

Related Artists

Related Movements & Topics

Content compiled and written by Justin Wolf

Edited and published by The Art Story Contributors

Modern Art – An Exploration of the 20th-Century Modernist Movement

The Modernism movement within art, arising in the early 20 th century, referred to art that accurately reflected the society in which artists found themselves. After the French industrial revolution, artists demonstrated a great desire to move away from the traditional aspects that previously governed fine art in favor of creating artworks that sought to capture the experiences and values in modern industrial life. Thus, Modern Art existed as a broad movement that incorporated a variety of other “isms” under its title.

Table of Contents

• 1 What Is Modernism?
• 2 An Appropriate Modernism Definition
• 3.1 The Influence of the Industrial Revolution
• 3.2 The Influence of War
• 4 Main Characteristics of Modern Art
• 5 Criticisms of Modern Art
• 6.1 Impressionism (1870s – 1880s)
• 6.2 Fauvism (1905 – 1907)
• 6.3 Expressionism (1905 – 1920)
• 6.4 Cubism (1908 – 1914)
• 6.5 Futurism (1909 – 1944)
• 6.6 Dadaism (1916 – 1924)
• 6.7 Surrealism (1924 – 1950s)
• 6.8 Abstract Expressionism (1940s – 1950s)
• 6.9 Pop Art (1950s – 1960s)
• 7 Modern Art in America
• 8.1 Paul Cézanne (1839 – 1906)
• 8.2 Claude Monet (1840 – 1926)
• 8.3 Georges Seurat (1859 – 1891)
• 8.4 Henri Matisse (1869 – 1954)
• 8.5 Giacomo Balla (1871 – 1958)
• 8.6 Pablo Picasso (1881 – 1973)
• 8.7 Marcel Duchamp (1887 – 1968)
• 8.8 Salvador Dalí (1904 – 1989)
• 8.9 Jackson Pollock (1912 – 1956)
• 8.10 Andy Warhol (1928 – 1987)
• 9 Modernism into Postmodernism

What Is Modernism?

Known as a global movement that existed in society and culture, Modern Art developed at the start of the 20 th century in reaction to the widespread urbanization that appeared after the industrial revolution. Modern Art, also referred to as Modernism, was viewed as both an art and philosophical movement at the time of its emergence. This movement reflected the immense longing of artists to produce new forms of art, philosophy, and social structures that precisely reflected the newly developing world.

Modernism included a variety of different styles, techniques, and media within the broad movement. However, the fundamental principle that was demonstrated in all the artworks of each movement within Modernism was a complete dismissal of history and traditional concepts associated with realism.

Artists began to make use of new images, materials, and techniques to create artworks that they thought better reflected the realities and hopes that existed in rapidly modernizing societies.

Due to the fact that it was not considered a singular and cohesive movement, many different movements developed that fell into the bracket of Modernism. These Modern movements included Post-Impressionism , Fauvism, Cubism, Dadaism, Expressionism, and Futurism, to name a few. The unifying element that existed within these movements was the consistent yearning to break away from the customs of representational art .

A great influence of Modernism was considered to be the Impressionism movement, as artists practicing within this period began to make use of non-naturalistic colors when depicting subjects. Impressionism was wildly unpopular with high society at the time, as it embraced elements that did not fit into the traditional way of making art. Thus, this deviation from the norm was said to pave the way for the beginning of Modernism Art as it embraced the start of abstract tendencies that were still to be explored.

Modernists disregarded old rules relating to color, perspective, and composition in order to create their own visions of how artworks should be constructed. These attitudes were strengthened by the rapid changes that were brought on by the industrial revolution decades before, as well as the start of World War One in 1914. Artists, in reaction to the horror and brutality that was seen in society as a result of war, abandoned intellect for intuition within their artworks and depicted the world exactly as they observed it.

This period of rapid changes characterized modern society at the time, leading artists to constantly update and refine their techniques when making art so as to accurately depict the aspirations and dreams of the modern world that had developed. Modernism was a response to the rapidly changing conditions of life due to the rise of industrialization and the beginning of wartime, with artists looking for new subject matter, working techniques, and materials to better capture this change.

Additionally, the reason for this change in technique was because artists regarded traditional forms of art to be outdated and therefore obsolete within modern society. Artists stated that they felt a growing alienation from the previous Victorian society and searched for new modes of expression that would adequately reflect how they felt within the new world. Modernism was heavily motivated by the different social and political agendas of the time, with artists attempting to reflect these ideal visions of human life and society in their works.

Whilst artists experimented with new techniques to adequately depict modern life, they also attempted to express the emotional and psychological effects of negotiating a world in rapid changes in their artworks. This was an important element in Modern art, with artists like Henri Matisse and Paul Cézanne exploring their subject matters in-depth and in ways that shocked society.

Modernism Art was essentially the creative world’s answer to the rationalist customs and viewpoints of the new lives and ideas that were provided by the technological progressions of industrialization. Artists attempted to represent their experience of modern life in innovative ways irrespective of the artistic genre they were working from. Thus, Modern Art was characterized by artists who rejected traditional styles and values, instead including their own perspective into their works and portrayed their subjects exactly as they existed in the world.

By the 1960s, Modernism had become a leading movement within the art sphere. While some academics have said that the movement continued into the 21 st century, others have stated that it evolved into a late type of Modernism that was termed “Postmodernism.” Despite using the term “modernism” in its name, the Postmodern art movement demonstrated a vast departure from Modernist principles, as it rejected its fundamental assumptions in an effort to produce a new kind of art.

An Appropriate Modernism Definition

Modernism has been interpreted to mean a variety of things, ranging from a manner of thinking to an aesthetic form of self-examination. Additionally, the movement has also been viewed as a broad social, cultural, and political initiative that upheld the principles of impermanence within the newly urbanizing world.

The terms “Modernism” and “Modern Art” were used by art historians and critics when describing the series of art movements that emerged after the Realism period that was dominated by artist Gustav Courbet . Realism occurred just prior to the Industrial Revolution in France and along with Courbet’s distinct style, marked the beginning of an art period that abandoned the romanticism that previously dictated artmaking.

The philosophical characteristics that accompanied the Modernist movement helped to define it as a way of thinking in addition to an art medium . This was demonstrated by the self-consciousness and self-reference that artists included within their artworks. These brazen and unashamed elements were used to refer to their new modern reality, as well as to highlight their straying away from what was previously seen as fine art.

In Western society, Modernism was defined as a socially liberal trend of thought. Modern Art was said to acknowledge the strength of human beings in creating, enhancing, and restructuring their environment through the advancements in technology and scientific knowledge. These changes were demonstrated through the subsequent art movements that developed, which all found their basic principles under the broad term of Modernism.

Poet Ezra Pound’s famous 1934 line, “Make it New”, went on to exist as the benchmark of the Modernism approach, as Pound ordered artists and creatives to produce art out of distinctly innovative materials.

Thus, an appropriate Modernism definition would be artworks that rejected all traditional forms of art in an attempt to include the perspective of artists and the consequences and effects of industrialization in the developing contemporary world.

The Origins of Modern Art

Modern Art was said to begin in 1863 after artist Édouard Manet exhibited his shocking and disrespectful painting, Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe , at the Salon des Refuses in Paris. Despite Manet’s artwork paying respect to a Renaissance artwork by Raphael, its exhibition to society is widely considered to mark the start of the changes that began to occur in art, which led to the emergence of Modernism.

After Manet’s painting, the new generation of artists were tired of following the conventional academic art forms that dominated the 18th and early 19th century. These artists were branded as “modern”, and they started to create a variety of Modernism paintings that were based on new themes, materials, and methods.

Whilst sculpture and architecture were also affected by these new ideas within art, their period of changes occurred at a later stage. Initially, fine art painting appeared to be the first creative sphere that abandoned traditional views in favor of a Modern outlook that acutely reflected society at the time.

In the centuries that preceded the Modern era, many advancements were made in the numerous styles that developed, as shown in movements such as the Renaissance, Baroque, and Rococo periods . The prevailing characteristic that appeared throughout these movements in art was the idealization of the subject matter.

Instead of painting exactly what they saw, artists were known to paint what they imagined to be the epitome of their subject.

The first Modern artist who veered away from these traditional values of art was Gustave Courbet, who sought to establish his own distinct style in the mid-19 th century. Courbet achieved this with his large 1948 – 1850 painting, Burial at Ornans , as he portrayed a funeral of an ordinary man with filthy farmworkers surrounding the open grave. This angered the formal art academy, as only works devoted to classical myths or historical scenes were seen as appropriate subject matter for a painting of this proportion.

Despite being shunned for this artwork, Courbet’s painting went on to be highly influential to the following generations of Modern artists. This idea of rejecting artworks previously reserved for religious and important imagery was embraced by artists when Modernism fully developed, with artists creating immense artworks to depict the lives and struggles of common society as they saw fit.

The Influence of the Industrial Revolution

The onset of the Industrial Revolution in France in the mid-19 th century was seen as a turning point in both the world’s history and the elements of formal art. With the invention and rapid advancement of technology, artists began to abandon a romanticized view of the world in order to accurately depict what they were seeing. This drastic urbanization led to a change in the pace and quality of ordinary life, with artists feeling compelled to represent this change in the works.

Many people began to relocate from rural farms into city centers in order to find work, which transferred the center of life from the country and villages to the growing urban capitals. Artists were drawn to these rapid developments and began to depict the new visual landscapes that emerged in society, as they bustled with a variety of modern wonders and styles that were waiting to be fully explored.

A significant technological advancement that occurred within this time frame was the invention of the camera in 1888 , which began to rapidly progress. As technology began to develop, photography became more and more accessible to the general public. Suddenly, ordinary people were able to create their own portraits simply by taking a photograph, instead of commissioning an artwork to be made.

This development in portraiture presented a threat to traditional artistic modes of portraying a subject, as no existing artforms were able to capture the same degree of detail and depth as a photograph could. Due to the accuracy of photography, artists were forced to find new methods of expression, which led to new ideas and paradigms in the artistic community.

The Influence of War

Whilst modern society believed in the idea of progress and its many benefits, this belief faded when the First World War began. This period of time sparked further outrage that was felt in connection to traditional art, as artists began to question the morality of urbanization if it could lead to something as gruesome as war.

World War One had a destructive impact on Europe and on the minds of every individual that it reached. A noticeable shift in artistic creation happened after the war, as societies began to distance themselves from its aftermath. Cities began to quickly expand, which led artists, writers, and philosophers to begin adopting views and beliefs that differed from those that existed prior to the war.

Some artists turned towards notions of beauty, order, and harmony within their modern works as a way to offset the disorder, separation, and ugliness that was left from the war. Others began to represent the individuals as hollow and ghostlike within their artworks, in an attempt to refer to the destruction that the war had caused. This was very noticeable in the artworks that formed part of the German Expressionist movement during World War One.

However, some artists viewed this fragmentation and deformity of figures in the art to be cruel, as society had already suffered so much death and pain when soldiers returned home.

Some artists believed that returning to prewar Cubism and Expression was impossible, and so instead looked ahead for a new form of expression that would appropriately capture their current time whilst not coming across as brutal.

Main Characteristics of Modern Art

Lasting for almost an entire century, Modern Art involved multiple different art movements that all incorporated a variety of different elements and techniques. Modernism embraced everything in its subsequent movements, including pure abstraction, hyperrealism, and anti-art styles to name a few. Due to the movement’s great diversity, it is difficult to consider any unifying characteristics which can be used to define this era.

However, one thing that can be said about Modernism Art that managed to separate it from prior movements, as well as the Postmodern movement which followed it, was that artists truly believed that their art was important and held real value. This differed from their predecessors who simply assumed that their work was valuable if it incorporated traditional elements, purely because the art academies told them so.

Despite there being no singular defining characteristic of Modern Art, it incorporated various important characteristics over a few of the movements. The first characteristic was that most Modern Art movements attempted to create a new type of art, through using styles such as collage art, assemblage, animation, photography, land art , and performance art.

The second characteristic was that most modern painters attempted to make use of new materials when creating art, such as attaching fragments of newspapers and other items to canvases. A good example of this is artist Marcel Duchamp, who popularized the use of readymade objects through his iconic artworks which he essentially created out of trash. By using a variety of new materials, a type of assemblage art was created, which allowed some artists to combine a variety of different and ordinary materials in one singular work.

The third characteristic that most Modernists incorporated into their work was a vivid use of color. The movements that made use of this technique the most were Fauvism and Expressionism, as artists practicing within these genres tended to exploit color in a variety of ways so as to emphasize the emotions they were attempting to convey.

Lastly, the fourth characteristic that was used within these Modernism movements was the invention of new techniques. Examples of this include automatic drawing and frottage that were invented by Surrealist artists , and benday dots and silkscreen painting that were introduced by Pop artists and brought into formal art.

Criticisms of Modern Art

Like every other artistic period, Modern Art had its fair share of criticisms. Due to the fact that Modernism disregarded conventional elements of art and placed emphasis on freedom of expression, experimentation, and radicalism, it was met with complete disbelief and outrage from audiences. Modernism also managed to alienate certain audiences through its eccentric and unpredictable effects, such as the disturbing motifs that were included in Surrealist artworks.

A major criticizer of the Modern Art era was the Nazi government in Germany, who deemed the artworks that fell into the bracket of Modernism as narcissistic and nonsensical. The Nazis went so far as to label Modern Art as “degenerate art”, and had some works belonging to the German Expressionism movement destroyed.

Most Important Movements Within Modernism

As Modernism was merely an umbrella term for a variety of different movements that came into existence after the Industrial Revolution and in the early 20 th century, it is easy to wonder: what is Modernism? Essentially, Modernism was a period in which many movements existed. What made these movements similar was the unifying characteristic that rejected all traditional forms of art, which made them each modern within their own sense.

Impressionism (1870s – 1880s)

Seen as an important precursor to the Modernist movement, Impressionism made famous the use of non-naturalist colors in the artworks that were created. The importance of Impressionism was demonstrated by artist Claude Monet , whose landscape works focused on capturing transient moments of light and color in excruciating detail.

This attention to detail was also seen when artists chose the colors within their artworks, as these vivid and shocking colors were said to emphasize the emotions that they felt. Additionally, Impressionists made use of loose and highly textured brushstrokes that made the painting unrecognizable if viewed from up close. These specific techniques made Impressionism very disliked in the conventional art spheres, as the works created did not conform to the traditional elements of art.

This led to Impressionism being seen as an important influence of Modernism, as it was one of the initial movements to reject the realism associated with traditional art through the color palette and brush strokes used. Impressionism went on to validate the use of unrealistic colors in artworks, which went on to pave the way for the emergence of abstract art . This continued to be upheld as an important characteristic in the Modern Art movements that developed.

Fauvism (1905 – 1907)

Led by Henri Matisse, Fauvism was an incredibly short-lived movement that existed during the mid-1900s in Paris. Despite its lifespan, it was an incredibly dynamic and influential movement and was seen as a very fashionable and modern style during its time.

Fauvism is known for launching at the Salon d’Automne , with the movement becoming instantly renowned for its intense, loud, and non-naturalistic colors that were used in the artworks created. This excessive use of color made the previous movement of Impression seem monochromatic in its palette choice, with the use of colors being extremely exaggerated in Fauvism.

The major contribution of Fauvism to the Modern Art movement was its demonstration of the power of color. Fauvism showcased the independent strength that colors possessed, which turned artworks into a force to be reckoned with when various colors were combined. Additionally, Fauvism was seen as a highly subjective movement, existing as a strong contender to the previous classical artistic style that was used.

Expressionism (1905 – 1920)

Despite being predicted in the artworks by artists such as Paul Gauguin and Vincent Van Gogh, the Expressionist movement only truly came into being in pre-war Germany. Two groups within Expressionism emerged named Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter , which went on to define this movement as one that belonged within Modern Art.

