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Modern art

Modern art

Overview


Modern art refers to artistic works produced during the period extending roughly from the 1860s to the 1970s, and denotes the style and philosophy of the art produced during that era. The term is usually associated with art in which the traditions of the past have been thrown aside in a spirit of experimentation. Modern artists experimented with new ways of seeing and with fresh ideas about the nature of materials and functions of art.
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Modern art refers to artistic works produced during the period extending roughly from the 1860s to the 1970s, and denotes the style and philosophy of the art produced during that era. The term is usually associated with art in which the traditions of the past have been thrown aside in a spirit of experimentation. Modern artists experimented with new ways of seeing and with fresh ideas about the nature of materials and functions of art. A tendency toward abstraction
Abstraction
Abstraction is the process or result of generalization by reducing the information content of a concept or an observable phenomenon, typically to retain only information which is relevant for a particular purpose. For example, abstracting a leather soccer ball to a ball retains only the information...

 is characteristic of much modern art. More recent artistic production is often called Contemporary art
Contemporary art
Contemporary art can be defined variously as art produced at this present point in time or art produced since World War II. The definition of the word contemporary would support the first view, but museums of contemporary art commonly define their collections as consisting of art produced since...

 or Postmodern art
Postmodern art
Postmodern art is a term used to describe an art movement which was thought to be in contradiction to some aspect of modernism, or to have emerged or developed in its aftermath. In general, movements such as Intermedia, Installation art, Conceptual Art and Multimedia, particularly involving video...

.

The notion of modern art is closely related to Modernism
Modernism
Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes both a set of cultural tendencies and an array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society in the late...

.

Roots in the 19th century


Although modern sculpture
Sculpture
Sculpture is three-dimensional artwork created by shaping or combining hard and/or plastic material, sound, and/or text and or light, commonly stone , metal, glass, or wood. Some sculptures are created directly by finding or carving; others are assembled, built together and fired, welded, molded,...

 and architecture
Architecture
For a topical guide to this subject, see Outline of architecture. Architecture is the art and science of designing and constructing buildings and other physical structures for human shelter or use....

 are reckoned to have emerged at the end of the nineteenth century, the beginnings of modern painting
Painting
Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . In art, the term describes both the act and the result, which is called a painting. Paintings may have for their support such surfaces as walls, paper, canvas, wood, glass, lacquer, clay or concrete...

 can be located earlier. The date perhaps most commonly identified as marking the birth of modern art is 1863, the year that Édouard Manet
Édouard Manet
Édouard Manet , 23 January 1832 – 30 April 1883, was a French painter. One of the first nineteenth century artists to approach modern-life subjects, he was a pivotal figure in the transition from Realism to Impressionism....

 exhibited his painting Le déjeuner sur l'herbe in the Salon des Refusés
Salon des Refusés
The Salon des Refusés, French for “exhibition of rejects” , is generally an exhibition of works rejected by the jury of the official Paris Salon, but the term is most famously used to refer to the Salon des Refusés of 1863....

in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital of France and the country's most populous city. It is situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

. Earlier dates have also been proposed, among them 1855 (the year Gustave Courbet
Gustave Courbet
Jean Désiré Gustave Courbet was a French painter who led the Realist movement in 19th-century French painting. The Realist movement bridged the Romantic movement , with the Barbizon School and the Impressionists...

 exhibited The Artist's Studio
The Artist's Studio
The Artist's Studio : A Real Allegory of a Seven Year Phase in my Artistic and Moral Life is an 1855 oil painting on canvas by Gustave Courbet. It is located in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, France....

) and 1784 (the year Jacques-Louis David
Jacques-Louis David
Jacques-Louis David was a highly influential French painter in the Neoclassical style, considered to be the preeminent painter of the era...

 completed his painting The Oath of the Horatii). In the words of art historian H. Harvard Arnason: "Each of these dates has significance for the development of modern art, but none categorically marks a completely new beginning .... A gradual metamorphosis took place in the course of a hundred years."

The strands of thought that eventually led to modern art can be traced back to the Enlightenment
Age of Enlightenment
The Age of Enlightenment, or simply The Enlightenment, is a term used to describe a time in Western philosophy and cultural life, centered upon the eighteenth century, in which reason was advocated as the primary source and legitimacy for authority....

, and even to the seventeenth century. The important modern art critic Clement Greenberg
Clement Greenberg
Clement Greenberg was an influential American art critic closely associated with Modern art in the United States...

, for instance, called Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant was an 18th-century German philosopher from the Prussian city of Königsberg...

 "the first real Modernist" but also drew a distinction: "The Enlightenment criticized from the outside ... . Modernism criticizes from the inside." The French Revolution
French Revolution
The French Revolution was a period of political and social upheaval and radical change in the history of France, during which the French governmental structure, previously an absolute monarchy with feudal privileges for the aristocracy and Catholic clergy, underwent radical change to forms based...

 of 1789 uprooted assumptions and institutions that had for centuries been accepted with little question and accustomed the public to vigorous political and social debate. This gave rise to what art historian Ernst Gombrich
Ernst Gombrich
Sir Ernst Hans Josef Gombrich, OM, CBE was an Austrian-born art historian who spent most of his working life in the United Kingdom...

 called a "self-consciousness that made people select the style of their building as one selects the pattern of a wallpaper."

The pioneers of modern art were Romantics
Romanticism
Romanticism is a complex artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Western Europe, and gained strength during the Industrial Revolution...

, Realists
Realism (visual arts)
Realism in the visual arts is a style that depicts the actuality of what the eyes can see. The term is used in different senses in art history; it may mean the same as illusionism, the representation of subjects with visual mimesis or verisimilitude, or may mean an emphasis on the actuality of...

 and Impressionists
Impressionism
Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement that began as a loose association of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence in the 1870s and 1880s...

. By the late 19th century, additional movements which were to be influential in modern art had begun to emerge: post-Impressionism
Post-Impressionism
Post-Impressionism is the term coined by the British artist and art critic Roger Fry in 1910 to describe the development of French art since Manet...

 as well as Symbolism
Symbolism (arts)
Symbolism was a late nineteenth-century art movement of French and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts. In literature, the movement had its roots in Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire...

.

Influences upon these movements were varied: from exposure to Eastern decorative arts, particularly Japanese printmaking
Japonism
Japonism, or Japonisme, the original French term, which is also used in English, is a term for the influence of the arts of Japan on those of the West...

, to the colouristic innovations of Turner
J. M. W. Turner
Joseph Mallord William Turner RA was an English Romantic landscape painter, watercolourist and printmaker, whose style is said to have laid the foundation for Impressionism. Turner was considered a controversial figure in his day, but is now regarded as the artist who elevated landscape painting...

 and Delacroix
Eugène Delacroix
Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix was a French Romantic artist regarded from the outset of his career as the leader of the French Romantic school...

, to a search for more realism
Realism (arts)
Realism in the visual arts and literature is the depiction of subjects as they appear in everyday life, without embellishment or interpretation...

 in the depiction of common life, as found in the work of painters such as Jean-François Millet
Jean-François Millet
Jean-François Millet was a French painter and one of the founders of the Barbizon school in rural France...

. The advocates of realism stood against the idealism
Idealism
Idealism is the philosophical theory that maintains that the ultimate nature of reality is based on mind or ideas. It holds that the so-called external or "real world" is inseparable from mind, consciousness, or perception...

 of the tradition-bound academic art
Academic art
Academic art is a style of painting and sculpture produced under the influence of European academies or universities.Specifically, academic art is the art and artists influenced by the standards of the French Académie des beaux-arts, which practiced under the movements of Neoclassicism and...

 that enjoyed public and official favor. The most successful painters of the day worked either through commissions or through large public exhibitions of their own work. There were official, government-sponsored painters' unions, while governments regularly held public exhibitions of new fine and decorative arts.

The Impressionists argued that people do not see objects but only the light which they reflect, and therefore painters should paint in natural light (en plein air)
En plein air
En plein air is a French expression which means "in the open air", and is particularly used to describe the act of painting outdoors.Artists have long painted outdoors, but in the mid-19th century working in natural light became particularly important to the Barbizon school and Impressionism...

 rather than in studios and should capture the effects of light in their work. Impressionist artists formed a group, Société Anonyme Coopérative des Artistes Peintres, Sculpteurs, Graveurs ("Association of Painters, Sculptors, and Engravers") which, despite internal tensions, mounted a series of independent exhibitions. The style was adopted by artists in different nations, in preference to a "national" style. These factors established the view that it was a "movement"
Art movement
An art movement is a tendency or style in art with a specific common philosophy or goal, followed by a group of artists during a restricted period of time, or, at least, with the heyday of the movement defined within usually a number of years.-The concept:...

. These traits—establishment of a working method integral to the art, establishment of a movement or visible active core of support, and international adoption—would be repeated by artistic movements in the Modern period in art.

Early 20th Century


Among the movements which flowered in the first decade of the 20th century were Fauvism
Fauvism
Les Fauves were a short-lived and loose grouping of early 20th century Modern artists whose works emphasized painterly qualities and strong colour over the representational or realistic values retained by Impressionism...

, Cubism
Cubism
Cubism was a 20th century avant-garde art movement, pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music and literature. The first branch of cubism, known as "Analytic Cubism", was both radical and influential as...

, Expressionism
Expressionism
Expressionism was a cultural movement originating in Germany at the start of the 20th-century as a reaction to positivism and other artistic movements such as naturalism and impressionism. It sought to express the meaning of "being alive" and emotional experience rather than physical reality...

, and Futurism
Futurism (art)
Futurism was an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy in the early 20th century. It was largely an Italian phenomenon, though there were parallel movements in Russia, England and elsewhere...

.

World War I
World War I
World War I , also known as the First World War, the Great War, and the War to End All Wars, was a global military conflict which involved most of the world's great powers, assembled in two opposing alliances: the Triple Entente and the Triple Alliance...

 brought an end to this phase but indicated the beginning of a number of anti-art
Anti-art
The term Anti-art refers to art which presents a challenge to the currently existing definition of art. It is a term that by wide consensus seems to have been coined by Marcel Duchamp. This would have been around the time that he began making readymades around 1913. Some still regard the readymades...

 movements, such as Dada
Dada
Dada or Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in Zürich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1922. The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature—poetry, art manifestoes, art theory—theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a...

, including the work of Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp was a French artist whose work is most often associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. Duchamp's output influenced the development of post-World War I Western art...

, and of Surrealism
Surrealism
Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....

. Artist groups like de Stijl
De Stijl
De Stijl , Dutch for "The Style", also known as neoplasticism, was a Dutch artistic movement founded in 1917. In a narrower sense, the term De Stijl is used to refer to a body of work from 1917 to 1931 founded in the Netherlands....

 and Bauhaus
Bauhaus
' is the common term for the ', a school in Germany that combined crafts and the fine arts, and was famous for the approach to design that it publicized and taught. It operated from 1919 to 1933....

 developed new ideas about the interrelation of the arts, architecture, design, and art education.

Modern art was introduced to the United States with the Armory Show
Armory Show

Many exhibitions have been held in the vast spaces of U.S. National Guard armories, but the Armory Show refers to the International Exhibition of Modern Art that was organized by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors and opened in New York City's 69th Regiment Armory, on...

 in 1913 and through European artists who moved to the U.S. during World War I
World War I
World War I , also known as the First World War, the Great War, and the War to End All Wars, was a global military conflict which involved most of the world's great powers, assembled in two opposing alliances: the Triple Entente and the Triple Alliance...

.

After World War II


It was only after World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global military conflict which involved a majority of the world's nations, including all great powers, organized into two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...

, however, that the U.S. became the focal point of new artistic movements. The 1950s and 1960s saw the emergence of Abstract Expressionism
Abstract expressionism
Abstract expressionism was an American post-World War II art movement. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve worldwide influence and put New York City at the center of the western art world, a role formerly filled by Paris....

