The Early Twentieth Century

The Early Twentieth Century, roughly 1900 to 1945, was the crucible of artistic modernism, as painters and sculptors in Paris, Munich, Berlin, Moscow, and Milan systematically dismantled the representational conventions inherited from the Renaissance. Henri Matisse and André Derain's showing at the 1905 Salon d'Automne earned them the mocking label 'Fauves' (wild beasts) for their violently non-naturalistic color, while in Germany the Die Brücke (1905) and Der Blaue Reiter (1911) groups pursued raw emotional Expressionism under artists like Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Wassily Kandinsky, the latter pioneering fully abstract painting around 1910-1913. In 1907, Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, developed alongside Georges Braque, launched Cubism, which fractured form into multiple simultaneous viewpoints and by 1912 incorporated collage and papier collé. Italian Futurists glorified speed, machinery, and violence following Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's 1909 manifesto, while in Zurich in 1916 the nihilistic, anti-war Dada movement emerged around Hugo Ball and Marcel Duchamp, whose 'readymades' questioned the very definition of art. Dada's exploration of the unconscious fed directly into Surrealism, formally launched by André Breton's 1924 manifesto and embraced by Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, and Max Ernst. The period was framed by two world wars, the Russian Revolution, which produced Kazimir Malevich's radically reductive Suprematism, and the Bauhaus school (1919-1933) in Weimar and Dessau, which fused fine art, craft, and design before Nazi persecution scattered its faculty largely to the United States, seeding the postwar American avant-garde.