Existing before and after World War One, Expressionism was said to be heavily based on the brutalities that occurred. The Expressionist movement used the horror associated with the war as its main subject and created works that accurately echoed the devastation and consequences felt in society after it ended.

Die Brücke , translated to “the bridge”, was formed in Dresden in 1905 and existed as one of the integral groups within Expressionism. Founded by artist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner , Die Brücke made use of figural distortions, a primal straightforwardness of rendering, and expressive use of color in its artworks.

The second essential group within the Expressionist movement was Der Blaue Reider . Known as “the Blue Rider”, this group was founded by Wassily Kandinsky in Munich in 1911 and centered around the potential of pure abstraction within the art that was created. Kandinsky also argued that abstraction offered completeness that mere representation did not.

The importance of Expressionism within Modernism was that the movement popularized the idea of subjectivity in painting. Additionally, the vivid color palette used in Expressionist artworks existed as a fundamental characteristic within other Modern Art movements.

Cubism (1908 – 1914)

Developed by artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, Cubism existed as quite a harsh and challenging style of painting. This art form differed greatly from previous movements that were inspired by the techniques of linear perspective and softly curved volumes made famous in the Renaissance. Instead, Cubism made use of a compositional arrangement of flat and shattered planes that were combined to make up a painting.

Cubism was developed into two versions, namely Analytical Cubism and Synthetic Cubism. Analytical Cubism, which existed from 1910 to 1012, examined the use of basic shapes and overlapping surfaces to portray the individual forms of the subjects in a painting. Synthetic Cubism appeared after and ran from 1912 to 1914. This style emphasized on including characteristics such as simple shapes and bright colors that held hardly any depth in the artworks that were created.

Despite its influence over abstract art, the appeal surrounding Cubism was extremely limited. However, an important contribution of the Cubism movement within Modern Art was that it offered an entirely new alternative to standard perspective due to its creation of the flat picture plane.

Futurism (1909 – 1944)

The Futurist movement, founded by Italian art theorist and poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, was an art form that celebrated technology, speed, inventions such as the automobile and the airplane, and scientific achievement.

This movement saw all of these avenues of development as worthy of praise and believed that they were responsible for the advancement of modern society. Futurism captured the dynamism and energy that existed in the modern world and proposed the creation of art that celebrated modernity and the development of technology in all its forms.

Existing as a heavily influential movement, it borrowed elements from other eras such as Neo-Impressionism, Italian Divisionism, and Cubism. This was demonstrated through the splintered forms and numerous viewpoints that were typical of some Futurist artworks.

Futurism was at its most influential stage between 1909 and 1914, as World War One brought the first wave of Futurism to a close. This led artists to turn to different styles that incorporated elements of modernity. However, after the war had ended, Marinetti revived the movement and continued to develop into what was called second-generation Futurism. Thus, Futurism was seen as a significant Modern Art movement as it introduced the element of movement into art and linked the concept of beauty to scientific achievement.

Dadaism (1916 – 1924)

Seen as the first anti-art movement to be established, Dada was an art practice that rebelled against the system which had allowed the atrocity of World War One to take place. Dadaism began at the Cabaret Voltaire in Switzerland and was led by a group of artists who had relocated to the neutral country during the outbreak of the war.

The boisterous, facetious, and iconoclastic performances that were created were intended to lay heavy criticism on the bourgeois society and the economic forces that the Dadaists blamed for the onset of war. Dadaism quickly became a revolutionary movement as its main aim was to undermine the art establishment in an attempt to point out the futility in order and tradition as it led to war.

Using performance art that could not be commodified, the Dada movement advocated for the eradication of the commercial art institution along with its traditional concepts and reasons. Dada artists embraced the notions of irrationality and originality within their works, as demonstrated by artists such as Jean Arp, Hugo Ball, and Marcel Duchamp.

Existing as the most notable artist within the Dada movement was Duchamp, whose infamous 1917 Fountain caused enormous controversy due to him merely making use of an ordinary urinal in his artwork and submitting it for exhibition. Duchamp also introduced the idea of the “ready-mades” into art, which was the use of everyday items in place of traditional artistic elements.

Dadaism existed as an important movement in Modern Art, as it managed to disrupt the traditional art academy through its anarchistic tendencies. Dadaism brought great creativity and critique into modern society, as demonstrated through its embrace of junk items as art, which forced audiences to consider what intellect within art and society truly meant.

Surrealism (1924 – 1950s)

Existing right after the Dadaism movement and still maintaining its seditious humor, Surrealism was established in Paris by writer Andre Breton. Surrealism was seen as the last significant avant-garde movement that existed in the interwar period, as it began to fade out with the onset of World War Two.

Evolving out of the nihilistic Dada movement, Surrealism rejected the notions of order and beauty within its artworks, yet it was not viewed as anti-art or heavily political. Surrealism was built on a preference for the irrational and created artworks that used dreams, hallucination, and random and automatic image generation. This was done to evade rational thought processes in the creation of art, in addition to demonstrating the absurdity that existed in the intellectual minds of society.

Surrealist artists avoided any notion of rationality within their works. Instead, artists leaned towards psychological concepts about the unconscious mind that was primarily introduced by neurologist Sigmund Freud, who believed that this was where the base of artistic creativity lay. Thus, Surrealism attempting to connect with the unconscious mind through interpreting dreams and using automatism within the artworks created.

The main contribution of Surrealism to Modernism was its ability to generate a refreshing set of new artworks that were constructed out of one’s subconscious mind. Surrealism was able to introduce a period of imagination and fun into the interwar years within Modern Art.

Abstract Expressionism (1940s – 1950s)

Developed in New York City after the ending of World War Two, Abstract Expressionism was established by a group of vaguely associated artists who sought to create a stylistically varied body of work. Abstract Expressionism, also known as the New York School, introduced extreme new directions in art and relocated the art world’s attention to focus on Abstract Modernist art.

Abstract Expressionism, which was strongly influenced by European artists living in America, consisted of two main styles. The first was an extremely energetic form of gestural painting that was introduced by Jackson Pollock, and the second was a more passive mood-directed style known as Color Field painting made famous by Mark Rothko .

Abstract Expressionism aimed to create art that, while still abstract in nature, was able to evoke great expression and emotion as an effect. This was inspired by the previous movement of Surrealism, as Abstract Expressionists also subscribed to the notion that art should develop from the unconscious mind. The influence of Abstract Expressionism within Modernism was its ability to popularize abstraction, in addition to inventing a new style called “action painting”, as demonstrated by Pollock’s drip paintings.

Pop Art (1950s – 1960s)

The last influential movement said to exist within Modern Art was Pop Art. Initially emerging in America and England in the late 1950s, Pop Art reflected the popular culture and mass consumerism that existed in America in the early 1960s. Pop Art existed as a dominant form of avant-garde art due to its brazen and easy-to-recognize imagery, its use of vivid block colors, and the inclusion of famous icons.

Andy Warhol was an exemplary figure of the Pop Art movement, as his use of famous icons and popular celebrities in his artworks made his work incredibly well-known. Pop Art also branched into the creation of posters, advertisements, comic strips, and product packaging, to demonstrate the flexibility of art within the new consumer-driven society. Additionally, these materials helped to reduce the separation that existed between commercial art and fine art.

Essentially, Pop Art celebrated the consumerism of the post-World War Two period. The movement rejected Abstract Expressionism in an effort to praise and subsequently glorify advertising, the material consumer culture, and the image representation of the mass production era. Thus, the main contribution of Pop Art within Modern Art was its demonstration that any art deemed worthy could be unsophisticated and mass-marketed, in addition to being constructed out of mere commodities.

Modern Art in America

Due to the expansiveness of Modern Art, it is not easy to integrate the various movements of America and Europe into a chronological timeline. A multitude of historical and sociocultural factors exist for both American and European Modernism, which makes combining the two variations of Modern Art very challenging.

Modern Art took slightly longer to ground itself in America among its artists, critics, and the public. Prior to the development of Modernism, there was a variety of other American movements that had started to embrace elements of modernity in the artworks created.

The event that acted as the true catalyst for the growth of Modernism within America was the 1913 Armory Show, which was exhibited in New York. Nearly 1300 artworks created by 300 artists were displayed, with two-thirds of these artists being American. The style within these works included Ashcan, French Impressionist, Cubist, and Fauvist , which gave fellow artists, collectors, critics, and the public a glimpse into the future of Modern Art.

Modernist ideas began to grow within the minds of American artists , which were encouraged in the upcoming years by refugee artists who fled Europe at the onset of World War One. Additionally, the influx of artists who left Nazi-occupied Europe in the run-up to World War Two also brought new techniques and philosophies, which greatly inspired American artists and helped spur the development of Modern Art.

The introduction of Abstract Expressionism was also seen as a major turning point in American Modernism, as artists were largely influenced by the number of European avant-garde artists who had settled in America. Due to the country’s economic advantage that emerged after the end of World War Two, New York replaced Paris as the unofficial capital of Western art. This was thought to lead to the eventual appearance of Modern Art as a full-blown movement within America.

Notable Modern Artists and Their Well-Known Artworks

Throughout the expansive period of Modern Art, many different artistic movements embraced the rejection of traditionalism and the introduction of modernity within the Modernism paintings created. Listed below are some of the more notable artists and their artworks to come out of the Modernism era.

Paul Cézanne (1839 – 1906)

A significant artist existing in the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist period was Paul Cézanne, whose artworks have been considered as important precursors to the development of Modern Art. Completed in the year that Cézanne passed away, The Large Bathers was painted from 1898 to 1906 and existed as one of the finest examples of Cézanne’s investigation of the theme of the modern and courageous nude within a natural setting.

Cézanne created a series of these bathing nudes, with The Large Bathers existing as both his last and his largest composition in the series. Within this work, Cézanne depicted the female nudes in numerous effortless positions, with the ease that he created his composition being likened to him arranging objects in a still life. The archway formed by the overlapping trees and sky helped to ground the figures in the middle of the painting, in addition to turning them into the focal point through drawing the eyes of the viewer inwards.

When painting The Large Bathers , Cézanne attempted to create an artwork that would be viewed as timeless. He achieved this through his deviation from the Impressionist themes of light and natural effect and instead composed the scene as a series where his emphasis fell on the carefully constructed figures. Cézanne was more interested in the way his forms were able to occupy space as opposed to depicting his visual observations as realistically as possible.

This artwork was seen as a significant predecessor in the development of Cubism, as its disruption of illusionism and growing abstraction were elements that were later adopted in the Cubist movement. The brushstrokes within this painting were obvious, which gave Cézanne’s work an incomplete quality. Additionally, he boldly left traces of his working patterns on his paintings, with his colors blending into each other at certain points.

Despite its seemingly unrefined state, The Large Bathers is still seen as a masterpiece of Modern Art due to the characteristics it introduced to the art world. Cézanne’s work was praised for its use of vivid yet cool colors which swirled around the canvas, with the commanding nature of his colors later going on to be an important characteristic within Modern Art.

Claude Monet (1840 – 1926)

Another influential artist within the Impressionism period was Claude Monet. Impressionism was generally thought to be the first fully Modern movement to exist, with some of its characteristics influencing the later movements in the Modernism period. Within his landscape artworks, Monet placed focus on light and atmosphere, which existed as key characteristics of the Impressionism movement. In his 1873 painting, titled Impression, Sunrise , Monet demonstrated his focus on the same elements.

Impression, Sunrise is seen as Monet’s pioneering Modernism artwork. A misty sunrise over a French harbor is depicted, along with a very blurred background. The orange and yellow tones chosen by Monet contrast vividly with the darker ships, with little to no detail being visible to viewers at all.

Monet’s loose style of painting and use of abstraction evoked what he felt and experienced when painting the scene at the harbor, which was a very uncommon approach for a painter at that time. Additionally, the title of his work conveyed the ephemeral nature of his painting, as it was based purely on what Monet observed at the time of the sunrise.

This painting was very unusual of Monet’s own work during this time and of the Impressionist movement in general, as little to no Impressionist methods of light and color were shown. The colors chosen were incredibly restrained and at certain places, Monet left pieces of the canvas entirely visible.

Monet’s work was considered to be extremely atmospheric and subjective as opposed to analytical, which would go on to be an important characteristic of Modern Art. Monet kept details to a bare minimum within Impression, Sunrise , with the painting making use of a fleeting and near-abstract technique. Due to this, the style of his painting drew more attention than the actual composition itself, which outraged viewers at the time. Audiences even claimed that they were unable to identify what they were viewing at all.

Due to the techniques employed by Monet within Impression, Sunrise , this work is viewed as an important precursor to Modernism, as it made use of a variety of styles that would go on to later inform other Modern movements.

Georges Seurat (1859 – 1891)

An important Neo-Impressionist French artist was Georges Seurat, who’s paintings seemed to supersede his own reputation. Seurat altered the direction of Modern Art through his introduction of the Neo-Impressionism movement , which emerged at a time in modern France where painters were searching for new methods to explore. Existing as the best-known and largest painting done by Seurat is his 1884 to 1886 masterpiece, titled Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte , which was an important Neo-Impressionist work.

Seurat’s artwork depicts relaxed individuals in a park on an island in the Seine River known as “La Grande Jatte”, which was a popular place for middle- and upper-class Parisians in the 19 th century. What makes this painting so remarkable is that its theme captured something as boring and ordinary as a normal Sunday afternoon, yet it still carried an air of mystery.

At first glance, this work appears to be a painting of ordinary people relaxing in the park. However, upon closer inspection, truly peculiar images come to light. For example, the lady carrying the parasol on the right appears to be walking a monkey on a leash, and the little girl wearing the white dress that is placed in the center of the painting is the only figure who is depicted without a shadow.

Additionally, Seurat’s bizarre artwork introduced a new style of painting called Pointillism , with this technique still being known by this name today. This painting technique was highly systematic and near scientific in its development but was relatively easy for other artists to copy. Seurat started with a layer of small horizontal brushstrokes of complementary colors , upon which he later added small dots that appeared solid and radiant from afar.

This was done to prove his theory that painting in dots was able to create a brighter color than painting in strokes, as the viewer’s eye would be able to optically blend the colors from a distance. This led to a radical turning point within the Modern Art era, as artists were presented with an alternative way to define forms within their artworks as opposed to making use of the worn-out traditional methods.

Henri Matisse (1869 – 1954)

Existing as an important artist within the Fauvism movement was Henri Matisse , who was well-known for his expressive use of color and his fluid and original drawing techniques. Matisse is commonly regarded as an artist who helped define the groundbreaking developments within visual arts, with some of his paintings existing as important works in early Modernism.

One such work is his painting, titled Le Bonheur de Vivre (The Joy of Life) , which he painted from 1905 to 1906. Within this work, Matisse depicted the figures of blue-green and pink nudes dancing, singing, and frolicking in what seemed to be an unblemished and multicolored version of Eden.

Through overemphasizing and simplifying his figures at odd angles, Matisse was able to emphasize the canvas as a mere two-dimensional support for the harmonious contrast of color as opposed to any sort of precise depiction of nature.

Matisse separated color from reasoning within his artwork, as he used these bright tones as an expressive medium that was not intended to make any visual sense.  It was thought that this technique was used to introduce the concept of Primitivism into 20 th century Modernism, with artists like Matisse choosing to paint naïve and simple artworks in an era dominated by rapid industrialization and modernization. Additionally, Matisse’s work implied a lot about the new territory of Modernism that was emerging.

Giacomo Balla (1871 – 1958)

Futurist artist Giacomo Balla produced some incredibly well-known artworks within Modern Art. As a key proponent of Futurism, Balla skillfully depicted light, movement, and speed in his artworks. What set him aside from other Futurists was that his focus on movement did not relate to that produced by a machine, which led his artworks to be quite playful and witty in nature.

Balla’s most notable work, as well as the most well-known work of the Futurist movement, was his 1912 painting, titled Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash . Within this work, Balla combined the idea of art and science, which was influenced by his fascination with chronophotographic studies of animals in motion. Chronophotography existed as a technique whereby several photos were taken in quick succession to capture the movement of a subject.

