Understand modern art and contemporary art

Artistic movements: understand modern art and contemporary art
Contemporary art is the current artistic movement represented by a series of individualized expressions. It emerged shortly after modern art, which was the first expressive break with the formal rules propagated by academics. The two movements make up distinct cycles in the history of art.

How is modern art expressed? Does it mean the same thing as contemporary art? Which artists represent these periods? If you also have these questions, keep following the post as we will clarify each of them.
Inside modern art and contemporary art

To this day, these two artistic movements still generate doubts among the population. Some think they are synonyms, others relate the name to the division of the historical period. For example, as if modern art was made in the Modern Age, and contemporary art corresponded to the Contemporary Age.

All of these points, however, are wrong and both expressions have different characteristics that began to emerge from the 19th century onwards. To help you better understand all of this, the following topics will explain the details of these important artistic expressions in a simple way.

Modern art: breaking paradigms

Art has always been present in society, an example of this is prehistoric paintings, which date back thousands or millions of years. Over time, artistic expressions have changed and each era has gained new characteristics and nomenclature.

Modern art began to develop in the mid-19th century, at the time of the Industrial Revolution, and continued until around the 1960s. It emerged with a proposal to break with the formal standards of academia. For this reason, it brought other languages that went beyond painting and sculpture, such as photography.

Avant-garde movements — the name given to groups that fit into this new aesthetic — effectively emerged at the beginning of the 20th century and sought to express the changes of the period in which they were living. This included cars, the arrival of cinema and the creation of photography itself.

Therefore, modern art emphasized this body in movement and brought expressions such as cubism, surrealism, expressionism, fauvism, dadaism, futurism and abstractionism.
Brazilian modernism

Modernism emerged in Brazil with the Modern Art Week of 1922. This moment brought together musicians, poets, architects, painters and artists in general who began, from that point on, to reflect on the social and political reality of the country.

There were three phases of the movement. The first lasted until 1930 and was the period of greatest ruptures, the second lasted until 1945 and emphasized regionalist themes and the last was the final phase of Brazilian modernism.

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