Chapter 11.3: Modern Art, 1850-1960

Modern art, painting, sculpture, architecture, and graphic arts are 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.

People use the term “modern” in a variety of ways, often very loosely, with a lot of implied associations of new, contemporary, up-to-date, and technological. We know the difference between a modern society and one that remains tied to the past and it usually has less to do with art and more to do with technology and industrial progress, things like indoor plumbing, easy access to consumer goods, freedom of expression, and voting rights. In the 19th century, however, modernity and its connection with art had certain specific associations that people began recognizing and using as barometers to distinguish themselves and their culture from earlier nineteenth-century ways and attitudes.

Chronologically, Modernism refers to the period from 1850 to 1960. It begins with the Realist movement and ends with Abstract Expressionism. That’s just a little over one hundred years. During that period the western world experienced some significant changes that transformed Europe and the United States from traditional societies that were agriculturally based into modern ones with cities and factories and mass transportation.

The Avant Garde

The avant garde is a term used to identify artists whose painting subjects and techniques were radical, setting them apart from the more traditional or academic styles, but not with any particular political ideology in mind. Avant garde became a kind of generic term for a number of art movements centered on the idea of artistic autonomy and independence. Realists painters such as Manet and impressionists such as Renoir and Monet epitomized the meaning of this term given their solid rejection of traditional art themes and technique. However, the avant garde was never a cohesive group of artists and what was avant garde in one nation was not necessarily the same in others.