What Is Modernism in Art? Ideas, Artists and Key Works

Modernism is the umbrella term for the art movements that, from the 1860s to the 1960s, broke with the academy's rules about models, perspective and finish. Artists explored the medium itself – colour, form and surface – and looked for new ways to depict the modern world.

Facts

The break with the academy

In the nineteenth century the academy in Paris decided what counted as good art: historical subjects, smooth brushwork and an illusion of depth. In 1863 the jury rejected so many works that Emperor Napoleon III ordered a separate Salon des Refusés. That same year Édouard Manet painted Olympia, a nude woman who looks straight at the viewer instead of playing a mythological figure. When it was shown at the Salon in 1865 it caused an outcry, and many see it as the starting point of modernism. As early as 1855 Gustave Courbet had put up his own pavilion for his works outside the World's Fair in Paris, a sign that artists were beginning to take a stand against the official institutions.

Soon afterwards the Impressionists let light and the passing moment take charge, and Paul Cézanne began to build the picture from geometric forms and planes of colour. His series The Card Players from the 1890s shows how he simplified the subject to make the structure of the picture visible.

Art freed from the subject

After 1900 developments came fast. The Fauves let go of naturalistic colour, and Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque broke the subject apart in Cubism. Around 1910 Wassily Kandinsky painted some of the first pictures with no recognisable subject at all, and abstract art became a language of its own.

Piet Mondrian took the idea furthest in Composition with Red, Blue and Yellow, where only straight lines and primary colours remain. At the same time Marcel Duchamp asked a very different question when he submitted a urinal, Fountain, to an exhibition in 1917: who decides what is art?

The ideas behind it

Modernism was marked by a belief in progress and in the new. Manifestos and artists' groups became a way of attracting attention, and the avant-garde saw itself as a vanguard showing the way. In 1960 the critic Clement Greenberg described modernist painting as art that draws attention to its own means, for instance the flatness of the picture.

The movement was not only about paintings. The school Bauhaus wanted to unite art, craft and industry, and its ideas live on in architecture and design; read more in the guide to the Bauhaus. The Museum of Modern Art in New York, which opened in 1929, became one of the key institutions for showing and explaining the new art.

The end and the legacy

After the Second World War the centre of gravity moved from Paris to New York. Abstract Expressionists such as Jackson Pollock painted huge, gestural canvases and became symbols of post-war art; see the post-war period. In the 1960s artists began to question modernism's seriousness and purity, and Pop Art, Conceptual art and Minimalism opened the way to what is often called postmodernism.

Modernism is still not finished as an idea. Many of its questions – what is a picture, who decides what is art – are still being asked, and it has shaped how we see museums, posters and furniture alike. At the same time galleries, private collectors and magazines became more important to artists than academic commissions, a change that still shapes the art world.

How to recognise it

Exercise

Which work is often seen as the starting point of modernism?