Modern Art

I INTRODUCTION

Modern Art, painting, sculpture, and other forms of 20th-century art. Although scholars disagree as to precisely when the modern period began, they mostly use the term modern art to refer to art of the 20th century in Europe and the Americas, as well as in other regions under Western influence. The modern period has been a particularly innovative one. Among the 20th century's most important contributions to the history of art are the invention of abstraction (art that does not imitate the appearance of things), the introduction of a wide range of new artistic techniques and materials, and even the redefinition of the boundaries of art itself. This article covers some of the theories used to interpret modern art, the origins of modern art in the 19th century, and its most important characteristics and modes of expression.

Modern art comprises a remarkable diversity of styles, movements, and techniques. The wide range of styles encompasses the sharply realistic painting of a Midwestern farm couple by Grant Wood, entitled American Gothic (1930, Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois), and the abstract rhythms of poured paint in Black and White (1948, private collection), by Jackson Pollock. Yet even if we could easily divide modern art into representational works, like American Gothic, and abstract works, like Black and White, we would still find astonishing variety within these two categories. Just as the precisely painted American Gothic is representational, Willem de Kooning's Marilyn Monroe (1954, private collection) might also be considered representational, although its broad brushstrokes merely suggest the rudiments of a human body and facial features. Abstraction, too, reveals a number of different approaches, from the dynamic rhythms of Pollock's Black and White to the right-angled geometry of Composition with Red, Yellow, and Blue (1937-1942, Tate Gallery, London) by Dutch painter Piet Mondrian, whose lines and rectangles suggest the mechanical precision of the machine-made. Other artists preferred an aesthetic of disorder, as did German artist Kurt Schwitters, who mixed old newspapers, stamps, and other discarded objects to create Picture with Light Center (1919, Museum of Modern Art, New York City).

Thus 20th-century art displays more than stylistic diversity. It is in the modern period that artists have made paintings not only of traditional materials such as oil on canvas, but of any material available to them. This innovation led to developments that were even more radical, such as conceptual art and performance art—movements that expanded the definition of art to include not just physical objects but ideas and actions as well.

II CHARACTERISTICS OF MODERN ART

In view of this diversity, it is difficult to define modern art in a way that includes all of 20th-century Western art. For some critics, the most important characteristic of modern art is its attempt to make painting and sculpture ends in themselves, thus distinguishing modernism from earlier forms of art that had conveyed the ideas of powerful religious or political institutions. Because modern artists were no longer funded primarily by these institutions, they were freer to suggest more personal meanings. This attitude is often expressed as art for art's sake, a point of view that is often interpreted as meaning art without political or religious motives. But even if religious and government institutions no longer commissioned most art, many modern artists still sought to convey spiritual or political messages. Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, for instance, felt that color combined with abstraction could express a spiritual reality beneath ordinary appearances, while German painter Otto Dix created openly political works that criticized policies of the German government.

Another theory claims that modern art is by nature rebellious and that this rebellion is most evident in a quest for originality and a continual desire to shock. The term avant-garde, which is often applied to modern art, comes from a French military term meaning “advance guard,” and suggests that what is modern is what is new, original, or cutting-edge. To be sure, many artists in the 20th century tried to redefine what art means, or attempted to expand the definition of art to include concepts, materials, or techniques that were never before associated with art. In 1917, for example, French artist Marcel Duchamp exhibited everyday, mass-produced, utilitarian objects—including a bicycle wheel and a urinal—as works of art. In the 1950s and 1960s, American artist Allan Kaprow used his own body as an artistic medium in spontaneous performances that he declared to be artworks. In the 1970s American earthwork artist Robert Smithson used unaltered elements of the environment—earth, rocks, and water—as material for his sculptural pieces. Consequently, many people associate modern art with what is radical and disturbing. Although a theory of rebellion could be applied to explain the quest for originality motivating a great number of 20th-century artists, it would be difficult to apply it to an artist such as Grant Wood, whose American Gothic clearly rejected the example of the advanced art of his time.

Another key characteristic of modern art is its fascination with modern technology and its embrace of mechanical methods of reproduction, such as photography and the printing press. In the early 1910s Italian artist Umberto Boccioni sought to glorify the precision and speed of the industrial age in his paintings and sculptures. At about the same time, Spanish painter Pablo Picasso incorporated newspaper clippings and other printed material into his paintings in a new technique known as collage. By the same token, however, other modern artists have sought inspiration from the spontaneous impulses of children's art or from exploring the aesthetic traditions of nonindustrialized, non-Western cultures. French artist Henri Matisse and Swiss artist Paul Klee were profoundly influenced by children's drawings, Picasso closely observed African masks, and Pollock's technique of pouring paint onto canvas was in part inspired by Native American sand painting.

Yet another view holds that the basic motivation of modern art is to engage in a dialogue with popular culture. To this end, Picasso pasted bits of newspaper into his paintings, Roy Lichtenstein imitated both the style and subject of comic strips in his paintings, and Andy Warhol made images of Campbell's soup cans. But although breaking down the boundary between high art and popular culture is typical of artists like Picasso, Lichtenstein, and Warhol, it is not of Mondrian, Pollock, or most other abstract artists.

Each of these theories of course, is compelling and could explain a great many strategies employed by modern artists. Yet even this brief examination reveals that 20th-century art is far too diverse to be fully contained within any one definition. Each theory can contribute a part to the puzzle, but no single theory can claim to be the solution to the puzzle itself.

III ORIGINS

Art of the late 19th century anticipated many of the characteristics of modern art noted above. These include the idea of art for art's sake, the focus on originality, the celebration of modern technology, the fascination with the “primitive,” and the engagement with popular culture.