, Color field painting, Pop art
Pop art
Pop art is a visual art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art challenged tradition by asserting that an artist's use of the mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture is contiguous with the perspective of fine art...

, Op art
Op art
Op art, also known as optical art, is a genre of visual art that makes use of optical illusions."Optical Art is a method of painting concerning the interaction between illusion and picture plane, between understanding and seeing." Op art works are abstract, with many of the better known pieces...

, Hard-edge painting
Hard-edge painting
Hard-edge painting is painting in which abrupt transitions are found between color areas. Color areas are often of one unvarying color. Color transitions often take place along straight lines, though curvilinear edges of color areas are also common...

, Minimal art, Lyrical Abstraction
Lyrical Abstraction
Lyrical Abstraction refers to two related but distinctly separate trends in Post-war Modernist painting;European Lyrical Abstraction born in Paris in 1945, and the French critic Charles Estienne created its name in 1946...

, FLUXUS
Fluxus
Fluxus—a name taken from a Latin word meaning "to flow"—is an international network of artists, composers and designers noted for blending different artistic media and disciplines in the 1960s. They have been active in Neo-Dada noise music and visual art as well as literature, urban planning,...

, Postminimalism
Postminimalism
Postminimalism is a term used in various artistic fields for work which is influenced by, or attempts to develop and go beyond, the aesthetic of minimalism...

, Photorealism
Photorealism
Photorealism is the genre of painting based on making a painting from a photograph. The term is primarily applied to paintings from the United States photorealism art movement that began in the late 1960s, early 1970s.-Style and history:...

 and various other movements. In the late 1960s and the 1970s, Land art
Land art
Land art, Earthworks, or Earth art is an art movement which emerged in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s, in which landscape and the work of art are inextricably linked. Sculptures are not placed in the landscape; rather the landscape is the very means of their creation...

, Performance art
Performance art
Performance art is art in which the actions of an individual or a group at a particular place and in a particular time constitute the work. It can happen anywhere, at any time, or for any length of time. Performance art can be any situation that involves four basic elements: time, space, the...

, Conceptual art
Conceptual art
Conceptual art is art in which the concept or idea involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns. Many of the works, sometimes called installations, of the artist Sol LeWitt may be constructed by anyone simply by following a set of written instructions...

, and other new art forms had attracted the attention of curators and critics, at the expense of more traditional media. Larger installations
Installation art
Installation art describes an artistic genre of site-specific, three-dimensional works designed to transform the perception of a space.Generally, the term is applied to interior spaces, whereas exterior interventions are often called Land art; however the boundaries between these terms overlap....

 and performances
Performance art
Performance art is art in which the actions of an individual or a group at a particular place and in a particular time constitute the work. It can happen anywhere, at any time, or for any length of time. Performance art can be any situation that involves four basic elements: time, space, the...

 became widespread.

Around that period, a number of artists and architects started rejecting the idea of "the modern
Modernism
Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes both a set of cultural tendencies and an array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society in the late...

" and created typically Postmodern
Postmodern art
Postmodern art is a term used to describe an art movement which was thought to be in contradiction to some aspect of modernism, or to have emerged or developed in its aftermath. In general, movements such as Intermedia, Installation art, Conceptual Art and Multimedia, particularly involving video...

 works.

By the end of the 1970s, when cultural critics began speaking of "the end of painting" (the title of a provocative essay written in 1981 by Douglas Crimp), new media art
New media art
New media art is a genre that encompasses artworks created with new media technologies, including digital art, computer graphics, computer animation, virtual art, Internet art, interactive art technologies, computer robotics, and art as biotechnology...

 had become a category in itself, with a growing number of artists experimenting with technological means such as video art
Video art

Video art is a type of art which relies on moving pictures and comprises video and/or audio data....

. Painting assumed renewed importance in the 1980s and 1990s, as evidenced by the rise of neo-expressionism
Neo-expressionism
Neo-expressionism was a style of modern painting and sculpture that emerged in the late 1970s and dominated the art market until the mid-1980s. Related to American Lyrical Abstraction, New Image Painting and precedents in Pop painting, it developed as a reaction against the conceptual and...

 and the revival of figurative painting
Figurative art
Figurative art, sometimes written as figurativism, describes artwork - particularly paintings and sculptures - which are clearly derived from real object sources, and are therefore by definition representational...

.

Art movements and artist groups


(Roughly chronological with representative artists listed.)

Modern art

19th century

  • Romanticism
    Romanticism
    Romanticism is a complex artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Western Europe, and gained strength during the Industrial Revolution...

     the Romantic movement - Francisco de Goya, J. M. W. Turner
    J. M. W. Turner
    Joseph Mallord William Turner RA was an English Romantic landscape painter, watercolourist and printmaker, whose style is said to have laid the foundation for Impressionism. Turner was considered a controversial figure in his day, but is now regarded as the artist who elevated landscape painting...

    , Eugène Delacroix
    Eugène Delacroix
    Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix was a French Romantic artist regarded from the outset of his career as the leader of the French Romantic school...

  • Realism
    Realism (visual arts)
    Realism in the visual arts is a style that depicts the actuality of what the eyes can see. The term is used in different senses in art history; it may mean the same as illusionism, the representation of subjects with visual mimesis or verisimilitude, or may mean an emphasis on the actuality of...

     - Gustave Courbet
    Gustave Courbet
    Jean Désiré Gustave Courbet was a French painter who led the Realist movement in 19th-century French painting. The Realist movement bridged the Romantic movement , with the Barbizon School and the Impressionists...

    , Camille Corot, Jean-François Millet
    Jean-François Millet
    Jean-François Millet was a French painter and one of the founders of the Barbizon school in rural France...

  • Impressionism
    Impressionism
    Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement that began as a loose association of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence in the 1870s and 1880s...

     - Edgar Degas
    Edgar Degas
    Edgar Degas[p] , born Hilaire-Germain-Edgar De Gas , was a French artist famous for his work in painting, sculpture, printmaking and drawing. He is regarded as one of the founders of Impressionism although he rejected the term, and preferred to be called a realist...

    , Édouard Manet
    Édouard Manet
    Édouard Manet , 23 January 1832 – 30 April 1883, was a French painter. One of the first nineteenth century artists to approach modern-life subjects, he was a pivotal figure in the transition from Realism to Impressionism....

    , Claude Monet
    Claude Monet
    Claude Monet also known as Oscar Claude Monet or Claude Oscar Monet giverny.org...

    , Camille Pissarro
    Camille Pissarro
    Camille Pissarro was a French Impressionist painter. His importance resides not only in his visual contributions to Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, but also in his patriarchal standing among his colleagues, particularly Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin.-Early life and work:Jacob-Abraham-Camille...

    , Alfred Sisley
    Alfred Sisley
    Alfred Sisley was an English Impressionist landscape painter who was born, and spent most of his life, in France. Sisley is generally recognized as the most consistent of the Impressionists in his dedication to painting landscape en plein air...

  • Post-impressionism
    Post-Impressionism
    Post-Impressionism is the term coined by the British artist and art critic Roger Fry in 1910 to describe the development of French art since Manet...

     - Georges Seurat, Paul Cézanne
    Paul Cézanne
    Paul Cézanne was a French artist and Post-Impressionist painter whose work laid the foundations of the transition from the 19th century conception of artistic endeavour to a new and radically different world of art in the 20th century...

    , Paul Gauguin
    Paul Gauguin
    Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin was a leading Post-Impressionist painter. His bold experimentation with colouring led directly to the Synthetist style of modern art while his expression of the inherent meaning of the subjects in his paintings, under the influence of the cloisonnist style, paved the way...

    , Vincent van Gogh
    Vincent van Gogh
    Vincent Willem van Gogh was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter whose work had a far reaching influence on 20th century art for its vivid colors and emotional impact. He suffered from anxiety and increasingly frequent bouts of mental illness throughout his life, and died largely unknown, at the age...

    , Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
    Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
    Henri Marie Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec-Monfa or simply Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was a French painter, printmaker, draftsman, and illustrator, whose immersion in the colourful and theatrical life of fin de siècle Paris yielded an œuvre of exciting, elegant and provocative images of the modern...

    , Henri Rousseau
    Henri Rousseau
    Henri Julien Félix Rousseau was a French Post-Impressionist painter in the Naive or Primitive manner. He was also known as Le Douanier after his place of employment...

  • Symbolism
    Symbolism (arts)
    Symbolism was a late nineteenth-century art movement of French and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts. In literature, the movement had its roots in Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire...

     - Gustave Moreau
    Gustave Moreau
    Gustave Moreau was a French Symbolist painter whose main focus was the illustration of biblical and mythological figures. As a painter of literary ideas rather than visual images, Moreau appealed to the imaginations of some Symbolist writers and artists, who saw him as a precursor to their...

    , Odilon Redon
    Odilon Redon
    Bertrand-Jean Redon, better known as Odilon Redon was a French Symbolist painter, printmaker, draughtsman and pastellist.-Life:...

    , James Ensor
    James Ensor
    James Sidney Edouard, Baron Ensor was a Belgian painter and printmaker, an important influence on expressionism and surrealism who lived in Ostend for almost his entire life. He was associated with the artistic group Les XX.-Biography:Ensor's father was of English extraction, and his mother was...

  • Les Nabis
    Les Nabis
    Les Nabis were a group of Post-Impressionist avant-garde artists who set the pace for fine arts and graphic arts in France in the 1890s. Initially a group of friends interested in contemporary art and literature, most of them studied at the private art school of Rodolphe Julian in Paris in the...

     - Pierre Bonnard
    Pierre Bonnard
    Pierre Bonnard was a French painter and printmaker, a founding member of Les Nabis.-Biography:Bonnard was born in Fontenay-aux-Roses. He led a happy and careless youth as the son of a prominent official of the French Ministry of War. At the insistence of his father, Bonnard studied law, graduating...

    , Edouard Vuillard
    Édouard Vuillard
    Jean-Édouard Vuillard was a French painter and printmaker associated with the Nabis.-Early years and education:...

    , Félix Vallotton
    Félix Vallotton
    Félix Edouard Vallotton was a Swiss painter and printmaker associated with Les Nabis. He was an important figure in the development of the modern woodcut.-Life and work:...

  • pre-Modernist Sculptors - Aristide Maillol
    Aristide Maillol
    Aristide Maillol or Aristides Maillol was a French Catalan sculptor and painter.-Biography:Maillol was born in Banyuls-sur-Mer, Roussillon. He decided at an early age to become a painter, and moved to Paris in 1881 to study art...

    , Auguste Rodin
    Auguste Rodin
    Auguste Rodin[p] was a French sculptor. Although Rodin is generally considered the progenitor of modern sculpture, he did not set out to rebel against the past...


Early 20th century (before WWI)

  • Art Nouveau
    Art Nouveau
    Art Nouveau is an international movement and style of art, architecture and applied art—especially the decorative arts—that peaked in popularity at the turn of the 20th century . The name 'Art nouveau' is French for 'new art'...

     & variants - Jugendstil, Modern Style, Modernisme
    Modernisme
    See also: ModernismModernisme also known, in English, as Catalan modernism, was the Catalan equivalent to a number of fin-de-siècle art movements, such as Symbolism, Decadence and Art Nouveau / Jugendstil, from roughly 1888 to 1911...

     - Aubrey Beardsley
    Aubrey Beardsley
    Aubrey Vincent Beardsley was an English illustrator and author. His emphasis of the erotic element is present in many of his drawings, but nowhere as boldly as in his illustrations for Lysistrata which were done for a privately printed edition at a time when he was totally out of favor with polite...

    , Alphonse Mucha, Gustav Klimt
    Gustav Klimt
    Gustav Klimt was an Austrian Symbolist painter and one of the most prominent members of the Vienna Secession movement. His major works include paintings, murals, sketches, and other art objects, many of which are on display in the Vienna Secession gallery...