The artwork depicts a black dachshund walking alongside a woman wearing dark shoes and a dress, which added to the monochrome feeling of the painting. Both the feet of the figure and the dog are shown to be in speedy motion, as signified by their slight blurring and the multiplication of their parts, as well as the numerous depictions of the dog lead.

A striking feature of this artwork is the quiet sincerity that is implied by the skittering dog. Thus, while the painting’s title expressed the lively movement as seen by the motion of the dog, the peaceful honesty present in the work contradicts this.

To reinforce the perception of speed, Balla painted the ground using diagonal lines and positioned his signature and the date at a lively angle. This work made use of characteristics that were significant within Modernism, such as the fascination with speed and technology, which were later referred to in other modern movements.

Pablo Picasso (1881 – 1973)

An important artist working within the Cubism movement was Spanish artist Pablo Picasso. His artworks have been categorized into different periods, such as his Blue Period and his Rose Period, which allowed Picasso to experiment with a variety of styles. These include both Analytic and Synthetic Cubism, as well as making use of some elements of Neoclassicism and Surrealism in his later works.

Out of all his Cubist works, his 1907 painting titled Les Demoiselles d’Avignon remains one of his most notable works. Considered to be the artwork that essentially launched the Cubism movement, Picasso’s work was met with substantial controversy for its portrayal of a brothel scene and for the rough, prominent, and abstract forms he used to represent the women.

When painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon , Picasso accumulated inspiration from various sources, such as African tribal art , Expressionism, and the Post-Impressionist artworks of Paul Cézanne. These sources are noticeable within Picasso’s work, as demonstrated by several of the women whose faces seemed to be modeled on African masks, as well as the sculptural deconstruction of space that originated from the works of Cézanne.

The multiplicity of the styles used within this painting clearly represented a turning point in Picasso’s career, as well as managing to separate his version of Modern Art from the Western artistic tradition. Thus, the integration of these diverse sources within a single painting demonstrated the new approach to art-making that artists had adopted. This also conveyed how the perspective of artists had expanded with the steady rise of the Modernist movement.

Marcel Duchamp (1887 – 1968)

Commonly regarded as one of the most influential artists who helped define the innovative developments in the plastic arts at the start of the 20 th century is Marcel Duchamp . Additionally, Duchamp is also commonly recognized as the face of the Dada movement, in which he exists as one of its most notable contributors.

Duchamp’s invention of the “readymade”, in which he made use of common items and claimed them to be artworks, rattled the traditional and formal art academies. In using ordinary items, that were sometimes even considered to be junk, Duchamp managed to separate the items from their utilitarian purpose in order to present them as new forms of art. Thus, Duchamp helped to reformulate what made essentially made up a work of art within the modern era.

His most well-known work, created in 1917, remains Fountain . Within this readymade sculpture, Duchamp made use of a store-bought urinal which he signed with the pseudonym “R. Mutt”, before submitting the work to the Society of Independent Artists in New York for exhibition. Fountain caused enormous controversy upon being submitted with the society ultimately rejecting Duchamp’s sculpture, which caused a great uproar in the artistic community at that time.

Duchamp, along with his sculpture, demonstrated that an extraordinary work of art no longer required the act of creation, as an artist simply needed to label the work as art in order for it to be deemed as such. This thought quickly spanned across Europe and the rest of the world, influencing the art-making techniques that existed. Thus, this Dada sculpture is regarded as a major avant-garde landmark in 20 th century Modern Art.

Salvador Dalí (1904 – 1989)

Spanish artist Salvador Dalí was an important figure within the Surrealism movement and was celebrated for his technical skills, drawing ability, and the remarkable yet peculiar images in his work. Existing as an incredibly well-known work of art is his 1931 painting, titled The Persistence of Memory .

This painting depicts an otherworldly landscape in a very organic manner, where time was portrayed as a series of melting watches that were surrounded by crawling ants. The idea of decay as a natural process held great fascination for Dalí, with this concept often coming up throughout history with critics attempting to understand the meaning behind his work.

However, when asked about the meaning of his work, Dalí continuously stated that he did not know the meaning. Additionally, he refused to associate his depictions of clocks with any tangible concepts, simply referring to them only as the “camembert of time.”

Through creating haunting dreamscapes in his Modernism paintings, Dalí succeeded in portraying images of solid absurdity. Dalí developed a technique called a paranoiac-critical method, in which he would self-induce a hypnotic state. He believed that this would allow him to break free of reality as the visions for his paintings would only appear to him in this unrestricted state of mind. Thus, in The Persistence of Memory , a metaphorically empty space is created out of Dalí’s subconscious mind, where time truly had no power.

Dalí’s obsession with dream imagery and metaphor would go on to firmly cement his place in the Surrealism movement of the early 20 th century. Additionally, the unrestrained and seemingly wild thoughts that he translated into his paintings referred to the increasing artistic freedom and experimentation that had developed in Modernism.

Jackson Pollock (1912 – 1956)

The Abstract Expressionism movement developed in New York City as a post-war movement in the 1940s, with Jackson Pollock going on to become one of the movement’s most notable artists. In addition to defining the concept of Action Painting, Pollock developed his “drip” style of painting, which led to him being seen as one of the influential driving forces behind Abstract Modernist art.

Drip painting involved Pollock setting up his canvases horizontally on the ground and then, with a paintbrush or paint jar, walking all around them and letting paint fall wherever he desired. This style within his Modernism paintings allowed Pollock to uncover a new abstract, visual language from his unconscious that moved beyond the techniques associated with Surrealism.

An important drip painting of his, created in 1950, is Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) . At this period of time, Pollock was at the peak of his career and created this nonrepresentational painting out of an unstretched canvas and thinned paint. With his canvas flat on the floor, Pollock dripped, dribbled, scumbled, poured, flicked, and splattered the paint onto the canvas. He then made use of sticks and knives to strengthen and intensify the thick and lyrical composition, which included intricate labyrinths of line.

Within Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) , there is no main point to focus on and no ranking of elements, which allowed Pollock to create a composition where every bit of the surface was regarded as equal. At certain places, Pollock’s work evoked elements of both Impressionism and Surrealism. Pollock’s work was an important contribution to Modern Art, as it demonstrated the complete freedom and lack of formality that artists were experimenting with.

Andy Warhol (1928 – 1987)

Lastly, a notable Pop Artist within the Modern Art era was Andy Warhol. Creating artworks that made use of commercial reproduction, Warhol upheld the Modernist art notion that celebrated the development of technology and the use of machinery. An iconic artwork, that falls within both the Modernism and Postmodernism era, is his 1962 silkscreen, titled Marilyn Diptych .

Within this work, Warhol mass-produced a well-known image of Marilyn Monroe using the silkscreen method and repeated the image of her face 50 times in both color and black and white. At first glance, the sheer amount of Monroe’s face encourages a form of worship to the legendary icon. However, Warhol merely selected this image due to its prominence in popular culture at the time and went on to immortalize it as art.

Marilyn Diptych , along with Warhol’s other artworks, embraced the notion of Modernism through their continuous reference to consumerism and commodification. Additionally, the advancement of technology is demonstrated through the method of production chosen, with Warhol demonstrating the influence that pop culture held over society at the time.

Modernism into Postmodernism

While some art historians believe that Modernist art principles have lived on into the current 21 st century, others have stated that they evolved into a movement now known as Postmodernism. This movement was said to symbolize an intentional departure from the Modernist values that had previously guided artistic creation and involved a wider range of approaches in art such as visual art, literature, design, and other avenues.

Although existing as a new form of art at the time, Modernism eventually went on to be seen in all the institutions against which it initially rebelled. This led to the development of Postmodernism, which sought to break the established rules about style and worked to introduce even more freedom into the creation of art.

Postmodernism was defined by attitudes of incredulity and irony, as it blatantly dismissed the idea that art or life had any intrinsic value. Postmodernism began to emerge in the 1980s and 1990s and criticized concepts such as reality, human nature, rationale, science, morality, and social progress.

Artists within Postmodernism began to experiment with digital, conceptual, and performance art, among other styles. Postmodernism aimed to surpass the limits set by Modernism and went on to pick apart Modern Art’s grand narrative so as to investigate cultural codes, politics, and social ideology in their immediate context.

It was this engagement with notions of the surrounding world that differentiated Postmodern Art from Modern Art, as well as appointing Postmodernism as a unique factor within the developing Contemporary Art . Postmodernism went on to explore several movements, including Conceptual Art , Feminist Art, Installation Art, and Performance Art.

Modernism was a period of art that encapsulated a variety of different art movements under the same title. Modernists attempted to reflect society exactly as they perceived it and made use of various styles that could adequately capture their thoughts and feelings. Thus, Modern Art existed as a period of great experimentation and rebellion, as the traditional aspects previously dictating artistic creation were rejected in favor of the techniques emerging from the rapidly developing industrialized world.

Take a look at our Modernism Art webstory here!

Isabella studied at the University of Cape Town in South Africa and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts majoring in English Literature & Language and Psychology. Throughout her undergraduate years, she took Art History as an additional subject and absolutely loved it. Building on from her art history knowledge that began in high school, art has always been a particular area of fascination for her. From learning about artworks previously unknown to her, or sharpening her existing understanding of specific works, the ability to continue learning within this interesting sphere excites her greatly.

Her focal points of interest in art history encompass profiling specific artists and art movements, as it is these areas where she is able to really dig deep into the rich narrative of the art world. Additionally, she particularly enjoys exploring the different artistic styles of the 20 th century, as well as the important impact that female artists have had on the development of art history.

Learn more about Isabella Meyer and the Art in Context Team .

Cite this Article

Isabella, Meyer, “Modern Art – An Exploration of the 20th-Century Modernist Movement.” Art in Context. April 28, 2021. URL: https://artincontext.org/modern-art/

Meyer, I. (2021, 28 April). Modern Art – An Exploration of the 20th-Century Modernist Movement. Art in Context. https://artincontext.org/modern-art/

Meyer, Isabella. “Modern Art – An Exploration of the 20th-Century Modernist Movement.” Art in Context , April 28, 2021. https://artincontext.org/modern-art/ .

Similar Posts

Appropriation in Art – Why Artists Use Existing Elements

What Is 3D Art? – The Different Aspects of Three-Dimensional Art

Minoan Art – The Most Notable Minoan Artifacts, Paintings, and Art

Tonalism – Exploring American Tonalism and the Paintings of the Style

Biblical Artifacts – Famous Holy Artifacts from the Bible

Harmony in Art – Looking at Different Examples of Harmony in Art

Leave a reply cancel reply.

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

The Most Famous Artists and Artworks

Discover the most famous artists, paintings, sculptors…in all of history! 

MOST FAMOUS ARTISTS AND ARTWORKS

Discover the most famous artists, paintings, sculptors!

Beyond the Mainstream: Essays on Modern and Contemporary Art

Abstract:  This selection of essays by a prominent art historian, critic and curator of modern art examines the art and artists of the twentieth century who have operated outside the established art world. In a lucid and accessible style, Peter Selz explores modern art as it is reflected, and has had an impact on, the tremendous transformations of politics and culture, both in the United States and in Europe. An authoritative overview of a neglected phenomenon, his essays explore the complex relationship between art at the periphery and art at the putative center, and how marginal art has affected that of the mainstream. Author:  Peter Selz Publication date:  January 28, 1998 Publication type:  Book

What's the Difference Between Modern and Contemporary Art?

Asking the elusive question.

By Google Arts & Culture

Landscape with Church (Landscape with Red Spots I) (1913) by Wassily Kandinsky Museum Folkwang

Modern, contemporary. Contemporary, modern. These terms are often used interchangeably. So is there actually any difference between them? And if so, why? One answer is simple: time. Modern art came before contemporary art. Most art historians and critics put the beginning of modern art in the West at around the 1860s, continuing up to the 1960s. Whereas, contemporary art means art made in the present day. But it can be hard to define what the ‘present day’ really means. Is that art made by living artists? Art made in our lifetimes? Or is it artists making work that references or engages with the culture of the present day? Perhaps even artwork made in a way that defines what the ‘present day’ is? So, the start date of contemporary art is, perhaps paradoxically, most often set back in the 1960s and 70s.

Musée d'Orsay, accrochage salle Van gogh (2012) by Musée d'Orsay, display in the Van Gogh room Musée d’Orsay, Paris

But as well as time difference, there are also other differences—in method, medium, and approach. And when we talk about modern and contemporary art, we’re also talking about lots of different movements and forms, from Post-Impressionism, to Dada, to Pop Art, to Installation Art.

Luncheon on the Grass (1863) by Edouard Manet Musée d’Orsay, Paris

So first let’s take a look at modern art . When we see Monet printed on tea towels and Cézanne on the cover of biscuit tins, it can be hard to imagine how radical and shocking this style of painting was in its day. Modern art and ‘modernism’ was a radical departure from the kinds of art that had gone before; its rejection of traditional perspective and subject matter was especially innovative.

Many art historians say that Édouard Manet was the first ‘modern’ artist—specifically his painting from 1863, Luncheon on the Grass . This is because the piece didn’t try to portray the scene in a way that looked ‘real’ and three dimensional. Manet’s figures look like they sit on top of one another; the woman bathing in a stream almost seems to be hovering over the other characters, as though she could fall off her perch and land in their laps at any moment. Manet was also criticized for the lack of shading between the light and dark areas of the picture and for the 'lowly' subject matter of his painting.

Window Opening on Nice (1928) by DUFY, Raoul Shimane Art Museum

This movement away from attempts to accurately represent the outside world ushered in a new era of art, which encompassed Impressionism , Post-Impressionism , Japonism , Fauvism , Cubism , Futurism , and Expressionism .

So how did we get from here, to contemporary art, with its piles of bricks and $10,000 'non-visible' artworks ? A kind of mini-turning point in the transition between modern and contemporary art came with the movement known as ' abstract expressionism ’, as this ushered in a movement away from the content of the picture, and towards a focus on the process of making the artwork itself. Take Jackson Pollock; his artworks were as much about the act of dripping paint and moving around the canvas, cigarette in mouth , as it was about the finished product per se. This movement was a small stepping stone on the road towards what we now think of as contemporary art.

Jackson Pollock by Hans Namuth Sound and Music

Wirtschaftswert Speisekuchen (1977/1977) by Joseph Beuys MUSEION

The sea-change came in the 1960s and 70s, with a revolution in the way we make, and think about, art. Much modernist art, including abstract expressionism, took itself very seriously, privileging the 'genius' of the artist. Pop art , minimalism , conceptual art , and performance art, however, turned this on its head, making artwork that looked at modernism's preconceptions about art with a wry smirk. Instead of beauty and form, artists were often now more interested in the concept behind the artwork, so art now took on lots of different forms—video, performance, installation—and often lived outside of galleries or traditional art spaces altogether.

Will Britain get through this recession (1992/1993) by Gillian Wearing British Council

An important part of contemporary art isn’t held in the brushstrokes of paint, or the marble of a sculpture; it isn’t even in the artwork at all, rather, it’s the viewer's impression of the artwork. Contemporary artworks often focus on the effect on, and experience of, an artwork’s viewer. To many critics and art theorists, we make the artwork what it is. In some cases, the artwork is only made up of the people who experience it, as with many performance and social action projects.

Jeremy Deller, Valerie's Snack Bar (2008) Hayward Gallery

A question that so often gets leveled at contemporary art is usually something along the lines of, “but is it art though?’ or, “my four-year-old could do that”. But, funnily enough, this shows that contemporary artists are doing their jobs properly. How? Because a lot of contemporary art is interrogating our conception of ‘aesthetics’. Aesthetics is the philosophical enquiry into what makes something art. So when we look at a pile of bricks, or a urinal in an art gallery, the artists are actually trying to make us question whether or not their work is art, and if it is, what makes it so.

