WHAT IS MODERN ART?
In simplistic terms, one could define all modernist art as not “realistic” unlike what preceded it (e.g. Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, etc.). To better understand that, it helps to examine its first movement: Impressionism. Although Impressionism is a realistic style, since it shows what painters experience and encounter, it bears very little resemblance to the French Realist movement (1840-1870) that actually belongs to pre-modern art moveemnts. What the Impressionists painted might seem based on reality, but their artworks were never replicas of what they were painting. In technical terms, visual modern art is non-figurative representation of objects, be it imaginary like a unicorn or a Greek goddess, or real, like a family on a train. Objects and also objectivity were no concerns for the emerging modern artist. What mattered most was subjectivity – the artist’s feelings and perception of reality.
The Impressionist fascination with light and reflection at the expense of clear outlines often manifested in a haze of color – “close up, it’s a big ol’ mess” as a character in the movie Clueless puts it. But there’s more here than just a “mess”: art had just started slowly marching towards abstraction. A few decades later, a painting wouldn’t contain more than just a black square. That lack of clear representation of objects is one of the defining features of visual modern art. Hence, impressionism is considered the turning point that marks the breakaway from the traditional representational art of four centuries. Also, modern art arrived with new methods of painting, new materials and media, and overturned even the conventional notions of things like beauty (you won’t find nude sirens and nymphs in Impressionist paintings).