    ,
  • Art Nouveau
    Art Nouveau
    Art Nouveau is an international movement and style of art, architecture and applied art—especially the decorative arts—that peaked in popularity at the turn of the 20th century . The name 'Art nouveau' is French for 'new art'...

     Architecture
    Architecture
    For a topical guide to this subject, see Outline of architecture. Architecture is the art and science of designing and constructing buildings and other physical structures for human shelter or use....

     & Design
    Design
    Design is the planning that lays the basis for the making of every object or system. It can be used both as a noun and as a verb and, in a broader way, it means applied arts and engineering . As a verb, "to design" refers to the process of originating and developing a plan for a product,...

     - Antoni Gaudí
    Antoni Gaudí
    Antoni Plàcid Guillem Gaudí i Cornet – in English sometimes referred to by the Spanish translation of his name, Antonio Gaudí...

    , Otto Wagner
    Otto Wagner
    Otto Koloman Wagner was an Austrian architect.Wagner was born in Penzing, a district in Vienna. He studied in Berlin and Vienna. In 1864, he started designing his first buildings in the historicist style...

    , Wiener Werkstätte
    Wiener Werkstätte
    Established in 1903, the Wiener Werkstätte was a production community of visual artists. The workshop brought together architects, artists and designers whose first commitment was to design art which would be accessible to everyone...

    , Josef Hoffmann
    Josef Hoffmann
    Josef Hoffmann was a Austrian architect and designer of consumer goods.- Biography :...

    , Adolf Loos
    Adolf Loos
    Adolf Loos was one of the most important and influential Austrian and Czechoslovak architects of European Modern architecture. In his essay Ornament and Crime he repudiated the florid style of the Vienna Secession, the Austrian version of Art Nouveau...

    , Koloman Moser
    Koloman Moser
    Koloman Moser was an Austrian artist who exerted considerable influence on twentieth-century graphic art and one of the foremost artists of the Vienna Secession movement and a co-founder of Wiener Werkstätte....

  • Cubism
    Cubism
    Cubism was a 20th century avant-garde art movement, pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music and literature. The first branch of cubism, known as "Analytic Cubism", was both radical and influential as...

     - Georges Braque
    Georges Braque
    Georges Braque[p] was a major 20th century French painter and sculptor who, along with Pablo Picasso, developed the art movement known as Cubism.-Youth:...

    , Pablo Picasso
    Pablo Picasso
    Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso was a Spanish painter, draughtsman, and sculptor. Commonly known simply as Picasso, he is one of the most recognized figures in 20th-century art...

  • Fauvism
    Fauvism
    Les Fauves were a short-lived and loose grouping of early 20th century Modern artists whose works emphasized painterly qualities and strong colour over the representational or realistic values retained by Impressionism...

     - André Derain
    André Derain
    André Derain was a French painter and co-founder of Fauvism with Henri Matisse.- Biography :Derain was born in 1880 in Chatou, Yvelines, Île-de-France, just outside Paris. In 1898, while studying to be an engineer at the Académie Camillo, he attended painting classes under Eugène Carrière, and...

    , Henri Matisse
    Henri Matisse
    Henri Matisse was a French artist, known for his use of colour and his fluid, brilliant and original draughtsmanship. He was a master draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but excelled primarily as a painter. Matisse is regarded, with Picasso, as the greatest artist of the 20th century...

    , Maurice de Vlaminck
    Maurice de Vlaminck
    Maurice de Vlaminck was a French painter. Along with André Derain and Henri Matisse he is considered one of the principal figures in the Fauve movement, a group of modern artists who from 1904 to 1908 were united in their use of intense color.-Life:Maurice de Vlaminck was born in Paris to a family...

  • Expressionism
    Expressionism
    Expressionism was a cultural movement originating in Germany at the start of the 20th-century as a reaction to positivism and other artistic movements such as naturalism and impressionism. It sought to express the meaning of "being alive" and emotional experience rather than physical reality...

     - Egon Schiele
    Egon Schiele
    Egon Schiele was an Austrian painter. A protégé of Gustav Klimt, Schiele was a major figurative painter of the early 20th century....

    , Oskar Kokoschka
    Oskar Kokoschka
    Oskar Kokoschka was an Austrian artist, poet and playwright best known for his intense expressionistic portraits and landscapes....

    , Edvard Munch
    Edvard Munch
    Edvard Munch was a Norwegian Symbolist painter, printmaker and an important forerunner of expressionistic art...

    , Emil Nolde
    Emil Nolde
    Emil Nolde was a German painter and printmaker. He was one of the first Expressionists, a member of Die Brücke, and is considered to be one of the great oil painting and watercolour painters of the 20th century. He is known for his vigorous brushwork and expressive choice of colors...

  • Futurism
    Futurism (art)
    Futurism was an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy in the early 20th century. It was largely an Italian phenomenon, though there were parallel movements in Russia, England and elsewhere...

     - Giacomo Balla
    Giacomo Balla
    -Biography:Born in Turin, in the Piedmont region of Italy, the son of an industrial chemist, as a child Giacomo Balla studied music.At 9, when his father died, he gave up music and began working in a lithograph print shop. By age twenty his interest in art was such that he decided to study painting...

    , Umberto Boccioni
    Umberto Boccioni
    Umberto Boccioni was a painter and a sculptor. Like other Futurists, his work centered on the portrayal of movement , speed, and technology. He was born in Reggio Calabria, Italy....

    , Carlo Carrà
    Carlo Carrà
    Carlo Carrà was an Italian painter, a leading figure of the Futurist movement that flourished in Italy during the beginning of the 20th century. In addition to his many paintings, he wrote a number of books concerning art. He was long a teacher in the city of Milan.-Biography:Carrà was born in...

  • Die Brücke
    Die Brücke
    Die Brücke was a group of German expressionist artists formed in Dresden in 1905, after which the Brücke Museum in Berlin was named. Founding members were Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. Later members were Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein and Otto Mueller...

     - Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
    Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
    Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was a German expressionist painter and printmaker and one of the founders of the artists group Die Brücke or "The Bridge", a key group leading to the foundation of Expressionism in 20th century art. He volunteered for army service in the First World War, but soon suffered a...

  • Der Blaue Reiter
    Der Blaue Reiter
    Der Blaue Reiter was a group of artists from the Neue Künstlervereinigung München in Munich, Germany. Der Blaue Reiter was a German movement lasting from 1911 to 1914, fundamental to Expressionism, along with Die Brücke which was founded the previous decade in 1905.-History:Wassily Kandinsky,...

     - Wassily Kandinsky
    Wassily Kandinsky
    Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky was a Russian painter, and art theorist. He is credited with painting the first modern abstract works....

    , Franz Marc
    Franz Marc
    Franz Marc was one of the principal painters and printmakers of the German Expressionist movement. He was a founding member of "Der Blaue Reiter" , an almanac the name of which later became synonymous with the circle of artists collaborating in it.-Life and work:Franz Marc was born in 1880, in the...

  • Orphism - Robert Delaunay
    Robert Delaunay
    Robert Delaunay was a French artist who used Orphism, which is similar to abstract art, abstraction and cubism in his work. Delaunay concentrated on Orphism, while his later works were more abstract, reminiscent of Paul Klee. His key influence related to bold use of colour, and a clear love of...

    , Sonia Delaunay
    Sonia Delaunay
    Sonia Delaunay was a Jewish-French artist who, with her husband Robert Delaunay and others, cofounded the Orphism art movement, noted for its use of strong colours and geometric shapes. Her work extends to painting, textile design and stage set design...

    , Jacques Villon
    Jacques Villon
    Jacques Villon was a French cubist painter and printmaker.-Early life:Born Gaston Emile Duchamp in Damville, Eure, in the Haute-Normandie region of France, he came from a prosperous and artistically inclined family...

  • Photography
    Photography
    Photography is the process, activity and art of creating still or moving pictures by recording radiation on a sensitive medium, such as a photographic film, or an electronic sensor...

     - Pictorialism
    Pictorialism
    ‎Pictorialism is the name given to a photographic movement in vogue from around 1885 following the widespread introduction of the dry-plate process...

    , Straight photography
    Straight photography
    Pure photography refers to photography that attempts to depict a scene as realistically and objectively as permitted by the medium, renouncing the use of manipulation.Founded in 1932, Group f/64 who championed purist photography, had this to say:...

  • Post-Impressionism
    Post-Impressionism
    Post-Impressionism is the term coined by the British artist and art critic Roger Fry in 1910 to describe the development of French art since Manet...

     - Emily Carr
    Emily Carr
    Emily Carr was a Canadian artist and writer heavily inspired by the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast...

  • Pre-Surrealism
    Surrealism
    Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....

     - Giorgio de Chirico
    Giorgio de Chirico
    Giorgio de Chirico was a pre-Surrealist and then Surrealist Greek-Italian painter born in Volos, Greece, to a Genovese mother and a Sicilian father. He founded the scuola metafisica art movement...

    , Marc Chagall
    Marc Chagall
    Marc Chagall ; [shuh-GAHL] , was a Russian-French artist, associated with several key art movements and was one of the most successful artists of the twentieth century. He forged a unique career in virtually every artistic medium, including paintings, book illustrations, stained glass, stage sets,...

  • Russian avant-garde
    Russian avant-garde
    The Russian avant-garde is an umbrella term used to define the large, influential wave of modern art that flourished in Russia approximately 1890 to 1930 - although some place its beginning as early as 1850 and its end as late as 1960...

     - Kasimir Malevich, Natalia Goncharova
    Natalia Goncharova
    Natalia Sergeevna Goncharova was a Russian avant-garde artist , painter, costume designer, writer, illustrator, and set designer. Her great-aunt was Natalia Pushkina, wife of the poet Alexander Pushkin....

    , Mikhail Larionov
    Mikhail Larionov
    Mikhail Fyodorovich Larionov was an avant-garde Russian painter.-Life and work:...

  • Sculpture
    Sculpture
    Sculpture is three-dimensional artwork created by shaping or combining hard and/or plastic material, sound, and/or text and or light, commonly stone , metal, glass, or wood. Some sculptures are created directly by finding or carving; others are assembled, built together and fired, welded, molded,...

     - Pablo Picasso
    Pablo Picasso
    Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso was a Spanish painter, draughtsman, and sculptor. Commonly known simply as Picasso, he is one of the most recognized figures in 20th-century art...

    , Henri Matisse
    Henri Matisse
    Henri Matisse was a French artist, known for his use of colour and his fluid, brilliant and original draughtsmanship. He was a master draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but excelled primarily as a painter. Matisse is regarded, with Picasso, as the greatest artist of the 20th century...

    , Constantin Brancusi
    Constantin Brancusi
    Constantin Brâncuşi was an internationally renowned Romanian sculptor whose works, which blend simplicity and sophistication, led the way for numerous modernist sculptors.-Early years:...

  • Synchromism
    Synchromism
    Synchromism was an art movement founded in 1912 by American artists Stanton MacDonald-Wright and Morgan Russell.Synchromism is based on the idea that colour and sound are similar phenomena, and that the colours in a painting can be orchestrated in the same harmonious way that a composer arranges...

     - Stanton MacDonald-Wright
    Stanton Macdonald-Wright
    Stanton MacDonald-Wright , was a U.S. abstract painter. One of his significant achievements was co-founding the Synchromist movement in 1913....

    , Morgan Russell
    Morgan Russell
    Morgan Russell was a U.S. abstract painter. He was born and raised in New York City in 1886. He was along with artist Stanton Macdonald-Wright the founder of Synchromism an important modernist movement in early 20th century art.-Biography:Initially he studied architecture and after 1903 he became...

  • Vorticism
    Vorticism
    Vorticism was a short lived British art movement of the early 20th century. It is considered to be the only significant British movement of the early 20th century but lasted fewer than three years.-Origins:...

