Modern & Contemporary Art: Masterpieces & Movements
Posted on Jun 5, 2025 in Arts and Humanities
Notable Modern & Contemporary Artworks
City by Fernand Léger (1919)
Location/Context: Philadelphia, Cubism period.
Description: Characterized by loud colors and busy motion, representing the dynamic energy of city life.
Fountain by Marcel Duchamp (1950)
Location/Context: Philadelphia, Dadaism period.
Description: A provocative piece that challenges traditional notions of art, asserting that anything can be art and forcing viewers to perceive art in a new way.
Night by Max Beckmann (1919)
Location/Context: Düsseldorf, German Expressionism period.
Description: Depicts the brutality of the early 20th century with tortured and contorted bodies, reflecting the era’s turmoil.
Bauhaus Building by Walter Gropius (1925)
Location/Context: Germany, Bauhaus period.
Description: An iconic example of modernist architecture, featuring a skeleton in glass building with reinforced concrete, embodying the “form follows function” principle.
Migrant Mother by Dorothea Lange (1935)
Location/Context: Oakland, Photographic Realism period.
Description: A powerful photograph showing the strength and worry of a migratory worker struggling to feed her children during the Great Depression.
Your Gaze Hits the Side of My Face by Barbara Kruger (1981)
Location/Context: New York, Contemporary Art.
Description: Addresses the issue of the male gaze and societal views on women, highlighting how they are often treated as material possessions.
Essential Art Terms & Movements
Fête Galante
An outdoor entertainment or rural festival, especially as depicted in 18th-century French painting.
Romanticism
A movement in the arts and literature that originated in the late 18th century, emphasizing inspiration, subjectivity, and the primacy of the individual.
Realism
The quality or fact of representing a person, thing, or situation accurately or in a way that is true to life.
Impressionism
A style or movement in painting originating in France in the 1860s, characterized by a concern with depicting the visual impression of the moment, especially in terms of the shifting effect of light and color.
Sublime
Of such excellence, grandeur, or beauty as to inspire great admiration or awe.
Pointillism
A technique of Neo-Impressionist painting using tiny dots of various pure colors, which become blended in the viewer’s eye. It was developed by Georges Seurat with the aim of producing a greater degree of luminosity and brilliance of color.
Fauvism
A style of painting with vivid expressionistic and non-naturalistic use of color that flourished in Paris from 1905 and, although short-lived, had an important influence on subsequent artists, especially the German Expressionists. Henri Matisse was regarded as the movement’s leading figure.
Readymades
A mass-produced article selected by an artist and displayed as a work of art.
Neo-Plasticism
A style of abstract painting developed by Piet Mondrian, using only vertical and horizontal lines and rectangular shapes in black, white, gray, and primary colors.
Bauhaus
A German art school operational from 1919 to 1933 that combined crafts and the fine arts, and was famous for its approach to design that it publicized and taught.
Form Follows Function
A principle associated with 20th-century modernist architecture and industrial design which states that the shape of a building or object should primarily relate to its intended function or purpose.
Surrealism
A 20th-century avant-garde movement in art and literature that sought to release the creative potential of the unconscious mind, for example by the irrational juxtaposition of images.
Postmodernism
A late-20th-century style and concept in the arts, architecture, and criticism that represents a departure from modernism and has at its heart a general distrust of grand theories and ideologies as well as a problematical relationship with any notion of “art.”
Abstract Expressionism
A development of abstract art that originated in New York in the 1940s and 1950s and aimed at subjective emotional expression with particular emphasis on the creative spontaneous act (e.g., action painting). Leading figures were Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning.