A Impressionism

Modern art's celebration of art for art's sake was initiated by French artists associated with impressionism, including Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, and Berthe Morisot. Abandoning direct references to religious and historical subjects, many of the impressionists broke away from the French art establishment in the 1870s and exhibited their paintings independently, anticipating the modern desire for independence from established institutions. In painting scenes of everyday life, especially life in local bars and theaters, the impressionists anticipated modern art's interest in popular culture. In depicting railroads, bridges, and examples of the new cast-iron architecture, they anticipated modern art's fascination with technology. And by pioneering new artistic techniques (that is, applying paint in small, broken brush strokes) and by intensifying their colors, they anticipated the modern fascination with originality. By exhibiting quickly executed works as finished paintings, they forced the public to reconsider the sketch, no longer as a preliminary exercise, but as an end in itself, thereby anticipating the tendency of modern artists to change and expand the definition of art.

B Postimpressionism

In the last two decades of the 19th century a number of artists who had been inspired by the impressionists' style and technique reacted strongly against the impressionist example. These artists, who were eventually called postimpressionists, established a number of alternate approaches to painting, each of which was to have remarkable repercussions for 20th-century art. Paul Gauguin, for instance, rejected the impressionist technique of applying touches of color in separate, small brushstrokes in favor of using large areas comprised of a single color bound by heavy contour lines. This innovation had an impact on Matisse and scores of later artists who used color as an expressive device rather than as a means for copying nature. In 1891 Gauguin decided to settle on the Pacific island of Tahiti, motivated by a desire to leave Western civilization and embrace a simpler form of existence. His work there contributed to the modern fascination with non-Western art.

Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh, a friend of Gauguin, used both color and brushwork to translate his emotional state into visual form. In addition, he infused his paintings with religious or allegorical meanings (black crows as symbols of death, for example), countering the impressionists' emphasis on direct observation.

The work of Norwegian painter Edvard Munch was based on the assumption that painting could sacrifice truth to nature for expressive purposes. Munch used harsh combinations of colors, distorted forms, and exaggerated perspectives to give visual form to the alienation of the individual in modern, industrial society. The works of Gauguin, van Gogh, and Munch laid the groundwork for the later development of expressionism in 20th-century art.

Other postimpressionist artists reacted against impressionism in a different way. French artist Georges Seurat sought to raise art to the level of science by incorporating the latest theories about light and color into his work. He divided color into its constituents (purple into blue and red, or green into blue and yellow, for example) and applied these colors to his canvas dot by dot. His method, called pointillism, was meant to eliminate all intuition and impulse from the activity of painting.

Another postimpressionist, Paul Cézanne, sought to introduce greater structure into what he saw as the unsystematic practice of impressionism. Objects appear more solid and tangible in his paintings than in the works of his impressionist colleagues. But despite this increased solidity, Cézanne did more than any previous artist to destabilize the integrity of form through subtle distortions and seeming inaccuracies in his many still-life paintings. Objects do not rest comfortably on their bases, vases seen from the front have rims seen from above, and the horizontal edges of tables, when projecting from either side of a tablecloth, sometimes do not match up. It is almost as if Cézanne was dismantling the very solidity he meant to reintroduce to the depiction of objects.

Cézanne also introduced a radical innovation in works such as his Mont Sainte-Victoire (1902-1904, Philadelphia Museum of Art): The edge of the mountain opens up to allow areas of sky to penetrate the otherwise solid mountain. With this simple device, Cézanne decisively changed the course of art history. Two physical entities—earth and sky—believed to be distinct and separable were now made interchangeable. The world as it is seen and experienced, Cézanne seemed to say, is not as important as the laws of picture making. After Cézanne's example, the world of reality and the world of art began to drift apart. The fragmentation initiated by Cézanne's work spearheaded Picasso's later experimentation with form and invention of cubism.

IV MODERN ART'S FIRST DECADES

Cultural historians have related the fragmentation of form in late-19th- and early-20th-century art to the fragmentation of society at the time. The increasing technological aspirations of the industrial revolution widened the rift between the middle and the working classes. Women demanded the vote and equal rights. And the view of the mind presented by the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, stipulated that the human psyche, far from being unified, was fraught with emotional conflicts and contradictions. The discovery of X rays, physicist Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, and other technological innovations suggested that our visual experience no longer corresponded with science's view of the world.

Not surprisingly, various forms of artistic creativity reflected these tensions and developments. In literature, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf experimented with narrative structure, grammar, syntax, and spelling. In dance, Sergei Diaghilev, Isadora Duncan, and Loie Fuller experimented with unconventional choreography and costume. And in music, Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky composed pieces that did not depend on traditional tonal structure.

Music not only took its place among the most experimental of the arts, but it also became a great inspiration for visual artists. Many art critics in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were influenced by German philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, who had proclaimed that music was the most powerful of all the arts because it managed to suggest emotions directly, not by copying the world. Many painters of the late-19th-century symbolist movement, including Odilon Redon and Gustave Moreau, tried to emulate music's power of direct suggestion. By including abstract forms and depicting an imaginary, rather than an observable, reality in their paintings, Redon and the symbolists paved the way for abstract art.

A Fauvism

The idea that art could approximate music is reflected in Henri Matisse's Red Room (Harmony in Red) (1909, State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia), a painting whose subtitle is borrowed from musical terminology. From Gauguin, Matisse borrowed large areas of unvaried color, simplified shapes, and heavy contour lines. The simplicity of Matisse's drawing style relates to Gauguin's fascination with the art of non-Western cultures. Matisse also employed the abstract designs of carpets and textiles, reinforcing the flatness of the painting rather than attempting to create the illusion of depth. His interest in these designs demonstrates the influence of forms of creativity not often associated with fine art.

