MODERN ART [PAINTING AND DRAWING]

The birth of Modern Art is generally considered to have taken place in the mid-19th century, within the context of the technical and industrial revolutions. From 1950 onwards, it was succeeded by Contemporary Art. Modern Art first took root in Impressionism, the first major painting movement to break away from the pictorial conventions of the Academy of Fine Arts. It was then that the official Salons gradually lost their influence over the European bourgeoisie, and the juries of these Salons surrendered to the powerful surge of the Impressionist movement and its modernity. Modern Art owes much to the determination of artists driven by the reality of their craft who, from Manet to Cézanne, including Degas, Pissarro, Sisley, Monet, Berthe Morisot, and Mary Cassatt, succeeded in overturning all established codes. They themselves recognized Gustave Courbet and Eugène Delacroix as the precursors who had set them on a revolutionary path. Modern Art encompasses painting, engraving, sculpture, photography, and applied arts; in the 20th century, it expressed itself through modernist movements such as Divisionism, Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, Orphism, Futurism, Dadaism, and Surrealism, to name only the most prominent. The School of Paris, which brought together around a hundred artists from all over the world at the beginning of the 20th century who came to Paris to join the spirit of freedom and innovation initiated by their great predecessors, eluded all established movements while drawing upon them with the greatest disorder and freedom. The School of Paris—a term coined by art critic André Warnod in 1925—extensively blended cultures from around the world which, from Montmartre to Montparnasse, animated a generation of cosmopolitan artists who were without master or pupil, and resolutely independent, expressionist, and unique. Many of them, who would only find glory in the shadow of the stars of the Roaring Twenties—Kees Van Dongen, Foujita, Derain, Pascin, Picabia, and many others—each participated at their own level in creating the great effervescence that illuminated Paris, transforming it into the art capital of the world, especially until 1930, and then declining until the Second World War.