     - Wyndham Lewis
    Wyndham Lewis
    Percy Wyndham Lewis was an English painter and author . He was a co-founder of the Vorticist movement in art, and edited the literary magazine of the Vorticists, BLAST...


WWI to WWII

  • Dada
    Dada
    Dada or Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in Zürich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1922. The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature—poetry, art manifestoes, art theory—theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a...

     - Jean Arp
    Jean Arp
    Jean Arp / Hans Arp was a German-French sculptor, painter, poet and abstract artist in other media such as torn and pasted paper.Arp was born in Strasbourg...

    , Marcel Duchamp
    Marcel Duchamp
    Marcel Duchamp was a French artist whose work is most often associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. Duchamp's output influenced the development of post-World War I Western art...

    , Max Ernst
    Max Ernst
    Max Ernst was a German painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and poet. A prolific artist, Ernst is considered to be one of the primary pioneers of the Dada movement and Surrealism.-Early life:...

    , Francis Picabia
    Francis Picabia
    Francis Picabia was a French painter and poet.-Biography:Francis Picabia was born in Paris of a French mother and a Spanish-Cuban father who was an attaché at the Cuban legation in Paris. His mother died of tuberculosis when he was seven. His father was of aristocratic Spanish descent...

    , Kurt Schwitters
    Kurt Schwitters
    Kurt Hermann Eduard Karl Julius Schwitters was a German painter who was born in Hanover, Germany. Schwitters worked in several genres and media, including Dada, Constructivism, Surrealism, poetry, sound, painting, sculpture, graphic design, typography and what came to be known as...

  • Synthetic Cubism - Georges Braque
    Georges Braque
    Georges Braque[p] was a major 20th century French painter and sculptor who, along with Pablo Picasso, developed the art movement known as Cubism.-Youth:...

    , Juan Gris
    Juan Gris
    José Victoriano González-Pérez , better known as Juan Gris, was a Spanish painter and sculptor who lived and worked in France most of his life...

    , Fernand Léger
    Fernand Léger
    Joseph Fernand Henri Léger was a French painter, sculptor, and filmmaker.-Biography:Léger was born in the Argentan, Orne, Basse-Normandie, where his father raised cattle. Fernand Léger initially trained as an architect from 1897-1899 before moving in 1900 to Paris, where he supported himself as an...

    , Pablo Picasso
    Pablo Picasso
    Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso was a Spanish painter, draughtsman, and sculptor. Commonly known simply as Picasso, he is one of the most recognized figures in 20th-century art...

  • Pittura Metafisica - Giorgio de Chirico
    Giorgio de Chirico
    Giorgio de Chirico was a pre-Surrealist and then Surrealist Greek-Italian painter born in Volos, Greece, to a Genovese mother and a Sicilian father. He founded the scuola metafisica art movement...

    , Carlo Carrà
    Carlo Carrà
    Carlo Carrà was an Italian painter, a leading figure of the Futurist movement that flourished in Italy during the beginning of the 20th century. In addition to his many paintings, he wrote a number of books concerning art. He was long a teacher in the city of Milan.-Biography:Carrà was born in...

  • De Stijl
    De Stijl
    De Stijl , Dutch for "The Style", also known as neoplasticism, was a Dutch artistic movement founded in 1917. In a narrower sense, the term De Stijl is used to refer to a body of work from 1917 to 1931 founded in the Netherlands....

     - Theo van Doesburg
    Theo van Doesburg
    Theo van Doesburg was a Dutch artist, practicing in painting, writing, poetry and architecture...

    , Piet Mondrian
    Piet Mondrian
    Pieter Cornelis "Piet" Mondriaan, after 1912 Mondrian , was a Dutch painter.He was an important contributor to the De Stijl art movement and group, which was founded by Theo van Doesburg. He evolved a non-representational form which he termed Neo-Plasticism...

  • Expressionism
    Expressionism
    Expressionism was a cultural movement originating in Germany at the start of the 20th-century as a reaction to positivism and other artistic movements such as naturalism and impressionism. It sought to express the meaning of "being alive" and emotional experience rather than physical reality...

     - Egon Schiele
    Egon Schiele
    Egon Schiele was an Austrian painter. A protégé of Gustav Klimt, Schiele was a major figurative painter of the early 20th century....

    , Amedeo Modigliani
    Amedeo Modigliani
    Amedeo Clemente Modigliani was an Italian artist who worked mainly in France. Primarily a figurative artist, he became known for paintings and sculptures in a modern style characterized by mask-like faces and elongation of form...

    , Chaim Soutine
    Chaim Soutine
    Chaïm Soutine was a Jewish, expressionist painter from Belarus. He has been interpreted as both a forerunner of Abstract Expressionism and as a proponent of painting in the European tradition exemplified by the works of Rembrandt, Chardin, and Courbet.-Biography:Soutine was born in Smilavichy near...

  • New Objectivity
    New Objectivity
    The New Objectivity , was an art movement that arose in Germany in the early 1920s as an outgrowth of, and in opposition to, expressionism. The movement essentially ended in 1933 with the fall of the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Nazis to power...

     - Max Beckmann
    Max Beckmann
    Max Beckmann was a German painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor, and writer. Although he is classified as an Expressionist artist, he rejected both the term and the movement...

    , Otto Dix
    Otto Dix
    Wilhelm Heinrich Otto Dix was a German painter and printmaker. Noted for his ruthless and harshly realistic depictions of Weimar society and of the brutality of war, he, along with George Grosz, is widely considered one of the most important artists of the Neue Sachlichkeit.-Early life and...

    , George Grosz
    George Grosz
    George Grosz was a German artist known especially for his savagely caricatural drawings of Berlin life in the 1920s...

  • Figurative painting - Henri Matisse
    Henri Matisse
    Henri Matisse was a French artist, known for his use of colour and his fluid, brilliant and original draughtsmanship. He was a master draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but excelled primarily as a painter. Matisse is regarded, with Picasso, as the greatest artist of the 20th century...

    , Pierre Bonnard
    Pierre Bonnard
    Pierre Bonnard was a French painter and printmaker, a founding member of Les Nabis.-Biography:Bonnard was born in Fontenay-aux-Roses. He led a happy and careless youth as the son of a prominent official of the French Ministry of War. At the insistence of his father, Bonnard studied law, graduating...

  • American Modernism
    American modernism
    American modernism like modernism in general is a trend of thought that affirms the power of human beings to create, improve, and reshape their environment, with the aid of scientific knowledge, technology and practical experimentation, and is thus in its essence both progressive and optimistic...

     - Stuart Davis
    Stuart Davis (painter)
    Stuart Davis , was an early American modernist painter. He was well known for his Jazz influenced, proto pop art paintings of the 1940s and 1950s, bold, brash, and colorful.-Biography:...

    , Arthur G. Dove, Marsden Hartley
    Marsden Hartley
    Marsden Hartley was an American Modernist painter, poet, and essayist of the early 20th century. Hartley was born in Lewiston, Maine, USA, where his English parents had settled. He began his art training at the Cleveland Institute of Art after the family moved to Cleveland, Ohio, in 1892...

    , Georgia O'Keeffe
    Georgia O'Keeffe
    Georgia Totto O'Keeffe was an American artist. Born near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, O'Keeffe was a major figure in American art from the 1920s. She received widespread recognition for her technical contributions, as well as for challenging the boundaries of modern American artistic style...

  • Constructivism
    Constructivism (art)
    Constructivism was an artistic and architectural movement that originated in Russia from 1919 onward which rejected the idea of "art for art's sake" in favour of art as a practice directed towards social purposes...

     - Naum Gabo
    Naum Gabo
    Naum Gabo KBE, born Naum Neemia Pevsner was a prominent Russian sculptor in the Constructivism movement and a pioneer of Kinetic Art.-Early life:...

    , Gustav Klutsis
    Gustav Klutsis
    Gustav Klutsis was a pioneering photographer and major member of the Constructivist avant-garde in the early 20th century...

    , László Moholy-Nagy
    László Moholy-Nagy
    László Moholy-Nagy , July 20, 1895 – November 24, 1946) was a Hungarian painter and photographer as well as professor in the Bauhaus school. He was highly influenced by constructivism and a strong advocate of the integration of technology and industry into the arts.-Early life:Moholy-Nagy...

    , El Lissitzky
    El Lissitzky
    , better known as El Lissitzky , was a Russian artist, designer, photographer, typographer, polemicist and architect. He was an important figure of the Russian avant garde, helping develop suprematism with his mentor, Kazimir Malevich, and designing numerous exhibition displays and propaganda works...

    , Kasimir Malevich, Vadim Meller, Alexander Rodchenko
    Alexander Rodchenko
    Aleksander Mikhailovich Rodchenko was a Russian artist, sculptor, photographer and graphic designer. He was one of the founders of constructivism and Russian design; he was married to the artist Varvara Stepanova....

    , Vladimir Tatlin
    Vladimir Tatlin
    Vladimir Yevgrafovich Tatlin worked as a painter and architect. With Kazimir Malevich he was one of the two most important figures in the Russian avant-garde art movement of the 1920s, and he later became the most important artist in the Constructivist movement...

  • Surrealism
    Surrealism
    Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....

     - Jean Arp
    Jean Arp
    Jean Arp / Hans Arp was a German-French sculptor, painter, poet and abstract artist in other media such as torn and pasted paper.Arp was born in Strasbourg...

    , Salvador Dalí
    Salvador Dalí
    Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, 1st Marquis of Púbol was a Spanish Catalan surrealist painter born in Figueres....

    , Max Ernst
    Max Ernst
    Max Ernst was a German painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and poet. A prolific artist, Ernst is considered to be one of the primary pioneers of the Dada movement and Surrealism.-Early life:...

    , René Magritte
    René Magritte
    René François Ghislain Magritte[p] was a Belgian surrealist artist. He became well known for a number of witty and thought-provoking images...

    , André Masson
    André Masson
    André-Aimé-René Masson was a French artist.-Biography:Masson was born in Balagny-sur-Thérain, near Senlis in Picardy, but was brought up in Belgium. He studied art in Brussels and Paris. He fought for France in World War I and was seriously injured.Masson's early works display an interest in cubism...

    , Joan Miró
    Joan Miró
    Joan Miró i Ferrà was a Spanish Catalan painter, sculptor, and ceramist born in Barcelona.Earning international acclaim, his work has been interpreted as Surrealism, a sandbox for the subconscious mind, a re-creation of the childlike, and a manifestation of Catalan pride...

    , Marc Chagall
    Marc Chagall
    Marc Chagall ; [shuh-GAHL] , was a Russian-French artist, associated with several key art movements and was one of the most successful artists of the twentieth century. He forged a unique career in virtually every artistic medium, including paintings, book illustrations, stained glass, stage sets,...

  • Bauhaus
    Bauhaus
    ' is the common term for the ', a school in Germany that combined crafts and the fine arts, and was famous for the approach to design that it publicized and taught. It operated from 1919 to 1933....

     - Wassily Kandinsky
    Wassily Kandinsky
    Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky was a Russian painter, and art theorist. He is credited with painting the first modern abstract works....

    , Paul Klee
    Paul Klee
    Paul Klee was a Swiss painter of German nationality. His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art that included expressionism, cubism, and surrealism. He was, as well, a student of orientalism. Klee was a natural draftsman who experimented with and eventually mastered color...

    , Josef Albers
    Josef Albers
    Josef Albers was a German-born American artist and educator whose work, both in Europe and in the United States, formed the basis of some of the most influential and far-reaching art education programs of the 20th century....

  • Sculpture
    Sculpture
    Sculpture is three-dimensional artwork created by shaping or combining hard and/or plastic material, sound, and/or text and or light, commonly stone , metal, glass, or wood. Some sculptures are created directly by finding or carving; others are assembled, built together and fired, welded, molded,...

