Modernism is certainly a style and movement that marked revolution in the history of art. After mater painter of history such as Michelangelo, Caravaggio, and Delacroix, I can say the modernism of early 20th century started with Paul Cézanne. He was one of the first painters who applied those loose brushstrokes on the canvas quite abstractly. He demonstrated painting in a new way of looking; cubical and undefined surfaces along with striking color and composition which all created sensational journey of modernism. The German critic Julius Meier-Graefe described Cezanne’s painting as “mosaic-pictures…amazing in their vigorous contrasts of colour, which may be compared to a kind of kaleidoscope”. So the modernism started with the acceptance of abstraction in art and freedom of expressing their mind and soul onto canvas which was the new door to the early avant-garde art. Cezanne continued to influence artists in early 20th century and gave birth to those master artists such as Picasso and Matisse. There are many different yet relevant movements created in this time period such as cubism, fauvism, abstract expressionism, Dadaism, surrealism, futurism, neo-plasticism, and constructivism. And these western art movements arrived in America and there he was, Marcel Duchamp. He was interested in idea and concept which his contribution towards modernism continues to evoke in today’s art world. I personally think all these movements from early 20th century art are heavily related to their cultural and social environment. Whether we like it or not, modernism is now a heavy stroke of art history. The term definitely encompasses the output of “traditional art” that became outdated in the new economic, social and political conditions of an industrialized world.
There are many debates implied by, and implicated in, the Postmodernism. Architecturally speaking, Modernism ended around 1945 after de stijl, which I think opened modernism to a lot more complicated and complex compound because after Bauhaus, art doesn’t only deal with fine-art but also deals with architecture, craft, and design. Moreover, postmodernism is also about literature, politics, drama, cinema, and music. Postmodernism became cultural phenomenon as technology and human being itself developed into a systematical and conditional agenda. Postmodernism started to offer much more sophisticated and even brutal critiques towards new movements; Clement Greenburg, who is one of the greatest American ctritic stated that the significance of form is the most important quality in art. American abstract expressionist painters such as Pollock, Smith, Still, Newman, Rothko flourished along with Greenburg’s formalism idea during 1950s. I guess this is the starting point of abstract expressionism, realism, pop-art, minimalism and conceptualism.