Although Red Room was intended as a pleasing image of middle-class domesticity, Matisse's manner of depiction was considered highly revolutionary, especially in the way he assigned intense colors to objects arbitrarily and not according to their appearance in nature. A scandalized contemporary critic declared Matisse and his fellow artists—André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck, and Georges Braque (of France), and Kees van Dongen (of the Netherlands)—to be fauves (French for “wild beasts”). This derogatory term became the name of their movement. Fauvism lasted only from about 1898 to 1908, but it had an enduring impact on 20th-century art.

B Cubism

Pablo Picasso, a friend and rival of Matisse, also invented a new style of painting, focusing mainly on line rather than color. Picasso's art changed radically around 1907, when he decided to incorporate some stylistic elements of African sculpture into his paintings. Unlike Matisse's pleasant image of a middle-class interior, Picasso's Les Demoiselles D'Avignon (1907, Museum of Modern Art, New York City) does violence to the human form by means of radical simplifications, arbitrary and harsh color combinations, and extreme distortions of human anatomy and proportions. The painting's space, moreover, does not conform to the logic of perspective, the traditional system for portraying depth in a picture, and is so fragmented that it is difficult to read clearly.

The violence inherent in Picasso's Demoiselles, however, gave way by about 1912 to his more meditative paintings, such as Ma Jolie (1912, Museum of Modern Art, New York City). In this and other examples of analytical cubism, the subject, usually a portrait or still life, is fragmented into a series of intersecting and interpenetrating geometric planes. Cézanne's influence can be felt in this fragmentation, as can Picasso's love of ambiguity and merging of opposites. Solid and void, figure and environment, background and foreground interpenetrate in defiance of both the logic of traditional painting and the logic of everyday experience. Ma Jolie is painted in muted tones of gray and brown; this lack of color also is characteristic of analytical cubism, as is the incorporation of lettering. The words MA JOLIE (French for “my pretty one”) appear at the bottom of the painting, referring to a popular song of the time and reinforcing the link between modern art and popular culture.

These links were further reinforced in Picasso's Still Life with Chair Caning (1912, Musée Picasso, Paris), to which the artist affixed a piece of oilcloth printed with the woven pattern of caning. This was among the first instances of collage, a violation of traditional painting techniques by the inclusion of foreign material. After the cubist experiments of Picasso and his French colleague Georges Braque, no material would ever be considered foreign to art, opening the door for art to redefine itself again and again as the century progressed.

Picasso's cubism proved remarkably influential. French artists who experimented with it included Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, Robert Delaunay, Fernand Léger, and Juan Gris. Their use of the style to glorify modern life's relationship to technology distinguishes their work from Picasso's and Braque's. Léger, for example, simplified forms in The City (1919, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania) into flat areas of color or suggestions of three-dimensional cubes or cylinders. In this work, Picasso's quirky and personal version of cubism has yielded to Léger's more mechanical and impersonal one. The shift reflects a contemporary political belief that the individual personality should be subordinated to the demands of society as a whole. The City is Léger's vision of an ideal community, or utopia: humanity's merger with the machine.

C Futurism

The futurists, a group of Italian artists working between 1909 and 1916, shared Léger's enthusiasm for technology, but pushed it even further. As their name suggests, the futurists embraced all that glorified new technology and mechanization and decried anything that had to do with tradition. They declared a speeding automobile to be more beautiful than an ancient Greek statue.

In combining Picasso's fragmentation of form with Seurat's pointillist painting technique, Dynamism of a Soccer Player (1913, Museum of Modern Art, New York City) by Umberto Boccioni is typical of futurism. But the most noticeable feature of Boccioni's many-legged soccer player is its depiction of motion. To achieve this sense of motion, the futurists drew upon sequential photographs of human movement by photographer Eadweard Muybridge and scientist Etienne-Jules Marey. "A galloping horse," the futurists proclaimed, "has not four legs but twenty." Like Léger, the futurists believed that a new society could be built only if citizens sacrificed their individuality for the good of the larger group. The new ideal human being suggested in Boccioni's painting would be more machine than man: strong, energetic, impersonal, even violent. Other futurist painters are Giacomo Balla, Carlo Carr , and Gino Severini.

D German Expressionism

Whereas an embrace of the new and technological was the hallmark of the Italian futurist movement, a group of artists in Germany called Die Brücke (The Bridge) celebrated not technology but human instinct. Die Brücke, founded in Dresden in 1905, included German artists Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. These artists saw the modern city as a place of alienation.

In such works as Berlin Street Scene (1913, Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart, Germany), Kirchner underscored the artificiality of city life and the way people lose their identity in a crowd. His human figures have distorted proportions and generalized facial features. Kirchner heightened the sense of anxiety with clashing color juxtapositions and angular shapes, the latter inspired by African sculpture and German woodcuts. Those artistic forms appealed to the expressionists not only for their simplification of human anatomy but also for their roughness, which revealed traces of the artist's hand and the difficulty of working in wood. Following Gauguin's example, the expressionists frequently represented the human body in the midst of nature, presumably freed from the strict moral codes of middle-class society.