Tomorrow (2013) UCCA Center for Contemporary Art

Contemporary art is often an experiment in pushing boundaries and asking questions about what art is and can be. So when you say, ‘is it art though?’, that’s exactly the kind of question the artist wants you to ask. Learn more about: - Modern art

Museum Folkwang

Phyllis tate: a quiet maverick, sound and music, henri matisse 1869-1954: a retrospective exhibition, hayward gallery, folk archive, british council, from station to the renovated musée d'orsay, musée d’orsay, paris, scenes in and around kyoto, shimane art museum, collecting for tomorrow, new directions: li ming, ucca center for contemporary art, vincent van gogh up close, northern innovation and the british music collection, anthony caro, fashion utopias: international fashion showcase 2016, collection of shimane art museum, museion #10yearson, peter wayne lewis & frederick j. brown.

Expression and modern art

Pablo Picasso, The Old Guitarist , 1903-04 oil on panel, 122.9 x 82.6 cm ( Art Institute of Chicago )

In his painting The Old Guitarist , Picasso made a series of choices to evoke feelings of pity. The guitarist is an old man, with gray hair. The fact that he is seated on the ground suggests that he is playing on the street for spare change. His emaciated state, torn clothes, and dejected posture show poverty and depression.

Furthermore, Picasso does not simply paint the old guitarist exactly as he would appear in real life; he deliberately distorts or exaggerates certain aspects of the scene in order to further intensify his intended expression. Most obviously, the entire work—except for the guitar—is in blue monochrome. This is clearly unrealistic, but it capitalizes on the melancholy emotional quality associated with that color.

Left: Edouard Manet, The Spanish Singer , 1860, oil on canvas, 58 x 45 cm ( The Metropolitan Museum of Art ); right: Pablo Picasso, The Old Guitarist , 1903-04 oil on panel, 122.9 x 82.6 cm ( Art Institute of Chicago )

When we compare Picasso’s painting to one of a very similar subject by Edouard Manet , we can see other strategic formal distortions. Picasso’s guitarist is in an improbable (if not impossible) pose that is cramped on all sides by the frame. He looks caged or trapped, where Manet’s guitarist, already in a more dynamic pose with his energy thrusting upward, has room to move within the frame. Also, where the form of Manet’s guitarist flows through organic, rounded curves, Picasso has exaggerated the hard angularity of his guitarist, who appears to be all jutting elbows, ankles, and tendons.

These two works exemplify the difference between naturalism and expression as artistic goals. One of Manet’s primary goals was an accurate depiction of the appearance of the guitarist, what art historians call naturalism. As to how to feel about him, we are left largely on our own: it is equally probable that a viewer could pity his evident poverty (examine his worn shoes, five o’clock shadow, and simple meal), or admire his bohemian freedom. Picasso, by contrast, paints his guitarist in an expressive manner, explicitly directing our feelings through his stylistic choices.

Left: Caravaggio, Deposition (or Entombment) , c. 1600-04, oil on canvas, 300 x 203 cm ( Vatican Museums ); right: J. M. W. Turner, T he Slave Ship , 1840, oil on canvas, 90.8 x 122.6 cm ( Museum of Fine Arts, Boston )

Picasso’s willingness to sacrifice naturalism in order to enhance the emotional impact of The Old Guitarist is what makes the painting exemplary of modern expression. Between the Renaissance and the nineteenth century (with some notable exceptions, such as El Greco ), artists would primarily evoke emotions in ways consistent with naturalism.

In his Deposition , the Baroque artist Caravaggio uses spotlighting, gritty earth colors, and body language to help express the emotional drama of the moment Christ’s body is laid in the tomb, but nothing is too distorted. The work remains naturalistic; you could see such a scene in real life. Romantic artist J. M. W. Turner pushes the boundaries more in his Slave Ship , with obviously painterly brushwork and very intense color, but the painting still looks plausibly like a storm at sea, with the whipping spray and blowing clouds backlit by the setting sun. The Baroque and Romantic periods both emphasized expression as an artistic goal, but both also largely stayed within the confines of naturalistic representation.

Left: Edvard Munch, The Scream , 1910, tempera on board, 66 x 83 cm ( The Munch Museum, Oslo ); right: Joan Mitchell, Rock Bottom , 1960-61, oil on canvas, 198.1 x 172.7 cm ( Blanton Museum, Austin, Texas )

Starting in the later nineteenth century, the expressionist art movements of the Modern period were increasingly willing to sacrifice naturalism in pursuit of more powerful expressive effects. Although Edvard Munch’s The Scream does include expressive body language in the foreground figure, the painting’s emotional charge is largely carried by its formal distortions. We react first of all to the expressive power of the work’s acrid color, vertiginous recession, and nauseatingly undulating composition, which have been exaggerated to the point where the depicted scene is no longer plausible. Expression has superseded naturalism as the main aesthetic goal. The Modern period saw an increasing recognition of the expressive power of form — color, line, shape, composition, and so on. It is no great conceptual leap from Munch to Joan Mitchell, for whom pure form conveys pure expression, as the name of the Abstract Expressionist movement suggests.

Ex-pression as non-rational

The prefix “ex” means “out,” so to ex-press literally means to push out, reconfirming the distinction between expression and representation or naturalism. In the latter, the motive for the work is out in the world, part of nature, and the artist just re-presents it. With ex-pression, the motive for the work is inside the artist, a mental or emotional state, and must be pushed out.

Expression in art history is generally associated with non-rational states of mind. It is not used to describe works that convey objective facts or for ideas arrived at through rational thought processes. In addition to emotions, the term expression is also used for works that convey spiritual content, such as Vasily Kandinsky’s apocalyptic paintings of the 1910s, and subconscious content, such as the Surrealist André Masson’s automatic drawings of the 1920s.

Left: Vasily Kandinsky, Small Pleasures , 1913, oil on canvas, 110.2 x 119.4 cm ( Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York ); right: André Masson, Automatic Drawing , 1924, ink on paper, 23.5 x 20.6 cm ( MoMA )

Because it pertains to non-rational states of mind, expression is often associated with spontaneous or even involuntary creative processes, both mental and manual. While naturalistic art is generally acknowledged to require intensive training, the skills associated with expressionist art are often said to be innate. Correspondingly, rapid or unrefined execution is frequently taken as a sign of expressive intensity, as though the artist’s hand were responding in automatic synchronization with the outpourings of the emotions or unconscious. This is not a universal stylistic characteristic of modern expressionist art, but it is common, as the examples above of Turner, Munch, Mitchell, Masson, and Kandinsky all demonstrate.

The stereotype of the expressionist artist

There is a stereotype of the expressionist artist that — not coincidentally — matches the qualities associated with expressionist art: almost pathologically irrational, careless of social conventions, and spontaneous to the point of being out of control. It seems that in order to express intensely, the artist has to live intensely. Many analyses of The Old Guitarist begin with the story of Picasso’s own adversities at the time, when he was living in poverty in Paris and had just lost a close friend to suicide. Similar stories of the Post-Impressionist Vincent van Gogh ’s madness, the German Expressionist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner ’s wartime trauma, and the American Neo-Expressionist Jean-Michel Basquiat ’s life on the streets are often used to validate the expressive authenticity of their art.

Left: Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear and Pipe , 1889, oil on canvas ( The Courtauld Gallery, London ); center: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Self-Portrait as a Soldier , 1915, oil on canvas, 69 x 61 cm ( Allen Memorial Art Museum ); right: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Self-Portrait , 1984, acrylic and lipstick on paper, 98.7 x 71.1 cm ( Gagosian )

We need to maintain a distinction between expression and self-expression, however. The term self-expression is reserved for works whose primary intent is to communicate something about the artist him- or herself. Most modern expressionist art had a broader goal than this. Even when modern artists drew from their own experiences, the intent was to create works that express something about the society or culture of their time, or about the wider human condition. Truly self-expressive works are of limited relevance to outside viewers; this is why art historians typically try to relate works to issues beyond the personal biography of the artists who created them.

Not all modern art is about expression

The concept of expression and the stereotype of the expressionist artist are probably the most commonly evoked justifications for modern art in the popular understanding. If the work does not look like reality, many people assume that it is because the artist was trying to express something, rather than depict something. However, expression of non-rational mental states is only one potential goal of art, and although it was a particularly prominent goal during the modern period, it is not the only motive for non-naturalistic art. We explore other broad answers to the question, ‘Why doesn’t modern art look like reality?’ in the essays The ambiguity of “realism” , Formalism I , and Formalism II .

Cite this page

Your donations help make art history free and accessible to everyone!

Modernism refers to a global movement in society and culture that from the early decades of the twentieth century sought a new alignment with the experience and values of modern industrial life. Building on late nineteenth-century precedents, artists around the world used new imagery, materials and techniques to create artworks that they felt better reflected the realities and hopes of modern societies.

Ben Nicholson OM 1934 project for Massine for Beethoven 7th Symphony Ballet (1934) Tate

© Angela Verren Taunt 2024. All rights reserved, DACS

The terms modernism and modern art are generally used to describe the succession of art movements that critics and historians have identified since the realism of Gustav Courbet and culminating in abstract art and its developments in the 1960s.

Although many different styles are encompassed by the term, there are certain underlying principles that define modernist art: A rejection of history and conservative values (such as realistic depiction of subjects); innovation and experimentation with form (the shapes, colours and lines that make up the work) with a tendency to abstraction; and an emphasis on materials, techniques and processes. Modernism has also been driven by various social and political agendas. These were often utopian, and modernism was in general associated with ideal visions of human life and society and a belief in progress.

By the 1960s modernism had become a dominant idea of art, and a particularly narrow theory of modernist painting had been formulated by the highly influential American critic Clement Greenberg. A reaction then took place which was quickly identified as postmodernism .

Key moments in modernism

Read the captions of the artworks below to find out some key developments of modernism

Alphonse Legros Le Repas des Pauvres (1877) Tate

Georges Braque Bottle and Fishes (c.1910–12) Tate

© ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2024

Kazimir Malevich Black Square 1913 Malevich’s black square: Kazimir Malevich painted his first Black Square in 1915. It is one of the seminal works of modern art, and of Western art generally, marking as it does the break between representational painting and abstract painting. Malevich declared the square a work of Suprematism, a movement which he proclaimed but which is associated almost exclusively with his own work

László Moholy-Nagy K VII (1922) Tate

Raoul Hausmann The Art Critic (1919–20) Tate

Salvador Dalí Metamorphosis of Narcissus (1937) Tate

© Salvador Dali, Gala-Salvador Dali Foundation/DACS, London 2024

Robert Morris Untitled (1965, reconstructed 1971) Tate

© ARS, NY and DACS, London 2024

Does this text contain inaccurate information or language that you feel we should improve or change? We would like to hear from you.

Related terms and concepts

Abstract art.

Abstract art is art that does not attempt to represent an accurate depiction of a visual reality but instead uses shapes, colours, forms and gestural marks to achieve its effect

Formalism is the study of art based solely on an analysis of its form – the way it is made and what it looks like

Significant form

Term coined by art critic Clive Bell in 1914 to describe the idea that the form of an artwork or forms within an artwork can be expressive, even if largely or completely divorced from a recognizable reality

In its specific sense realism refers to a mid nineteenth century artistic movement characterised by subjects painted from everyday life in a naturalistic manner; however the term is also generally used to describe artworks painted in a realistic almost photographic way

Sorry, no image available

Impressionism

Impressionism developed in France in the nineteenth century and is based on the practice of painting out of doors and spontaneously ‘on the spot’ rather than in a studio from sketches. Main impressionist subjects were landscapes and scenes of everyday life

Post-impressionism

Post-impressionism is a term which describes the changes in impressionism from about 1886, the date of last Impressionist group show in Paris

Fauvism is the name applied to the work produced by a group of artists (which included Henri Matisse and André Derain) from around 1905 to 1910, which is characterised by strong colours and fierce brushwork

Cubism was a revolutionary new approach to representing reality invented in around 1907–08 by artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. They brought different views of subjects (usually objects or figures) together in the same picture, resulting in paintings that appear fragmented and abstracted

Suprematism

Name given by the artist Kazimir Malevich to the abstract art he developed from 1913 characterised by basic geometric forms, such as circles, squares, lines and rectangles, painted in a limited range of colours

Constructivism

Constructivism was a particularly austere branch of abstract art founded by Vladimir Tatlin and Alexander Rodchenko in Russia around 1915

De Stijl was a circle of Dutch abstract artists who promoted a style of art based on a strict geometry of horizontals and verticals

Minimalism is an extreme form of abstract art developed in the USA in the 1960s and typified by artworks composed of simple geometric shapes based on the square and the rectangle

Postmodernism

Postmodernism can be seen as a reaction against the ideas and values of modernism, as well as a description of the period that followed modernism's dominance in cultural theory and practice in the early and middle decades of the twentieth century. The term is associated with scepticism, irony and philosophical critiques of the concepts of universal truths and objective reality.

Explore this term

Modernists don't die in ambleside.

Paul Farley

This article investigates the exile of German modernist artist Kurt Schwitters, who spent his final years in the Lake District painting the local landscape and winning prizes in provincial art exhibitions

A stubborn cornerstone at the onset of modernism

Nancy Ireson and Dexter Dalwood

Artist Dexter Dalwood and curator Nancy Ireson explore the enduring influence and legacy of self-taught artist Henri Rousseau

Kenneth Clark and the Death of Painting

Martin Hammer

For this research article, art historian Martin Hammer reviews Kenneth Clark’s public spat with Herbert Read about modern art, situating the exchange within discourses about modernism and politics. The spat erupted in successive issues of the Listener magazine in October 1935

‘Waste Dominion’, ‘White Warfare’, and Antarctic Modernism

Mark Rawlinson

This paper considers the historical coincidence of modernism and the heroic age of Antarctic exploration. In particular, it contextualises allusions to representations of Antarctic journeys in the writings of Henry James and T.S. Eliot, and reflects on the way these bear on the fate of the sublime in the twentieth century.

Sifting defunct modernism in search of something useful

Martin Herbert

Article exploring ‘new modernism’ – the recent trend for re-sifting and re-puporsing modernism for the twenty-first century

Something supernatural, this way comes

Michael Bracewell

Micheal Bracewell discusses the pervading influence of folklore, mythology, mysticism and the occult in the development of modernism and surrealism in Britain, in this Tate Etc. article

Modernism at Tate

Picasso & modern british art.

Major new exhibition at Tate Britain, Picasso and Modern British Art explores his extensive legacy and influence on British art

• Grants by Application
• Emergency Grants
• Grants by Nomination
• Grants to Artists
• Ellsworth Kelly Award
• COVID-19 Relief Grants
• FCA Emergency Grants COVID-19 Fund
• FCA COVID-19 Bridge Fund
• Artist Relief
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Music/Sound
• Performance Art/Theater
• Visual Arts
• Mixed Media
• Works on Paper
• Photography
• Artists A-Z
• Benefit Exhibitions

Publications

In 1999, a series of commissioned writings on contemporary art, published in  the Foundation's annual grants booklet , was inaugurated. The essays, by renowned arts writers, artists and friends of FCA, deal with a myriad of topics relevant to contemporary art, from questions on the nature of performance art to global climate change.

2018 commissioned essay author and 2012 grantee Kate Millett in her studio, New York, NY, 2000. Photo by Bettina Flitner.

2017 commissioned essay author and 1997 grantee Neil Greenberg in Solo for Lost and Found, at Danspace Project, New York, 2016. Photo by Ian Douglas.

2012 commissioned essay author and 1999 grantee Stephen Petronio, from the premiere of Beauty and the Brut, at The Joyce Theater, New York, 2008. Photo by Sarah Silver.

The Value of Art Why should we care about art?

One of the first questions raised when talking about art is simple—why should we care? Art in the contemporary era is easy to dismiss as a selfish pastime for people who have too much time on their hands. Creating art doesn't cure disease, build roads, or feed the poor. So to understand the value of art, let’s look at how art has been valued through history and consider how it is valuable today.

