European Art

Modern Art: 1870 - 1945 AD

Beginning in the 1870s and continuing until the 1940s Modernism grew from the Renaissance rejection of the Medieval God centered world order and its replacement by the humanist Classical world view. Between the 1870s and 1890s Impressionists such as Claude Monet and Paul Cezanne created paintings which used light and colour to capture fleeting moments. Their Expressionist successors from the 1890s to the 1920s such as Edvard Munch used vibrant colours and abstract shapes in their work to describe emotions and rejected accurate depictions of the world. Between 1905 and 1939 Cubist artists such as Pablo Picasso used abstract shapes and spaces, often to reflect the industrialized world around them. In Germany from the 1920s until the 1940s Bauhaus artists such as Wassily Kandinsky applied the concepts of Cubism to their creation of more functional art and design. Surrealist artists including Salvador Dali and Rene Magritte explored the representation of the unconscious mind in the form of paintings of imaginary and dreamlike scenes.

Post Modern Art: 1945 - Present

Post-Modernism tended to reject broad human narratives in favour of personal expression. After the second World War Abstract Expressionism, produced paintings of patterns of colour without images of or reference to subject matter. Photography was now seen as a better recorder of events in the real world than art. Pop art began in the 1950s using simplified representations of common objects and commercial goods to reflect popular culture. Conceptual artists use common everyday objects to make personal statements, whilst Minimalism reduces art to its simplest elements such as a line or blank canvas, which is intended to have no meaning beyond what the viewer might apply to it.