What is modern art?

Definition of modern art
Modern art is a period of art history that begins in the 1850s and ends in the mid-1950s. It precedes the period of contemporary art that begins after the war. It begins with the Impressionist movement and painters such as Edgar Manet and ends with the appearance of Pop Art.

Modern art is made up of several artistic movements (Cubism, Futurism, Surrealism, Impressionism, Expressionism, Art Brut, etc.), but their common characteristic is that these movements are breaking with the rules and canons of classical art, especially as regards figuration. Indeed, during this period, painters, sculptors or draftsmen no longer try to represent reality faithfully, as happened in previous centuries, but to show it differently or to free themselves from any desire for realism.
The rise of modern art
Why is the art of the period between 1850 and 1950 called modern? The notion of modernity emerged in the 1850s to refer to the profound transformations that industrialized countries experienced from the 19th century onwards with the technical and industrial revolutions.

However, modernity is also a decidedly innovative way of thinking and creating in reaction to the rules of the Academy of Fine Arts. The Academy of Fine Arts, which since 1725 had agreed or not to exhibit artists in the Salon of Painting and Sculpture (commonly known as the Salon) was losing influence and the juries of the Salons were losing their great credibility in the eyes of painters, the public and the State. Painters outside the academy (because they infringed the rules established by it) progressively refused to be exhibited alongside academic painters.

At the same time, art criticism developed because art became an object of writing. Great writers such as Baudelaire or Zola wrote reviews of the work of modern artists, often in support of them. Some artists themselves wrote art reviews such as Matisse or manifestos (Dadaist manifesto, surrealist manifesto).

Finally, the emergence of photography as a new medium of visual art has had a number of repercussions on artists. Firstly, they see it as another reason to move away from the figurative and the canons of classical art. Photography will also be a new source of inspiration and a means of work: artists photograph landscapes or objects and then capture them with greater or lesser fidelity in their works.

Tip: Did you know that you can find thousands of modern works on Artsper? To distinguish them from contemporary works of art, go to the page of the work and you will find the date of creation of the work in the description at the bottom of the work. Also, on the pages of the artists, you will find the date of birth of the artist, which will tell you whether it is a contemporary or modern artist.

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