modern art: The Isms of Early Twentieth-Century Art

From the early 20th cent. color reigned supreme and invaded the contours of recognizable objects with the brilliant patterns of fauvism (1905–8), dominated by Matisse and Rouault in France, the orphism of Robert Delaunay and Frank Kupka, and the explosive hues of the German group Die Brücke, which included such practitioners of expressionism as Kirchner and Nolde. Kandinsky transformed (c.1910) color into a completely abstract art absolutely divorced from subject matter. The fauvists and expressionists shared an appreciation of the pure and simplified shapes of various examples of primitive art, an enthusiasm that was generated by Gauguin and extended to Picasso, Brancusi, Modigliani, Derain, and others.

Sections in this article:

• Introduction
• Modern Sculpture
• Postwar Modern Art and the Rejection of Modernism
• Other Modes of Modern Art
• Geometric Abstraction
• Cubism
• The Isms of Early Twentieth-Century Art
• Nineteenth-Century Painting after Impressionism
• Impressionism
• Origins of Modern Art
• Bibliography

The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2024, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.

See more Encyclopedia articles on: European Art, 1600 to the Present