Modern

Arts

20th
Century Arts
 Modern
• Refers to Art
works produced during the
approximate period 1860- 1970.
(19th cent. to the mid-20th cent. )
• Throwing out of the OLD, embracing of the NEW.
• There is more of EXPERIMENTATION in new ways
of seeing ideas about how art functions.
• Modern art was about the people , places and ideas
that the artist had DIRECT CONTACT WITH.
• Modern Art also witnessed the emergence of NEW
MEDIA, like photography.
 When did Modern Art
Begin?

Édouard Manet showed his painting

Le déjeuner sur l'herbe (Lunch
on the Grass) in the Salon des
Refusés in Paris.
 The World during 1860- 1970
1869 - Transcontinental Rail Service
Begun in the United States.
1871- Photographer W.H.
Jackson takes a number of
photographs on the Yellowstone
Expedition.
1872 – Yellowstone National
Park was established as the
first National Park in the
United States.
1876- Alexander Graham Bell made
the first successful telephone call,
saying, "Watson, come
here, I need you.“
1883-The Brooklyn Bridge was
opened with an enormous
celebration.
1896- The first modern Olympic
games, the idea of Pierre de
Coubertin, are held in Athens,
Greece.
 The World during 20’th Century
1900- Sigmund Freud
Publishes The Interpretation of
Dreams.
1912- the titanic sinks.
1914- World War 1 starts
1918-World War 1 end
1928- First Mickey Mouse
Cartoon
1938 - Superman First Appears in
Comic Books
1939- world war II starts
1940- Cartoon Character Bugs
Bunny Debuts in “A Wild Hare”
1945 – Hitler commits suicide.
World War II ends
1955- James Dean dies in car
accident.
1963 - Martin Luther King Jr.
Makes His "I Have a Dream"
Speech
1964- Beatles Become Popular in
U.S.
1969- Neil Armstrong Becomes
the First Man on the Moon
Nearly every phase of modern art
was initially greeted by the public
with ridicule, but as the shock
wore off, the various movements
settled into history, influencing and
inspiring new generations of
artists.

The Scream (1893)

by Edvard
Munch
Representational art that did not necessarily
rely on realistic depictions.

Impressionist artists moved from the studio to the

streets and countryside, painting en plein air.
The first modern art movement
loosened their brushwork and lightened their
palettes to include pure, intense colors.

They abandoned traditional linear perspective

and avoided the clarity of form.

records the effects of the massive mid-

nineteenth-century renovation of Paris.
Impression,
Sunrise
(1873),by
Claude
Monet
Paris Street,
Rainy Day
(1877)
by Gustave

Caillebotte
 Symbolism was both an artistic and a literary
movement that suggested ideas through symbols and
emphasized the meaning behind the forms, lines,
shapes, and colors.

Symbolism was both an artistic and a literary movement

that suggested ideas through symbols and emphasized to express psychological
the meaning behind the forms, lines, shapes, and colors. truth and the idea that
behind the physical world
lay a spiritual reality.
Symbolists combined religious mysticism, the perverse,
the erotic, and the decadent. Symbolist subject matter is
typically characterized by an interest in the occult, the
morbid, the dream world, melancholy, evil, and death.
Death and Masks
by James Ensor
Rejecting interest in depicting the observed world,
they instead looked to their memories and
emotions in order to connect with the viewer on
a deeper level.

Rather than merely represent their surroundings,

they relied upon the interrelations of color and
shape to describe the world around them.
Aimed at modernizing design, seeking to escape the
eclectic historical styles that had previously been popular.
movement that
Artists drew inspiration from both organic and geometric swept through
forms, evolving elegant designs that united flowing, the decorative
natural forms with more angular contours.
arts and
The desire to abandon the historical styles of the 19th
architecture
century was an important impetus
radical goal of separating color from its descriptive,
representational purpose and allowing it to exist on the
canvas as an independent element.

Color could project a mood and establish a structure The Fauves ("wild
within the work of art without having to be true to the beasts") were a
natural world. loosely allied group of
French painters with
shared
The artist's direct experience of his subjects, his interests.
emotional response to nature, and his intuition were all
more important than academic theory or elevated
subject matter.
 The Dance
(1909-1910)
by Henri

Matisse
 Henri Matisse
The Red Room (1908-1909)
by Henri Matisse is an
example of the artist’s
Fauvist style, which was
expressive and emotional.
The process Matisse used to
create this painting involved
constantly checking his
own reactions to the piece
unfolding before him as he
worked and continuing in
this manner until the
painting “felt” finished.
Art was now meant to come forth from within
the artist

meant to convey the turgid emotional state of

the artist reacting to the anxieties of the Emerged in
modern world.
Germany in
employed swirling, swaying, and exaggeratedly response to the
executed brushstrokes in the depiction of their
subjects.
widespread
anxiety.
With the turn of the century in Europe, shifts in
artistic styles and vision erupted as a response
to the major changes in the atmosphere of
society.
 Most Important Expressionist Art

Throughout his artistic career, Munch

focused on scenes of death, agony, and
anxiety in distorted and emotionally charged
portraits, all themes and styles that would
be adopted by the Expressionists.

