Top Modern Art Flashcards

Love it or hate it, modern art is a huge part of 21st century artistic culture. In art history, the modern period begins around the 1860s or 70s, when artists increasingly turned away from “realistic” depictions and toward more impressionistic and abstract designs. In part, they did this because realistic painters were no longer needed: with the invention of photography, people could easily create beautiful portraits and landscape art without ever touching a canvas. So there was no longer a strong demand for painters who could do realistic work. Instead, painters were increasingly free to explore and invent new techniques, no longer constrained by the demand for realistic depictions.

Today, “modern art” is often used to refer any kind of abstract, conceptual, or non-traditional art. In art history, however, the term has a more specific meaning: it’s a kind of transitional phase between classical representational art and the highly abstract works that we would now call “postmodern.”