In 1911 a second expressionist group was founded in Germany, this time in Munich, called Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider). This group included Russians Wassily Kandinsky and Alexei von Jawlensky; Germans Franz Marc, August Macke, and Gabriele Münter; and the Swiss Paul Klee. Like the members of Die Brücke, the artists of Der Blaue Reiter appreciated non-Western art as well as children's drawings, folk art, and handicrafts. But the members of Der Blaue Reiter were more interested in the spiritual side of humanity than in its instinctual side. Kandinsky wrote a treatise, Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1912), in which he connected representational art with materialism and abstract art with spirituality. As had the late-19th-century symbolist painters, Kandinsky drew parallels between painting and music, and believed that colors could evoke different emotions in the same way as different melodies and sounds do. In Kandinsky's abstract works, such as Improvisation 28 (1912, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City), the contours of shapes remain incomplete, as if open, and line and color function independently of one another. Although some scholars view these works as the first examples of abstract art, others have discovered that many of Kandinsky's turbulent preliminary sketches refer to scenes of the deluge, Last Judgment, and other biblical events. This discovery suggests that the spirituality Kandinsky accorded to abstract art was not just a general idea, but a crucial aspect of his subject matter.

E Russian Suprematism and Constructivism

Two Russian groups also arrived at abstraction in the early 20th century. Around 1913, painters Kasimir Malevich and El Lissitzky initiated a movement called suprematism, and sculptors Vladimir Tatlin and Aleksandr Rodchenko founded a movement known as constructivism.

The suprematists, like Kandinsky, believed that abstraction could convey a religious connotation. In 1915 Malevich painted a black square on a white background and exhibited it in the corner of a room—the traditional location for a Russian icon (religious image). According to Malevich, the term suprematism was meant to evoke the “supremacy of pure feeling.” The square symbolized sensation; the field or background, nothingness. What Malevich wanted to depict was the pure essence of sensation itself, not a sensation connected to a specific experience such as hunger, sadness, or happiness.

The constructivists sought an art that would be abstract, yet easily understood. Their sculptures celebrated the material properties of objects, such as texture and shape. Influenced by Picasso's techniques of collage and construction, Tatlin created sculptures without using the traditional techniques of carving or modeling. Whereas carving requires removing materials to reveal a sculpted form, construction is an additive process by which the artist combines ordinary materials such as metal and wood to build a sculpture. Unlike Picasso, Tatlin never painted or altered his materials, preferring instead to have their untouched surfaces relay their true nature. In his proposal for a Monument to the Third International (1919-1920, wooden model in the Russian State Museums, Saint Petersburg), Tatlin designed a huge metal structure that would celebrate the foundation of the new Soviet state. He intended it to be taller than the Eiffel Tower in Paris and to have internal rotating elements that would house government offices, some rotating once a day, some once a month, some once a year. This highly impractical monument was never built, but it exemplifies several tendencies of modern art: its tendency to express utopian ideals, to experiment with new materials and techniques, and to blur the boundaries between fine art and engineering.

F De Stijl

In 1917 Dutch painters Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg founded an artistic group known as De Stijl (The Style). Other members included painter Bart van der Leck, sculptor Georges van Tongerloo, and architect Gerrit Rietveld. Like the suprematists and constructivists, many of the artists of De Stijl were committed to the idea of abstract art and to the view that it had a purpose beyond mere decoration. Art, they felt, could change the nature of society and create a new kind of human environment. Mondrian's Composition with Red, Yellow, and Blue (1937-1942, Tate Gallery, London) reveals De Stijl's tendency to reduce painting to its most essential elements. Horizontal and vertical black lines divide the white canvas into rectangles, some of which are painted red, yellow, or blue. The surface of the painting reveals nothing impulsive or intuitive; everything seems (but was not always) pre-planned in the mind of the artist. Intending their work to look impersonal and machinelike, De Stijl artists echoed the cubists and futurists in their hope that a new society could be built by rejecting individuality and embracing a collective will.

Although Mondrian's rectilinear geometry is worlds apart from Kandinsky's dynamic and apocalyptic images, both artists were dedicated to the idea of abstract art and shared the belief that abstraction could convey philosophical meaning. Just as Kandinsky saw his abstractions as conveying a sense of spirituality, Mondrian saw the asymmetrical grids of his compositions as metaphors for the balancing of opposing forces: man and nature, individual and society, and so forth. These ideas were so central to Mondrian's work that he envisioned his compositions as the basis for architecture and interior design, a vision that Rietveld and other architects later helped fulfill.

G New Objectivity

After the unprecedented devastation of World War I (1914-1918), some artists lost faith in abstraction. In particular, many came to believe that abstract art looked trivial and superficial when so many millions of people had lost their lives, entire cities were coping with food shortages and political corruption, and these cities were overrun by soldiers crippled during the war. In Germany artists belonging to a movement known as the Neue Sachlichkeit (new objectivity) believed that to address these problems art should no longer divorce itself from everyday experience, pursue abstract philosophical ideals, or probe the individual psychology of its creator. These artists, who included George Grosz and Otto Dix, advocated a return to more traditional modes of representation along with direct engagement with the pressing social and political issues of the time. Dix's Matchseller (1920, Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart), for example, rejects cubism, expressionism, and abstraction in favor of a more immediately comprehensible kind of representation. Addressing the insensitive treatment of soldiers who had risked their lives for their country, this painting shows a crippled soldier selling matches on the street as passersby pointedly ignore him. Dix was aware that the postwar treatment of veterans depended on their social class. Thus his image denounced not only war in general but also the specific social tensions that were dividing Germany at that time.

