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Curated category

Modern art

  • Abstract artAbstract art uses the visual language of shape, form, color, and line to build a composition that can stand apart from anything visible in the world.
  • Abstract expressionismIn 1952, the American critic Harold Rosenberg wrote that the canvas had begun to appear to one painter after another as an arena in which to act.
  • CubismCubism arrived in Paris in the first decade of the twentieth century and changed the way humans look at objects forever.
  • Constructivism (art)Constructivism began with a handful of artists in Russia who decided that beauty was not enough. Founded in 1915 by Vladimir Tatlin and Alexander Rodchenko…
  • Modernism"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold." That line from W. B. Yeats's poem "The Second Coming" is how literary scholars often sum up Modernism, an early…
  • Art DecoArt Deco appeared in Paris in the 1910s, just before the guns of World War I fell silent, and within a decade it had spread to every corner of the world.
  • Pop artIn a 1947 collage called I was a Rich Man's Plaything, the word "pop" floated inside a cloud of smoke drifting from a revolver.
  • FuturismFuturism declared war on the past on the 5th of February 1909, when Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published his Manifesto of Futurism in a small Italian paper…
  • Avant-gardeAvant-garde is a French military term that once described a reconnaissance unit sent ahead of the main army to scout unknown terrain.
  • PrimitivismPrimitivism is a mode of aesthetic idealization that shaped some of the most celebrated and contested works in the Western artistic canon.
  • Russian avant-gardeThe Russian avant-garde was not a single movement with a single manifesto. It was a wave, vast and multidirectional, washing over painting, sculpture…