- Salvador Dali's "Persistence of Memory," an example of the Surrealist painting school
Modern art is one of the most profound cultural revolutions of the twentieth century. With the invention of photography, art's primary mission--to represent everyday realities--assumed lesser importance. Artists took aim at portraying alternate realities, such as those represented in Salvador Dali's famous surrealistic landscapes, that only existed in people's imagination and more specifically dreams and imagined unconscious. As modern art master Paul Klee once expressed it, his mission was to move beyond simple representation, "and thereby express the belief that inside reality is merely an isolated phenomenon latently outnumbered by other realities." These desires coincided with similar movements in modern science and psychology to go beyond what the eye sees--and takes for granted--as the face of everyday reality. In that regard, Picasso is the quintessential modern artist for his ability to combine both those worlds through this manipulation of intent and expression. - A representative painting by the Dutch artist Piet Mondrian
The roots of modern art go as far back as nineteenth century French Impressionism, whose chief practitioners, such as by Henri Matisse, for example, manipulated colors and focused on lighting, even if their subjects happened to be realistic ones. This manipulation of color intensified through the Symbolist and Art Nouveau movements, inspiring greater debate from audiences and critics used to a traditional representative style. In freely combining color and emotions, as German Expressionism did, for example, during the 1920s, modern artists forced people to reconsider their own deeply-held beliefs that art should simply mirror the every day world, without regard for what lay beneath the surface thus bringing the art world into the social commentary realm. Not surprisingly, many of these movements, such as Expressionism, immediately followed major upheavals, such as the total German defeat following World War I. - The German Reichstag building, following its wrapping in cloth in 1971
Like many creative movements, modern art has experienced many different faces. Cubists freely experimented with color and geometric forms, as exemplified by the works of French artists like Paul Cezanne, and Marcel Duchamp's "Nude Descending A Staircase," which showed the imagined passage of time. The Dutch artist, Piet Mondrian, took this a step further by liberating geometric shapes and colors from the burden of looking like actual objects and focusing on the abstract. Other notable movements included Dada, which threw out tradition in favor of conceptual pieces that its practitioners referred to as "non-art" objects. Surrealists like Salvador Dali took this desire to a mid-point in using their work to represent the worlds of dreams and psychic experiences. During the 1950s, Abstract Expressionism reached new heights in the color and shape experiments of artists like DeKooning, and Jackson Pollock, while Abstract Formalism favored more of an emphasis on line, and color, which is the predominant association for people's conceptions of modern art. - During the 1960s and 1970s, the line between expression and technique blurred even further, such as the Pop Art movement, which elevated ordinary objects like street signs and traffic lights into elaborately realized works that reflected and commented on the outside simultaneously. Conceptual artists, like the Bulgarian-born Christo, took this desire a step further by abandoning conventional painting or drawing techniques in favor of elaborate gestures, such as the wrapping of the German Reichstag building in cloth, to prod viewers into seeing familiar landscapes in a different manner. These kinds of tactics were intended to redirect debate toward the artist's intentions, as opposed to their message or technique.
- Although shock and provocation are the most two common values associated with modern art, leaving the emphasis there does its practitioners a disservice, since many casual viewers fail to appreciate the realistic elements present in Cubism and Expressionism, for example. In breaking with traditions, modern artists created one of their own, which, if anything, moves faster than its century-old forebears, as exemplified by 1960- and 1970-era rejection of modernist ideals for the more relevant pastures of postmodernism. With artists increasingly incorporating elements from outside their chosen mediums, such as found objects, or video, for example, it seems self-evident that modern art will not sit still for long, if ever.
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