H Dada

The slaughter of World War I affected artists in different ways. Some felt, as Mondrian did, that human betterment lay in the creation of an impersonal, mechanistic way of life, whereas others agreed with Dix that it lay in drawing attention to political problems. Still others concluded that the very idea of human betterment was a pointless illusion. For this group, the main lesson of the war, if anything, was the bankruptcy of reason, politics, technology, and even art itself. On this premise, several artists and poets founded a movement whose name, dada, was purposely meaningless, and whose members ridiculed anything having to do with culture, politics, or aesthetics. Centered at first in Zürich, Switzerland, dada later spread to Berlin, Paris, and New York City. Among its members were German poet Hugo Ball, German artist Kurt Schwitters, Romanian poet Tristan Tzara, Romanian artist Marcel Janco, American artist Man Ray, and French artists Jean Arp, Marcel Duchamp, and Francis Picabia. The dadaists attacked the idea of art or poetry by creating collage constructions from discarded junk, such as Kurt Schwitters's Painting with Light Center (1919, Museum of Modern Art, New York City). They also would write satirical poems by picking words out of a hat. Chance and accident were among the dadaists' most common creative devices.

An early and particularly influential dada work is Marcel Duchamp's Fountain (1917, Museum of Modern Art, New York City), an ordinary, mass-produced urinal that has been transformed into a work of art simply by being exhibited in a gallery and receiving a new title. Duchamp wished to ridicule traditional ideas of art, creativity, and beauty. The artist (although Duchamp always denied being “an artist”) would no longer create works of aesthetic merit based on inspiration or talent, but would select prefabricated everyday objects. And although these objects, which Duchamp dubbed ready-mades, had originally been functional, Duchamp denied their utilitarian function by putting them in a new context—a gallery or museum—and by changing their title.

I Surrealism

The dadaists' radical critique of art and reason had a strong appeal for an artistic and literary movement that was founded in 1924: surrealism. The surrealists, however, wanted to put a more positive spin on dada's pessimistic message. They were inspired by the writings of Freud, who had argued that the human mind was split between the conscious mind and the inaccessible unconscious mind, where a person's innermost thoughts, feelings, and desires lay repressed. The surrealists set out to gain access to these private wishes and feelings through dream imagery, random association of words, and art. The artists seeking ways of accessing the unconscious mind included André Breton, André Masson, and Yves Tanguy of France, René Magritte of Belgium, Joan Mir? and Salvador Dal? of Spain, and Max Ernst of Germany.

Two distinct styles emerged within surrealism. Some artists, such as Dal? and Magritte, attempted to suggest dream imagery by depicting objects accurately, but juxtaposing them in an irrational manner. An example of this strategy is Dal?'s The Persistence of Memory (1931, Museum of Modern Art, New York City). In this painting, pocket watches hang limply from a dead branch, while insects, a tabletop, and a distorted face lie in a barren landscape that leads back to a seashore and cliffs. The merging of these incongruous elements suggests an alternative, or a sur-reality, as the movement's name implies.

Other surrealists attempted to allow the hand to wander across the canvas surface without any conscious control, a technique they called automatism. The automatists reasoned that if the conscious mind were allowed to relax its hold, the unconscious could begin to manifest itself. The lines of the painting would then be motivated not by the conscious mind, which conforms to social convention and training, but by the powerful store of emotions hidden in the unconscious. Automatism began with Paris surrealists, such as Picabia, Arp, and Masson, but in the 1940s gained a strong following in New York City and in Montréal, Canada. André Masson's Panic (1963, Musée Nationale d'Art Moderne, Paris) is more abstract than the dream imagery of Dal?, though it nonetheless invites the viewer to examine its complex surfaces in search of visual clues to hidden meanings. These are meanings that Masson may not have intended but that he believed were nonetheless connected to his innermost emotions and desires.

J Sculpture in Europe

Although many 20th-century sculptors attached themselves to various movements, such as cubism and constructivism, others tended to carve their own paths. Constantin Brancusi, a Romanian who had settled in Paris, helped pioneer abstraction by simplifying forms into the most elemental shapes. Moreover, in pieces such as Bird in Space (1919, Museum of Modern Art, New York City), Brancusi polished the bronze surface of the sculpture to a highly reflective finish, contrasting the smooth metal with the textures of the stone base and wooden pedestal. Each material, in other words, became important in its own right and celebrated for its individual, natural properties.

Not all modern sculpture, however, was dedicated to abstraction. Surrealists such as Swiss sculptor Méret Oppenheim chose to render everyday, utilitarian objects using unexpected combinations of materials. For Object (Breakfast in Fur) (1936, Museum of Modern Art, New York City) Oppenheim lined an ordinary tea cup and spoon with fur. Although startling combinations like this are typical of surrealism, her piece is particularly disturbing because she manipulates viewers into imagining how a fur-lined spoon would feel and taste, forcing them into a disagreeable experience that engages multiple senses.

Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti was also associated with surrealism and often exploited its delight in ambiguity and multiple readings. His early work was deeply influenced by African sculptures from the Dan people of Liberia and Côte d'Ivoire who made ladles and spoons with handles shaped like small human feet. Giacometti's forms could likewise be viewed as either representations of the human body or as utilitarian objects. By the late 1940s and 1950s Giacometti had moved away from the visual puns of surrealism and begun to create extremely thin, elongated figures with rough, irregular surfaces. Man Crossing Street (1949, Kunsthaus, Zürich, Switzerland) is typical of such pieces, with its stark images of human beings isolated from both their environment and other individuals.

Another sculptor whose works wavered between figural references and abstraction was Englishman Henry Moore. Among his most common subjects was the reclining female form, as in Recumbent Figure (1938, Tate Gallery, London). This work combines the reclining nude motif of Western art with the Aztec tradition of depicting horizontal figures. Moore took liberties with human anatomy by carving deep holes in the figure, thus making the form more abstract and drawing attention to colors and shapes visible through these punctured areas. The organic and undulating shape of the figure recalls the curvilinear language of surrealism and plays upon the similarity between the curves of the female form and the undulation of the earth, reinforcing the idea of fertility usually associated with each.