The value of creating

At its most basic level, the act of creating is rewarding in itself. Children draw for the joy of it before they can speak, and creating pictures, sculptures and writing is both a valuable means of communicating ideas and simply fun. Creating is instinctive in humans, for the pleasure of exercising creativity. While applied creativity is valueable in a work context, free-form creativity leads to new ideas.

Material value

Through the ages, art has often been created from valuable materials. Gold , ivory and gemstones adorn medieval crowns , and even the paints used by renaissance artists were made from rare materials like lapis lazuli , ground into pigment. These objects have creative value for their beauty and craftsmanship, but they are also intrinsically valuable because of the materials they contain.

Historical value

Artwork is a record of cultural history. Many ancient cultures are entirely lost to time except for the artworks they created, a legacy that helps us understand our human past. Even recent work can help us understand the lives and times of its creators, like the artwork of African-American artists during the Harlem Renaissance . Artwork is inextricably tied to the time and cultural context it was created in, a relationship called zeitgeist , making art a window into history.

Religious value

For religions around the world, artwork is often used to illustrate their beliefs. Depicting gods and goddesses, from Shiva to the Madonna , make the concepts of faith real to the faithful. Artwork has been believed to contain the spirits of gods or ancestors, or may be used to imbue architecture with an aura of awe and worship like the Badshahi Mosque .

Patriotic value

Art has long been a source of national pride, both as an example of the skill and dedication of a country’s artisans and as expressions of national accomplishments and history, like the Arc de Triomphe , a heroic monument honoring the soldiers who died in the Napoleonic Wars. The patriotic value of art slides into propaganda as well, used to sway the populace towards a political agenda.

Symbolic value

Art is uniquely suited to communicating ideas. Whether it’s writing or painting or sculpture, artwork can distill complex concepts into symbols that can be understood, even sometimes across language barriers and cultures. When art achieves symbolic value it can become a rallying point for a movement, like J. Howard Miller’s 1942 illustration of Rosie the Riveter, which has become an icon of feminism and women’s economic impact across the western world.

Societal value

And here’s where the rubber meets the road: when we look at our world today, we see a seemingly insurmountable wave of fear, bigotry, and hatred expressed by groups of people against anyone who is different from them. While issues of racial and gender bias, homophobia and religious intolerance run deep, and have many complex sources, much of the problem lies with a lack of empathy. When you look at another person and don't see them as human, that’s the beginning of fear, violence and war. Art is communication. And in the contemporary world, it’s often a deeply personal communication. When you create art, you share your worldview, your history, your culture and yourself with the world. Art is a window, however small, into the human struggles and stories of all people. So go see art, find art from other cultures, other religions, other orientations and perspectives. If we learn about each other, maybe we can finally see that we're all in this together. Art is a uniquely human expression of creativity. It helps us understand our past, people who are different from us, and ultimately, ourselves.

Reed Enger, "The Value of Art, Why should we care about art?," in Obelisk Art History , Published June 24, 2017; last modified November 08, 2022, http://www.arthistoryproject.com/essays/the-value-of-art/.

Advanced Composition Techniques

Let's get mathematical

Art History Methodologies

Eight ways to understand art

Categorizing Art

Can we make sense of it all?

By continuing to browse Obelisk you agree to our Cookie Policy

If you're seeing this message, it means we're having trouble loading external resources on our website.

If you're behind a web filter, please make sure that the domains *.kastatic.org and *.kasandbox.org are unblocked.

To log in and use all the features of Khan Academy, please enable JavaScript in your browser.

Europe 1800 - 1900

Course: europe 1800 - 1900   >   unit 1, becoming modern, urban culture, a middle-class audience, the avant-garde, want to join the conversation.

• Upvote Button navigates to signup page
• Downvote Button navigates to signup page
• Flag Button navigates to signup page

By Will Fenstermaker

June 14, 2017

There has never been a time when art critics held more power than during the second half of the twentieth century. Following the Second World War, with the relocation of the world’s artistic epicenter from Paris to New York, a different kind of war was waged in the pages of magazines across the country. As part of the larger “culture wars” of the mid-century, art critics began to take on greater influence than they’d ever held before. For a time, two critics in particular—who began as friends, and remained in the same social circles for much of their lives—set the stakes of the debates surrounding the maturation of American art that would continue for decades. The ideas about art outlined by Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg are still debated today, and the extent to which they were debated in the past has shaped entire movements of the arts. Below are ten works of criticism through which one can trace the mainstreaming of Clement Greenberg’s formalist theory, and how its dismantling led us into institutional critique and conceptual art today.

The American Action Painters

Harold Rosenberg

Harold Rosenberg, a poet who came to art through his involvement with the Artist’s Union and the WPA, was introduced to Jean-Paul Sartre as the “first American existentialist.” Soon, Rosenberg became a contributor to Sartre’s publication in France, for which he first drafted his influential essay. However, when Sartre supported Soviet aggression against Korea, Rosenberg brought his essay to Elaine de Kooning , then the editor of ARTnews , who ran “The American Action Painters” in December, 1952.

RELATED: What Did Harold Rosenberg Do? An Introduction to the Champion of “Action Painting”

Rosenberg’s essay on the emerging school of American Painters omitted particular names—because they’d have been unfamiliar to its original French audience—but it was nonetheless extraordinarily influential for the burgeoning scene of post-WWII American artists. Jackson Pollock claimed to be the influence of “action painting,” despite Rosenberg’s rumored lack of respect for the artist because Pollock wasn’t particularly well-read. Influenced by Marxist theory and French existentialism, Rosenberg conceives of a painting as an “arena,” in which the artist acts upon, wrestles, or otherwise engages with the canvas, in what ultimately amounts to an expressive record of a struggle. “What was to go on the canvas,” Rosenberg wrote, “was not a picture but an event.”

Notable Quote

Weak mysticism, the “Christian Science” side of the new movement, tends … toward easy painting—never so many unearned masterpieces! Works of this sort lack the dialectical tension of a genuine act, associated with risk and will. When a tube of paint is squeezed by the Absolute, the result can only be a Success. The painter need keep himself on hand solely to collect the benefits of an endless series of strokes of luck. His gesture completes itself without arousing either an opposing movement within itself nor the desire in the artist to make the act more fully his own. Satisfied with wonders that remain safely inside the canvas, the artist accepts the permanence of the commonplace and decorates it with his own daily annihilation. The result is an apocalyptic wallpaper.

‘American-Type’ Painting

Clement Greenberg

Throughout the preceding decade, Clement Greenberg, also a former poet, had established a reputation as a leftist critic through his writings with The Partisan Review —a publication run by the John Reed Club, a New York City-centered organization affiliated with the American Communist Party—and his time as an art critic with The Nation . In 1955, The Partisan Review published Greenberg’s “‘American-Type’ Painting,” in which the critic defined the now-ubiquitous term “abstract expressionism.”

RELATED: What Did Clement Greenberg Do? A Primer on the Powerful AbEx Theorist’s Key Ideas

In contrast to Rosenberg’s conception of painting as a performative act, Greenberg’s theory, influenced by Clive Bell and T. S. Eliot, was essentially a formal one—in fact, it eventually evolved into what would be called “formalism.” Greenberg argued that the evolution of painting was one of historical determinacy—that ever since the Renaissance, pictures moved toward flatness, and the painted line moved away from representation. Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso were two of the landmarks of this view. Pollock, who exhibited his drip paintings in 1951, freeing the line from figuration, was for Greenberg the pinnacle of American Modernism, the most important artist since Picasso. (Pollock’s paintings exhibited in 1954, with which he returned to semi-representational form, were regarded by Greenberg as a regression. This lead him to adopt Barnett Newman as his new poster-boy, despite the artist’s possessing vastly different ideas on the nature of painting. For one, Greenberg mostly ignored the Biblical titles of Newman’s paintings.)

Greenberg’s formalist theories were immensely influential over the subsequent decades. Artforum in particular grew into a locus for formalist discourse, which had the early effect of providing an aesthetic toolkit divorced from politic. Certain curators of the Museum of Modern Art, particularly William Rubin, Kirk Varnedoe, and to an extent Alfred Barr are credited for steering the museum in an essentially formalist direction. Some painters, such as Frank Stella , Helen Frankenthaler , and Kenneth Noland, had even been accused of illustrating Greenberg’s theories (and those of Michael Fried, a prominent Greenbergian disciple) in attempt to embody the theory, which was restrictive in its failure to account for narrative content, figuration, identity, politics, and more. In addition, Greenberg’s theories proved well-suited for a burgeoning art market, which found connoisseurship an easy sell. (As the writer Mary McCarthy said, “You can’t hang an event on your wall.”) In fact, the dominance of the term “abstract expressionism” over “action painting,” which seemed more applicable to Pollock and Willem de Kooning than any other members of the New York School, is emblematic of the influence of formalist discourse.

The justification for the term, “abstract expressionist,” lies in the fact that most of the painters covered by it took their lead from German, Russian, or Jewish expressionism in breaking away from late Cubist abstract art. But they all started from French painting, for their fundamental sense of style from it, and still maintain some sort of continuity with it. Not least of all, they got from it their most vivid notion of an ambitious, major art, and of the general direction in which it had to go in their time.

Barbara Rose

Like many critics in the 1950s and 60s, Barbara Rose had clearly staked her allegiance to one camp or the other. She was, firmly, a formalist, and along with Fried and Rosalind Krauss is largely credited with expanding the theory beyond abstract expressionist painting. By 1965, however, Rose recognized a limitation of the theory as outlined by Greenberg—that it was reductionist and only capable of account for a certain style of painting, and not much at all in other mediums.

RELATED: The Intellectual Origins Of Minimalism

In “ABC Art,” published in Art in America where Rose was a contributing editor, Rose opens up formalism to encompass sculpture, which Greenberg was largely unable to account for. The simple idea that art moves toward flatness and abstraction leads, for Rose, into Minimalism, and “ABC Art” is often considered the first landmark essay on Minimalist art. By linking the Minimalist sculptures of artists like Donald Judd to the Russian supremacist paintings of Kasimir Malevich and readymades of Duchamp, she extends the determinist history that formalism relies on into sculpture and movements beyond abstract expressionism.

I do not agree with critic Michael Fried’s view that Duchamp, at any rate, was a failed Cubist. Rather, the inevitability of a logical evolution toward a reductive art was obvious to them already. For Malevich, the poetic Slav, this realization forced a turning inward toward an inspirational mysticism, whereas for Duchamp, the rational Frenchman, it meant a fatigue so enervating that finally the wish to paint at all was killed. Both the yearnings of Malevich’s Slavic soul and the deductions of Duchamp’s rationalist mind led both men ultimately to reject and exclude from their work many of the most cherished premises of Western art in favor of an art stripped to its bare, irreducible minimum.

How I Spent My Summer Vacation

Philip Leider

Despite the rhetorical tendency to suggest the social upheaval of the '60s ended with the actual decade, 1970 remained a year of unrest. And Artforum was still the locus of formalist criticism, which was proving increasingly unable to account for art that contributed to larger cultural movements, like Civil Rights, women’s liberation, anti-war protests, and more. (Tellingly, The Partisan Review , which birthed formalism, had by then distanced itself from its communist associations and, as an editorial body, was supportive of American Interventionism in Vietnam. Greenberg was a vocal hawk.) Subtitled “Art and Politics in Nevada, Berkeley, San Francisco, and Utah,” the editor’s note to the September 1970 issue of Artforum , written by Philip Leider, ostensibly recounts a road trip undertaken with Richard Serra and Abbie Hoffman to see Michael Heizer’s Double Negative in the Nevada desert.

RELATED: A City of Art in the Desert: Behind Michael Heizer’s Monumental Visions for Nevada

However, the essay is also an account of an onsetting disillusion with formalism, which Leider found left him woefully unequipped to process the protests that had erupted surrounding an exhibition of prints by Paul Wunderlich at the Phoenix Gallery in Berkeley. Wunderlich’s depictions of nude women were shown concurrently to an exhibition of drawings sold to raise money for Vietnamese orphans. The juxtaposition of a canonical, patriarchal form of representation and liberal posturing, to which the protestors objected, showcased the limitations of a methodology that placed the aesthetic elements of a picture plane far above the actual world in which it existed. Less than a year later, Leider stepped down as editor-in-chief and Artforum began to lose its emphasis on late Modernism.

I thought the women were probably with me—if they were, I was with them. I thought the women were picketing the show because it was reactionary art. To the women, [Piet] Mondrian must be a great revolutionary artist. Abstract art broke all of those chains thirty years ago! What is a Movement gallery showing dumb stuff like this for? But if it were just a matter of reactionary art , why would the women picket it? Why not? Women care as much about art as men do—maybe more. The question is, why weren’t the men right there with them?

Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?

Linda Nochlin

While Artforum , in its early history, had established a reputation as a generator for formalist theory, ARTnews had followed a decidedly more Rosenberg-ian course, emphasizing art as a practice for investigating the world. The January 1971 issue of the magazine was dedicated to “Women’s Liberation, Woman Artists, and Art History” and included an iconoclastic essay by Linda Nochlin titled “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”

RELATED: An Introduction to Feminist Art

Nochlin notes that it’s tempting to answer the question “why have there been no great women artists?” by listing examples of those overlooked by critical and institutional organizations (a labor that Nochlin admits has great merit). However, she notes, “by attempting to answer it, they tacitly reinforce its negative implications,” namely that women are intrinsically less capable of achieving artistic merit than men. Instead, Nochlin’s essay functions as a critique of art institutions, beginning with European salons, which were structured in such a way as to deter women from rising to the highest echelons. Nochlin’s essay is considered the beginning of modern feminist art history and a textbook example of institutional critique.

There are no women equivalents for Michelangelo or Rembrandt, Delacroix or Cézanne, Picasso or Matisse, or even in very recent times, for de Kooning or Warhol, any more than there are black American equivalents for the same. If there actually were large numbers of “hidden” great women artists, or if there really should be different standards for women’s art as opposed to men’s—and one can’t have it both ways—then what are feminists fighting for? If women have in fact achieved the same status as men in the arts, then the status quo is fine as it is. But in actuality, as we all know, things as they are and as they have been, in the arts as in a hundred other areas, are stultifying, oppressive, and discouraging to all those, women among them, who did not have the good fortune to be born white, preferably middle class and above all, male. The fault lies not in our stars, our hormones, our menstrual cycles, or our empty internal spaces, but in our institutions and our education.

Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief

Thomas McEvilley

One of the many extrapolations of Nochlin’s essay is that contemporary museum institutions continue to reflect the gendered and racist biases of preceding centuries by reinforcing the supremacy of specific master artists. In a 1984 Artforum review, Thomas McEvilley, a classicist new to the world of contemporary art, made the case that the Museum of Modern Art in New York served as an exclusionary temple to certain high-minded Modernists—namely, Picasso, Matisse, and Pollock—who, in fact, took many of their innovations from native cultures.

RELATED: MoMA Curator Laura Hoptman on How to Tell a Good Painting From a “Bogus” Painting

In 1984, MoMA organized a blockbuster exhibition. Curated by William Rubin and Kirk Varnedoe, both of whom were avowed formalists, “‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern” collected works by European painters like Paul Gaugin and Picasso with cultural artifacts from Zaire, arctic communities, and elsewhere. McEvilley takes aim at the “the absolutist view of formalist Modernism” in which MoMA is rooted. He argues that the removal tribal artifacts from their contexts (for example, many were ritual items intended for ceremonies, not display) and placement of them, unattributed, near works by European artists, censors the cultural contributions of non-Western civilizations in deference to an idealized European genius.

The fact that the primitive “looks like” the Modern is interpreted as validating the Modern by showing that its values are universal, while at the same time projecting it—and with it MoMA—into the future as a permanent canon. A counter view is possible: that primitivism on the contrary invalidates Modernism by showing it to be derivative and subject to external causation. At one level this show undertakes precisely to coopt that question by answering it before it has really been asked, and by burying it under a mass of information.

