Modern Art: A History from Impressionism to Today

Over 200 paintings, sculptures, photographs, and conceptual pieces trace the story of modern art's innovation and adventure. With explanatory texts for each work, and essays introducing each of the major modern movements, this is an authoritative overview of the ideas and the artworks that shook up standards, assaulted the establishment, and trailblazed new ideas.

A blow-by-blow account of groundbreaking modernism. Most art historians agree that the modern art adventure first developed in the 1860s in Paris. A circle of painters, whom we now know as Impressionists, began painting pictures with rapid, loose brushwork. They turned to everyday street life for subjects, instead of overblown heroic scenes, and they escaped the power of the Salon by organizing their own independent exhibitions.

After this first assault on the artistic establishment, there was no holding back. In a constant desire to challenge, innovate, and inspire, one modernist style supplanted the next: Symbolism, Expressionism, Futurism, Dada, abstract art, renewed Realism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop, Minimal and conceptual practice.

This indispensable overview traces the restless energy of modern art with a year-by-year succession of the groundbreaking artworks that shook standards and broke down barriers. Introductory essays outline the most significant and influential movements alongside explanatory texts for each major work and its artist.

This book is from the Bibliotheca Universalis series.

Modern Art - Preface by Hans Werner Holzwarth
Impressionism

• Pictures created from light and colour - Essay by Karin H. Grimme
• Gustave Caillebotte
• Edgar Degas
• Claude Monet
• Mary Cassatt
• Pierre-Auguste Renoir
• Alfred Sisley
• Camille Pissarro
• Auguste Rodin
• Georges Seurat
• Paul Cezanne
• Vincent van Gogh
• Paul Gauguin
• Henri Rousseau
• Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
• Claude Monet
• Paul Signac
• Andre Derain
• Henri Matisse
• Paul Cezanne

Symbolism

• Faced with the Sphinx - essay by Norbert Wolf
• Edward Burne-Jones
• Odilon Redon
• Franz von Stuck
• Edvard Munch
• James Ensor
• Ferdinand Hodler
• Pablo Picasso
• Gustav Klimt
• Egon Schiele

Cubism

• A new Cognitive order? - essay by Anne Ganterfuhrer-Trier
• Pablo Picasso
• Georges Braque
• Robert Delanay
• Marc Chagall
• Albert Gleizes
• Fernand Leger
• Jean Metzinger
• Juan Gris

Expressionism

• A metaphysical German Meatloaf - essay by Norbert Wolf
• Max Pechstein
• Alexej von Jawlensky
• Erich Heckel
• Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
• Oskar Kokoschka
• Wassily Kandinsky
• Franz Marc
• Ludwig Meidner
• August Macke
• Emil Nolde
• Wilhelm Lehmbruck
• Amedeo Modigliani
• George Grosz
• Otto Dix
• Chaim Soutine
• Lyonel Feininger

Futurism

• Art + Action + Life = Futurism - essay by Sylvia Martin
• Umberto Boccioni
• Gino Severini
• Giacomo Balla
• Carlo Carra
• Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

Abstract Art

• Paintings of Autonomous Signs - essay by Dietmar Elger
• Kazimir Malevich
• Alexander Rodchenko
• El Lissitzky
• Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
• Wassily Kandinsky
• Theo van Doesburg
• Constantin Brancusi
• Paul Klee
• Piet Mondrian

Dadaism

• Before Dada was there, there was Dada - essay by Dietmar Elger
• Marcel Duchamp
• Francis Picabia
• Raoul Hausmann
• Hannah Hoch
• Kurt Schwitters
• Man Ray

Realism

• The truth of the visible - essay by Kerstin Stremmel
• Tamara de Lempicka
• Georgia O'Keeffe
• Max Beckmann
• Christian Schad
• Grant Wood
• Diego Rivera
• Edward Hopper
• Balthus
• Charles Sheeler
• Felix Nussbaum

Surrealism

• A new declaration of the rights of man - essay by Cathrin Klingsohr-Leroy
• Giorgio de Chirico
• Max Ernst
• Man Ray
• Joan Miro
• Hans Bellmer
• Rene Magritte
• Hans Arp
• Pablo Picasso
• Salvador Dali
• Richard Oelze
• Yves Tanguy
• Paul Delvaux
• Matta
• Wifredo Lam
• Frida Kahlo
• Dalvador Dali
• Jean Fautrier
• Jean Dubuffet
• Alexander Calder
• Henri Matisse
• Alberto Giacometti
• Henry Moore
• Wols

Abstract Expressionism

• A constant searching of oneself - essay by Barbara Hess
• Barnett Newman
• Clyfford Still
• David Smith
• Jackson Pollock
• Willem de Kooning
• Sam Francis
• Ad Reinhardt
• Richard Diebenkorn
• Robert Motherwell
• Philip Guston
• Hans Hartung
• Joan Mitchell
• Adolph Gottlieb
• Franz Kline
• Mark Rothko
• Asger Jorn
• Hans Hofmann
• Yves Klein
• Lucio Fontana
• Frank Stella
• Cy Twombly
• Josef Albers

Pop Art

• The tension between Art and Reality - essay by Klaus Honnef
• Jasper Johns
• Robert Rauschenberg
• Claes Oldenburg
• Peter Phillips
• Wayne Thienbaud
• Andy Warhol
• Tom Wesselmann
• Ed Ruscha
• James Rosenquist
• Richard Lindner
• Roy Lichtenstein
• Sigmar Polke
• George Segal
• David Hockney
• Lucian Freud
• Georg Baselitz
• Gerhard Richter
• Francis Bacon
• Fernando Botero
• Konrad Klapheck
• Chuck Close
• Louise Bourgeois
• Dieter Roth

Minimal Art

• What you see is what you see - essay by Daniel Marzona
• Dan Flavin
• Sol LeWitt
• Robert Ryman
• Eva Hesse
• Carl Andre
• Donald Judd
• Richard Serra
• Joseph Beuys
• Brice Marden

Conceptual Art

• Ideas, systems, processes - essay by Daniel Marzona
• Joseph Kosuth
• Bruce Nauman
• Robert Smithson
• Alighiero Boetti
• Marcel Broodthaers
• On Kawara
• Nam June Paik
• Gordon Matta-Clark
• Robert Morris
• Christo and Jeanne-Claude
• James Turrell
• Walter De Maria

Post-Modernism

• A more fully human world than the older one - essay by Hans Werner Holzwarth
• Cindy Sherman
• Richard Prince
• Julian Schnabel
• Jean-Michel Basquiat
• Eric Fischl
• Barbara Kruger
• Keith Haring
• Anselm Kiefer
• Mike Kelley
• Gunther Forg
• Martin Kippenberger
• Jeff Koons
• Damien Hirst
• Robert Gober
• Paul McCarthy
• Albert Oehlen
• Christopher Wool
• Ai Weiwei
• Beatriz Milhazes
• Thomas Struth
• Peter Doig
• Neo Rauch
• Andreas Gursky
• Glenn Brown

Glossary
Index of persons
Biographical notes on the authors
Photo credits