V MODERN ART AFTER WORLD WAR II

Although Europe had been the acknowledged center of modern art in the first half of the 20th century, most critics now agree that after World War II (1939-1945), the center tended to shift to the United States. In the 1920s and 1930s, many American artists—including Charles Demuth, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, and John Marin—had tried to adopt elements of cubism or futurism into their works. But these movements were construed as being of European origin, and were considered essentially foreign to the United States.

In the 1930s some American artists staged a strong rebellion against European influences in American art. Grant Wood's American Gothic was typical of a movement called regionalism, whose agenda was to celebrate what was typically American, and to do it in a style that avoided any references to European modernism. But for other American artists the regionalists' embrace of nationalism could only hinder the arts.

A Abstract Expressionism

During the late 1940s a movement called abstract expressionism began to develop in the United States under the influence of surrealist ideas, especially the desire to tap into the unconscious through the technique of automatism. Abstract expressionists emphasized the process of painting, by allowing evidence of the artist's gestures to remain visible on the canvas surface. Among the leaders of this movement were Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, and Hans Hofmann. Abstract expressionist paintings such as Pollock's Autumn Rhythm (1950, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City) give the impression of unprecedented spontaneity and physical energy. They also introduced all-over composition, in which visual marks are distributed in such a way as to produce no visual center of attention. In addition to surrealism, the abstract expressionists were influenced by Kandinsky's ideas about similarities between abstract art and music and the ability of abstraction to communicate meaning and emotional content.

Other abstract expressionists, including Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, Clyfford Still, Ad Reinhardt, and Barnett Newman, chose a different approach. Instead of emphasizing the act of painting, they created images composed of large expanses of color and simplified forms. Barnett Newman, for instance, used a single vertical stripe to divide an otherwise solid field of color in his Onement I (1948, Museum of Modern Art, New York City). The image seems simple, but Newman saw it as symbolic of the vulnerability of humanity (the stripe) before nature (the field).

Another group of abstract expressionists, called color-field painters, combined Pollock's interest in gravity and pouring paint with Rothko's and Newman's interest in the visual effect of color. Americans Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, and Kenneth Noland diluted acrylic paint so that it approximated watercolor in fluidity. When applied on the canvas the pigment was absorbed into the weave rather than remaining on its surface, leading to the descriptive term stained painting. In Point of Tranquillity (1960, Hirschhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.), Louis folded and tipped the canvas, allowing gravity to guide the liquid colors across the surface. With this technique the artist intentionally gave up a certain amount of control over the resulting work of art.

B Postwar Developments in Europe

As abstract expressionism gained prominence in America, similar movements emerged in Europe. Art informel, the term used to distinguish gestural abstraction from geometric abstraction in Europe, is associated primarily with French artist Pierre Soulages, along with Hans Hartung and Wols, two artists who were born in Germany but worked in France. Like the abstract expressionists, these artists emphasized the painter's gesture, or brushstroke, and the physical qualities of the paint, especially its texture. In doing so, they sought to give the impression of pure spontaneity without artistic preparation or calculation.

Within art informel was a group called tâchistes (from the French word tâche, meaning "stain" or "spot”). Belgian poet and painter Henri Michaux and French painter Georges Mathieu were among the leading tâchistes. Mathieu's large canvases combined intense color with an abstract style based on line, gesture, and an interest in Asian calligraphy. Mathieu executed his works rapidly, sometimes even in public, celebrating the artist's freedom to act without preconceived ideas or a predictable outcome. Some critics connected this quality with existentialism, a contemporary philosophical movement that also stressed the issue of personal freedom within the confines of a sometimes irrational world.

The concern for physical texture evident in art informel and tâchisme is also found in works by French painter Jean Dubuffet. But unlike his abstract colleagues, Dubuffet usually focused on the human figure, and drew inspiration from the art of children, the insane, and others whom he saw as free from corrupting cultural influences. He chose the term art brut (French for “brutal art”) for this art and it has since come to refer to the work of Dubuffet himself. Like many earlier modern artists, Dubuffet drew inspiration from sources outside the Western tradition. He rejected the view that art must be aesthetically pleasing or that it should illustrate visual reality. His deliberately crude drawing style emphasized a slow and difficult artistic process. Thus he rejected the facility and impulsiveness of the abstract painters in favor of an art that was more primal, raw, and brutal.

C Abstraction in Sculpture

American sculptor Alexander Calder began experimenting with abstract forms and motion in the 1920s and 1930s, influenced by the mechanical forms in Russian constructivism and the elemental quality of Mondrian's compositions. But Calder's most innovative contribution was the mobile, a work of abstract metal sculpture whose components were both balanced in equilibrium and arranged to permit natural movement. Thus the artist incorporated chance by allowing nature—in the form of wind or air currents-to move parts of the work in unpredictable ways. Calder produced mobiles from the 1930s to the 1970s.

Another sculptor to blur the established boundaries of artistic categories was American David Smith. In works from the 1930s to the early 1950s he combined found objects with abstract shapes, the fluidity of line with the solidity of sculptural form, and the opacity of metal with the transparency of his overall design. His works seem to have no visual center of attention, thus applying the principle of all-over composition found in abstract expressionist paintings. In later works, such as Cubi XIX (1964, Tate Gallery, London), Smith moved from organic to geometric abstraction, welding cubic forms together in precarious balance. He maintained a combination of sculptural and painterly elements by rubbing and polishing the metal surface of Cubi XIX, a process that left curving calligraphic marks and evoked a sense of the artist's spontaneous execution.

