Modern Art part 1

It may be hard to believe, but this now beloved art genre was once an outcast visual movement. Breaking from Realism, Impressionist painters moved away from realistic representations to use visible brushstrokes, vivid colors with little mixing, and open compositions to capture the emotion of light and movement. Impressionism started when a group of French artists broke with academic tradition by painting en plein air—a shocking decision when most landscape painters executed their work indoors in a studio.

The original group, which included Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, and Frédéric Bazille, formed in the early 1860s in France. Additional artists would join in forming their own society to exhibit their artwork after being rejected by the traditional French salons, who deemed it too controversial to exhibit. This initial underground exhibition, which took place in 1874, allowed them to gain public favor ("13 Revolutionary Art Movements That Have Shaped Our Visual History").

Again originating from France, this type of art developed between 1886 and 1905 as a response to the Impressionist movement. This time, artists reacted against the need for the naturalistic depictions of light and color in Impressionist art. As opposed to earlier styles, Post-Impressionism covers many different types of art, from the Pointillism of Georges Seurat to the Symbolism of Paul Gauguin.

Not unified by a single style, artists were united by the inclusion of abstract elements and symbolic content in their artwork. Perhaps the most well-known Post-Impressionist is Vincent van Gogh, who used color and his brushstrokes not to convey the emotional qualities of the landscape, but his own emotions and state of mind ("13 Revolutionary Art Movements That Have Shaped Our Visual History").

Art nouveau is an international style in architecture and design that emerged in the 1890s and is characterized by sinuous lines and flowing organic shapes based on plant forms

Fauvism is the name applied to the work produced by a group of artists (which included Henri Matisse and André Derain) from around 1905 to 1910, which is characterized by strong colors and fierce brushwork

Expressionism is a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Northern Europe around the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas.

A truly revolutionary style of art, Cubism is one of the most important art movements of the 20th century. Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque developed Cubism in the early 1900s, with the term being coined by art critic Louis Vauxcelles in 1907 to describe the artists. Throughout the 1910s and 1920s, the two men—joined by other artists—would use geometric forms to build up the final representation. Completely breaking with any previous art movement, objects were analyzed and broken apart, only to be reassembled into an abstracted form.

This reduction of images to minimal lines and shapes was part of the Cubist quest for simplification. The minimalist outlook also trickled down into the color palette, with Cubists forgoing shadowing and using limited hues for a flattened appearance. This was a clear break from the use of perspective, which has been the standard since the Renaissance. Cubism opened the doors for later art movements, like Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism, by throwing out the prescribed artist’s rulebook ("13 Revolutionary Art Movements That Have Shaped Our Visual History").

Perhaps one of the most controversial movements of the Modernist era was Futurism, which, at a cursory glance, likened humans to machines and vice versa in order to embrace change, speed, and innovation in society while discarding artistic and cultural forms and traditions of the past. However, at the center of the Futurist platform was an endorsement of war and misogyny. Futurism—coined in a 1909 manifesto by Filippo Marinetti—was not limited to just one art form, but in fact was embraced by sculptors, architects, painters, and writers.

Paintings were typically of automobiles, trains, animals, dancers, and large crowds; and painters borrowed the fragmented and intersecting planes from Cubism in combination with the vibrant and expressive colors of Fauvism in order to glorify the virtues of speed and dynamic movement.

Writers focused on ridding their poetry of what they saw as unnecessary elements such as adjectives and adverbs so that the emphasis could rest on the action of infinitive verbs. This technique in conjunction with the integration of mathematical symbols allowed them to make more declarative statements with a great sense of audacity. Although originally ardent in their affirmation of the virtues of war, the Futurists lost steam as the devastation of WWI became realized ("10 Modernist Art Movements").