     - Alexander Calder
    Alexander Calder
    Alexander Calder , also known as Sandy Calder, was an American sculptor and artist most famous for inventing the mobile. In addition to mobile and stabile sculpture, Alexander Calder also created paintings, lithographs, toys, tapestry and jewelry.-Childhood:Born in Lawnton, Pennsylvania, on July...

    , Alberto Giacometti
    Alberto Giacometti
    Alberto Giacometti was a Swiss sculptor, painter, draftsman, and printmaker. Alberto Giacometti was born in October 1901 in Italian-speaking Switzerland and came from an artistic background - his father, Giovanni, was a well known Post-Impressionist painter...

    , Gaston Lachaise
    Gaston Lachaise
    Gaston Lachaise was a French-American sculptor, active in the early 20th century. A native of Paris he was most noted for his female nudes such as Standing Woman.- Biography :Gaston Lachaiseborn March 19, 1882, Paris, France...

    , Henry Moore
    Henry Moore
    Henry Spencer Moore OM CH FBA was an English sculptor and artist. He was best known for his abstract monumental bronze sculptures which are located around the world as public works of art....

    , Pablo Picasso
    Pablo Picasso
    Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso was a Spanish painter, draughtsman, and sculptor. Commonly known simply as Picasso, he is one of the most recognized figures in 20th-century art...

    , Julio Gonzalez
    Julio González (sculptor)
    Juli González i Pellicer was a Catalan abstract, cubist painter and sculptor.-Biography:Born in Barcelona, as a young man he worked with his older brother, Joan, in his father’s metal smith workshop. Both brothers took evening classes in art at the Escuela de Bellas Artes...

  • Scottish Colourists
    Scottish Colourists
    The Scottish Colourists were a group of painters from Scotland whose work was not very highly regarded when it was first exhibited in the 1920s and 1930s, but which in the late 20th Century came to have a formative influence on contemporary Scottish art....

     - Francis Cadell
    Francis Cadell (artist)
    Francis Campbell Boileau Cadell was a Scottish painter associated with the Scottish Colourists.-Life and work:...

    , Samuel Peploe
    Samuel Peploe
    Samuel John Peploe was a Scottish Post-Impressionist painter, noted for his still life works and for being one of the group of four painters that became known as the Scottish Colourists....

    , Leslie Hunter, John Duncan Fergusson
    John Duncan Fergusson
    John Duncan Fergusson was a Scottish artist, regarded as one of the major artists of the Scottish Colourists school of painting.Fergusson was born on 9 March 1874 at 7 Crown Street in Leith, Edinburgh. He was the first of four children and attended the Royal High School...

  • Suprematism
    Suprematism
    Suprematism : is an art movement focused on fundamental geometric forms which formed in Russia in 1915-1916...

     - Kazimir Malevich
    Kazimir Malevich
    Kazimir Severinovich Malevich , was a painter and art theoretician, pioneer of geometric abstract art and the originator of the Avant-garde Suprematist movement.- Life and work :...

    , Aleksandra Ekster
    Aleksandra Ekster
    Aleksandra Aleksandrovna Ekster was a Russian-Ukrainian painter , designer, and one of the founders of Art Deco.-Childhood:...

    , Olga Rozanova
    Olga Rozanova
    Olga Vladimirovna Rozanova Olga Vladimirovna Rozanova Olga Vladimirovna Rozanova (also spelled Rosanova, Russian: (Ольга Владимировна Розанова) (1886-7 November, 1918, Moscow) was a Russian avant-garde artist in the styles of Suprematist, Neo-Primitivist, and Cubo-Futurist.-Biography:...

    , Nadezhda Udaltsova
    Nadezhda Udaltsova
    Nadezhda Udaltsova was a Russian avant-garde artist and painter.-Biography:Nadezhda Udaltsova was born in town Orel in Russia...

    , Ivan Kliun
    Ivan Kliun
    Ivan Kliun was a Russian painter, Avant-garde artist , graphic artist and sculptor.-Biography:Ivan Vasilyevich Kliun was born in 1873 in Bolshie Gorki village ....

    , Lyubov Popova
    Lyubov Popova
    Lyubov Sergeyevna Popova [April 24, 1889May 25, 1924) was a Russian avant-garde artist , painter and designer...

    , Nikolai Suetin
    Nikolai Suetin
    Nikolai Suetin was a Russian Suprematist artist. He worked as a graphic artist, a designer, and a ceramics painter.Suetin studied at the High Institute of Art, Vitebsk under Kazimir Malevich, founder of Suprematism, an early abstract art movement which developed a style based on 'non objective'...

    , Nina Genke-Meller
    Nina Genke-Meller
    Nina Genke or Nina Genke-Meller, or Nina Henke-Meller, was a Ukrainian-Russian avant-garde artist, , designer, graphic artist and scenographer. -Biography:...

    , Ivan Puni
    Ivan Puni
    Ivan Puni or Puny was a Russian avant-garde artist .-Biography:Ivan Puni was born in Kuokkala to a family of Italian origins...

    , Ksenia Boguslavskaya
    Ksenia Boguslavskaya
    Ksenia or Kseniya Boguslavskaya - Russian avant-garde artist poet and interior decorator. Her husband Ivan Puni was also a notable painter...


After WWII

  • Figuratifs
    Figurative art
    Figurative art, sometimes written as figurativism, describes artwork - particularly paintings and sculptures - which are clearly derived from real object sources, and are therefore by definition representational...

     - Bernard Buffet
    Bernard Buffet
    Bernard Buffet was a French painter of Expressionism and Member of the Anti-Abstract Art Group "L 'homme Témoin [the Witness-Man]".-Life and Work:...

    , Jean Carzou
    Jean Carzou
    Jean Carzou , born Garnik Zouloumian, was a French-Armenian artist. Jean arrived in Paris in 1924 to study architecture. He started working as a theater decorator but he then quickly realized he preferred drawing and painting...

    , Maurice Boitel
    Maurice Boitel
    Maurice Boitel , was a French painter.-Artistic life:Maurice Boitel belonged to the art movement called "La Jeune Peinture" "young picture" of the School of Paris, with painters like Bernard Buffet, Yves Brayer, Louis Vuillermoz, Pierre-Henry, Daniel du Janerand, Gaston Sébire, Paul Collomb, Jean...

    , Daniel du Janerand
    Daniel du Janerand
    Daniel du Janerand was a French painter artistborn in the "Marais", center of Paris, on July 18, 1919.-Artistic life:*École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris;*Member founder of the Salon "Comparaisons";...

    , Claude-Max Lochu
    Claude-Max Lochu
    French artist, painter and designer, Claude-Max Lochu was born in 1951 in Delle in Franche-Comté completed his degree at the École des Beaux-Arts of Besançon. Lochu was exhibited in the Museum of Fine Arts, Dole, and is now exhibited permanently in Faure Museum as well as in 2 galleries in Paris...

  • Sculpture
    Sculpture
    Sculpture is three-dimensional artwork created by shaping or combining hard and/or plastic material, sound, and/or text and or light, commonly stone , metal, glass, or wood. Some sculptures are created directly by finding or carving; others are assembled, built together and fired, welded, molded,...

     - Henry Moore
    Henry Moore
    Henry Spencer Moore OM CH FBA was an English sculptor and artist. He was best known for his abstract monumental bronze sculptures which are located around the world as public works of art....

    , David Smith
    David Smith (sculptor)
    David Roland Smith was an American Abstract Expressionist sculptor best known for creating large steel abstract geometric sculptures.-Biography:...

    , Tony Smith
    Tony Smith (sculptor)
    Tony Smith was an American sculptor, visual artist, and a noted theorist on art.Tony Smith was born in South Orange, New Jersey. He first trained as an architect and in 1939 began working for Frank Lloyd Wright and was introduced to Wright's module concrete blocks...

    , Alexander Calder
    Alexander Calder
    Alexander Calder , also known as Sandy Calder, was an American sculptor and artist most famous for inventing the mobile. In addition to mobile and stabile sculpture, Alexander Calder also created paintings, lithographs, toys, tapestry and jewelry.-Childhood:Born in Lawnton, Pennsylvania, on July...

    , Isamu Noguchi
    Isamu Noguchi
    was a prominent Japanese American artist and landscape architect whose artistic career spanned six decades, from the 1920s onward. Known for his sculpture and public works, Noguchi also designed stage sets for various Martha Graham productions, and several mass-produced lamps and furniture pieces,...

    , Alberto Giacometti
    Alberto Giacometti
    Alberto Giacometti was a Swiss sculptor, painter, draftsman, and printmaker. Alberto Giacometti was born in October 1901 in Italian-speaking Switzerland and came from an artistic background - his father, Giovanni, was a well known Post-Impressionist painter...

    , Sir Anthony Caro, Jean Dubuffet
    Jean Dubuffet
    Jean Philippe Arthur Dubuffet was one of the most famous French painters and sculptors of the second half of the 20th century.-Life and work:...

    , Isaac Witkin
    Isaac Witkin
    Isaac Witkin, internationally renowned modern sculptor, was born in Johannesburg, South Africa on May 10, 1936, and he died April 23, 2006. Witkin entered St Martin’s School of Art in London, in 1957...

    , René Iché
    René Iché
    René Iché was a 20th century French sculptor.-Life and work:René Iché fought in World War I, where he was injured and gassed. After the war, graduated in law, he changed his life and studied sculpture with Antoine Bourdelle and architecture with Auguste Perret...

    , Marino Marini
    Marino Marini
    Marino Marini was an Italian sculptor.Born in Pistoia, Marini is particularly famous for his series of stylised equestrian statues, which feature a man with outstretched arms on a horse...

    , Louise Nevelson
  • Abstract expressionism
    Abstract expressionism
    Abstract expressionism was an American post-World War II art movement. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve worldwide influence and put New York City at the center of the western art world, a role formerly filled by Paris....

     - Willem de Kooning
    Willem de Kooning
    Willem de Kooning was an abstract expressionist artist, born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.In the post-World War II era, de Kooning painted in a style that came to be referred to variously as Abstract expressionism, Action painting, and the New York School...

    , Jackson Pollock
    Jackson Pollock
    Paul Jackson Pollock was an influential American painter and a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement. During his lifetime, Pollock enjoyed considerable fame and notoriety. He was regarded as a mostly reclusive artist. He had a volatile personality and struggled with alcoholism all of...

    , Hans Hofmann
    Hans Hofmann
    Hans Hofmann was a German-born American abstract expressionist painter. He was born in Weißenburg, Bavaria on March 21, 1880 the son of Theodor and Franziska Hofmann...

    , Franz Kline
    Franz Kline
    Franz Kline was an American painter mainly associated with the Abstract Expressionist painters who were centered, geographically, around New York, and temporally, in the 1940s and 1950s; but not limited to that setting...

    , Robert Motherwell
    Robert Motherwell
    Robert Motherwell was an American abstract expressionist painter and printmaker. He was one of the youngest of the New York School , which also included Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and Philip Guston.Motherwell was born in Aberdeen, Washington...

    , Clyfford Still
    Clyfford Still
    Clyfford Still was an American painter, and one of the leading figures of Abstract Expressionism.-Biography:...

    , Lee Krasner
    Lee Krasner
    Lee Krasner was an influential abstract expressionist painter in the second half of the 20th century.On October 25th 1945, she married artist Jackson Pollock, who was also influential in the Abstract Expressionism movement....

  • American Abstract Artists
    American Abstract Artists
    American Abstract Artists was formed in 1936 in New York City, to promote and foster public understanding of abstract art. American Abstract Artists exhibitions, publications, and lectures helped to establish the organization as a major forum for the exchange and discussion of ideas, and for...

     - Lee Krasner
    Lee Krasner
    Lee Krasner was an influential abstract expressionist painter in the second half of the 20th century.On October 25th 1945, she married artist Jackson Pollock, who was also influential in the Abstract Expressionism movement....