The wooden sculptures of Louise Nevelson also reflect the all-over compositions of abstract expressionism. Nevelson took ordinary objects, contained them within tightly organized geometric frames, and painted them a single color, usually black. By recombining these ordinary objects into a work of art, she neutralized their original identities and functions. The single color united the various elements, even as it drew attention to the variety of their forms. Although many of her pieces rest on the floor, her later works became increasingly dynamic and many of them fastened to the wall. The forms in Mirror Shadow II (1985), for example, intersect at a variety of angles and project energetically toward the spectator.

D Dada's Return

Although abstract expressionism had become widely identified with art in the United States from the 1940s on, in the late 1950s American artists Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns wanted to reopen the dialogue between art and ordinary objects, which the dada movement had begun. Rauschenberg invented the combine, an art form that, as its name indicates, combined painting with real objects. These works stood midway between painting and sculpture, high art and popular culture. They combined the gestural and highly personal application of paint typical of the abstract expressionists with the discarded refuse of Western culture, as well as with everyday objects such as newspaper clippings and photographs. Johns likewise played with oppositions. In Flag (1958, Museum of Modern Art, New York City), for instance, he painted a replica of a very familiar object, the American flag. His work parodied the abstract expressionist's desire for free expression by using the predetermined form and pattern of the flag. But he undermined the format of the flag through the painting's rough, irregular surface, created by mixing crumpled newspaper with the paint. To complete the circle, this textured surface reminds the viewer of the brush strokes of abstract expressionist works. In addition, Johns chose to represent an object that is as flat as the painting, leaving the spectator to wonder whether this is a painting of a flag, a flag itself, or both.

E Minimalism

The stripes of Johns's flag had a remarkable influence on Frank Stella, an artist whose style helped initiate a completely different movement: minimal art. Stella eliminated any references to everyday objects, but maintained the concept of repetition he had seen in Johns's flags. In The Marriage of Reason and Squalor (1959, Museum of Modern Art, New York City) Stella painted a symmetrical and precisely measured pattern of white pinstripes on black canvas, using repetition as his means of composing the picture. Once he had defined a modular unit (the stripe), he simply repeated this unit across the canvas. He abandoned the traditional method of composing a picture, in which the artist gradually adds elements to bring the picture into balance, in favor of a method by which the painting virtually paints itself. When asked about the content of his work, Stella replied “What you see is what you see,” implying that the visual experience of the work was most significant, and that attempts to infer meaning were essentially beside the point.

Another key figure in the minimalist movement was sculptor Donald Judd. Like Stella, Judd exploited in his sculptures the minimalist device of repetition. Many of these works consist of series of identical and interchangeable boxes made of such industrial materials as steel and Plexiglas. In addition, Judd eliminated any emotional content from his work by turning over the construction of his sculptures to engineers and craftsmen. Other important minimalist artists were Americans Carl Andre, Robert Morris, and Dan Flavin.

F Pop Art

The pop art movement of the 1960s took inspiration from the use of everyday objects by Johns and Rauschenberg. The pop artists—including Americans Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, and Tom Wesselmann—established a stronger connection than ever before between high art and popular culture. In Whaam! (1963, Tate Gallery, London) Lichtenstein created art from something that had never before been associated with high art: the comic book. Lichtenstein reproduced comic strips almost exactly, down to the mechanical dots created by the printing process. But what was most original about Lichtenstein's image was that once separated from the other panels of the comic strip, it no longer told a story. Taken out of context, the image had its own abstract power. Moreover, the machine-printed dots gained a distinctive new quality when Lichtenstein painted them by hand.

Andy Warhol preferred another strategy. Like Judd, he frequently relegated the execution of his pieces to assistants. In his Atomic Bomb (1965, Saatchi Collection, London), and in similar pieces showing car crashes and electric chairs, Warhol took a shocking image from a newspaper and repeated it again and again. These works demonstrated how repetition—made possible by mechanical reproduction techniques—can sometimes desensitize an audience to an image's content.

G New Art Forms

In the 1960s and 1970s several movements emerged that attempted to free art from the art market—a system in which works of art become commodities to be bought and sold or held as a financial investment. A group of artists sometimes referred to as postminimalists wanted to create art that would be too short-lived to be sold. Sculptor Richard Serra, for instance, threw molten lead into a corner of the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City for a series of works called Splashing (1968). His point was not only to make ephemeral, unmarketable art, but also to express the inherent properties of the liquid metal, properties that became visible only through the process of putting that material into action.

Artists Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer, Walter De Maria, and Nancy Holt were also intrigued by how the forces of nature could be incorporated in a work of art. Ultimately, these artists chose to move their work outdoors and create what became known as earthworks (see Sculpture: Earthworks). Instead of brushes or pencils, they used bulldozers and other machinery to move earth into giant sculptural forms. Smithson's Spiral Jetty (1970), for instance, was a giant coil of earth, rock, and salt crystals extending outward from the shore of the Great Salt Lake in Utah. Not only was this work too large to be bought or sold, but Smithson left it vulnerable to the natural forces of rain, wind, and erosion.

G1 Performance Art

Driven by similar impulses to exclude market forces from art, and inspired by dadaist performances of some 40 years earlier, the performance art movement emerged in the early 1960s. Allan Kaprow, Vito Acconci, Chris Burden, and Carolee Schneeman were among the artists who created happenings. These unrehearsed performances or events, in which the audience was often expected to participate, were intended to blur the boundaries between art and everyday life. In Germany, an international group of artists who called themselves had similar goals. Fluxus was founded in 1961 by American artist George Maciunas, Korean American artist Nam June Paik, and German artist Wolf Vostell.

