Modernism

Modernism was a sweeping international movement across the visual arts, literature, music, and architecture, spanning roughly the 1860s to the mid-20th century, that emerged from a deliberate break with academic tradition and a search for new forms suited to a rapidly industrializing, secularizing world. Its visual roots lie in mid-19th-century France, where Édouard Manet's paintings displayed at the 1863 Salon des Refusés (a rival exhibition staged after the official Paris Salon rejected thousands of submissions) challenged academic convention with flattened space and frank subject matter; critic Clement Greenberg later argued that modernist painting 'most definitely begins' with Manet. Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, including Georges Seurat's Divisionist technique, carried experimentation further, prioritizing perception, light, and color over illusionistic realism. By the early 20th century, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque's Cubism, inaugurated by Picasso's 1907 Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, abandoned single-point perspective altogether, presenting multiple viewpoints simultaneously. Parallel movements proliferated across Europe: Italian Futurism (F.T. Marinetti's 1909 manifesto) celebrated speed and machinery; German Expressionist groups like Die Brücke (1905) and Der Blaue Reiter (1911, founded by Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, and Paul Klee) foregrounded raw emotion. The 1913 Armory Show introduced this European avant-garde to American audiences, while the Bauhaus (founded 1919) fused abstraction with design and architecture. Modernism was often driven by utopian, even political, ambitions, artists believed formal innovation could reflect or improve modern life. The rise of fascism disrupted this trajectory: the Nazi regime's 1937 'Degenerate Art' exhibition in Munich vilified modernist work and pushed many artists to emigrate, shifting the movement's center of gravity to New York by the 1940s, where it fed directly into Abstract Expressionism. By the 1960s modernism had become art's dominant establishment paradigm, prompting the reaction that would crystallize as postmodernism.