    , Ibram Lassaw
    Ibram Lassaw
    Ibram Lassaw is an American sculptor, known for nonobjective construction in brazed metals.-Biography:Lassaw was born in Alexandria, Egypt, of Russian émigré parents, he went to the U.S. in 1921. His family settled in Brooklyn, New York. He became a US citizen in 1928...

    , Ad Reinhardt
    Ad Reinhardt
    Adolph Frederick Reinhardt was an Abstract painter active in New York beginning in the 1930s and continuing through the 1960s. He was a member of the American Abstract Artists and was a part of the movement centered around the Betty Parsons Gallery that became known as Abstract Expressionism...

    , Josef Albers
    Josef Albers
    Josef Albers was a German-born American artist and educator whose work, both in Europe and in the United States, formed the basis of some of the most influential and far-reaching art education programs of the 20th century....

    , Burgoyne Diller
    Burgoyne Diller
    Burgoyne A. Diller was an American abstract painter. Many of his best-known works are characterized by orthogonal geometric forms that reflect his strong interest in the De Stijl movement and the work of Piet Mondrian in particular...

  • Art Brut
    Outsider Art
    The term outsider art was coined by art critic Roger Cardinal in 1972 as an English synonym for art brut , a label created by French artist Jean Dubuffet to describe art created outside the boundaries of official culture; Dubuffet focused particularly on art by insane-asylum inmates.While...

     - Adolf Wölfli
    Adolf Wölfli
    Adolf Wölfli was a prolific Swiss artist who was one of the first artists to be associated with the Art Brut or outsider art label.-Early life:...

    , August Natterer
    August Natterer
    August Natterer , also known as Neter, was a schizophrenic German outsider artist.-Biography:August Natterer, given the pseudonym Neter by his psychiatrist to protect him and his family from the immense social stigma associated with mental illness at the time, was born in 1868 in Schornreute, near...

    , Ferdinand Cheval
    Ferdinand Cheval
    Ferdinand Cheval was a French postman who spent 33 years of his life building Le Palais Idéal in Hauterives which is regarded as an extraordinary example of naïve art architecture.-Origins:...

    , Madge Gill
    Madge Gill
    Madge Gill , born Maude Ethel Eades, was an English outsider and visionary artist.-Early years:Born an illegitimate child in East Ham, Essex, , she spent much of her early years in seclusion and was placed in an orphanage at the age of 9...

    , Paul Salvator Goldengreen
    Paul Salvator Goldengreen
    Paul Salvator Goldengreen Warburg is anartist whose work originates in Art Brut / Outsider Art.-Life:After fifteen months basic military training with the German Army at Munster and Lueneburg in 1980/81, he got the Abitur after 6 semesters from 1982 to 1984 at Westfalenkolleg in Paderborn.From...

  • Arte Povera
    Arte Povera
    The term Arte Povera was introduced in a time where artists were taking a radical stance at the end of the sixties. As in the rest of Europe and North America, the late sixties was a period of social upheaval in Italy...

     - Jannis Kounellis
    Jannis Kounellis
    Jannis Kounellis was born on March 23, 1936 in Piraeus, Greece. He studied in art college in Athens until 1956 and at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome....

    , Luciano Fabro
    Luciano Fabro
    Luciano Fabro was an Italian artist associated with the Arte Povera movement.Born in Turin, Fabro moved to Milan in 1959, continuing to live and work there until his death....

    , Mario Merz
    Mario Merz
    Mario Merz was an Italian artist.-Early life:Born in Milan, Merz started drawing during World War II, when he was imprisoned for his activities with the Giustizia e Libertà antifascist group. He experimented with a continuous graphic stroke–not removing his pencil point from the paper...

    , Piero Manzoni
    Piero Manzoni
    Piero Manzoni was an Italian artist best known for his ironic conceptual art. Influenced by the work of Yves Klein, his own work anticipated, and directly influenced, the work of a generation of younger Italian artists brought together by the critic Germano Celant in the first Arte Povera...

    , Alighiero Boetti
    Alighiero Boetti
    Alighiero Boetti was an Italian conceptual artist, considered to be a member of the art movement Arte Povera. He is most famous for a series of embroidered maps of the world, Mappa, created between 1971 and his death in 1994...

  • Color field painting - Barnett Newman
    Barnett Newman
    Barnett Newman was an American artist. He is seen as one of the major figures in abstract expressionism and one of the foremost of the color field painters.-Youth:...

    , Mark Rothko
    Mark Rothko
    Mark Rothko, born Marcus Rothkowitz , was a Latvian-born American painter and printmaker. He is classified as an abstract expressionist, although he himself rejected this label, and even resisted the classification as an "abstract painter".- Childhood :Mark Rothko was born in Dvinsk, Vitebsk...

    , Sam Francis
    Sam Francis
    Samuel Lewis Francis was an American painter and printmaker. He was born in San Mateo, California, and studied botany, medicine and psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. He served in the United States Air Force during World War II before being injured in a plane crash...

    , Morris Louis, Helen Frankenthaler
    Helen Frankenthaler
    Helen Frankenthaler is an American Abstract Expressionist painter. She is an important and major contributor to the history of postwar American painting. Having exhibited her work in six decades she has spanned several generations of abstract painters while continuing to produce vital and...

  • Tachisme
    Tachisme
    Tachisme was a French style of abstract painting in the 1940s and 1950s. It is often considered to be the European equivalent to abstract expressionism...

     - Jean Dubuffet
    Jean Dubuffet
    Jean Philippe Arthur Dubuffet was one of the most famous French painters and sculptors of the second half of the 20th century.-Life and work:...

    , Pierre Soulages
    Pierre Soulages
    Pierre Soulages is a French painter, engraver and sculptor.Born in Rodez in 1919, Soulages is also known as "the painter of black" because of his interest in the colour...

    , Hans Hartung
    Hans Hartung
    Hans Hartung was a German-French painter, known for his gestural abstract style. He was also a decorated World War II veteran of the French Foreign Legion.-Life:...

    , Ludwig Merwart
    Ludwig Merwart
    Ludwig Merwart was an influential Austrian painter and graphic artist. He is an important representative of abstract expressionism and was a major force in graphic arts and prints, especially after World War II...

  • COBRA
    COBRA (avant-garde movement)
    COBRA was a European avant-garde movement active from 1949 to 1952. The name was coined in 1948 by Christian Dotremont from the initials of the members' home cities: Copenhagen , Brussels , Amsterdam .-History:...

     - Pierre Alechinsky
    Pierre Alechinsky
    Pierre Alechinsky is a Belgian artist. Lives and works in France since 1951He was born in Brussels. In 1944 he attended the l'Ecole nationale supérieure d'Architecture et des Arts décoratifs de La Cambre, Brussels where he studied illustration techniques, printing and photography...

    , Karel Appel
    Karel Appel
    Christiaan Karel Appel was a Dutch painter, sculptor, and poet. He started painting at the age of fourteen and studied at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam in the 1940s...

    , Asger Jorn
    Asger Jorn
    Asger Oluf Jorn was a founding member of the Situationist International, and a prolific artist and essayist. He was born in Vejrum, in the northwest corner of Jutland, Denmark and baptized Asger Oluf Jørgensen....

  • Neo-Dada
    Neo-Dada
    Neo-Dada is a label applied primarily to the visual arts describing artwork that has similarities in method or intent to earlier Dada artwork. Neo-Dada is exemplified by its use of modern materials, popular imagery, and absurdist contrast. It also patently denies traditional concepts of aesthetics...

     - Robert Rauschenberg
    Robert Rauschenberg
    Robert Rauschenberg was an American artist who came to prominence in the 1950s transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art. Rauschenberg is perhaps most famous for his "Combines" of the 1950s, in which non-traditional materials and objects were employed in innovative combinations...

    , Jasper Johns
    Jasper Johns
    Jasper Johns, Jr. is an American contemporary artist who works primarily in painting and printmaking. He is represented by the Matthew Marks Gallery.-Life:...

    , John Chamberlain, Joseph Beuys
    Joseph Beuys
    Joseph Beuys was a German performance artist, sculptor, installation artist, graphic artist, art theorist and pedagogue of art....

    , Edward Kienholz
    Edward Kienholz
    Edward Kienholz was an American installation artist whose work was highly critical of aspects of modern life. He often collaborated with his wife, Nancy Reddin Kienholz, from 1972 until his death. Collectively, they are referred to as "Kienholz".- Early life and artistic development :Edward...

  • Fluxus
    Fluxus
    Fluxus—a name taken from a Latin word meaning "to flow"—is an international network of artists, composers and designers noted for blending different artistic media and disciplines in the 1960s. They have been active in Neo-Dada noise music and visual art as well as literature, urban planning,...

     - George Maciunas
    George Maciunas
    George Maciunas was a Lithuanian-born American artist. He was a founding member of Fluxus, an international community of artists, architects, composers, and designers...

    , Allan Kaprow
    Allan Kaprow
    Allan Kaprow was an American painter, assemblagist and a pioneer in establishing the concepts of performance art. He helped to develop the "Environment" and "Happening" in the late 1950s and 1960s, as well as their theory. His Happenings - some 200 of them - evolved over the years...

    , Nam June Paik
    Nam June Paik
    Nam June Paik was a Korean-born American artist. He worked with a variety of media and is considered to be the first video artist...

    , Yoko Ono
    Yoko Ono
    , , is a Japanese-American artist and musician. She is known for her marriage to John Lennon and for her work as an avant-garde artist and musician.-Early life:...

    , Dick Higgins
    Dick Higgins
    Dick Higgins was a composer, poet, printer, and early Fluxus artist.Higgins was born in Cambridge, England. Like many of the other Fluxus artists, he studied composition with John Cage. He married artist Alison Knowles in 1960...

  • Dau-al-Set - founded in Barcelona
    Barcelona
    Barcelona is the capital, most populous city of the Autonomous Community of Catalonia and the second largest city in Spain, with a population of 1,615,908 in 2008. It is the 11th-most populous municipality in the European Union and sixth-most populous urban area in the European Union after Paris,...

     by poet/artist Joan Brossa
    Joan Brossa
    Joan Brossa i Cuervo . Poet, playwright, graphic designer and plastic artist. He was one of the founders of both the group and the publication known as Dau-al-Set and one of the leading early proponents of visual poetry in Catalan literature...

    , - Antoni Tàpies
    Antoni Tàpies
    Antoni Tàpies is a Spanish Catalan painter. He is one of the famous artists of European abstract expressionism. After studying law for 3 years, he devoted himself from 1943 onwards only to his painting...

  • Geometric abstraction - Wassily Kandinsky
    Wassily Kandinsky
    Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky was a Russian painter, and art theorist. He is credited with painting the first modern abstract works....

    , Kazimir Malevich
    Kazimir Malevich
    Kazimir Severinovich Malevich , was a painter and art theoretician, pioneer of geometric abstract art and the originator of the Avant-garde Suprematist movement.- Life and work :...

    , Nadir Afonso
    Nadir Afonso
    Nadir Afonso, OSE is a geometric abstractionist painter. Formally trained in architecture, which he practiced early in his career with Le Corbusier and Oscar Niemeyer, Nadir Afonso later studied painting in Paris and became one of the pioneers in Kinetic art, working alongside...

    , Manlio Rho
    Manlio Rho
    Manlio Rho was a painter born in Como, Italy. He is considered one of the most important abstract artists in Italy.-Life and work:...

    , Mario Radice
    Mario Radice
    Mario Radice was an Italian painter born in Como. He is considered to be an important Italian abstract artist.-Life and work:...

  • Hard-edge painting
    Hard-edge painting
    Hard-edge painting is painting in which abrupt transitions are found between color areas. Color areas are often of one unvarying color. Color transitions often take place along straight lines, though curvilinear edges of color areas are also common...

     - Ellsworth Kelly
    Ellsworth Kelly
    Ellsworth Kelly is an American painter and sculptor associated with Hard-edge painting, Color Field painting and the Minimalist school. His works demonstrate unassuming techniques that emphasize the simplicity of form. Kelly often employs bright colors to enhance his works. Ellsworth Kelly lives...

