Knowra Modern art Modern art Modern art is art made from the late 19th century through much of the 20th century. It is marked by experiments that challenged academic traditions and inherited conventions.
Impressionism : A late 19th-century movement that used visible brushwork and changing light to depict immediate experience. Its loose brushwork and modern subjects helped loosen academic standards.
Cubism : An early 20th-century movement that fragmented subjects into geometric forms and multiple viewpoints. Cubist artists dismantled single-point perspective and pictorial unity.
Pablo Picasso : A Spanish artist who helped develop Cubism and worked across painting, sculpture, printmaking, and ceramics. His Cubist innovations and changing styles became defining landmarks of modern art.
Academic art : Art made within formal academies and their teaching systems, which upheld established standards and genres. Modern artists rebelled against its rules of technique, subject, and artistic authority.
Armory Show : A 1913 exhibition in New York that introduced many Americans to European modern art. Its public reception made modernist experimentation a national controversy in the United States.
Industrial Revolution : The transformation of production and society through mechanization, beginning in Britain in the 18th century. Industrialization reshaped the cities, technologies, and social conditions modern artists depicted.
Abstract art : Art that does not aim to represent recognizable people, places, or objects directly. Abstraction made color, line, and form independent subjects of artistic work.
Wassily Kandinsky : A Russian-born painter and theorist associated with the development of abstract art. His paintings and writings argued that color and form could carry meaning without depicting objects.
Realism : An approach to art that represents subjects without idealization, often emphasizing ordinary life. Modern art often departed from realism, though some modern movements retained its social aims.
Museum of Modern Art : A New York museum founded in 1929 and devoted to modern and contemporary art. Its exhibitions and collections helped establish modern art's public canon.
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