What defines modern art?
Modern art includes artistic work produced during the period extending roughly from the 1860s to the 1970s, and denotes the styles 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 art, painting, sculpture, architecture, and graphic arts characteristic of the 20th and 21st centuries and of the later part of the 19th century. Modern art embraces a wide variety of movements, theories, and attitudes whose modernism resides particularly in a tendency to reject traditional, historical, or academic forms and conventions in an effort to create an art more in keeping with changed social, economic, and intellectual conditions.
The beginnings of modern painting cannot be clearly demarcated, but there is general agreement that it started in 19th-century France. The paintings of Gustave Courbet, Edouard Manet, and the Impressionists represent a deepening rejection of the prevailing academic tradition and a quest for a more naturalistic representation of the visual world. These painters’ Post-Impressionist successors can be viewed as more clearly modern in their repudiation of traditional techniques and subject matter and their expression of a more subjective personal vision. From about the 1890s on, a succession of varied movements and styles arose that are the core of modern art and that represent one of the high points of Western visual culture. These modern movements include Neo-Impressionism, Symbolism, Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism, Expressionism, Suprematism, Constructivism, Metaphysical painting, De Stijl, Dada, Surrealism, Social Realism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop art, Op art, Minimalism, and Neo-Expressionism. Despite the enormous variety seen in these movements, most of them are characteristically modern in their investigation of the potentials inherent within the painting medium itself for expressing a spiritual response to the changed conditions of life in the 20th century and beyond. These conditions include accelerated technological change, the expansion of scientific knowledge and understanding, the seeming irrelevance of some traditional sources of value and belief, and an expanding awareness of non-Western cultures.
An important trend that began in the 20th century was that of abstract, or nonobjective, art—i.e., art in which little or no attempt is made to objectively reproduce or depict the appearances or forms of objects in the realm of nature or the existing physical world. It should also be noted that the development of photography and of allied photomechanical techniques of reproduction has had an obscure but certainly important influence on the development of modern art, because these mechanical techniques freed (or deprived) manually executed drawing and painting of their hitherto crucial role as the only means of accurately depicting the visible world.
Modern architecture arose out of the rejection of revivals, classicism, eclecticism, and indeed all adaptations of past styles to the building types of industrializing late 19th- and 20th-century society. It also arose out of efforts to create architectural forms and styles that would utilize and reflect the newly available building technologies of structural iron and steel, reinforced concrete, and glass. Until the spread of postmodernism, modern architecture also implied the rejection of the applied ornament and decoration characteristic of premodern Western buildings. The thrust of modern architecture has been a rigorous concentration on buildings whose rhythmical arrangement of masses and shapes states a geometric theme in light and shade. This development has been closely tied to the new building types demanded by an industrialized society, such as office buildings housing corporate management or government administration. Among the most important trends and movements of modern architecture are the Chicago School, Functionalism, Art Deco, Art Nouveau, De Stijl, the Bauhaus, the International Style, the New Brutalism, and postmodernism.
Modern Art
Naturalism
New Realism (American Realism)
Naïve Art (Primitivism)
Social Realism
Symbolism
Surrealism
Aestheticism
Metaphysical art
Tonalism
Magic Realism
Impressionism
Art Deco
Post-Impressionism
Purism
Arts and Crafts
Precisionism
Harlem Renaissance (New Negro Movement)
Incoherents
Art Nouveau
Regionalism
Secession
Socialist Realism
Pictorialism
New Medievialism
Muralism
Expressionism
Neo-Romanticism
Existential Art
Lettrism
Young Poland
Cubism
Abstract Expressionism
Indian Space Painting
Orphism (Simultanism)
Abstract Art
Art Informel
Avant-garde
Tachisme
Futurism
Haute Pâte (Matter Painting)
Cubo-Futurism
Neo-Concretism
Rayonism
Viennese Actionism
Vorticism
Performance Art
Synchromism
Neo-Surrealism
Dada
Transautomatism
Suprematism
Sots Art
Constructivism
Post-Painterly Abstraction
Abstract Illusionism
Modernism
Feminist Art
Modernismo
Fiber Art
Analytical Realism
Mail Art
New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit)
Outsider art (Art brut)
De Stijl (Neoplasticism)
Art Singulier
Concrete Art (Concretism)
Neo-Expressionism
Neo-Dada
Neo-Figurative Art
Kinetic art
Spatialism
Arte Povera
Soviet Nonconformist Art
Op Art
Pop Art
Nouveau Réalisme
New Generation Sculpture
Classical Realism
Indigenism
Source: https://www.britannica.com/topic/modern-art-to-1945-2080464