    , Frank Stella
    Frank Stella
    Frank Stella is an American painter and printmaker. He is a significant figure in minimalism and post-painterly abstraction.He was born in Malden, Massachusetts...

    , Al Held
    Al Held
    Al Held was an American Abstract expressionist painter. He was particularly well known for his large scale Hard-edge paintings.-Background and education:...

    , Ronald Davis
    Ronald Davis
    Ronald Davis , born 1937, is an American painter whose work is associated with Geometric abstraction, Abstract Illusionism, Lyrical Abstraction, Hard-edge painting, Shaped canvas painting, Color field painting, and 3D Computer Graphics...

  • Kinetic art
    Kinetic art
    Kinetic art is art that contains moving parts or depends on motion for its effect. The moving parts are generally powered by wind, a motor or the observer. The term kinetic sculpture refers to a class of art made primarily from the late 1950s through 1960s...

     - George Rickey
    George Rickey
    George Rickey was an American kinetic sculptor.Rickey was born on June 6, 1907 in South Bend, Indiana. When Rickey was a child, his father, an executive with Singer Sewing Machine Company, moved the family to Helensburgh, Scotland. Rickey was educated at Glenalmond College and received a degree in...

    , Getulio Alviani
    Getulio Alviani
    Getulio Alviani is an Italian painter born in Udine. He is considered to be an important International Optical - Kinetic artist.-Life and work:Since childhood Alviani showed talent for design and geometric drawing...

  • Land art
    Land art
    Land art, Earthworks, or Earth art is an art movement which emerged in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s, in which landscape and the work of art are inextricably linked. Sculptures are not placed in the landscape; rather the landscape is the very means of their creation...

     - Christo
    Christo and Jeanne-Claude
    Christo and Jeanne-Claude are a married couple who create environmental works of art...

    , Richard Long
    Richard Long (artist)
    Richard Long is an English sculptor, photographer and painter, one of the best known British land artists.Long is the only artist to be shortlisted for the Turner Prize four times, and he is reputed to have refused the prize in 1984...

    , Robert Smithson
    Robert Smithson
    Robert Smithson was an American artist famous for his land art.-Background and education:Smithson was born in Passaic, New Jersey and studied painting and drawing in New York City at the Art Students League of New York....

    , Michael Heizer
  • Les Automatistes
    Les Automatistes
    Les Automatistes were a group of Québécois artistic dissidents from Montreal, Quebec. The movement was founded in the early 1940s by painter Paul-Émile Borduas. "Les Automatistes" were so called because they were influenced by Surrealism and its theory of automatism...

     - Claude Gauvreau
    Claude Gauvreau
    Claude Gauvreau , was a Quebec playwright, poet and polemicist born in Montreal.Gauvreau did classical studies at the Collège Sainte-Marie, and graduated with a B.A in Philosophy from Université de Montréal....

    , Jean-Paul Riopelle
    Jean-Paul Riopelle
    Jean-Paul Riopelle, CC, GOQ was a painter and sculptor from Quebec, Canada.-Biography:Born in Montreal, he studied under Paul-Émile Borduas in the 1940s and was a member of Les Automatistes movement. He was one of the signers of the Refus global manifesto...

    , Pierre Gauvreau
    Pierre Gauvreau
    Pierre Gauvreau is a Québécois painter who has also worked in film and television productions.He studied at l'École des beaux-arts de Montréal, which is today part of UQAM...

    , Fernand Leduc
    Fernand Leduc
    Fernand Leduc is a Canadian abstract expressionist painter who was a major figure in the Quebec contemporary art scene in the 1940s and 1950s. During his 50-year career, Leduc has participated in many expositions in Canada, France and other countries...

    , Jean-Paul Mousseau
    Jean-Paul Mousseau
    Jean-Paul Mousseau was a student of Paul-Émile Borduas and a member of the Automatist school of Quebec artists....

    , Marcelle Ferron
    Marcelle Ferron
    Marcelle Ferron, GOQ , a Québécoise painter and stained glass artist, was a major figure in the Quebec contemporary art scene....

  • Minimal art - Sol LeWitt
    Sol LeWitt
    Sol LeWitt was an American artist linked to various movements, including Conceptual art and Minimalism. LeWitt rose to fame in the late 1960s with his wall drawings and "structures" but was prolific in a wide range of media including drawing, printmaking, and painting.He has been the subject of...

    , Donald Judd
    Donald Judd
    Donald Clarence Judd was a minimalist artist . In his work, Judd sought autonomy and clarity for the constructed object and the space created by it, ultimately achieving a rigorously democratic presentation without compositional hierarchy...

    , Dan Flavin
    Dan Flavin
    Dan Flavin was an American minimalist artist famous for creating sculptural objects and installations from commercially available fluorescent light fixtures.-Education:...

    , Richard Serra
    Richard Serra
    Richard Serra is an American minimalist sculptor and video artist known for working with large-scale assemblies of sheet metal...

    , Agnes Martin
    Agnes Martin
    Agnes Martin was a Canadian-American painter, often referred to as a minimalist; Martin considered herself an abstract expressionist.-Childhood and background:...

  • Postminimalism
    Postminimalism
    Postminimalism is a term used in various artistic fields for work which is influenced by, or attempts to develop and go beyond, the aesthetic of minimalism...

     - Eva Hesse
    Eva Hesse
    Eva Hesse , was a German-born American sculptor, known for her pioneering work in materials such as latex, fiberglass, and plastics. -Early life:...

    , Bruce Nauman
    Bruce Nauman
    Bruce Nauman is a contemporary American artist. His practice spans a broad range of media including sculpture, photography, neon, video, drawing, printmaking, and performance.-Life and work:...

    , Lynda Benglis
    Lynda Benglis
    Lynda Benglis is an American sculptor known for her wax paintings and poured latex sculptures. Benglis' work is noted for an unusual blend of organic imagery and confrontation with newer media incorporating influences such as Barnett Newman and Andy Warhol...

  • Lyrical abstraction
    Lyrical Abstraction
    Lyrical Abstraction refers to two related but distinctly separate trends in Post-war Modernist painting;European Lyrical Abstraction born in Paris in 1945, and the French critic Charles Estienne created its name in 1946...

     - Ronnie Landfield
    Ronnie Landfield
    Ronnie Landfield is an American abstract painter. During his early career from the mid-1960s through the 1970s his paintings were associated with Lyrical Abstraction, , and he was represented by the David Whitney Gallery and the Andre Emmerich Gallery...

    , Sam Gilliam
    Sam Gilliam
    Sam Gilliam is an African American Color field painter associated with the Washington Color School, Abstract Expressionism and Lyrical Abstraction. He works on stretched, draped, and wrapped canvas, and adds sculptural 3D elements...

    , Larry Zox
    Larry Zox
    Lawrence "Larry" Zox was an American painter and printmaker who is classified as an Abstract expressionist, Color Field painter and a Lyrical Abstractionist, although he did not readily use those categories for his work....

    , Dan Christensen
    Dan Christensen
    Dan Christensen, the American abstract painter, was born in Cozad, Nebraska on October 6, 1942, he died in Easthampton, New York on January 20, 2007....

  • Neo-figurative art
    Neo-figurative
    Neo-figurative art describes an expressionist revival in modern form of figurative art. The term neo and figurative emerged in the 1960s in Mexico and Spain to represent a new form of figurative art.-Neo-figurative artists:...

     - Fernando Botero
    Fernando Botero
    Fernando Botero Angulo is a Colombian figurative artist, self-titled "the most Colombian of Colombian artists" early on, coming to prominence when he won the first prize at the Salón de Artistas Colombianos in 1959.- Style :...

    , Antonio Berni
    Antonio Berni
    Delesio Antonio Berni was a figurative artist, born in Rosario, province of Santa Fe, Argentina. He worked as a painter, an illustrator and an engraver. His father, Napoleón Berni, was an immigrant tailor from Italy...

  • Neo-expressionism
    Neo-expressionism
    Neo-expressionism was a style of modern painting and sculpture that emerged in the late 1970s and dominated the art market until the mid-1980s. Related to American Lyrical Abstraction, New Image Painting and precedents in Pop painting, it developed as a reaction against the conceptual and...

     - Georg Baselitz
    Georg Baselitz
    Georg Baselitz is a German painter who studied in the former East Germany, before moving to what was then the country of West Germany...

    , Anselm Kiefer
    Anselm Kiefer
    Anselm Kiefer was born on March 8, 1945, in Donaueschingen. He is a German painter and sculptor. He studied with Joseph Beuys during the 1970s. His works incorporate materials such as straw, ash, clay, lead, and shellac...

    , Francesco Clemente
    Francesco Clemente
    Francesco Clemente is an Italian painter. His work shows both surrealist and expressionist references. Clemente was self taught and studied architecture in 1970 at the University of Rome. Following his studies he explored his psyche with the use of psychedelics and traveled to India to experience...

    , Jean-Michel Basquiat
    Jean-Michel Basquiat
    Jean-Michel Basquiat was an American artist and the first African-American painter to become an international art star. He gained popularity first as a graffiti artist in New York City, and then as a successful 1980s-era Neo-expressionist artist...

  • New realism
    New realism
    Nouveau Réalisme refers to an artistic movement founded in 1960 by the art critic Pierre Restany and the painter Yves Klein during the first collective exposition in the Apollinaire gallery in Milan...

     - Yves Klein
    Yves Klein
    Yves Klein was a French artist and is considered an important figure in post-war European art. New York critics of Klein's time classify him as neo-Dada, but other critics, such as Thomas McEvilley in an essay submitted to Artforum in 1982, have since classified Klein as an early, though...

    , Pierre Restany
    Pierre Restany
    Pierre Restany , was an internationally well known French art critic and cultural philosopher.Restany was born in Amélie-les-Bains-Palalda, Pyrénées-Orientales, and spent his childhood in Casablanca. On returning to France in 1949 he attended the Lycée Henri-IV before studying at universities in...

    , Arman
    Arman
    Arman was a French-born American artist. Born Armand Pierre Fernandez in Nice, France, Arman is a painter who moved from using the objects as paintbrushes to using them as the painting itself...

  • Op art
    Op art
    Op art, also known as optical art, is a genre of visual art that makes use of optical illusions."Optical Art is a method of painting concerning the interaction between illusion and picture plane, between understanding and seeing." Op art works are abstract, with many of the better known pieces...

     - Victor Vasarely
    Victor Vasarely
    Victor Vasarely, born was a Hungarian French artist whose work is generally seen aligned with Op-art....

    , Bridget Riley
    Bridget Riley
    Bridget Louise Riley CH CBE is an English painter who is one of the foremost proponents of op art.-Early life:...

    , Richard Anuszkiewicz
    Richard Anuszkiewicz
    Richard Anuszkiewicz is an American artist. -Life and work:...

  • Outsider art
    Outsider Art
    The term outsider art was coined by art critic Roger Cardinal in 1972 as an English synonym for art brut , a label created by French artist Jean Dubuffet to describe art created outside the boundaries of official culture; Dubuffet focused particularly on art by insane-asylum inmates.While...

     - Howard Finster
    Howard Finster
    Howard Finster was a Baptist Reverend and artist from Summerville, Georgia. He claimed to be inspired by God to spread the gospel through the environment of Paradise Garden and over 46,000 pieces of art...

    , Grandma Moses
    Grandma Moses
    Anna Mary Robertson Moses , better known as "Grandma Moses", was a renowned American folk artist. She is most often cited as an example of an individual successfully beginning a career in the arts at an advanced age.-Painting:Moses began painting in her seventies after abandoning a career in...

    , Bob Justin
    Bob Justin
    Bob Justin, a self taught outsider artist, was born in New Jersey in 1941. After being forced into retirement in 1991 by illness, he began to liquidate an old tool collection and other property at local flea markets. During this time he returned to a childhood penchant for finding imagery in...

