The 20th Century: The Early Years

It could be said that the art world has been in a state of perpetual turmoil for the last hundred years. All of the important movements that were born during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century are met with the hostile, antiseptic gloves of critical disdain. When Courbet’s paintings were rejected by the 1855 Salon, he set up his own Pavilion of Realism and pushed the Realist movement on its way. Just eight years later, rejection by the Salon jury prompted the origin of the Salon des Réfusés, an exhibition of works including those of Manet. These ornery French artists went on to found the influential Impressionist movement. The very name—Impressionism—was coined by a hostile critic who degraded their work as mere “impressions,” sort of quick and easy sketches of the painter’s view of the world. Impressionism ran counter to the preferred illusionistic realism of Academic painting.

20th-century art and what it became as — modern art — began with modernism in the late 19th century. Nineteenth-century movements of Post-Impressionism (Les Nabis), Art Nouveau and Symbolism led to the first twentieth-century art movements of Fauvism in France and Die Brücke ("The Bridge") in Germany. Fauvism in Paris introduced heightened non-representational colour into figurative painting. Die Brücke strove for emotional Expressionism. Another German group was Der Blaue Reiter ("The Blue Rider"), led by Kandinsky in Munich, who associated the blue rider image with a spiritual non-figurative mystical art of the future. Kandinsky, Kupka, R. Delaunay and Picabia were pioneers of abstract (or non-representational) art. Cubism, generated by Picasso, Braque, Metzinger, Gleizes and others rejected the plastic norms of the Renaissance by introducing multiple perspectives into a two-dimensional image. Futurism incorporated the depiction of movement and machine age imagery. Dadaism, with its most notable exponents, Marcel Duchamp, who rejected conventional art styles altogether by exhibiting found objects, notably a urinal, and too Francis Picabia, with his Portraits Mécaniques. Parallel movements in Russia were Suprematism, where Kasimir Malevich also created non-representational work, notably a black canvas. The Jack of Diamonds group with Mikhail Larionov was expressionist in nature.

The 20th century opened new vistas and possibilities that expanded everyday human experience and greatly influenced the world of art and original painting. From the earliest years of the turn of the century, artists were beginning to experiment with subject matter, creating realities reflective more of their own inner visions than what lay before them in nature. Concurrent with this was a search for new techniques, materials, and approaches to support these forays into new terrains. As a result, 20th century painting movements and trends inspired artists to set out in many divergent directions, resulting in a broad range of styles and forms. They tended to break with tradition. They preferred to look forward instead of backward and experiment with new artistic choices rather than relying on old methods. Art in the 20th century was all about progress. Artists wanted to contribute to the development of their viewers and their society. They highly valued free expression. They refused to conform to standard practices and instead painted what they thought, felt, and envisioned, even if no one else appreciated or understood it. The subject matter was less important than the way that subject matter was communicated to the viewer.