Modern art

One generally considers that the modern art begins in 1907, with the Young ladies of Avignon of Pablo Picasso and is completed in the middle of the Années 1960, with the appearance of the movements Fluxus and Pop Art, roots of the art and the current vocabulary of art known as Contemporary art. The modern art is different in its will from autonomy and in the birth of the Critic art , indeed at this period the art becomes a subject of writing: the criticism of the time is often speech engaged on work. Goethe and Matisse will write on the color. Many artists publish texts or proclamations (Dada, Futurisme, Surréalisme, etc: See Movements in painting).

The appearance of photography exerted an influence on many artists of the 20th century since Degas until Picasso, Matisse, Miró, and well of others which will become the eminent figures of the modern art.

Concept of Modern art

The concept " of art moderne" is defined at the same time by the style and the choice of the subjects. It characterizes into clean the art of first half of XXe -1905: year of the scandal of the Fauves to the Salon of autumn -, but it is between 1950 and 1960 that the term even of " moderne" takes all its direction and is employed to define one period.

The concept of modernity invades art and the institutions at the XXe century, but it emerges about 1850 to indicate the great changes to the XIXe century coming from the technical and industrial revolutions. The " modernité" is a mode to think, of living and creating which wants to be resolutely new founded on the change and in reaction (as it is always the case during major changes) to times which one preceded. In the Painter of the modern life , Charles Baudelaire finds the beauty in the street and he sees it changing, mobile; in the modern artist, he greets the aptitude to release from the transient of the daily newspaper the eternal of the beauty. At Walt Whitman, one endeavors to observe the impressive daily newspaper in perpetual movement. The beauty is not any more from now on the prerogative of the antique. The mass culture and the popular entertainment crush and sign the end of the exaltation of official morals. One finds new subjects covered impressed of a modernity very new, in particular industrialists as it is the case of the Station Saint-Lazare of Monet, where one hardly finds glance nostalgic, and it is true modernity there. The impressionist key, connects, is distinguished from the smoother key which was before of setting in conventions of the time. One also observes a greater freedom in the colors. From an institutional point of view, the emergence of modernity shakes the Academy in its capacity to authorize or not the entry of a work to the living room. The juries of the living rooms start to lose their absolute credibility for the painters, the State and the public.

In 1863 at the time of the Living room of Refused the, Napoleon III decides " to leave the public alone juge" , and it is an outburst of laughter and sarcastic remarks which falls down on the Lunch on the grass of Manet; that highlights very clearly which influence the jury exerts on the opinion of the public. In 1884, the Academy does not direct any more the Art schools and thus loses in legitimacy with the eyes of the artists; this loss of authority supports the emergence of creation known as “Bohème”, as of a market of the art in which the galleries become actresses of very first plan. The painters " out-académie" will finally refuse to be exposed beside the academists, and it is the reason of creation in 1885 of the Salon of Independent the, in 1890 of the Salon of the National company of the Art schools as well as Living room of autumn in 1903.

Concept of “avant-garde”

The concept of avant-garde is asserted by the artists in their priority with research and the innovation, in direct continuity of the World Fairs since 1851 and in a nearly simultaneous way. This assertion of new goes hand in hand with a total rupture of with conventions: the conventional categories are shaken (oil on fabric for painting, marble or bronzes for the sculpture,…) and lead the artists of the 20th century to create new ones such as joinings, the assemblies, the Ready-made, etc They are the " Before-gardes" (term resulting from the military vocabulary and which indicates a troop released and sent as a scout). The Avant-garde is not the fact of a isolated artist, but rather of a group which is linked to defend its production, the fight being a required passage for the diffusion of their new vision of the world. There is not thus an Avant-garde but several, not consisted of groups of more or less organized artists.

In 1936, Alfred Baar off proposes with the Museum Modern Art of New York an exposure in which it sets up a genealogical table of the Modern art. It treats heritage of the Impressionnisme and its classification is not done from now on more by national school but according to the observation of an international movement during one five years period in a successive way. The table clearly highlights the multiplicity of the groups, of their constant substitution as well as perpetual motion.

Chronological list of the artistic movements of the modern art

• Before 1914

• Art nouveau - Gustav Klimt
• Fauvisme - Andre Derain, Henri Matisse, Maurice de Vlaminck
• Cubism - Georges Directs, Juan Gris, Fernand Leger, Pablo Picasso
• Futurisme - Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà
• Expressionnisme - James Ensor, Oskar Kokoschka, Edvard Munch, Emil Nolde
• De Stijl - Piet Mondrian
• Abstraction - Wassily Kandinsky, Kasimir Malevitch

• the inter-war period

• Bauhaus - Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee
• Constructivisme - Naum Gabo, László Moholy-Nagy
• Hobby-horse - Jean Arp, Marcel Duchamp, max Ernst, Francis Picabia, Kurt Schwitters
• Surrealism - El Salvador Dalí, max Ernst, Rene Magritte, Andre Masson, Joan Miró
• New Objectivity (neue Sachlichkeit) - max Beckmann, Otto Ten, George Grosz

• the Figurative post-war period

• - Bernard Buffet, Jean Carzou, Yves Truss, Maurice Boitel, Pierre-Henry, Daniel of Janerand, Jean Monneret, Gaston Sébire, Louis Vuillermoz
• Not figuration - Jean Bazaine, Maurice Estève, Jean Moal, Alfred Manessier
• the abstract expressionnism or the Action Painting - Mark Rothko - Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock
• rough Art - Jean Dubuffet
• European Figuration - Francis Bacon, Alberto Giacometti, Rene Iché, Marino Marini, Henry Moore