20th-century art  

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Black Square (1915) by Kazimir Malevich
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Black Square (1915) by Kazimir Malevich

“I had scarcely entered the Salon des Indépendants when I heard shrieks of laughter coming from an adjoining wing…Suddenly I had entered a new world, a universe of ugliness…It was Matisse who took the first step into the undiscovered land of the ugly.” --"The Wild Men of Paris" (1910) by Gelett Burgess

Cover of the catalogue of the Nazi "Degenerate Art Exhibition" (1937)
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Cover of the catalogue of the Nazi "Degenerate Art Exhibition" (1937)
Blue Horse (1911) by Franz Marc
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Blue Horse (1911) by Franz Marc

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Twentieth-century art can be divided in modern art (until 1970) and contemporary art (1970-2000).

The first art movements of the 20th century are Fauvism in France and Die Brücke ("The Bridge") in Germany. Fauvism in Paris introduced heightened non-representational colour into figurative painting. Die Brücke strove for emotional Expressionism. Another German group was Der Blaue Reiter ("The Blue Rider"), led by Kandinsky in Munich, who associated the blue rider image with a spiritual non-figurative mystical art of the future. Kandinsky, Kupka, R. Delaunay and Picabia were pioneers of abstract (or non-representational) art. Cubism, generated by Picasso, Braque, Metzinger, Gleizes and others rejected the plastic norms of the Renaissance by introducing multiple perspectives into a two-dimensional image. Futurism incorporated the depiction of movement and machine age imagery. Dadaism, with its most notable exponents, Marcel Duchamp, who rejected conventional art styles altogether by exhibiting found objects, notably a urinal, and too Francis Picabia, with his Portraits Mécaniques.

History

20th century art and what it became known as - Modern art, really began with Modernism in the late 19th century. Nineteenth-century movements of Post Impressionism and Art Nouveau led to the first twentieth-century art movements of Fauvism in France and Die Brücke ("The Bridge"} in Germany. Fauvism in Paris introduced heightened non-representational colour into figurative painting. Die Brücke strove for emotional Expressionism. Another German group was Der Blaue Reiter ("The Blue Rider"), led by Kandinsky in Munich, who associated the blue rider image with a spiritual non-figurative mystical art of the future. Kandinsky was a pioneer of abstract (or non-representational) art. Cubism, generated by Picasso rejected the plastic norms of the Renaissance by introducing multiple perspectives into a two-dimensional image. Dadaism, with its most notable exponent, Marcel Duchamp, rejected conventional art styles altogether by exhbiting found objects, notably a urinal. Futurism incorporated the depiction of movement and machine age imagery.

Parallel movements in Russia were Suprematism, where Kasimir Malevich also created non-representational work, notably a black canvas.

Dadaism evolved into Surrealism, where the theories of Freudian psychology led to the depiction of the dream and the unconscious in art in work by Salvador Dali. Kandinsky's introduction of non-representational art led to the 1950s American Abstract Expressionist school, including Jackson Pollock, who dripped paint onto the canvas, and Mark Rothko, who created large areas of flat colour. This detachment from the world of imagery was directly challenged in the 1960s by the Pop Art movement, notably Andy Warhol, where brash commercial imagery became a Fine Art staple. Warhol also minimised the role of the artist, often employing assistants to make his work and using mechanical means of production, such as silkscreen printing. This marked a change from Modernism to Post-Modernism.

Subsequent initiatives towards the end of the century were a paring down of the material of art through Minimalism and its total rejection with Conceptual art, where the idea, not the made object, was seen to be the art. The last decade of the century saw a fusion of earlier ideas in work by Jeff Koons, who made large sculptures from kitsch subjects, and in the UK, the Young British Artists, where Conceptual Art, Dada and Pop Art ideas led to Damien Hirst's exhibition of a shark in formaldehyde in a vitrine.

See also




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "20th-century art" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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