The art movement of modernism, which came into full flower in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, was a response to industrialization, urbanization, world wars and revolutionary ideas in psychology, philosophy and science that left human understanding deeply shaken. Modernists decried the imitation of nature and history, and embraced bold experimentation with form, color, and materials in an effort to express inner truths and capture fragmented realities as well as communicate the essence of experience. Successive movements such as Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism and Expressionism sounded a series of avant-garde variations on their dissonant themes – challenging orthodoxy while expressing the anxieties and excitement of a world in transformation. This was the beginning of abstraction, when representation dissolved into pure visual language, enabling art to express emotion and idea independent from phenomena.
Cubism was invented by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque around 1907, taking found objects apart into geometric forms and displaying them so the viewer could see several angles at once on one canvas — a manifestation exemplified in its most shocking form, as with Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, whose angular mask-like faces were taken from African and Iberian sculpture. The analytical method dissected reality to uncover an abstract structure, inspired by Paul Cézanne’s remark that artists should treat nature in terms of the cylinder, sphere and cone. Meanwhile, Wassily Kandinsky inched toward total abstraction, convinced that color and form might resonate spiritually like music; his Composition series reached a crucial crescendo where figural forms dissolved into rhythmic structures of line and hue, freeing painting from the constraints of description.
Meanwhile, in movements such as Futurism in Italy, speed, technology and violence were glorified through dynamic compositions that depicted motion and energy, while Dada emerged during World War I as a nihilistic rebuke of everything Western, celebrating absurdity and chance in works by Marcel Duchamp: readymades that poked fun at the very idea of what art should be. Surrealism came next, and it turned to the unconscious, exploiting dreamlike imagery as Salvador Dalí and Max Ernst were among those who mixed fine technique with weird symbolic narratives conjured out of Freudian theory. Despite taking all these different routes, the modernists were united by a belief in the new and for this they were often vilified but over time re-wrote history in terms of what art is or was capable of.
The turn toward abstraction gained steam with such artists as Piet Mondrian, who boiled down reality to horizontal and vertical lines and primary colors in the service of universal harmony, and Kazimir Malevich, whose Black Square proclaimed the dominance of pure feeling over representation. These radical gestures mirrored broader ruptures in culture and thought, such as Einstein’s theory of relativity and the collapse of empirical certainty, inviting modes of viewership that were active rather than passive: not consumption, but participation. Artists like Sonia Delaunay and Georgia O’Keeffe delivered colorful forays into color, shape – broadening abstraction’s emotional and rhythmic range.
The deep, lasting impact of Modernism has been in extending artistic freedom and shaping design, architecture, as well as later tendencies from Abstract Expressionism up to the present. Becoming a place of inquiry into what is real, and how people experience reality, art became modern by serving up its very own subject matter. Their bold leaps beyond convention are as inspiring as they are reassuring, a reminder that great creative breakthroughs often come from risking the unknown and overturning the rules.