by Alina Livneva 29 July '19 Modern Art Definition, History, Movements & Paintings

The emergence of Modern Abstract Art & The Idea in Modern Art Paintings

Modern art refers to a worldwide movement in culture and society that by the first decades of the twentieth century sought a new alignment with the expertise and values of modern industrial life. Building on 19th -century precedents, artists around the world used new vision, materials, and methods to make artworks that they felt better reflected the realities and hopes of contemporary societies. The terms modernism and modern art are generally utilized to refer to the series of art movements that historians and critics have identified from the realism of Gustav Courbet to abstract art and its developments in the 1960s. Surrounded by the term, certain underlying principles specify modernist art. A rejection of background and conservative values (like a realistic depiction of topics ); invention and experimentation with form (the shapes, colors, and lines that make up the job ) with a propensity to abstraction. And an emphasis on materials, techniques, and procedures. Several political and social agendas have also driven modernism. These were often utopian, and modernism was generally associated with perfect visions of human life and culture and a belief in progress. Since 1960s modernism had become dominant in art, and Clement Greenberg created a particularly narrow concept of modernist painting. A response then took place that was quickly identified as postmodernism.

The arrival of modernism can be traced to the Industrial Revolution. This period of rapid changes in production, transportation, and engineering started around the mid-18th century and continued through the 19th century, profoundly affecting the social, economic, and cultural elements in Western World. New forms of transport, including the railroad, the steam engine, and the subway, changed how people lived, worked, and traveled, expanding their worldview and access to fresh ideas. As cities prospered, workers poured to cities for industrial jobs, and cities populations boomed. Most often commissioned to make art by wealthy sponsors or institutions such as the church. Much of the art depicted spiritual or mythological scenes that told stories meant to instruct the viewer. Throughout the 19th century, many artists began to make art based on their own personal experiences and subjects that they chose. With the publication of psychologist Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) and the popularisation of the notion of a subconscious mind, many artists began exploring dreams, symbolism, and personal iconography as paths for the depiction of the subjective experiences. Challenging the idea that art must realistically portray the planet, some artists experimented with the expressive use of color, unconventional materials, and new mediums and techniques. One of the new mediums was photography, whose creation in 1839 offered radical possibilities for depicting and distributing the world. After 1880, when the air was ripe for daring artists to take their work in new, surprising, and contemporary directions.

As secularisation of the society progressed, and the bourgeoisie class shaped up, art gradually started to evolve into a separate and self-sufficient field. Masters got engaged in exploring the essence of visuality and its unique features. Impressionists, like Monet, Sisley, Degas were among the first, who paved the way to that "complicated and weird" contemporary art: without completely rejecting the presence of a plot, they already started stressing the qualities of oil painting as an object – character of texture, painting surface, interaction with the space of a viewer.

Claude Monet

Artists strived to assert the independence of their works from any other spheres of life, form social, political, or historical context. 'Art for art's sake' was the famous motto among French, British and American artists and writers of fin de siècle. It was the powerful reaction on two interconnected factors: (1) Industrial Revolution, which led to the extensive growth of mass production and, as a result, the excessive commercialistic approach towards art; (2) protest against the middle-class perception of art's mission as moralization and instruction of a viewer.

The members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, James Whistler, who were the passionate followers of "Art for art's sake," still worked in line with the conventional vision of fine art, with a story behind their oil painting and life-like modeling of figures. However, gradually that principal started getting more radical forms, as Modernist art movements shaped up. Post impressionists (Paul Cezanne, Paul Gauguin), Fauvists (Edvard Munch, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner) challenged the concept of art as replicating of the reality, letting visual means of expression (color, line, composition) to play the first flute.