Modern Art
Art is the range of various human activities and its products which make life beautiful. Art is characterized by representations of reality, conveying of information, feelings and other qualities which add beauty to life. Modern art includes manifestations philosophy and styles of art that took place in the periods of 1860’s to the 20th century.
Modern art employs the techniques of research and coming up with new ideas on the nature of materials and their functions in art. Modern art marked a shift from the ancient narrative which was the known characteristic of art toward abstraction, which brought contemporary art. The development of modern art began with the renowned painters like Paul Gauguin, Vincent Van Gogh and Henri de Toulouse. The 20th Century began with several other artists like Maurice de Vlaminck, Georges Brague, Henri Matisse who revolutionalised the art world in Paris with figure and landscape paintings.
Pablo Picasso made the first cubist paintings influenced by Paul Cezanne’s initial idea; that nature can be represented using the solids which are: cone, sphere and cube. Picasso then dramatically came up with a picture of brothel with prostitutes in it and his some new cubist inventions. Thereafter he teamed up with Brague to develop analytic cubism and synthetic cubism. Synthetic cubism includes the introduction of a variety of textures, collage elements and a mixture of different subject matter
. Realists, Romantics and impressionists are the pioneers of Modern art. Movements such as post-impressionism and symbolism emerged during the late 19th century. The movements varied from the Eastern decorative arts like the Japanese painting to the Delacroix and Tumer coloristic innovations moving to realism in search for the depiction of common life.
The stride of ideas that led to modern art can be traced back to as early as the 17th Century when the real modernist Emmanuel Kant quoting that” enlightenment normally criticizes from the outside while modernity criticizes from within”. The evolution of art has no complete new inventions but only a gradual metamorphosis over the years.