Skip to content
Back Home
Smarthistory Logo
  • About
      • ABOUT SMARTHISTORY
      • What is Smarthistory?
      • Who is Smarthistory?
      • Is Smarthistory reliable?
      • Museum and institutional partners
      • Major donors
      • Press coverage
      • Our blog
      • Give us feedback
      • Contact us

      • At Smarthistory, the Center for Public Art History, we believe art has the power to transform lives and to build understanding across cultures. We believe that the brilliant histories of art belong to everyone, no matter their background.

        With 503 contributors from 201 colleges, universities, museums, and research centers, Smarthistory is the most-visited art history resource in the world.

  • For Learning
      • ART HISTORIES
      • Start here
      • Prehistoric
      • Africa
      • Americas
      • Asia
      • Ancient Mediterranean + Europe
      • Medieval Europe + Byzantine
      • The Islamic World
      • Europe 1300–1800
      • Europe 1800–1900
      • Pacific Islands
      • Modernisms 1900–1980
      • Art since 1980
      • TOPICS & COURSES
      • Art Appreciation
      • AP® Art History
      • A-Level Art History
      • History of photography
      • Creating and conserving
      • Understanding museums
      • Oppression and resistance in art
      • Illness, plagues, and pandemics in art
      • See all short courses
      • SPECIAL PROJECTS
      • The U.S. Civil War in Art
      • Seeing America
      • ARCHES: At-risk Cultural Heritage
      • Expanding the Renaissance
      • Across Cultures
      • Virtual Visits
  • Books
      • SMARTHISTORY BOOKS
      • Reframing Art History, a new kind of textbook
      • Guide to Byzantine Art
      • Guide to Ancient Roman Art
      • Guide to AP® Art History vol. 1 (#1–47)
      • Guide to AP® Art History vol. 2 (#48–98)
      • Guide to AP® Art History vol. 3 (#99–152)
      • See complete collection of titles
      • NEW TITLES
        • reframing art history cover smReframing Art History
          a new kind of textbook
        • Byzantine cover jpgGuide to Byzantine art
  • For Teaching
      • TOOLS FOR TEACHING
      • All content for teaching
      • Webinars past & present
      • Teaching with images: K-12
      • Syllabi
      • Do-it-yourself tools
        • UPCOMING EVENT
          • Dr. Elena FitzPatrick Sifford on casta paintings

            Check back for upcoming events

        • PAST EVENT
          • Dr. Elena FitzPatrick Sifford on casta paintings

            Apr.06.2022

            The Kaaba with Dr. Nancy Demerdash

  • Support
      • SUPPORT SMARTHISTORY
      • Donate
      • Contribute an essay

      • We created Smarthistory to provide students around the world with the highest-quality educational resources for art and cultural heritage—for free.

