By the middle of the 19th century, we had come a very long way since the first paintings on the cave walls at Lascaux. But, it seems that we begin to see more advancement and variety in artistic styles than we have ever seen before. There are many reasons for this, but three stand out. Since the Industrial Revolution, people no longer need to toil day and night just to survive. Lifestyles have become much less agrarian and much more urban. Food and clothing are available from other sources, and bare subsistence farming becomes less necessary. So, people come home from their jobs at the factory and have more time to themselves. So the first reason is that people in general have more time for leisure activities like art.

The second reason for such variety stems from the fact that, while in comparison with the human life, it’s a long time ago, the 19th century is really only a few generations ago. We haven’t had the luxury of time weeding out what art is important enough to be remembered – we must consider all the movements that we have.

The final, and perhaps the most crucial reason we see so much variance is modern technology. In the past artwork was very ephemeral. Artists did not paint things meant to last forever (in fact, they generally painted over their old work when they ran out of money or canvas.) Because we now have the ability to make copies of artwork so easily, we have an expectation of permanence. Even if the original is tragically destroyed, the likelihood is that there is at least one copy or picture of the work in existence, and it’s generally readily available on the internet. With all of this in mind, here are the many styles of modern art.

We began the 19th century with very realistic art. In the late 1860s we have the beginning of a movement that will change art’s direction entirely. Though extremely popular today the Impressionist movement was panned by critics of the day. Despite being extremely precise in their use of color, movement and light, the works of those like Monet, which tended to lean away from use of solid lines and conventional definition of figure, took quite a while to catch on.

When they finally did, art changed forever. We had the Neo-impressionist period beginning in the 1880s, in which the impressionists tweaked their technique and brought back more of the traditional artistic forms. This lead to the post-impressionist period, which seems to pull from a more traditional thought on form and figure, while using many of the impressionist techniques to capture light and movement.

Around the 1880s we also saw the rise of a style called Art Nouveau. Art Nouveau was the artistic movement of the Bohemians in Paris. Toulouse Lautrec, made famous again by his character’s appearance in the film Moulin Rouge, was one of many great artists working in this style. It is easily identified by it’s highly imaginative figures that have a very soft quality, yet are very starkly outlined, and make use of curvilinear forms. Many examples of French advertisements from the turn of the century are done in this style, though Art Nouveau artists were expected to work, not only on paper, but also in architecture, sculpture and furniture-making.

Around the post-impressionist period, Symbolism is emerging as an ideological movement across Europe. While not specifically an artistic movement, it does have a great influence on two of our next important styles: Expressionism and Surrealism.

Vincent Van Gogh and Edvard Munch are two of the most well known Expressionist artists. Their work is characterized by vivid splashes of color, and for interpreting the visual world then expressing it back on canvas – hence the name. The use of vivid colors is about the only uniform characteristic of expressionism. It ranges from very realistic, to nightmarishly abstract, from strictly defined forms to highly flowing color washes. There are many different styles of expressionism – Fauvism, Die Brucke, the Parisian School, Der Blaue Reiter – but one that, again, changed the art world forever.

Cubism was, at the beginning of the 20th century, the most radial artistic movement ever. Pablo Picasso threw all old sensibilities out – including proportion and figurative integrity. The image is broken down into very angular geometric forms, all presented from different perspectives at the same time. Picasso’s first truly Cubist piece Les Demoiselles d’Avignon shocked audiences by making them feel as though they were part of the picture, not separated as had been the previous tradition. Futurism grew out of Cubism, as did Abstraction.

After all of the different styles of Abstraction, we have early 20th century art. This era includes Art Deco, Graphic Art, the rise of photography as art, Bauhaus, and, then there was Dadaism.

Dadaism was to its artists the anti-art. Art focused on aesthetics, had a message, and appeals to the viewer. Dadaism threw the pretty picture out the window and left all message to the each viewer. It strove to be as nonsensical as possible. It is from this movement that metaphysical painting and Surrealism. Max Ernst, Frida Kahlo, Marc Chagall, Rene Magritte, and Salvador Dali all viewed realism as stifling to creativity and imagination.

We haven’t spoken much about American art, but it was mainly because for the most part, American artists tended to follow the trends in Europe. In the 1900’s we saw the beginning of our own artistic movements.

Beginning in the 1920s and lasting well into the 40s, the Harlem Renaissance used every cultural medium available to work towards equal rights and to express the pain of the long-standing oppression. This is the first time that African American art is seen as an artistic movement, and is absorbed into the American Culture.
In the 1930s, with the creation of the WPA as an attempt to alleviate the Great Depression, artists were hired to use what had been a traditional Mexican art for “the greater good” in America. Mural painters were hired across the country to paint scenes that would lift the spirits of the down-trodden, and remind them of past glories, and future promise.

From here we see a shift towards further abstraction. We see the rise of Color Field painting where large areas of color are used to express the artists feelings, without giving the viewer any other indication of form. There were several other artistic styles in the early 1950s including Arts Informel and Brut, but it wasn’t until the Pop Art movement that arose mid decade that we saw art headed in a different direction.

With Pop Art, we saw the re-emergence of the figure, vaguely reminiscent of Art Nouveau in terms of heavy outline, they now appeared flat, in solid colors, without the stress on the curvilinear. Though Pop Art began as an English phenomenon, American artist Andy Warhol typifies the style.

From Pop Art we art makes brief stops in Kinetic art – the study of things in motion – and Optical Art – which focused on geometric illusion. But the next major artistic movement arises in the 1970s – Graffiti. Whether you consider it a nuisance or artistic genius is up to you, but it is the refinement of the most ancient of artistic styles; in the most ancient of civilizations, people used artistic “tags” to mark territory and to express themselves.

Where art is headed in the future is unknown, but it seems strangely fitting that it should come full circle – back to where we began eons ago.