Modern Art: Breaking and Remaking the Picture

The Long Unraveling

"Modern art" is not a single style but a succession of revolutions, each feeding on the one before. Running roughly from the 1880s through the mid-twentieth century, the period encompasses Post-Impressionism, Symbolism, Fauvism, Cubism, Expressionism, Surrealism, and Abstract Expressionism — movements that agreed on almost nothing except that the conventions of academic painting were no longer adequate.

The catalysts were varied: industrialization and urban dislocation, colonial encounter with non-European art traditions, advances in photography that freed painting from the duty of literal record, and a growing sense that the inner world of emotion and unconscious experience was as real as the visible surface of things.

The Post-Impressionist Foundations

Paul Cezanne is the pivotal figure. Working in isolation in Aix-en-Provence, he spent decades studying how the eye actually constructs volume and depth — not through academic shading but through shifting planes of color. His late "Mont Sainte-Victoire" paintings and still lifes of apples fractured continuous surface into facets that Picasso and Braque would take to their logical extreme in Cubism.

Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin each pushed color and brushwork toward expressive rather than descriptive ends. Van Gogh's "The Starry Night" (1889) turns the night sky into a vortex of empathetic energy; his portraits and interiors make visible a psychological intensity that academic technique could not have accommodated. Gauguin's Tahitian canvases, for all their problematic colonial context, introduced flattened color fields and non-Western spatial conventions into the European mainstream.

Fauvism, Expressionism, and the Color Revolution

In Paris around 1905, Henri Matisse and a group of colleagues exhibited work of such chromatic violence that a critic called them "les fauves" — the wild beasts. Matisse's "The Joy of Life" (1905–06) abandons modeling and perspective in favor of flat planes of pure color arranged for maximum sensuous impact. His later cut-paper works carry this logic to its conclusion.

Gustav Klimt, in Vienna, merged decorative abstraction with frank erotic imagery. "The Kiss" (1907–08) encases its figures in a mosaic of gold leaf and pattern that has made it one of the most widely reproduced images of the twentieth century.

Cubism and After

Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, working in close dialogue between 1908 and 1914, dismantled the single-viewpoint picture inherited from the Renaissance. Analytic Cubism presents multiple simultaneous aspects of an object within the same flat picture plane; Synthetic Cubism reassembled fragments — newsprint, playing cards, wood-grain paper — into new pictorial realities. The implications were enormous: if representation was a convention rather than a necessity, painting was free to pursue purely formal relationships.

On Mojud you can explore the full arc of Modern art — from Cezanne's structured landscapes to Matisse's exuberant color fields, from Van Gogh's swirling expressiveness to the structured fragmentation of Cubism — browse at high resolution, download for free, or order prints.

Paul Klee, working at the Bauhaus, developed a playful, poetic approach to abstraction that drew equally on music, children's drawing, and his own invented alphabets of line and color. His small-format works reward close, patient attention.

The Modern Legacy

Modernism permanently expanded the range of what painting could do. The question it posed — not "what does this depict?" but "what does this mean, and how does it mean it?" — remains the central question of art to this day. Mojud brings together a broad selection of Modern works so you can explore these revolutionary decades at your own pace.