The painting mocks humanity, as well as human beliefs and institutions, both civic and religious.
Dr. Charles Cramer
By observing nature more closely, absorbing new scientific theories and spiritual investigations, many modern artists sought higher truths.
The ambiguity of “realism”
Expression in art history is generally associated with non-rational states of mind.
Expression and modern art
The German Expressionist Emil Nolde was particularly explicit in linking himself to a Nordic tradition.
Expressionism as Nordic?
Gauguin’s paintings of Brittany are, in the end, more fantasies than accurate images of an authentic peasant culture.
The Pont-Aven School and Synthetism
“Every word that is spoken and sung here says at least one thing: that this humiliating age has not succeeded in winning our respect.”
Dada Performance
For Bauhaus designers, beauty was achieved through careful choices of materials, proportions, textures, and colors for the functional features of the objects.
The Bauhaus and Bau
The Fauves created paintings that seem to celebrate the pleasures of painting as much as the pleasures of life.
Fauve Landscapes and City Views
Derain used a liberated Fauve approach to color and form to depict female figures in an exotic setting.
André Derain, The Dance
The Neo-Impressionists prided themselves on bringing scientific rigor to the hitherto largely intuitive Impressionist project.
Neo-Impressionist Color Theory
Although their subjects suggest carefree pleasure, there are undertones of social criticism in some Neo-Impressionist paintings.
Introduction to Neo-Impressionism, Part II
Cubist sculpture challenged the European sculptural tradition in terms of form, media, and often subject matter.
Cubist Sculpture II
The Neo-Impressionist desire to conform art-making to universal laws of perception, color, and expression echoes throughout Modernism.
Introduction to Neo-Impressionism, Part I
Severini and Boccioni use brilliant colors, abstraction, fragmentation and repetition of forms to create a vibrant whirling energy.
Gino Severini, Dynamic Hieroglyph of the Bal ...
Although the style implies a rapid or even slipshod painting process, Open Window, Collioure was carefully orchestrated in every aspect.
Henri Matisse, Open Window, Collioure
The Futurists called for the destruction of museums, libraries, and cultural monuments and glorified modern technology and the speed of automobiles, trains, and airplanes.
Umberto Boccioni and the Futurist City
Marc looked all the way back to a state of nature before humankind even existed.
Franz Marc and the animalization of art
Kandinsky believed that humankind was on the verge of a cataclysmic change from the current, materialistic epoch to an “Epoch of the Great Spiritual.”
Kandinsky, Apocalypse, Abstraction
The German Neue Sachlichkeit painters lived through the violence of World War I and their art reveals the disillusionment and cynicism that resulted from their often psychologically-shattering experiences.
Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) – An Introduction
The figure of the Blue Rider thus embodied the spiritual focus of the group as well as their belief that art plays an important social role in the struggle between good and evil.