  • Photorealism
    Photorealism
    Photorealism is the genre of painting based on making a painting from a photograph. The term is primarily applied to paintings from the United States photorealism art movement that began in the late 1960s, early 1970s.-Style and history:...

     - Audrey Flack
    Audrey Flack
    Audrey Flack is an American photorealist painter, printmaker, and sculptor.Flack studied fine arts in New York from 1948 to 1953. Her early work was abstract; one such painting paid tribute to Franz Kline. But gradually, Flack became a New Realist and finally a photorealist, in reaction to the...

    , Chuck Close
    Chuck Close
    Chuck Thomas Close is an American painter and photographer who achieved fame as a photorealist, through his massive-scale portraits...

    , Duane Hanson
    Duane Hanson
    Duane Hanson was an American artist based in South Florida, a sculptor known for his lifecast realistic works of people, cast in various materials, including polyester resin, fiberglass, Bondo and bronze...

    , Richard Estes
    Richard Estes
    Richard Estes is an American painter who is best known for his photorealistic paintings. The paintings generally consist of reflective, clean, and inanimate city and geometric landscapes...

    , Malcolm Morley
    Malcolm Morley
    Malcolm Morley is an English artist now living in the United States.Morley was born in north London. He had a troubled childhood, and did not discover art until serving a three-year stint in Wormwood Scrubs prison...

  • Pop art
    Pop art
    Pop art is a visual art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art challenged tradition by asserting that an artist's use of the mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture is contiguous with the perspective of fine art...

     - Richard Hamilton
    Richard Hamilton (artist)
    Richard Hamilton, CH is an English painter and collage artist. His 1956 collage titled Just What Is It that Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing?, produced for the This Is Tomorrow exhibition of the Independent Group in London, is considered by critics and historians to be one of the...

    , Robert Indiana
    Robert Indiana
    Robert Indiana is an American artist associated with the Pop Art movement.-Life and work:Robert Indiana was born in New Castle, Indiana and later relocated to Indianapolis where he graduated from Arsenal Technical High School...

    , Jasper Johns
    Jasper Johns
    Jasper Johns, Jr. is an American contemporary artist who works primarily in painting and printmaking. He is represented by the Matthew Marks Gallery.-Life:...

    , Roy Lichtenstein
    Roy Lichtenstein
    Roy Lichtenstein was a prominent American pop artist, his work heavily influenced by both popular advertising and the comic book style...

    , Robert Rauschenberg
    Robert Rauschenberg
    Robert Rauschenberg was an American artist who came to prominence in the 1950s transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art. Rauschenberg is perhaps most famous for his "Combines" of the 1950s, in which non-traditional materials and objects were employed in innovative combinations...

    , Andy Warhol
    Andy Warhol
    Andrew Warhola , more commonly known as Andy Warhol, was an American painter, printmaker, and filmmaker who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art...

    , Ed Ruscha, David Hockney
    David Hockney
    David Hockney, CH, RA, is an English painter, draughtsman, printmaker, stage designer and photographer, who is based in Bridlington, Yorkshire, although he also maintains a base in London...

  • Postwar Europe
    Europe
    Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally divided from Asia to its east by the water divide of the Ural Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian Sea, the Caucasus Mountains , and the Black Sea to the southeast...

    an figurative painting - Lucien Freud, Francis Bacon
    Francis Bacon (painter)
    Francis Bacon was an Irish-born British figurative painter. His artwork is known for its bold, austere, homoerotic and often violent or nightmarish imagery, which typically shows room-bound masculine figures isolated in glass or steel geometrical cages set against flat, nondescript backgrounds...

    , Frank Auerbach
    Frank Auerbach
    Frank Helmut Auerbach is a German-born British painter. His work typically portrays either one of a small group of mainly female models, or scenes around London, especially Camden Town.-Career:...

  • Shaped canvas
    Shaped canvas
    Shaped canvases are paintings that depart from the normal flat, rectangular configuration. Canvases may be shaped by altering their contours, while retaining their flatness. An ancient, traditional example is the tondo, a painting on a round canvas: Raphael, as well as some other Renaissance...

     - Lee Bontecou
    Lee Bontecou
    Lee Bontecou is an American artist who was born 15 January 1931 in Providence, Rhode Island. She attended the Art Students League of New York from 1952 to 1955 where she studied with the sculptor William Zorach. She received a Fulbright scholarship to study in Rome in 1957-1958 and the Louis...

    , Frank Stella
    Frank Stella
    Frank Stella is an American painter and printmaker. He is a significant figure in minimalism and post-painterly abstraction.He was born in Malden, Massachusetts...

    , Kenneth Noland
    Kenneth Noland
    Kenneth Noland is an American abstract painter. He is identified today as one of the best-known contemporary American Color field painters, although in the 1950s he was thought of as an abstract expressionist and in the early 1960s he was thought of as a minimalist painter.- Biography:Noland was...

    , Robert Mangold
    Robert Mangold
    Robert Mangold is an American minimalist artist.- Works :“Robert Mangold’s paintings,” wrote Michael Kimmelman in the New York Times in 1997, “are more complicated to describe than they seem, which is partly what’s good about them: the way they invite intense scrutiny, which, in the nature of good...

    .
  • Soviet art
    Soviet art
    -Early years:During the Russian Revolution a movement was initiated to put all arts to service of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The instrument for this was created just days before the October Revolution, known as Proletkult, an abbreviation for "Proletarskie kulturno-prosvetitelnye...

     - Alexander Deineka, Alexander Gerasimov
    Alexander Gerasimov
    Alexander Mikhaylovich Gerasimov was a leading proponent of Socialist Realism in the visual arts, and painted Stalin as well as other Soviet leaders....

    , Ilya Kabakov
    Ilya Kabakov
    Ilya Kabakov, Russian Илья Иосифович Кабаков is a Russian-American conceptual artist. He is Jewish. He was born in born in Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine. He worked for thirty years in Moscow, from the 1950s until the late 1980s. He now lives and works on Long Island...

    , Komar & Melamid, Alexandr Zhdanov
    Alexandr Zhdanov
    Alexandr Pavlovich Zhdanov was a Russian avant-garde painter.He was born in Vyoshenskaya, Soviet Union. Zhdanov was expelled four times from the Grekov Art School in Rostov-on-the-Don but managed to graduate after six years.In 1973, he moved to Moscow and within a year was part of a group of...

    , Leonid Sokov
    Leonid Sokov
    Leonid Sokov is a Russian artist and sculptor. He lives and works in New York City.-Life and work:Sokov was born in Mikhalevo in the Tver region, Russia in 1941 and graduated from the Stroganov Institute now called the Moscow School of Art and Industry, in 1969. He emigrated to the United States...

  • Spatialism
    Spatialism
    Spatialism is an art movement, headed by Argentinian artist Lucio Fontana in 1946, which came about right along with the birth of Abstract Expressionism in New York City. Fontana called the movement Movimento Spaziale. Spatialism combines ideas from the Dada movement, Tachism and Concrete art...

     - Lucio Fontana
    Lucio Fontana
    Lucio Fontana was a painter and sculptor born in Rosario, , the son of an Italian father and an Argentine mother...

  • Visionary art
    Visionary art
    Visionary art is art that purports to transcend the physical world and portray a wider vision of awareness including spiritual or mystical themes, or is based in such experiences....

     - Ernst Fuchs
    Ernst Fuchs (artist)
    Ernst Fuchs is an Austrian visionary painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor, architect, stage designer, composer, poet, singer and one of the founders of the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism.-Life and Work:...

    , Paul Laffoley
    Paul Laffoley
    Paul Laffoley is a U.S. artist and architect. As an architect, Laffoley worked for 18 months on design for the World Trade Center Tower II. As a painter, his work is usually classified as visionary art or outsider art...

    , Michael Bowen
    Michael Bowen
    Michael Bowen may refer to:* Michael George Bowen, former Archbishop of Southwark* Michael Bowen , American film and television actor* Michael Bowen , American artist...


Important Modern art exhibitions and museums

For a comprehensive list see Museums of modern art
Museums of modern art
-Australia:*Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney 140 George Street, The Rocks, Sydney*Heide Museum of Modern Art, Bulleen, Melbourne-Austria:* Ludwig Foundation, Museumsquartier, Vienna*Kunsthalle, Museumsquartier, Vienna* , Klagenfurt, Kärnten...

.


See also

  • Modernism
    Modernism
    Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes both a set of cultural tendencies and an array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society in the late...

  • List of modern artists
  • Contemporary art
    Contemporary art
    Contemporary art can be defined variously as art produced at this present point in time or art produced since World War II. The definition of the word contemporary would support the first view, but museums of contemporary art commonly define their collections as consisting of art produced since...

  • Postmodern art
    Postmodern art
    Postmodern art is a term used to describe an art movement which was thought to be in contradiction to some aspect of modernism, or to have emerged or developed in its aftermath. In general, movements such as Intermedia, Installation art, Conceptual Art and Multimedia, particularly involving video...

  • Art periods
    Art periods
    Art period n. A phase in the development of the work of an artist, groups of artists or art movement.This article outlines phases of art in the Western world.-Medieval art:c. 200 - c...

  • Modern architecture
    Modern architecture
    Modern architecture is art with similar characteristics, primarily the simplification of form and creation of ornament from the structure and theme of the building. The first variants were conceived early in the 20th century...

  • Art manifesto
    Art manifesto
    The Art manifesto has been a recurrent feature associated with the avant-garde in Modernism. Art manifestos are mostly extreme in their rhetoric and intended for shock value to achieve a revolutionary effect. They often address wider issues, such as the political system...

  • History of painting
    History of painting
    The history of painting reaches back in time to artifacts from pre-historic humans, and spans all cultures, that represents a continuous, though disrupted, tradition from Antiquity. Across cultures, and spanning continents and millennia, the history of painting is an ongoing river of creativity,...

  • Western painting
    Western painting
    The history of Western painting represents a continuous, though disrupted, tradition from antiquity. Until the mid 19th century it was primarily concerned with representational and Classical modes of production, after which time more modern, abstract and conceptual forms gained favor.Developments...

  • 20th century Western painting
    20th century Western painting
    20th century Western painting begins with the heritage of painters like Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat and Henri de Toulouse Lautrec all of whom were essential for the development of modern art...

  • 20th century art
    20th century art
    20th century art and what it became known as - Modern art, really began with Modernism in the late 19th century. Nineteenth-Century movements of Post Impressionism and Art Nouveau led to the first Twentieth-Century art movements of Fauvism in France and Die Brücke in Germany. Fauvism in Paris...

  • Art movements

Further reading

  • Adams, Hugh. 1979. Modern Painting. [Oxford]: Phaidon Press. ISBN 0-7148-1984-0 (cloth) ISBN 0-7148-1920-4 (pbk)
  • Childs, Peter. 2000. Modernism. London and New York: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-19647-7 (cloth) ISBN 0-415-19648-5 (pbk)
  • Crouch, Christopher. 2000. Modernism in Art Design and Architecture. New York: St. Martins Press. ISBN 0312218303 (cloth) ISBN 031221832X (pbk)
  • Dempsey, Amy. 2002. Art in the Modern Era: A Guide to Schools and Movements. New York: Harry A. Abrams. ISBN 0810941724
  • Hunter, Sam, John Jacobus, and Daniel Wheeler. 2004. Modern Art. Revised and Updated 3rd Edition. New York: The Vendome Press [Pearson/Prentice Hall]. ISBN 0-13-189565-6 (cloth) 0-13-150519-X (pbk)
  • Kolocotroni, Vassiliki, Jane Goldman, and Olga Taxidou (eds.). 1998. Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-45073-2 (cloth) ISBN 0-226-45074-0 (pbk)
  • Ozenfant, Amédée. 1952. Foundations of Modern Art. New York: Dover Publications.

External links