Please Wait By the Coatroom

Not content to let MoMA and the last vestiges of formalism off the hook yet, John Yau wrote in 1988 an essay on Wifredo Lam, a Cuban painter who lived and worked in Paris among Picasso, Matisse, Georges Braque, and others. Noting Lam’s many influences—his Afro-Cuban mother, Chinese father, and Yoruba godmother—Yau laments the placement of Lam’s The Jungle near the coatroom in the Museum of Modern Art, as opposed to within the Modernist galleries several floors above. The painting was accompanied by a brief entry written by former curator William Rubin, who, Yau argues, adopted Greenberg’s theories because they endowed him with “a connoisseur’s lens with which one can scan all art.”

RELATED: From Cuba With Love: Artist Bill Claps on the Island’s DIY Art Scene

Here, as with with McEvilley’s essay, Yau illustrates how formalism, as adapted by museum institutions, became a (perhaps unintentional) method for reinforcing the exclusionary framework that Nochlin argued excluded women and black artists for centuries.

Rubin sees in Lam only what is in his own eyes: colorless or white artists. For Lam to have achieved the status of unique individual, he would have had to successfully adapt to the conditions of imprisonment (the aesthetic standards of a fixed tradition) Rubin and others both construct and watch over. To enter this prison, which takes the alluring form of museums, art history textbooks, galleries, and magazines, an individual must suppress his cultural differences and become a colorless ghost. The bind every hybrid American artist finds themselves in is this: should they try and deal with the constantly changing polymorphous conditions effecting identity, tradition, and reality? Or should they assimilate into the mainstream art world by focusing on approved-of aesthetic issues? Lam’s response to this bind sets an important precedent. Instead of assimilating, Lam infiltrates the syntactical rules of “the exploiters” with his own specific language. He becomes, as he says, “a Trojan horse.”

Black Culture and Postmodernism

Cornel West

The opening up of cultural discourse did not mean that it immediately made room for voices of all dimensions. Cornel West notes as much in his 1989 essay “Black Culture and Postmodernism,” in which he argues that postmodernism, much like Modernism before it, remains primarily ahistorical, which makes it difficult for “oppressed peoples to exercise their opposition to hierarchies of power.” West’s position is that the proliferation of theory and criticism that accompanied the rise of postmodernism provided mechanisms by which black culture could “be conversant with and, to a degree, participants in the debate.” Without their voices, postmodernism would remain yet another exclusionary movements.

RELATED: Kerry James Marshall on Painting Blackness as a Noun Vs. Verb

As the consumption cycle of advanced multinational corporate capitalism was sped up in order to sustain the production of luxury goods, cultural production became more and more mass-commodity production. The stress here is not simply on the new and fashionable but also on the exotic and primitive. Black cultural products have historically served as a major source for European and Euro-American exotic interests—interests that issue from a healthy critique of the mechanistic, puritanical, utilitarian, and productivity aspects of modern life.

Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power

Anna C. Chave

In recent years, formalist analysis has been deployed as a single tool within a more varied approach to art. Its methodology—that of analyzing a picture as an isolated phenomena—remains prevalent, and has its uses. Yet, many of the works and movements that rose to prominence under formalist critics and curators, in no small part because of their institutional acceptance, have since become part of the rearguard rather than the vanguard.

In a 1990 essay for Arts Magazine , Anna Chave analyzes how Minimalist sculpture possesses a “domineering, sometimes brutal rhetoric” that was aligned with “both the American military in Vietnam, and the police at home in the streets and on university campuses across the country.” In particular, Chave is concerned with the way Minimalist sculptures define themselves through a process of negation. Of particular relevance to Chave’s argument are the massive steel sculptures by Minimalist artist Richard Serra.

Tilted Arc was installed in Federal Plaza in lower Manhattan in 1981. Chave describes the work as a “mammoth, perilously tilted steel arc [that] formed a divisive barrier too tall to see over, and a protracted trip to walk around.” She writes, “it is more often the case with Serra that his work doesn’t simply exemplify aggression or domination, but acts it out.” Tilted Arc was so controversial upon its erecting that the General Services Administration, which commissioned the work, held hearings in response to petitions demanding the work be removed. Worth quoting at length, Chave writes:

A predictable defense of Serra’s work was mounted by critics, curators, dealers, collectors, and some fellow artists…. The principle arguments mustered on Serra’s behalf were old ones concerning the nature and function of the avant-garde…. What Rubin and Serra’s other supporters declined to ask is whether the sculptor really is, in the most meaningful sense of the term, an avant-garde artist. Being avant-garde implies being ahead of, outside, or against the dominant culture; proffering a vision that implicitly stands (at least when it is conceived) as a critique of entrenched forms and structures…. But Serra’s work is securely embedded within the system: when the brouhaha over Arc was at its height, he was enjoying a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art…. [The defense’s] arguments locate Serra not with the vanguard but with the standing army or “status quo.” … More thoughtful, sensible, and eloquent testimony at the hearing came instead from some of the uncouth:

My name is Danny Katz and I work in this building as a clerk. My friend Vito told me this morning that I am a philistine. Despite that I am getting up to speak…. I don’t think this issue should be elevated into a dispute between the forces of ignorance and art, or art versus government. I really blame government less because it has long ago outgrown its human dimension. But from the artists I expected a lot more. I didn’t expect to hear them rely on the tired and dangerous reasoning that the government has made a deal, so let the rabble live with the steel because it’s a deal. That kind of mentality leads to wars. We had a deal with Vietnam. I didn’t expect to hear the arrogant position that art justifies interference with the simple joys of human activity in a plaza. It’s not a great plaza by international standards, but it is a small refuge and place of revival for people who ride to work in steel containers, work in sealed rooms, and breathe recirculated air all day. Is the purpose of art in public places to seal off a route of escape, to stress the absence of joy and hope? I can’t believe this was the artistic intention, yet to my sadness this for me has become the dominant effect of the work, and it’s all the fault of its position and location. I can accept anything in art, but I can’t accept physical assault and complete destruction of pathetic human activity. No work of art created with a contempt for ordinary humanity and without respect for the common element of human experience can be great. It will always lack dimension.

The terms Katz associated with Serra’s project include arrogance and contempt, assault, and destruction; he saw the Minimalist idiom, in other words, as continuous with the master discourse of our imperious and violent technocracy.

The End of Art

Arthur Danto

Like Greenberg, Arthur Danto was an art critic for The Nation . However, Danto was overtly critical of Greenberg’s ideology and the influence he wielded over Modern and contemporary art. Nor was he a follower of Harold Rosenberg, though they shared influences, among them the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Danto’s chief contribution to contemporary art was his advancing of Pop Artists, particularly Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein .

In “The End of Art” Danto argues that society at large determines and accepts art, which no longer progresses linearly, categorized by movements. Instead, viewers each possess a theory or two, which they use to interpret works, and art institutions are largely tasked with developing, testing, and modifying various interpretive methods. In this way, art differs little from philosophy. After decades of infighting regarding the proper way to interpret works of art, Danto essentially sanctioned each approach and the institutions that gave rise to them. He came to call this “pluralism.”

RELATED: What Was the Pictures Generation?

Similarly, in “Painting, Politics, and Post-Historical Art,” Danto makes the case for an armistice between formalism and the various theories that arose in opposition, noting that postmodern critics like Douglas Crimp in the 1980s, who positioned themselves against formalism, nonetheless adopted the same constrictive air, minus the revolutionary beginnings.

Modernist critical practice was out of phase with what was happening in the art world itself in the late 60s and through the 1970s. It remained the basis for most critical practice, especially on the part of the curatoriat, and the art-history professoriat as well, to the degree that it descended to criticism. It became the language of the museum panel, the catalog essay, the article in the art periodical. It was a daunting paradigm, and it was the counterpart in discourse to the “broadening of taste” which reduced art of all cultures and times to its formalist skeleton, and thus, as I phrased it, transformed every museum into a Museum of Modern Art, whatever that museum’s contents. It was the stable of the docent’s gallery talk and the art appreciation course—and it was replaced, not totally but massively, by the postmodernist discourse that was imported from Paris in the late 70s, in the texts of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Jean-François Lyotard, and Jacques Lacan, and of the French feminists Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray. That is the discourse [Douglas] Crimp internalizes, and it came to be lingua artspeak everywhere. Like modernist discourse, it applied to everything, so that there was room for deconstructive and “archeological” discussion of art of every period.

Editor’s Note: This list was drawn in part from a 2014 seminar taught by Debra Bricker Balken in the MFA program in Art Writing at the School of Visual Arts titled Critical Strategies: Late Modernism/Postmodernism. Additional sources can be found here , here , here (paywall), and here . Also relevant are reviews of the 2008 exhibition at the Jewish Museum, “Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940–1976,” notably those by Roberta Smith , Peter Schjeldahl , and Martha Schwendener .

Related Articles

Know your critics.

Current Shows

Receive our award winning emails & enjoy 10% off your first purchase, thanks for signing up for our newsletter., that email has already been subscribed..

Now, personalize your account so you can discover more art you'll love.

a treasure trove of fine art from the world's most renowned artists, galleries, museums and cultural institutions. We offer exclusive works you can't find anywhere else.

through exclusive content featuring art news, collecting guides, and interviews with artists, dealers, collectors, curators and influencers.

authentic artworks from across the globe. Collecting with us means you're helping to sustain creative culture and supporting organizations that are making the world a better place.

with our art advisors for buying advice or to help you find the art that's perfect for you. We have the resources to find works that suit your needs.

INSIDER ACCESS TO THE WORLD'S BEST ART

Artspace offers you authentic, exclusive works from world-renowned artists, galleries, museums and cultural institutions. Collecting with us helps support creative culture while bringing you art news, interviews and access to global art resources.

COLLECT FROM 300+ GALLERIES & MUSEUMS

Sign in for personalized experiences, exclusive access to new works, special offers, invitations and features.

Collect the world's best

Sign up to view price and receive personalized experiences exclusive access to new works, special offers, invitations and features.

Thank you for signing up

Tailor your art, news & information to your preferences.

THANK YOU FOR SIGNING-UP TO ARTSPACE

Welcome to the world's premier online marketplace for fine art.

Enjoy 10% on your next purchase by using coupon code WELCOME10 at checkout.

THANK YOU FOR RETURNING TO ARTSPACE

The world's premier online marketplace for fine art.

Enjoy 10% on your next purchase by using coupon code PHAIDON10 at checkout.

Forgot your password?

Please enter your email below and we will send you a new password.

We've emailed you a new password. Sign In

Interested in Firstname Lastname?

To follow this artist and get updates on new work & exclusives, you must be signed into your Artspace account. Don't have one? Create one now.

You are now following first name last name

Interested in saving this work.

To save this work to your personal gallery and to access other features like this, you must be signed into your Artspace account.

prompt placeholder

The 10 Essays That Changed Art Criticism Forever

Share this article

Use this form to share great articles with your friends.

Enter your email

Enter your friend's email

Your message was sent

Thank you for sharing with your friends.

• Share on Facebook
• Share on Twitter
• Share on Pinterest

Your email has been submitted and a 10% off discount code sent to you. Next, personalize your Artspace experience by creating an account.

Please select the statement that best describes you:

• I am an existing collector.
• I am a new and aspiring collector.

Types of art that interest you

Select all that interest you:, partners you'd like to follow, enter or select all partners that interest you:.

Your preferences have been saved to your account. Update them at any time in your Preference Center

How it Works

How bidding works.

To place a bid, enter the maximum amount you are willing to pay for the work. Artspace will accept a bid at the next increment, and save any excess amount as a maximum bid. If you are outbid, we will continue bid on your behalf up to your maximum bid.

Bid Increments

Bidding increments increase at the following intervals:

• Below $400: $50
• Between $400 and $699: $100
• Between $700 and $1,499: $200
• Between $1,500 and $2,499: $300
• Between $2,500 and $4,999: $500
• Between $5,000 and $9,999: $1,000
• Between $10,000 and $19,999: $2,000
• Between $20,000 and $29,999: $3,000
• Between $30,000 and $49,999: $4,000
• Between $50,000 and $99,999: $5,000
• Above $100,000: $10,000

You will receive an email confirmation of your bid and when you are outbid.

If you are the winning bidder, you will be contacted 48 hours after of the close of the auction.

Maximum Bidding

Every bid submitted is treated as a maximum bid. You should always bid the maximum you are willing to spend for a work, though this does not necessarily mean you will pay that price. As the auction unfolds, we will increase your bid by increments to ensure you remain the highest bidder. If the winning amount is less than your maximum bid, you will pay the current increment. If your maximum bid no longer exceeds the current bid, you will receive an outbid notification email, and have the option to bid again.

In the case of multiple bidders placing the same maximum bid, the first person to place the maximum amount takes precedence as the highest bid until another bidder exceeds the maximum amount.

Buyer's Premium & Additional Charges

For Artspace Auctions winning bidders are charged a 15% Buyer's Premium on top of the hammer price. For Artspace Benefit Auctions, Buyer's Premiums are not applied. If they are, this will be clearly noted. Purchases made from all auctions, including benefit auctions, are subject to sales tax.

Winning bidders will be contacted within 48 hours to arrange shipping and to provide final price including commission, shipping, and taxes and duties when applicable. Promotion codes cannot be applied to auction works.

Auction Pre-Registration

Credit Card Validation

In order to secure a bid, please enter your credit card details below. We will not charge your card but only use it to validate your bid. We only need to validate your card once. You will be notified that you are the winning bidder before your card is charged, and you will have the option to change your payment method at that time.

Create an Artspace account

All our frames are manufactured in the USA, using eco-friendly & sustainably sourced engineered hardwood for durability and a uniform finish that is free of defects. Frames are available in Black or White Satin and Honey Pecan.

• White Satin
• Honey Pecan
• Black Satin

All prints are hinged to a conservation quality, acid-free and lignin-free Alpha Cellulose matboard, using an acid-free linen tape. The mat's surface paper is fade and bleed resistant and is attached to a conservation quality foam-core mounting board that will keep the work safe from deterioration over time. Artworks with a deckled or decorative edges will be floated on the matboard, with acrylic spacers to separate the art from the glazing. All mounting is fully reversible, without any potential damage to the art.

Acrylic Glazing

All of our frames come with picture quality .090 mm plexiglass, which blocks 66% of UV to prevent color fading from exposure to light, keeping your art protected for years to come. It is now considered the industry standard for artists, museums and galleries throughout the world.

For images up to 30" x 40"

• 1 1/4” wide, 3/4” deep, with a 2 1/2” wide mat.
• We generally leave 1/4” - 1/2” of paper showing around the image, to accommodate signatures and for visual appeal.

For sheet sizes larger than 30” x 40”

• Please contact an Artspace advisor for a custom quote.

Artists you'd like to follow

Enter or select all artists that interest you:.

How Van Gogh’s ‘Bedroom’ paved the way to Modern art

Tate’s show on expressionism reminds us that vincent was “the father of us all”.

Van Gogh’s The Bedroom (October 1888), the first version now in Amsterdam, and Wassily Kandinsky’s Bedroom ( Schlafzimmer ) (1909)

Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation); Lenbachhaus, Munich

Adventures with Van Gogh is a weekly blog by Martin Bailey, our long-standing correspondent and expert on the artist. Published every Friday, his stories range from newsy items about this most intriguing artist to scholarly pieces based on his own meticulous investigations and discoveries. © Martin Bailey

Among the paintings in Tate Modern’s exuberant show Expressionists: Kandinsky, Münter and the Blue Rider (until 20 October) is one—depicting an artist's bedroom—that was inspired by a Van Gogh. Kandinsky, the star of the Tate exhibition, was a co-founder of the Der Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider) group in Munich in 1914, and along with his colleagues was a great admirer of the Dutchman.

Until Van Gogh, artists’ bedrooms were an unusual subject to paint, but as a highly personal motif they offer considerable scope for artistic exploration. In our time, Tracey Emin has exploited this in her intimate and provocative installation My Bed (1988), featuring the detritus of her complicated life. Bedroom-related works reveal much about the personality and lifestyle of their artists.

