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Modern Art 1880s - 1970s
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What is generally called the Modern art movement can be considered to date from the revolution in
art brought about by the French Impressionists painters during the second half of the 19th Century
and continuing in all its manifestations throughout close to a hundred years.
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The Driving Forces
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From Impressionism onwards the dramatic events of two world wars,
political and social upheavals, and scientific and technological advances were all mirrored in art
movements extending from Cubism, Fauvism and Expressionism to the Art Nouveau and Art Deco movements,
to Surrealism and Abstract. During and following WWII, with the emigration of many artists to the US,
New York became the new center for Abstract and Modern art. Pop Art and Op Art are Modern art movements
that were fundamentally American and British.
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Techniques and Materials
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One of the techniques which characterized "modern" art was the use
of oil paints in undiluted form and applying them "wet on wet" onto the canvas in a startling departure
from the classic tradition of applying multiple thin, semi transparent, layers and allowing each layer to
dry.
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Another technique was the manipulation of perspective, either
abandoning it altogether or overlaying multiple points of view in one composition. |
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The technique of using raw color and its juxtaposition on a
surface to create optical effects for their own sake is another characteristic of modern art. |
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Modern art was also characterized by the addition of materials
other than oil paint. The increased use of watercolors, inks, fillers to create texture, etching, wood
blocks and later stencils, acrylic paints, and collage all contributed to the "modern" methods of painting. |
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Modern art also found subjects in nature, in common people and
everyday events, in scientific and social developments, and in an interaction with other art disciplines
of each "modern era". Adoption of art forms and subjects of cultures foreign to the country in which the
art was being produced was also a "modern" development. |
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The Artist as Interpreter of Social Change
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While the Cubists were experimenting with de-structuring and
re-structuring color and line in France and the Expressionists were busy applying strong colors and heavy
brush strokes to inject intense feeling into their work in Germany, other "modern" movements were taking
place as reactions to the social and technological changes occurring throughout Europe and in Britain and
the US. |
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Art Nouveau was an international art movement that influenced
painting, printmaking, architecture, sculpture, jewelry and commercial design in the last two decades
of the 19th Century and first decade of the 20th. One of the most famous painters of that genre is
Gustav Klimt, Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907).
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The Cubists paved the way towards Abstract painting and the Art
Nouveau movement evolved into the Art Deco movement after WWII. |
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Wassily Kandinsky, who had been working at the turn of the century
with other Expressionists such as Paul Klee, Franz Marc, August Macke, Gabriele Münter, Alexei von
Jawlensky and Alfred Kubin in Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) movement, became the theorist of Abstract
painting around 1912. |
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Modern art in the US developed in several directions, with the
abstract works of Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock gaining fame alongside Andy Warhol and Roy
Lichtenstein's Pop Art - by definition a popular art accessible to everyone, and the antithesis of the
rarified "abstract art only understood by the initiated few". |
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Perhaps one of the most prolific and influential artists whose
work epitomizes what "modern" art encompassed was Henri Matisse (1869-1964) whose amazing output reflects
the evolution of artistic expression from his early expressionist masterpieces to the abstract paper cutouts
and stenciled figures of his final years. |
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Although the term "modern" will always cover a myriad of styles,
by the 1970s newer terms such as contemporary, post-modern, neo-realism, kinetic, neo-figurative, etc. were
necessary to describe the diverse expressions of artistic freedom enjoyed throughout most of the world
today. |