  • Search
Search

All Results

Generic filters
Search in excerpt
Search

over here

Start here

Looking at art
Browse this content
Why art matters
Why art matters (why look at art?)
Must art be beautiful? Picasso’s Old Guitarist
How art can help you analyze
The Power to Look
Alejandro Cesarco, What does looking mean?
What work of art inspired you?
Elements of Art
Line
Shape and Form
Color
Space
Texture
Surface and Depth
Light and shadow
Principles of composition
Balance, symmetry, and emphasis
Movement
Proportion and scale
Pattern, repetition and rhythm, variety and unity
Describing what you see
Introduction to art historical analysis
How to do visual (formal) analysis
Art historical analysis with Goya’s Third of May, 1808
Describing what you see: sculpture
Approaches to art history
Browse this content
An introduction to art history
Browse this content
What is art history and where is it going?
Art history and world art history
Ever wondered… why people become art historians?
Ever wondered…why study art of the past?
Art and empathy
A brief history of the representation of the body in Western painting
A brief history of the representation of the body in Western sculpture
The language of art history
Browse this content
Naturalism, realism, abstraction and idealization
Contrapposto explained
Foreshortening explained
Chiaroscuro explained
Linear perspective explained
Atmospheric perspective explained
Classic, classical, and classicism explained
Classical orders of architecture explained
What is genre painting?
Methods of art history
An introduction to iconography and iconographic analysis
Brief histories of art and culture
Browse this content
Common questions about dates
What maps tell us
A brief history of the cultures of Asia
A brief history of Western culture
About chronological periods in the Islamic world
Africa historical overview: to 1600
Africa historical overview: from the 1600s to the present
Questions in art history
Browse this content
What is cultural heritage?
Where are the women artists?
Why are there so few female artists?
Must art be beautiful?
Is there a difference between art and craft?
What's the point of realism?
What made art valuable: then and now?
What does it mean to be an “old master” and to make a “masterpiece”?
Current issues in art history
Browse this content
Why you don’t like art history
Cultural heritage “in crisis”
How Climate Changes Art
The $150,000 Banana
Art about Migration
What does art tell us about gender?
Should Art Be Publicly Funded?
Why Do Corporations Buy Art?
What does resistance look like?
The Art Market and taxes
The Case for Copying
The case for nudity
Trending artists
Behind the Banksy Stunt
Art, Pride, and the Rainbow Flag
Tools for understanding museums
Browse this content
The case for museums
A brief history of the art museum
Museums and politics: the Louvre, Paris
Art Museums and (Art) Objects
Artists in and against the Museum
The changing social functions of art museums
Looking at Art Museums
Local art appropriation in France—a study of the loot in the Louvre Museum
Remake the Met
How museums shape meaning
An interview with Fred Wilson about the conventions of museums and race
Tools for understanding religion in art
Browse this content
Beginner's guide
The five major world religions
A brief history of religion in art
Christianity
Browse this content
Christianity, an introduction
The Christian Bible
A new pictorial language: the image in Early Medieval art
The life of Christ in medieval and Renaissance art
The lives of Christ and the Virgin in Byzantine art
How to recognize the Four Evangelists
How to recognize saints
Architecture and liturgy
The audacity of Christian art
Browse this content
The problem with Christ
Christ is not like a snail: Signs and symbols
Putting God in his place: here, everywhere, and nowhere
Time and eternity: Yesterday, today, and always
This world and the next: Christ on earth; Christ in heaven
So near and yet so far: visions and thresholds
Unspeakable images: when words fail
Islam
Browse this content
Introduction to Islam
The Qur’an
The Five Pillars of Islam
Islamic pilgrimages and sacred spaces
Hajj
The Kaaba
Stories of the modern pilgrimage
The complex geometry of Islamic design
Introduction to mosque architecture
Hinduism
Browse this content
Hinduism and Buddhism, an introduction
Discovering Sacred Texts: Hinduism
Sacred texts in Hinduism
Hindu deities
Beliefs made visible: Hindu art in South Asia
Hindu temples
Varanasi: sacred city
Buddhism
Browse this content
Introduction to Buddhism
The historical Buddha
How to recognize the Buddha
How to recognize a bodhisattva
The Buddha and Buddhist sacred texts
The stupa
Images of Enlightenment: Aniconic vs. Iconic Depictions of the Buddha in India
Four Buddhas at the American Museum of Natural History
Buddhist meditation and chant
Bodh Gaya: center of the Buddhist world
Bodh Gaya: The Site of the Buddha’s Enlightenment
Mudras in Buddhist art
Beliefs made visible: Buddhist art in South Asia
Bodhisattvas, an introduction
Buddhist Monasteries
Judaism
Judaism, an introduction
Jewish history to the middle ages
Jewish history 1750 to WW II
Jewish history in the post-war period
The Torah and its adornment
Jewish ceremonial art
For the very beginner
Browse this content
Ancient Near Eastern and ancient Egyptian art
Ancient Greek and Roman art
Medieval and Byzantine art
Renaissance art
Baroque and Rococo
Nineteenth-century art
Introduction to Twentieth-Century Art
Introduction to Contemporary Art

Introduction to Twentieth-Century Art

by Utah System of Higher Education

Video from the Utah System of Higher Education (with special thanks to Dr. Nancy Ross). Video created by Ydraw.

Cite this page as: Utah System of Higher Education, "Introduction to Twentieth-Century Art," in Smarthistory, January 23, 2016, accessed March 20, 2023, https://smarthistory.org/introduction-to-twentieth-century-art/.

Flickr IconBrowse Smarthistory images for teaching & learning! 

Sign up for our newsletter!

Receive occasional emails about new Smarthistory content.

Have you seen our new "textbook"?

minimize arrow icon close icon

Reframing Art History—it's free!

more than 50 chapters

developed by more than 50 experts

Check it out!
See what is soon to be published Close

Smarthistory is a nonprofit organization

At Smarthistory we believe art has the power to transform lives and to build understanding across cultures. We believe that the brilliant histories of art belong to everyone, no matter their background. Smarthistory’s free, award-winning digital content unlocks the expertise of hundreds of leading scholars, making the history of art accessible and engaging to more people, in more places, than any other publisher.

  • Donate
  • Contact Us
facebook icon
twitter icon
instagram icon
youtube icon
flickr icon
  • About Smarthistory
  • Smarthistory’s blog
  • Contribute an essay
  • Content editors and contributors

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

· © 2023 Smarthistory · Powered by · Designed with the Customizr theme ·