Modern Art

3 Pages 779 Words

Modern Art
In the late 19th and early 20th century, the concepts (such as fauvism, expressionism, cubism, orphism futurism, etc.) are all classified under the category of modernism. Modernism includes all styles of painting, sculpture, and architecture that were done between 1880 and the beginning of World War II in 1939. (Stokstad 1023) This period of time in art history was filled with many new and different ideas, styles, and perceptions. Artists during the modernism period were all bound together by the fact that they were different from the standard. As modernism developed it, became more and more eclectic. This tendency gave artists the freedom to do what they want with art and not what was considered to be good art. The freedom of expression that began with modernism continued to be a part of the art world after World War II and is still a big part of artistic creation today.
A good example of what modernism is about was an artwork, Fountain, by Marcel Duchamp. A member of the American society of independent artists, Duchamp admitted Fountain, which was a urinal that had been fixed onto a painted background, into society?s exhibition of independent artists. Duchamp signed the art with a false name, R. Mutt, and turned it into the exhibition, just to see what the other members of the society would say. As one would suspect, the society threw the piece out. Duchamp defended the piece by expressing his views on art. Ducamp stated that it didn?t matter what the art looked like. Instead, what was more important was why it was created in the first place (Stokstad 1022). As modernism took over the art world, so did this idea of artistic expression. Artists, such as Paul Cezanne, painted what they felt when they looked at an object, landscape, person, etc. as opposed to painting exactly what they saw. Inspiration for the created works of artists like Gustave Klimt and Odilon Redon were composed primarily from their mi...