One of the most prominent members of Fluxus was Joseph Beuys, a German sculptor and performance artist. In the spirit of dadaism, Beuys's gestures were often intentionally absurd, such as his suggestion that the Berlin Wall be raised a few centimeters for better proportion or his attempt to found political parties for animals. In How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965), Beuys tied a piece of felt to the sole of one foot and a piece of metal to the other. He then covered his head with gold leaf and proceeded to explain works of art to a dead hare that he cradled in his arms. Hidden within this apparent absurdity were more serious questions about the boundaries between life and death, human being and animal, the rational and the irrational, and finally between art and audience.

G2 Conceptual Art

Performance artists began the process of separating art from the creation of a physical object; the conceptual art movement carried this impulse to its logical conclusion. In the mid-1960s conceptual artists began to make works of art indistinguishable from the ideas that brought them into being. One and Three Chairs (1970, Museum of Modern Art, New York City), by American conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth, is an example of what the artist called "Art as Idea as Idea." Kosuth juxtaposed a real chair with a photograph of a chair and a written dictionary definition of a chair. In doing so he called attention to the distinction between reality and representation and between representation and language.

Other conceptual artists wanted their art to have political content rather than philosophical content alone. In Right to Life (1979, private collection) German artist Hans Haacke reproduced a well-known shampoo advertisement depicting a young woman with luxuriant hair. Underneath the reproduction Haacke posted the shampoo manufacturer's written policy for its female employees of child-bearing age who might be exposed to toxic chemicals. The policy exempted the corporation from responsibility if these women bore children with birth defects. The policy also stated that these women had the right either to leave the company, accept transfer to lower-paying jobs in the same company, or be sterilized. Haacke's caption then repeated the company's name and added the sarcastic comment: "Where women have a choice."

H Photorealism

While happenings, earthworks, and conceptual art seemed to indicate an end to art as permanent physical object, the photorealism movement advocated a return to more traditional techniques and subject matter. Photorealist painters, including Americans Chuck Close, Don Eddy, Richard Estes, Audrey Flack, and Ralph Goings, and English artist Malcolm Morley, painted works based closely on photographs. Close's Phil (1969, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City) is a giant portrait of American composer Philip Glass. But photography never replicates the world exactly as it is: the curvature of the camera lens has slightly deformed the shape of the face, the tip of the nose and certain strands of hair appear out of focus, and other distortions have crept into the work. Instead of correcting these imperfections, Close recorded them as exactly as possible in his painting. Photorealism was realism of a new kind: not representation so much as the representation of representation, a clear acknowledgment of the role of the camera as an intermediary between reality and the artist.

Sculptors such as Duane Hanson and John De Andrea created three-dimensional human figures with strong ties to photorealism. Rather than using a camera, they cast molds directly from the human body. For Artist and His Model (1980, private collection) De Andrea had molds made of his own body and that of a model, which he then painted to replicate their bodies in precise detail. But despite the uncanny illusion of reality, De Andrea left the model's foot unpainted; flesh color appears only gradually to the viewer as the eye moves from foot to leg to body. De Andrea's omission negates the work's initial truthfulness, and recalls the myth of Pygmalion, the artist who fell so in love with his sculpture that the gods granted his wish and brought her to life.

I Neoexpressionism

In the 1970s and 1980s the return to figurative art took a more personal form in neoexpressionism. In Italy, Germany, and the United States neoexpressionists borrowed the vigorous brushstrokes of earlier expressionist artists but used them to paint the human form in new ways. Italian artists, including Francesco Clemente, Sandro Chia, and Enzo Cucchi, explored classical mythology and other topics long ignored by modernism. In Germany neoexpressionism offered a means for artists to draw on their cultural past: The earliest manifestations of expressionism in Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter had been primarily German. At the same time, German painters such as Anselm Kiefer and Georg Baselitz could use the visual language of the earlier expressionists to address difficult issues of Germany's Nazi past ignored by abstract painters of previous decades.

American neoexpressionists Julian Schnabel, Eric Fischl, David Salle, and others used figuration in a wide variety of ways. Fischl depicted vaguely sinister scenes of suburban life, Schnabel painted on unconventional materials such as black velvet or broken crockery, and Salle quoted imagery ranging from 17th-century Dutch paintings to Walt Disney cartoons to abstract expressionist works. Salle's work seemed to reject the idea of originality that had been so important to earlier modernists.

J Pluralism

Salle's indiscriminate borrowing of earlier artistic styles is one aspect of a larger phenomenon known as postmodernism, meaning “after modernism.” The problem with trying to define this broad term is that doing so depends on the existence of a persuasive definition of modernism, and few scholars have come to any agreement as to what modernism actually is. In addition to stylistic borrowing, strategies associated with postmodernism include inconsistency, irony, allegory, impurity, references to language, and ambiguous meanings. But there has been much scholarly debate on whether these strategies were completely new or whether they were themselves key components of modernism.

Competing styles existed side by side during the 1980s and 1990s, making this a period often described as pluralist. The only thing that seemed to unite most artists was the continuing belief that art can never be fully defined. This diversity can be seen in the works of American artist Jenny Holzer, who designed electronic signs; Korean American Nam June Paik, who built towers out of television sets; and Americans Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, who raised graffiti to the level of fine art.

Some artists have begun to use computer software to create art that brings its own existence into question. In a 1997 installation by American artist Peter Halley at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, spectators used computers to change the images and colors the artist had chosen. The work raised a number of key questions: What is the work of art? Is it the image on the screen? Is it the printout? Is it the software program? And if the program is interactive, who, then, is the artist? Or is the word artist itself no longer appropriate? These were among the important questions left unanswered by the art of the 20th century.

Contributed By:

Claude Cernuschi

American Gothic

American Gothic was painted by the 20th-century American artist Grant Wood in 1930. The subject matter of Wood's paintings was rural America, a world that the artist often presented in a satirical light. American Gothic is part of the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.