| Key to Art History |
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Four events or ideas affected (and continue to affect) the development of art in the twentieth century:
In addition to photography, artists now had to compete with movies, television and other technologies used to produce images. Artists began to experiment with new media and forms. The lines between various media became blurred and, in some cases, disappeared altogether.
As the 20th Century progressed, the Russian revolution and the first world war had a profound affect on art. The Dadaist and Surrealist movements arose out of a disgust with a social structure that could create so much misery, death and destruction. Many of the early Dadaists and Surrealists were communists who believed that all aspects of capitalist, bourgeois society had to be destroyed. Dadaists, sometimes with the use of humor, attempted to create a sort of anti-art. Marcel Duchamp was a leading proponent of Dadaism. Many Surrealists believed that by plunging into the subconscious a "super-realism" could be found. One of the leading surrealist painters was Salvador Dali. Another movement that developed during this same time was the De Stilj movement in Amsterdam. This movement emphasized the need for total abstraction and simplification, using straight lines, rectangles and cubes, as well as the use of primary colors of red, yellow and blue, and the neutral colors black, white and grey. The most well known member of this movement was Piet Mondrian . Mondrian eventually moved to Paris, where he and other abstract artists influenced Alexander Calder , who became America's first abstract artist of international fame. Calder is credited with inventing the mobile or moving sculpture. As dictatorships emerged in Europe between the wars, artists fled to France, England and the United States to avoid persecution and to practice their art. Russian experimentation with abstract and non-objective form was supported during the early years of the Russian revolution, but many artists left the Soviet Union when the authoritarian regime of Josef Stalin began to suppress their "decadent" art.
After the Second World War, the expanding economy of the United States provided a variety of communities that supported an ever increasing variety of artistic movements: Abstract Expressionism, Regionalism , Minimalism, Op Art, Pop Art, Performance Art, Conceptual Art and Hyper-realism to name a few. Universities and large cities supported artists working in the European avant-garde tradition, while conservative, regionalist artists such as Thomas Hart Benton , Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry prospered in the Midwest. The leading figure in American Abstract Expressionism was Jackson Pollock. Andy Warhol in the United States and David Hockney in England were proponents of Pop Art, which attempted to make art from the commonplace. Artists who, a hundred years ago, would have been painters or sculptors are now directing films or creating video, and yet, there is still a market for traditional art forms. There is clearly more freedom today for artistic self expression than at any time in history.
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