The Scream (1893)

by Edvard Munch
Berlin Street Scene
(1913) by Ernest
Ludwig Kirchner
Analytic Cubism, in which forms seem to be
'analyzed' and fragmented

Synthetic Cubism, foreign materials are collaged

to the surface of the canvas as 'synthetic' signs
for depicted objects. Cubism was one of
the first truly
modern
It abandoned perspective, which artists had used movements to
to order space
emerge in art.
turned away from the realistic modeling of
figures
Les Demoiselles
d'Avignon, Pablo
Picasso (1907)
Guitare
et Verre
by
Gorges
Braque
Dada was born in 1915, more or less simultaneously in
Switzerland and the United States (specifically in Zurich and
New York)—two countries that were at this time neutral Dada’s aesthetics,
during the war.
marked by its
The movement reflected disgust at the horrors of the war and mockery of
disillusionment with the values of the society from which it materialistic and
had emerged. nationalistic
attitudes, proved a
Dada artists tried to shock people from complacency, and powerful
many of them abandoned conventional materials and influence on
techniques artists in many
cities
Celebes by Max
ernst (1921)
 Portrait du
Marquis de Sade
by Marcel
Duchamp
(1938)
Constructivists proposed to replace art's traditional
concern with composition with a focus on construction.

Objects were to be created not in order to express Constructivist art often aimed
beauty, or the artist's outlook, or to represent the to demonstrate how materials
world, but to carry out a fundamental analysis of the behaved
materials and forms of art, one which might lead to the
design of functional objects.

concerns with form and abstraction often seem tinged

with mysticism, Constructivism firmly embraced the
new social and cultural developments that grew out of
World War I
Column(1923) by Naum Gabo

Monument to the Third

International (1920), by Vladimir
Tatlin
powerfully influenced by Sigmund Freud, the
Surrealists believed the conscious mind
repressed the power of the imagination,
weighting it down with taboos.

Influenced also by Karl Marx, they hoped that

the psyche had the power to reveal the
artists who sought to channel the
contradictions in the everyday world and spur
unconscious as a means
on revolution.
to unlock the power of
the
Surrealists were interested in exposing the imagination.
complex and repressed inner worlds of
sexuality, desire, and violence, and interest in
these topics fostered transgressive behavior.
Son of Man
(1964) by
René
Magritte
The
Persisten
ce of
Memory
by
Salvador
Dali
a movement that they translated into a new style
fitted to the post-war mood of anxiety and trauma.

Their art was championed for being emphatically

American in spirit - monumental in scale, romantic in Vague umbrella term for any
mood, and expressive of a rugged individual freedom. painting or sculpture which
does not portray recognizable
Abstract were profoundly influenced by the style and by objects or scenes.
its focus on the unconscious.

It encouraged their interest in myth and archetypal

symbols.
Yellow Grey
Black by
Jackson
Pollock (1947)
Suprematism
by Kasimir
malevich
(1919)
Art that depends on movement for its effects

The Kinetic art movement represented a

revitalization of that tradition, by utilizing
mechanical or natural motion to bring about a new
"Just as one can compose
relationship between art and technology.
colors, or forms, so one can
compose motions.“
The Kinetic art movement represented a - Alexander
revitalization of that tradition, by utilizing Calder
mechanical or natural motion to bring about a
new relationship between art and technology.
Pop's reintroduction of identifiable imagery was a
major shift for the direction of modernism.

Pop artists celebrated commonplace objects and

people of everyday life, in this way seeking to elevate Pop art has become
popular culture to the level of fine art.
one of the most
the Pop art movement aimed to blur the boundaries recognizable styles of
between "high" art and "low" culture.
modern art.
Pop artists searched for traces of the same trauma in
the mediated world of advertising, cartoons, and
popular imagery at large.

Pop artists seemingly embraced the post-WWII

manufacturing and media boom.
Optical, art typically employs abstract patterns
composed with a stark contrast of foreground
and background - often in black and white for
maximum contrast - to produce effects that
confuse and excite the eye.

Op art seemed to supply a style that was highly Artists have been intrigued
appropriate to modern society.
by the nature of
The pinnacle of the movement's success was perception and by
1965, when the Museum of Modern Art
embraced the style with the exhibition The
optical effects and
Responsive Eye, which showcased 123 paintings manyillusions for
centuries.
and sculptures
Artists whose work depended heavily on
photographs, which they often projected onto
canvas allowing images to be replicated with
precision and accuracy.

Photorealists acknowledge the modern world's

mass production and proliferation of
photographs, and they do not deny their
dependence on photographs.
 Avant-garde
(art forms)
“ Ahead of its time”.
Is traditionally used
to describe any
artist, group or style,
which is considered
to be significantly
ahead of the
majority in its
technique, subject
matter, or
application.
That’s All Thank You
Referenc
e