Modern Art

Modern art encompassed a variety of artists, styles, and movements from the mid-19th to the mid-20th centuries that shared a response to and engagement with the technological, social, and cultural conditions viewed as new and distinct from the past. What emerged in painting, sculpture, architecture, and design was distinguished by the use of materials, techniques and forms generating meanings that departed, often radically, from previous artistic traditions. Although the response to new conditions in Western societies and the motivation to create new art is common to modernist art, debates about modernist art's relationship to society have ranged widely. Two common strains can be discerned. Some have argued that cultural products should be judged by the degree to which they reveal social issues, but others, especially after the mid-20th century, have argued that art exists in a distinct realm and should be judged only by criteria internal to the art object, with emphasis on creative processes and notions of artistic expression that generalize and universalize the identity of the artist independent of social concerns.

During the past three decades, scholarly discourses on modern art have focused on the context within which art was created, including arguments concerning the role of identity in relation to art. Because of the strong relationship modern art had to social and cultural conditions, modern art is currently seen as constituting a response to how societies generally, and artistic practitioners in particular, identified themselves as modern. Identity-based approaches to modern art history examine the ways that certain groups have been marginalized or excluded from art historical discourses and art institutions based on religion, class, gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity.

This entry provides an overview of key terms that describe changes in conditions that occurred [Page 468]when modern art emerged in Western societies; theorists whose ideas formed the dominant idea of the character and development of modern art; the ideas that gave rise to art historical analyses emphasizing identity; notions of identity that have been uncovered in examples of important modern styles, movements, and artists in the modern period; and critiques of the dominant ideas of modernism's character and development in the late 20th century.