Modern Art Movements: Picasso to Mondrian Analyzed

Introduction to Modern Art

Modern Art encompasses a wide range of movements, each defined by a rejection of traditional forms and a desire to push the boundaries of what art can express. The five works examined below represent some of the most significant movements of the period, from Cubism and Dadaism to Surrealism, Neoplasticism, and Expressionism.

Pablo Picasso: Guitar and Violin

Picasso's painting Guitar and Violin is a work from the artist's Cubist period, which art historians recognize as lasting from 1907 to 1916. This particular painting was created in 1913, in the middle of the Cubist movement, after Picasso had already defined the genre's core characteristics. At that time, Picasso was heavily interested in painting inanimate objects — particularly guitars — for the mixture of organic materials and geometric shapes they presented.

This painting is stratified with layers of one instrument commingled with layers of the other, creating a jarring effect while still giving the viewer the understanding that they are looking at two distinct musical instruments. According to art historians, this painting is extremely important because it is considered "the definitive transition from Analytic to Synthetic Cubism." In the first Cubist works, Modernists tended to apply geometric shapes and figures to real-world images rather than furthering the understanding of the subject by underlining the organic geometry of the real world in their artwork.

Marcel Duchamp: Fountain

The artwork Marcel Duchamp titled Fountain is a repurposed urinal that he purchased at J. L. Mott Iron Works in 1917. He made only minor modifications to the piece, painting "Mott 1917" in black on the white surface of the urinal and turning it upside down. Duchamp became involved in the Modern Art movement known as Dadaism in the 1910s — a movement intent on reinterpreting what people consider to be art and widening that definition beyond conventional aesthetics. Dadaism has been described as "anti-art." Rather than depicting beautiful religious scenes or idealized figures, the works of this movement are often images of war and violence painted in harsh colors to illustrate the harshness of the world surrounding the artist.

From its debut, Fountain was the subject of controversy. Many applauded the work as the ultimate expression of the Dadaist movement, while others used it to exemplify the perception that Modern Art was not art at all. The story goes that Duchamp entered the piece anonymously, along with the requisite $6 entry fee, to the Society of Independent Artists — an organization that pledged to exhibit anyone's work. His intent was to challenge the very idea that anyone could be an artist and that anything could be art. This practical joke served to redefine what was considered art and to ask every person who viewed it to question their own perceptions, which was ultimately the aim of the Dadaists.

Salvador Dalí is perhaps the greatest artist of the Surrealist Movement — an artistic movement focused on recreating the impressions of the mind rather than depicting anything from the real world. Reality was, in fact, completely irrelevant to the Surrealists, as evidenced in one of Dalí's most famous works: The Persistence of Memory. Dalí took what was initially imperfect in his perspective and proceeded to exaggerate the failings and flaws he observed in order to create a stronger, more indelible impression. He also used his own body as a form of art, and thus became a visual icon of the Surrealist movement himself. Dalí was quoted as saying, "It must be stated once and for all to art critics, artists, etc., that they can expect from the new Surrealist images only deception, a bad impression and repulsion." He called his paintings "hand-painted dream photographs."