Kandinsky had seen the first version of Van Gogh’s The Bedroom (October 1888) in an exhibition in Munich in 1909, a show which encouraged him to make even bolder use of colour.

Kandinsky’s Bedroom (1909) depicts a rather more comfortable abode than that of Van Gogh. In the painting Kandinsky’s window is uncovered, giving an airy feel, contrasting with the Dutchman’s shuttered room. The dining table with its pair of cups and slippers under the bed add a welcoming touch.

Wassily Kandinsky’s Bedroom ( Schlafzimmer ) (1909)

Lenbachhaus, Munich

Curiously, Van Gogh included two pillows in his painting, while Kandinsky depicts a single, enormous one. Despite his pair of pillows, Van Gogh had no partner in the Yellow House in Arles (although he would have liked to have had one). Kandinsky’s personal life was complicated: by 1909 he was still married to his cousin Anja Chimiakin, but they were separated and he was engaged to his fellow Blue Rider artist Gabriele Münter, with whom he was living in Munich.

Both paintings illustrate just how much Modern art had moved on in the intervening 21 years. Kandinsky’s colours are brighter and harsher than Van Gogh’s. The brushwork in the Kandinsky is even looser, a hallmark of the Blue Rider group. But the two artists, a generation apart, still had much in common: in depicting their bedrooms, their intention was to be expressive, not to provide an accurate representation.

Egon Schiele’s My Room ( Das Zimmer des Künstlers in Neulengbach ) (1911)

CC BY 4.0 Wien Museum, Vienna

Kandinsky was not the only Expressionist to be inspired by Van Gogh’s Bedroom. Egon Schiele, then a young Viennese artist, painted My Room (1911) two years after Kandinsky. Schiele was living at the time in Neulingbach, a small town 40 kilometres west of Vienna. (Although Schiele was an Expressionist, he was not a member of the Blue Rider, so is not represented in the current Tate show.)

Schiele, like Kandinsky, was a loyal devotee of Van Gogh. He had seen the second version of Van Gogh's The Bedroom in a 1909 exhibition in Vienna and had got to know its owner, the wealthy brewer Carl Reininghaus, whose home he visited.

Van Gogh’s The Bedroom (September 1889), the second version now in Chicago

Art Institute of Chicago. CC0 Public Domain Designation

In contrast with Van Gogh’s intention to create a restful scene, Schiele’s room seems deliberately disturbing, with its sharp, angular furniture, including an uncomfortable bed. The perspective presents a bird’s eye view and the stark, claustrophobic room appears akin to a prison cell. In muted colours, it is suggestive of a tortured psyche, quite different from Kandinsky’s rendering.

A year after painting his room, Schiele was in fact sent to prison for three weeks. In April 1912 he was arrested, charged with seducing a 12-year-old girl and allowing her to see erotic drawings. In the end he was found guilty only of the erotica charge. As he exercised in prison, his thoughts turned to Van Gogh’s painting The Prison Courtyard (February 1890), which was based on a print of Newgate Prison by Gustave Doré.

Both Kandinsky and Schiele, like most of their avant-garde colleagues, were inspired by a range of Van Gogh’s work, not simply his bedroom painting. Max Pechstein, one of the earliest Expressionists, spoke for them when he declared that “Van Gogh was the father of us all!”

Martin Bailey is the author of Van Gogh’s Finale: Auvers and the Artist’s Rise to Fame (Frances Lincoln, 2021, available in the UK and US ). He is a leading Van Gogh specialist and investigative reporter for The Art Newspaper . Bailey has curated Van Gogh exhibitions at the Barbican Art Gallery and Compton Verney/National Gallery of Scotland. He was a co-curator of Tate Britain’s The EY Exhibition: Van Gogh and Britain (27 March-11 August 2019).

Martin Bailey’s recent Van Gogh books

Bailey has written a number of other bestselling books, including The Sunflowers Are Mine: The Story of Van Gogh's Masterpiece (Frances Lincoln 2013, available in the UK and US ), Studio of the South: Van Gogh in Provence (Frances Lincoln 2016, available in the UK and US ), Starry Night: Van Gogh at the Asylum (White Lion Publishing 2018, available in the UK and US ) and Van Gogh’s Finale: Auvers and the Artist’s Rise to Fame  (Frances Lincoln 2021, available in the UK and US ). Bailey's Living with Vincent van Gogh: the Homes and Landscapes that Shaped the Artist (White Lion Publishing 2019, available in the UK and US ) provides an overview of the artist’s life. The Illustrated Provence Letters of Van Gogh has been reissued (Batsford 2021, available in the UK and US ).

To contact Martin Bailey, please email [email protected] . Please note that he does not undertake authentications.

Read more from Martin's Adventures with Van Gogh blog   here .

Purdue Online Writing Lab Purdue OWL® College of Liberal Arts

Writing Essays in Art History

Welcome to the Purdue OWL

This page is brought to you by the OWL at Purdue University. When printing this page, you must include the entire legal notice.

Copyright ©1995-2018 by The Writing Lab & The OWL at Purdue and Purdue University. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, reproduced, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed without permission. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our terms and conditions of fair use.

Art History Analysis – Formal Analysis and Stylistic Analysis

Typically in an art history class the main essay students will need to write for a final paper or for an exam is a formal or stylistic analysis.

A formal analysis is just what it sounds like – you need to analyze the form of the artwork. This includes the individual design elements – composition, color, line, texture, scale, contrast, etc. Questions to consider in a formal analysis is how do all these elements come together to create this work of art? Think of formal analysis in relation to literature – authors give descriptions of characters or places through the written word. How does an artist convey this same information?

Organize your information and focus on each feature before moving onto the text – it is not ideal to discuss color and jump from line to then in the conclusion discuss color again. First summarize the overall appearance of the work of art – is this a painting? Does the artist use only dark colors? Why heavy brushstrokes? etc and then discuss details of the object – this specific animal is gray, the sky is missing a moon, etc. Again, it is best to be organized and focused in your writing – if you discuss the animals and then the individuals and go back to the animals you run the risk of making your writing unorganized and hard to read. It is also ideal to discuss the focal of the piece – what is in the center? What stands out the most in the piece or takes up most of the composition?

A stylistic approach can be described as an indicator of unique characteristics that analyzes and uses the formal elements (2-D: Line, color, value, shape and 3-D all of those and mass).The point of style is to see all the commonalities in a person’s works, such as the use of paint and brush strokes in Van Gogh’s work. Style can distinguish an artist’s work from others and within their own timeline, geographical regions, etc.

Methods & Theories To Consider:

Expressionism

Instructuralism

Postmodernism

Social Art History

Biographical Approach

Poststructuralism

Museum Studies

Visual Cultural Studies

Stylistic Analysis Example:

The following is a brief stylistic analysis of two Greek statues, an example of how style has changed because of the “essence of the age.” Over the years, sculptures of women started off as being plain and fully clothed with no distinct features, to the beautiful Venus/Aphrodite figures most people recognize today. In the mid-seventh century to the early fifth, life-sized standing marble statues of young women, often elaborately dress in gaily painted garments were created known as korai. The earliest korai is a Naxian women to Artemis. The statue wears a tight-fitted, belted peplos, giving the body a very plain look. The earliest korai wore the simpler Dorian peplos, which was a heavy woolen garment. From about 530, most wear a thinner, more elaborate, and brightly painted Ionic linen and himation. A largely contrasting Greek statue to the korai is the Venus de Milo. The Venus from head to toe is six feet seven inches tall. Her hips suggest that she has had several children. Though her body shows to be heavy, she still seems to almost be weightless. Viewing the Venus de Milo, she changes from side to side. From her right side she seems almost like a pillar and her leg bears most of the weight. She seems be firmly planted into the earth, and since she is looking at the left, her big features such as her waist define her. The Venus de Milo had a band around her right bicep. She had earrings that were brutally stolen, ripping her ears away. Venus was noted for loving necklaces, so it is very possibly she would have had one. It is also possible she had a tiara and bracelets. Venus was normally defined as “golden,” so her hair would have been painted. Two statues in the same region, have throughout history, changed in their style.

Compare and Contrast Essay

Most introductory art history classes will ask students to write a compare and contrast essay about two pieces – examples include comparing and contrasting a medieval to a renaissance painting. It is always best to start with smaller comparisons between the two works of art such as the medium of the piece. Then the comparison can include attention to detail so use of color, subject matter, or iconography. Do the same for contrasting the two pieces – start small. After the foundation is set move on to the analysis and what these comparisons or contrasting material mean – ‘what is the bigger picture here?’ Consider why one artist would wish to show the same subject matter in a different way, how, when, etc are all questions to ask in the compare and contrast essay. If during an exam it would be best to quickly outline the points to make before tackling writing the essay.

Compare and Contrast Example:

Stele of Hammurabi from Susa (modern Shush, Iran), ca. 1792 – 1750 BCE, Basalt, height of stele approx. 7’ height of relief 28’

Stele, relief sculpture, Art as propaganda – Hammurabi shows that his law code is approved by the gods, depiction of land in background, Hammurabi on the same place of importance as the god, etc.

Top of this stele shows the relief image of Hammurabi receiving the law code from Shamash, god of justice, Code of Babylonian social law, only two figures shown, different area and time period, etc.

Stele of Naram-sin , Sippar Found at Susa c. 2220 - 2184 bce. Limestone, height 6'6"

Stele, relief sculpture, Example of propaganda because the ruler (like the Stele of Hammurabi) shows his power through divine authority, Naramsin is the main character due to his large size, depiction of land in background, etc.

Akkadian art, made of limestone, the stele commemorates a victory of Naramsin, multiple figures are shown specifically soldiers, different area and time period, etc.

Iconography

Regardless of what essay approach you take in class it is absolutely necessary to understand how to analyze the iconography of a work of art and to incorporate into your paper. Iconography is defined as subject matter, what the image means. For example, why do things such as a small dog in a painting in early Northern Renaissance paintings represent sexuality? Additionally, how can an individual perhaps identify these motifs that keep coming up?

The following is a list of symbols and their meaning in Marriage a la Mode by William Hogarth (1743) that is a series of six paintings that show the story of marriage in Hogarth’s eyes.

• Man has pockets turned out symbolizing he has lost money and was recently in a fight by the state of his clothes.
• Lap dog shows loyalty but sniffs at woman’s hat in the husband’s pocket showing sexual exploits.
• Black dot on husband’s neck believed to be symbol of syphilis.
• Mantel full of ugly Chinese porcelain statues symbolizing that the couple has no class.
• Butler had to go pay bills, you can tell this by the distasteful look on his face and that his pockets are stuffed with bills and papers.
• Card game just finished up, women has directions to game under foot, shows her easily cheating nature.
• Paintings of saints line a wall of the background room, isolated from the living, shows the couple’s complete disregard to faith and religion.
• The dangers of sexual excess are underscored in the Hograth by placing Cupid among ruins, foreshadowing the inevitable ruin of the marriage.
• Eventually the series (other five paintings) shows that the woman has an affair, the men duel and die, the woman hangs herself and the father takes her ring off her finger symbolizing the one thing he could salvage from the marriage.

Why Modern Art Isn’t Right

Even a king can’t get a good portrait in an age of equality.

The strange new official portrait of Charles III is an occasion for conservatives to ask once more, “What’s wrong with modern art?” And is there any alternative to it, if this painting is the best that even a king can get?

Portraiture and monarchy have little place in today’s world—neither is extinct, though each has been largely deprived of function. The king reigns but does not rule. Portraits have prestige but are no longer necessary for memorializing or promoting anyone’s appearance. Democracy and photography have taken over the work of the old forms.

So the king’s portrait evokes dilution. Charles floats as a head on a hardly visible body, an indistinct figure subsumed by red haze. The color is simple and striking, as it must be to catch the desensitized eye. A royal portrait has to compete with every other meme and image today. Only the bizarre has a chance of standing out.

Charles is a neo-traditionalist in certain respects. He dislikes modern architecture and urban planning, for one thing, and has championed the creation of Poundbury , a town being built in Dorset along New Urbanist lines. But his portrait is placeless and modern, recalling a controversial 1997 depiction of his mother by Justin Mortimer.

That painting, commissioned by the Royal Society of the Arts, had Elizabeth II’s head completely detached from her body, against a blank yellow background. The artist may have been channeling his own detachment from his subject: “I don’t have anything in common with her apart from being English,” he told the Wall Street Journal in 2011.

Alienation and crude technique, often coupled with shock or outright obscenity, are familiar characteristics of modern art. What once may have been jarring enough to be liberating has long become formulaic. But royal portraits are a stodgy enough medium that a work like Jonathan Yeo’s crimsoned King Charles can still provoke a few days’ headlines.

The classics of modernism can still stir a reaction as well. A friend recently wrote on Facebook about seeing a Jackson Pollock painting—perhaps better described as just Jackson Pollock paint—at a museum in Philadelphia. He asked the docent why Pollock’s splatters of color weren’t something that any visitor could drip on a canvas himself. He was told Pollock did it first, which might come as a surprise to parents of small children.

Cultural scholars of a free-market bent have ventured an explanation for the primitive, ugly, offensive, and kitschy character of so much modern art. In an age when any consumer can own the symphonies of Beethoven or take a cheap flight to see the Mona Lisa firsthand, tastemakers whose own tastes were shaped by anti-capitalist intellectuals came to see the enjoyment of beauty as dreadfully vulgar. Something had to distinguish persons of enlightened sensibility from the vile bourgeoisie. But what could the great and good buy that the public couldn’t copy?

The answer wasn’t something that the masses couldn’t afford but something that they wouldn’t want—unbeautiful and unpopular things, the less appealing or more transgressive the better. On this account, elite anxiety is the root of modernism at its worst. Off-putting works are to be cherished precisely for their power to repel the right sort of person.

The latest essay every day.

Whether or not the elite collectors of such works enjoy them in themselves, finding the pickled sharks of Damien Hirst pleasant to stare at, they can enjoy them for what they signify relative to cultural opponents. A man loves money not because he delights in the design of a hundred-dollar bill but because he can use the currency to get what he wants from other people, and that power in the abstract makes money desirable even apart from its use. Ridiculous or repulsive art is also something a collector can learn to love not for its immediate aesthetic qualities—which might be bitter even to progressive tastes—but for the social or anti-social magnetism it exhibits.

Alexis de Tocqueville might offer a different explanation, however. Our elites are out of touch with popular feelings, but they are not immune to the pressures of egalitarianism. How can one justify being rich or otherwise of high status in a society that prizes equality?

The wealthy don’t want to lose their wealth, but few would want to defend their unequal place by adopting a consciously aristocratic or selfish philosophy. That would be not only socially unacceptable but psychologically dissonant. Most people, rich or poor, want to be judged good by the standards of the society in which they live, not least in the court of their own conscience.

But to be an enemy of inequality can suffice as an alternative to actually being equal. This accounts for the perversity of much of the American political left, which is often wealthy or well-educated yet insists on pretending to champion the lowly and marginal. Hating traditional, even mythical, sources of inequality substitutes for loving one’s neighbor. In the world of art on either side of the Atlantic, egalitarian virtue takes the form of rejecting the past and its values. Monarchy and traditional portraiture were features of a West less egalitarian than today, and by opposing and parodying such things the artist places himself on the right side of history.

Although morally and formally transgressive work is usually promoted as having some power to jolt the soul, the underlying logic of such art today is about conformity, not novelty.

All things associated with the inegalitarian past must be shunned or inverted. That includes the orthodox religion and sexual morals of the past, but it also includes the forms and aesthetics of traditional art. That was the art of princes and lords, factory owners and fat-cat businessmen, all of whom were proud of their more-than-equal status, whether they inherited it or won it. Excellence in established techniques is itself a form of inequality, and that too should be depreciated. Thus the moral triumph of a Jackson Pollock dripwork, the very reason it deserves to be in a museum or sell for millions, is that it’s a perfectly egalitarian work which anyone can do, yet done by someone of unequal reputation who nonetheless has placed himself on the side of equality by rejecting the inegalitarianism of form and beauty.

