Why did art change around 1900?
Modernism is the name for new ideas in the arts from about 1880 to 1945. Several changes pushed artists:
- Photography could record reality faster and more exactly than painting.
- Science and technology: electricity, cars, planes and new ideas about time, space and the mind.
- Big cities and industry changed how people lived and worked.
- Contact with other cultures: Japanese prints, African and Oceanic sculpture, and Indian, Persian and Chinese art reached European studios.
- Two world wars made many people question old values.
Groups of artists called the avant-garde (French for 'front guard') tried new things and often published manifestos, bold statements of their aims.
Colour and feeling: Post-Impressionism and Expressionism
Post-Impressionists (c. 1886–1905) built on Impressionism's outdoor light but added structure or emotion. Seurat placed tiny dots of pure colour side by side; Cézanne reduced nature to cylinders, spheres and cones; Van Gogh used thick, swirling strokes; Gauguin used flat, strong colour.
Expressionism (c. 1905–1920, strongest in Germany and Austria) deformed shapes and used unreal colours to show inner feelings such as fear or loneliness. The Fauves ('wild beasts') in France, led by Matisse, also freed colour from reality.
Many viewpoints and speed: Cubism and Futurism
Cubism (from c. 1908, Picasso and Braque) broke objects into flat facets and showed several viewpoints at once, because we know an object by moving around it. Later Cubists glued real paper and newsprint into pictures: the first collage.
Futurism (manifesto 1909, Italy) loved speed, machines and the modern city. Futurists repeated shapes to show motion. They also praised war and later links to Fascism show how art movements could serve political propaganda.
Pure shape and colour: abstraction, De Stijl and Constructivism
Abstract art shows no recognisable object. Kandinsky compared colours to musical sounds; Malevich painted a black square as 'pure feeling' (Suprematism).
De Stijl (Netherlands, 1917) used only straight lines, right angles and primary colours plus black, white and grey, hoping for a universal harmony.
Constructivism (Russia, after the 1917 revolution) wanted art to be useful for building a new society: posters, typography, furniture, stage sets and buildings. Its bold posters became tools of state propaganda. Later, some governments (for example in 1930s Germany and the USSR) banned modern art and forced a single official style.
Chance and dreams: Dada, Surrealism and the return to order
Dada (from 1916, during the First World War) mocked the logic that led to war with nonsense poems, performances and 'ready-mades', ordinary objects presented as art. This mixing of media (performance, text, objects, photo-montage) is called intermedia experiment.
Surrealism (1924 manifesto) explored dreams and the unconscious, with strange, realistic-looking scenes or automatic drawing.
After the war many artists made a 'return to order' (1920s): calmer, classical figures and clear drawing, while still using modern simplicity.
Modern architecture and design
'Form follows function': a building or object should get its shape from its use, not from added decoration. The Bauhaus school in Germany (1919–1933) joined art, craft and industry to design chairs, lamps, fonts and houses for mass production.
The Modern Movement (International Style) used reinforced concrete, steel and glass: flat roofs, open floor plans, long ribbon windows, white walls and columns (pilotis) lifting the building. Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe and Gropius are key names; Chandigarh in India shows these ideas at city scale.
Modernism beyond painting: music, theatre and dance
- Music: Schoenberg left traditional keys (atonality) and later invented the twelve-tone method; Stravinsky used clashing rhythms. From African American communities, blues and jazz brought new rhythms and improvisation that spread worldwide.
- Theatre: Stanislavski trained actors to live their roles truthfully (realism). Brecht's epic theatre did the opposite: it reminded the audience it was watching a play so they would think critically.
- Dance: the Ballets Russes joined modern composers, painters and choreographers; early modern dancers such as Isadora Duncan danced barefoot with free, natural movement.
Cultural exchange, colonialism and modernism in India
European modernists borrowed shapes from African and Oceanic masks and from Japanese prints, often taken during colonial rule, without naming the makers or understanding their meaning. Today this is discussed as cultural appropriation, and museums research where such objects came from.
Modernism was also global. In India, the Bengal School (Abanindranath Tagore) rejected colonial academic art for Asian traditions; Rabindranath Tagore and Jamini Roy developed new personal styles; Amrita Sher-Gil joined European training with Indian subjects; and the Progressive Artists' Group (1947: Souza, Raza, Husain and others) brought bold modern forms to independent India.
After 1945, contemporary art continued with abstract expressionism, pop art, conceptual art and new media.
Key formulas and definitions
- Post-Impressionism c. 1886 → Expressionism/Fauvism c. 1905 → Cubism c. 1908 → Futurism 1909 → Abstraction 1910s → Dada 1916 → De Stijl 1917 → Bauhaus 1919 → Surrealism 1924
- Key terms: avant-garde, manifesto, abstraction, deformation, multiple viewpoints, collage, ready-made
- Design rule: form follows function
- Modern Movement: concrete + steel + glass, flat roof, open plan, ribbon windows, pilotis
Worked examples
1. A painting shows a guitar from the front and the side at once, in flat brown and grey pieces with a scrap of newspaper glued on. Which movement?
Cubism (synthetic Cubism, because of the collage).
2. A poster uses red, black and diagonal blocks of bold letters to support a new government. Which movement and what is the art being used for?
Constructivist style; the art is used as political propaganda.
3. Why would a Bauhaus chair have no carved flowers?
Form follows function: the shape comes from sitting comfortably and making it in a factory, so decoration is left out.
4. Compare Stanislavski and Brecht in one line each.
Stanislavski: actors feel real emotions so the audience believes the story. Brecht: the play breaks the illusion so the audience thinks critically about society.
Common mistakes
- Thinking modern art means 'art made recently'. In art history, modern art is roughly 1860s/1880s–1945; later art is called contemporary.
- Thinking abstract art is random. Most abstract artists planned colour, balance and rhythm very carefully.
- Mixing up Impressionism (light, outdoor moments) and Expressionism (inner feelings, distorted shapes).
- Believing modernism was only European. It grew through exchange and had strong movements in India, Latin America, Japan and elsewhere.