Many modern artists are well-known household names. They include Vincent Van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Frida Kahlo, Claude Monet, Andy Warhol, Wassily Kandinsky, Gustav Klimt, Jackson Pollock, Sonia Delaunay, Salvador Dali, Henri Matise, Mark Rothko, and many more. Modern artists should not be confused with contemporary artists.
There are many striking differences between modern and classical art, and in many ways, modern artists were directly rebelling against the standards that classical art had set for many centuries. Some of the differences include:
Timeframe: The classical period lasted hundreds of years and was then revisited in the Renaissance and neoclassical periods. By comparison, the modern art movement was very short, lasting less than a century. However, the significant changes in the world and rapid development of technology during the modernist era fueled intense artistic developments over a short period.
Art was an expression of wealth and power in the classical period. By comparison, the modern art movement focused on the ideas and feelings of the artist. The artist created work primarily for themselves as a means of self-expression, not as a commission.
Function: Classical art depicts a scene, inspires devotion, or tells a story. These stories often depict mythology or religious scenes. Modern art focuses more on expressing the ideas or feelings of an artist. Some modern artworks have no definite meaning, purpose, or story behind them at all.
Philosophies: Classical and modernist art have very different attitudes. Classical art believes in order and celebrates humankind and religion. Modern art is more often critical of humanity and religion. Humanity and society are often depicted in a negative light, questioned, or criticized in modern artworks.
The modernist art movement started in France but spread across Europe, the Americas, the Middle East, and Australasia throughout the early 20th century. Modern art had wide-ranging influences and used global inspirations. This rapid globalization of art was largely fueled by mass immigration and displacement during the first and second world wars.
Technology: Technology in the classical era was far more limited than in the modern era. Modern painters had a greater variety of paints and materials to paint with, while modern sculptors had more variety of metals, plastics, and other materials. Modern artists also had a greater variety of machines and tools at their disposal, such as power tools, lights, printing machines, cameras, etc.
Mediums: The main art medium for fine art is observed in both classical and modern art. Painting, architecture, and sculpture dominated both movements. More statues and architecture remain in existence from the classical periods. The modernist period also introduced photography as a primary medium.
Fundamentals: While modern artists rebelled against classical styles, they still use the same fundamental artistic techniques and skills. These fine art fundamentals include value, form, perspective, line, space, balance, asymmetrical balance, shape, color, composition, and shape.
Because classical artworks are centuries old, they are impossible for most people to buy or collect. However, you can still observe and see classical artworks in Greece, Italy, and various museums worldwide. Collectors can, however, still buy original modern art from art galleries worldwide.
Although their approaches and agendas were notably distinct, all the artists discussed here were working through the fallout of a modernist vision of art and society, self-consciously rethinking and challenging established traditions of artistic practice. Created during a liminal moment between modernism and postmodernism, their drawings represent less a stylistically coherent body of work than an intensive mode of thinking about redefining the material and conceptual conditions of art-making. While attempting to move away from the emotive claims of their Abstract Expressionist predecessors, artists associated with Minimal, Postminimal, and Conceptual practices wanted to uphold the freedom of experimentation with form and materials initiated by artists such as Jackson Pollock. The climate of analysis and material experimentation of the 1960s and 1970s in the United States not only addressed the artwork and standards of artistic production but also extended to the critique of institutions, the role of the artist and audience, the dissemination of artworks in the market, and the industrial conditions of modern society.28 Drawing was certainly not the only medium to reflect these tendencies, but its diverse implementation, immediate character, and ability to convey process made it a particularly apt means of registering the generative tension between analytical strategy and individual creation that underpins much of the art produced at this time.
Meredith MaloneMeredith Malone received her MA and PhD in Art History from the University of Pennsylvania. A specialist in post-World War II art practices in Europe and the United States, she is associate curator at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum and adjunct lecturer in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Washington University in St. Louis. She has curated and co-curated several exhibitions, including TomÃs Saraceno: Cloud-Specific (2011); Cosima von Bonin: Character Appropriation (2011); Power Fields: Explorations in the Work of Vito Acconci (2008) and Chance Aesthetics (2009), an exhibition examining chance as a key compositional principle of modernism. The exhibition catalogue accompanying Chance Aesthetics won the Midwest Art History Society Award for Outstanding Catalogue for 2009.
Intended as a reaction to preceding modern art movements, contemporary art is thought to have begun on the heels of Pop Art. In post-war Britain and America, Pop Art was pioneered by artists like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. It is defined by an interest in portraying mass culture and reimagining commercial products as accessible art. While the movement lasted roughly from the 1950s through the early 1970s, it was reborn as Neo-Pop Art in the 1980s thanks to artists like Jeff Koons.
One might say, legitimately, that art cannot merely be a mirror image of political rhetoric. It must take a critical (and, ideally, revolutionary) attitude to the rhetoric of the times, hostile if necessary, supportive if possible, but always seeking to strengthen, intellectually and emotionally, that which is genuinely humane and progressive.
By Rosie LessoMA Contemporary Art Theory, BA Fine ArtRosie is a contributing writer and artist based in Scotland. She has produced writing for a wide range of arts organizations including Tate Modern, The National Galleries of Scotland, Art Monthly, and Scottish Art News, with a focus on modern and contemporary art. She holds an MA in Contemporary Art Theory from the University of Edinburgh and a BA in Fine Art from Edinburgh College of Art. Previously she has worked in both curatorial and educational roles, discovering how stories and history can really enrich our experience of art.
"Information" was a critical survey, and perhaps the first in America, of conceptual art. McShine, then associate curator in MoMA's painting and sculpture department, framed "Information" as an "international report" on the globalizing and democratizing power of new technologies (which, at the time, meant photography, television, film, satellites, and jet travel) that gave artists new avenues for making. Many of the works in the show (by artists like Vito Acconci, Daniel Buren, Art & Language, Jan Dibbets, Ed Ruscha, Robert Smithson, Jeff Wall, and Dennis Oppenheim) required audience participation or activation, the most notorious example being Hans Haacke's MoMA Poll, wherein museum visitors were surveyed about then-governor Nelson Rockefeller's attitude towards President Nixon's policies in Indochina. Rockefeller was on the museum's board; Haacke got away with it by leaving the specific question that the poll would ask out of his initial proposal to the museum. (It might be the most famous example of so-called "institutional critique.") For its political engagement, participatory engagement with its audience, and support of media-based work, "Information" was a pioneering project.
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