This Tocquevillian perspective accounts for why the thrill of transgression never wears off for the transgressors, no matter how old and predictable “modern” art becomes. Although morally and formally transgressive work is usually promoted as having some power to jolt the soul—and perhaps early on it did—the underlying logic of such art today is about conformity, not novelty: fitting in with the elite opponents of the old elitism.

This also means that the prospects for conservative or right-wing art are meager. Conservatives characteristically cherish the forms and morality of the past. This places them, often unintentionally, on the side of inequality. Yet conservatives are not rebellious by nature, and they too are sons and daughters of an egalitarian society. The result is a dilemma: to imitate the forms of the past without the spirit that made its classics possible means to be condemned to producing only second-rate work, or worse. But to try to adopt the spirit of an earlier time means to become freakish in the here and now, and is such a psychologically shattering thing to do that hardly any sane person, let alone a conservative, would attempt it. Those who do usually wind up becoming harmless curiosities; a few turn out like Yukio Mishima.

Yet the Tocquevillian analysis may go too far. When photography replaced painting and other visual arts as the medium for conveniently capturing images of faces, places, and objects, the old arts had every reason to adopt new aesthetics that no camera could replicate. Presentation remained as a defining quality of art, even if its former function of representation had been usurped. Impressionism, surrealism, and other modern styles showed the world in ways that photographs typically could not. And the subjects of presentation eventually came to include the elements of which painted images are composed—shapes, colors, even splatters of paint. Other artists presented as subjects for attention objects that had never been considered in such a light. This could serve to detract from the traditional priorities of art, but in individual cases that need not be so. Modern art does reflect modern conditions, sometimes in ways that produce not alienation but contemplative detachment of a sort that Schopenhauer might endorse. The problem of modern art is not that it’s not traditional, but that it easily becomes the opposite of what it’s advertised as being: an orthodoxy and straitjacket rather than a release from thoughtless imitation.

Tocqueville advised those who were wise enough to recognize the virtues of aristocracy to find ways to supply those virtues, or similar ones, through democracy. The challenge of cultivating new art forms that can express beauty and excellence as well as the old ones did is a test of Tocqueville’s prescription. The late cultural critic Paul Cantor was optimistic that the worst and ugliest modernist literature of the twentieth century would soon be forgotten, and the best commercial literature of the era, such as Tolkien, would find a place in the canon a century from now. The Lord of the Rings is, of course, a monumentally popular bestseller about a world more medieval than modern, yet not without a certain noble egalitarianism. There are ways out of the impasse that the end of the old order has led to.

What that might look like on canvas is hard to say, but King Charles the Red isn’t it.

function copyToClipboard() { navigator.clipboard.writeText(window.location.href).then(function() { alert("Link copied to clipboard and ready to share."); }).catch(function(err) { console.error('Unable to copy link.', err); }); }

• The Monsters Liberalism Made David Gordon John Gray’s book The New Leviathans laments the destruction wrought by utopian fantasies.
• The Myth of “Indigenous” Cultures Gene Callahan Claiming the moral high ground over “settler colonialists” will never deliver true justice.
• Russell Kirk’s Gothic Ghost Daniel McCarthy Three decades after his death, the Sage of Mecosta lives on.
• A Lenin Century Christopher Sandford The Soviet Union is long gone, but the evil example of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov remains.
• Ray Bradbury, Sci-Fi Traditionalist Robert Dean Lurie The “poet of the pulps” was also a conservative of the heart.

Subscribe now for full access.

4 print issues/year for just $30

This article is for paid subscribers only.

Subscribe now for only $24.99/year

Already have an account? Log in

Most Popular

Japan’s Southern-Style Conservatism

Out of histories of defeat comes a sense of solidarity and respect for tradition.

Shogun: A Swashbuckling Show That Cares About History

An FX miniseries about ancient Japan raises the standard for mass-market television.

The Great Books of the Great War

Courage, faith, and even peace can be found in the literature of the conflict that shattered Western civilization.

Subscribe now to receive the print magazine for a full year, along with access to our online offerings – just $30.

Departments

Subscriptions

Founded in 1957 by Russell Kirk and Henry Regnery, Modern Age is a journal of conservative thought and a magazine devoted to culture, history, philosophy, and the ideas behind the great currents of modern life. Follow us on X @ModAgeJournal

Designed by Beck & Stone

• Share full article

Critic’s Notebook

At SFMOMA, Disability Artwork Makes History

After 50 years, Creative Growth in Oakland celebrates as its artists enter the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s collection.

At the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition, “Creative Growth: The House That Art Built,” a mannequin wears an untitled piece by William Scott from 2020 (acrylic paint on suit jacket and pants). Right, a wall-size photo of Creative Growth artists and staff members. Credit... Don Ross, via San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Supported by

By Jonathan Griffin

Reporting from Oakland, Calif.

• Published May 7, 2024 Updated May 8, 2024

In 1974, Florence Ludins-Katz and Elias Katz — she an artist, he a psychologist — turned the garage of their Berkeley home into an art studio for adults with developmental disabilities. Across California at that time, people with a range of disabilities were being deinstitutionalized, with little provision made for them after their release. The Katzes viewed art-making as a pathway not only to personal fulfillment for disabled people, but also to their integration into a society that valued their work.

Half a century on, Creative Growth — as the iconoclastic and influential studio in Oakland was named — is celebrating its 50th anniversary with an exhibition, “Creative Growth: The House That Art Built,” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

The exhibition draws from SFMOMA’s half-million-dollar acquisition of more than 100 Creative Growth artworks, the largest purchase by any American museum of the work of disabled artists. The museum acquired 43 more pieces from Creative Growth’s sister organizations in California, also founded by the Katzes: Creativity Explored in San Francisco and NIAD (Nurturing Independence Through Artistic Development) in Richmond.

Time was when such work would have been siloed in collections of “Outsider Art” or folk art. Over the past decade, however, it has been increasingly common to see art by developmentally disabled artists integrated, without contextual fanfare, into group shows or biennials. Cultural institutions, from the Museum of Modern Art to the Brooklyn Museum, have occasionally acquired examples of such work, although it is seldom exhibited except in special displays.

What is happening at SFMOMA is different. The acquisition is part of a partnership with Creative Growth through which the museum, led since 2022 by the director Christopher Bedford, pledges to introduce more art by developmentally disabled people from the three Bay Area organizations into its collection displays, and consequently into the canon of modernist art history.

Tom Eccles, executive director of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, calls the partnership “unprecedented.” The art historian Amanda Cachia — who writes on disability art — agrees, saying, “The canon as we know it is being reorganized to incorporate the voices of disabled artists who have long been excluded from these narratives. Museums have a long way to go in recognizing contemporary disability art.”

The partnership with SFMOMA, which began in late 2022, is a landmark achievement for Tom di Maria, who joined Creative Growth as its executive director in 1999 and has led the organization to become the most successful and widely recognized studio of its kind in the United States.

The exhibition “Creative Growth: The House That Art Built” opened April 5, showcasing nearly 70 standout works by 11 of the center’s hundreds of current and former artists, alongside a newly commissioned mural in the museum by the acclaimed Creative Growth artist William Scott.

The partnership constitutes the breach of the institution’s high walls that Creative Growth has been striving toward for years. While it may signal a turning point for disability arts, it also comes at a time of change for the organization, as di Maria, 65, looks to retirement and its staff has moved to unionize.

In 2019, di Maria tried to step back from his position as Creative Growth’s leader, first by sharing the position of director, then later moving into a director emeritus role. New appointments did not stay in leadership roles for long. The pandemic complicated matters further, interrupting Creative Growth’s operations. Since December, when the executive director, Ginger Shulick Porcella, left after 12 months, di Maria stepped in once again as interim executive director.

Di Maria tells me that this kind of leadership problem is common in art nonprofits, where long-term directors broadened their job descriptions as their organizations grew. “When they step away,” he said in an interview, “you’re looking for somebody that’s going to be the fund-raiser, the curatorial director, the HR person, the grant-writer, all in one.”

Under di Maria’s leadership, Creative Growth has evolved in ways that make it barely recognizable from the nonprofit he inherited. Its annual budget has risen to $3.4 million from $900,000 in 1999, about a third of which is raised from sales of the artists’ work. (Art sales totaled around $20,000 annually when he joined. When artists sell their work through Creative Growth, the organization takes a 50 percent cut.)

Di Maria has advanced the Katzes’ legacy by pushing to integrate the work made by Creative Growth artists into the mainstream commercial art world. During his tenure, artworks have been acquired by museums including the Pompidou Center in Paris, the Tate in London and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Two Creative Growth artists, Judith Scott and Dan Miller, exhibited in the 2017 Venice Biennale. Many others have had solo shows at respected commercial galleries across the world.

The sale of artworks by disabled people, di Maria says, is a means of “getting a seat at the table.” Collectors acquire often-inexpensive works, and become invested in the lives of the makers; dealers take notice, and put on shows; prices go up; museum boards promote the work they own to curators; work gets donated to museum collections. Once the art is inside the museum, the real work can begin: changing the way the public values and understands the lives of disabled artists.

On one level, the exhibition — organized by the SFMOMA curators Jenny Gheith and Nancy Lim — presents a social history of disability arts in the Bay Area and the Katzes’ groundbreaking initiatives. This story is told through a well-designed interpretive display in a new gallery called “Art in Your Life,” and in cases of ephemera such as fund-raising letters and event announcements that frame the exhibition in documentary terms.

On another level, however, it is a show of art as accomplished as any in the museum. The first gallery showcases work by three of Creative Growth’s pre-eminent figures, and one emerging talent. Dwight Mackintosh, who died in 1999, was one of the first artists from the organization to win international attention for his drawings. Using felt-tip and colored paint, in his looping hand, he drew groups of translucent figures often surrounded by a distinctive, intermittently legible script.

Mackintosh’s repetitive mark-making rhymes with the intensely overlaid words and shapes in drawings and paintings of Dan Miller, 62, and in an assemblage sculpture by Judith Scott, who died in 2005: a small chair wrapped with strips of fabric and twine, tying in other items including a basket and a bicycle wheel. Meanings are buried deeply in these works.

Do not confuse such practices with art therapy. Just like professional artists who work and rework a set of ideas and motifs, Mackintosh, Miller and Scott spent decades honing private languages, resulting in oeuvres that embody their powerful personal visions.

In that first gallery is also an arresting video by Susan Janow, 43, her first foray into the medium. In “Questions?” (2018), Janow stares into the camera, tight-lipped, while questions are asked of her (in a voice-over, also recorded by Janow), ranging from the banal — “Do you wear a watch?” — to the existential — “Do you trust others easily?” “Who do you miss?” “Where do you see yourself in 10 years?” Her art reveals that her interior life is shaped as much by inquiry as by confident conclusion.

Another highlight of the exhibition is a vivacious untitled abstract painting, from 2021, by the Berkeley-based Joseph Alef, 43. In an exhibition text, Alef explains that nonfigurative work makes it “easier to get all of the emotions out.” These texts admirably elucidate artists’ processes and approaches without disclosing the nature of their disabilities, which might risk skewing viewers’ interpretation of their art.

If some artists choose to share details of their lives through their art, that is their prerogative. Camille Holvoet, 71, who worked at Creative Growth until 2001, makes cheerfully frank, brightly colored drawings of her joys, anxieties and hopes. Created between 1987 and 1998, the pictures on view depict her medications, her fear of public transport, her experience of moving to a new group home, and — poignantly, in this context — a picture of a smiling woman next to stacks of cash and checks: “Making More as Mush Money as a Good Artist, Without No SSI Cuts and No Pay Tax.”

Ordinarily, I am not inclined toward such illustrative artwork. But Holvoet’s pictures achieve one of the most profound aims of the exhibition, and indeed of Creative Growth’s founders: to help disabled artists thrive as individuals with agency and potential. Whether an artist is using creative work to narrate their life story or to transcend their circumstances, making art is a deeply assertive act.

Exemplary is William Scott’s commissioned mural “Praise Frisco: Peace and Love in the City,” part of the museum’s “Bay Area Walls” series. Over the course of his artistic career, Scott, 59, has painted his vision of a utopian San Francisco of the future, a city he calls “Praise Frisco” which incorporates rejuvenated elements of his past. In his mural at SFMOMA, we see smiling, youthful versions of himself and his mother, alongside a spotless depiction of the Alice Griffith public housing development where he grew up. (Also present are green flying saucers, labeled “Wholesome Skyline Friendly Organizations.”)

Three days before this triumphant exhibition opened, di Maria received a letter from Creative Growth staff members announcing their intention to unionize. “Forming a union will help ensure more equitable hiring and pay practices, standardized benefits, greater protections, safer working conditions, and improved procedures around transparency and accountability,” it read.

Di Maria accepted unionization soon after, on April 11. In recent years, staff members at arts institutions across the country from museums to art schools have been unionizing. Sam Lefebvre, a part-time artist aide and member of the union Creative Growth United, told me that high turnover, owing to unsustainable working conditions, can negatively affect the artists, who may form close bonds with studio facilitators, and who often respond best to routine and stability.

At this moment of transition for both Creative Growth and SFMOMA, all eyes are on the future. Museums across the country are working to connect more deeply with their audiences, and by including and celebrating the work of disabled artists in their collections, they will better reflect the lives and experiences of all their visitors.

“One in four people in the United States identifies with disability,” the scholar Jessica Cooley, who writes on disability arts and museum studies, said in an interview. “Disability art and artists are already everywhere, in every collection, making incredible impacts on the art world.” SFMOMA’s partnership with Creative Growth can be seen just as an acknowledgment of the contributions disabled artists have made to art history.

Advertisement

Visiting Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion? You must join the virtual exhibition queue when you arrive. If capacity has been reached for the day, the queue will close early.

Cecily Brown: Death and the Maid

Cecily Brown (b. 1969) transfixes viewers with sumptuous color, bravura brushwork, and complex narratives that relate to some of European painting’s grandest and most time-honored themes, including still life motifs and meditations on mortality through vanitas This intimate survey of the acclaimed British painter reexamines the work of an artist whose influential output references both modern heavyweights, such as Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, and Joan Mitchell, and Old Masters like Goya, Hogarth, Manet, and Rubens. The book features 21 paintings and 26 works on paper—drawings, watercolors, sketchbooks, and monotypes—that span the three decades of Brown’s career to date, including recently completed and never-before-published works. A conversation with the artist provides insight into her process and sources, while an insightful essay situates Brown in the lineage of the great artists of the last five hundred years.

Met Art in Publication

You May Also Like

Abstract Expressionism and Other Modern Works: The Muriel Kallis Steinberg Newman Collection in The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Abstract Expressionism: Works on Paper. Selections from The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Roof Garden Commission: Dan Graham

Charles Ray: Figure Ground

The Roof Garden Commission: Alex Da Corte: As Long as the Sun Lasts

Related content.

• Essay Art Nouveau
• Essay The Print in the Nineteenth Century
• Essay Symbolism
• Essay Édouard Manet (1832–1883)
• Essay Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) and Anthony van Dyck (1599–1641): Paintings
• Essay Nineteenth-Century French Realism
• Essay Jean Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806)
• Essay The Salon and the Royal Academy in the Nineteenth Century
• Essay The Aesthetic of the Sketch in Nineteenth-Century France
• Essay Women Artists in Nineteenth-Century France
• Essay Claude Monet (1840–1926)
• Essay Henri Matisse (1869–1954)
• Essay Impressionism: Art and Modernity
• Essay John Singer Sargent (1856–1925)
• Essay Lithography in the Nineteenth Century

Benjamin, Elizabeth, Ian Alteveer, and Adam Eaker. 2023. Cecily Brown: Death and the Maid . New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art.