Modern art includes artistic work produced during the period extending roughly from the 1860s to the 1970s, and denotes the styles and philosophies of the art produced during that era. The term is usually associated with art in which the traditions of the past have been thrown aside in a spirit of experimentation. Modern artists experimented with new ways of seeing and with fresh ideas about the nature of materials and functions of art. A tendency away from the narrative, which was characteristic for the traditional arts, toward abstraction is characteristic of much modern art. More recent artistic production is often called contemporary art or postmodern art.
Giorgio de Chirico was an Italian artist and writer born in Greece. In the years before World War I, he founded the scuola metafisica art movement, which profoundly influenced the surrealists. His most well-known works often feature Roman arcades, long shadows, mannequins, trains, and illogical perspective. His imagery reflects his affinity for the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer and of Friedrich Nietzsche, and for the mythology of his birthplace.
Balthasar Klossowskide Rola, known as Balthus, was a Polish-French modern artist. He is known for his erotically charged images of pubescent girls, but also for the refined, dreamlike quality of his imagery.
The Loves of the Gods is a monumental fresco cycle, completed by the Bolognese artist Annibale Carracci and his studio, in the Farnese Gallery which is located in the west wing of the Palazzo Farnese, now the French Embassy, in Rome. The frescoes were greatly admired at the time, and were later considered to reflect a significant change in painting style away from sixteenth century Mannerism in anticipation of the development of Baroque and Classicism in Rome during the seventeenth century.
The Song of Love is a painting by the Italian metaphysical painter Giorgio de Chirico. It is one of the most famous works by de Chirico and an early example of the surrealist style, though it was painted ten years before the movement was "founded" by André Breton in 1924.
Sebastiano Ricci was an Italian painter of the late Baroque school of Venice. About the same age as Piazzetta, and an elder contemporary of Tiepolo, he represents a late version of the vigorous and luminous Cortonesque style of grand manner fresco painting.
Bacchus and Ariadne (1522–1523) is an oil painting by Titian. It is one of a cycle of paintings on mythological subjects produced for Alfonso I d'Este, Duke of Ferrara, for the Camerino d'Alabastro – a private room in his palazzo in Ferrara decorated with paintings based on classical texts. An advance payment was given to Raphael, who originally held the commission for the subject of a Triumph of Bacchus. At the time of Raphael's death in 1520, only a preliminary drawing was completed and the commission was then handed to Titian. In the case of Bacchus and Ariadne, the subject matter was derived from the Roman poets Catullus and Ovid.
Gare Montparnasse (1914) is a painting by the Italian metaphysical painter Giorgio de Chirico. Many of de Chirico's works were inspired by the introspective feelings evoked by travel. He was born in Greece to Italian parents. This work was painted during a period when he lived in Paris.
The Double Dream of Spring is a painting by the Italian metaphysical painter Giorgio de Chirico.
The Melancholy of Departure (1916) is a painting by the Greek-Italian metaphysical painter Giorgio de Chirico. This painting was created after de Chirico returned to Italy from Paris to join the Italian Army in World War I.
Twentieth-century art—and what it became as modern art—began with modernism in the late nineteenth century. Nineteenth-century movements of Post-Impressionism, Art Nouveau and Symbolism led to the first twentieth-century art movements of Fauvism in France and Die Brücke in Germany. Fauvism in Paris introduced heightened non-representational colour into figurative painting. Die Brücke strove for emotional Expressionism. Another German group was Der Blaue Reiter, led by Kandinsky in Munich, who associated the blue rider image with a spiritual non-figurative mystical art of the future. Kandinsky, Kupka, R. Delaunay and Picabia were pioneers of abstract art. Cubism, generated by Picasso, Braque, Metzinger, Gleizes and others rejected the plastic norms of the Renaissance by introducing multiple perspectives into a two-dimensional image. Futurism incorporated the depiction of movement and machine age imagery. Dadaism, with its most notable exponents, Marcel Duchamp, who rejected conventional art styles altogether by exhibiting found objects, notably a urinal, and too Francis Picabia, with his Portraits Mécaniques.
Georgios Roilos was one of the most important and influential Greek painters of the late 19th-early 20th century. He belonged to the so-called "Munich School". His major works include historical topics, portraits, and scenes of everyday life. One of his most famous paintings is “The Poets”, which depicts some of the most important representatives of the New Athenian school of poetry, also known as the Generation of 1880.
The Child's Brain is oil on canvas painting by the Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico. The painting was completed in 1914 in Italy. It is an example of the Metaphysical art style. The painting measures 81.5 by 65 centimeters and is now housed at Moderna museet, Stockholm. The subject of The Child’s Brain is a nude young man, seen from the waist up, who is standing in back of a table with his eyes closed.
Beauty Revealed is an 1828 self-portrait by the American artist Sarah Goodridge, a watercolor portrait miniature on a piece of ivory. Depicting only the artist's bared breasts surrounded by white cloth, the 6.7-by-8-centimeter painting, originally backed with paper, is now in a modern frame. Goodridge, aged forty when she completed the miniature, depicts breasts that appear imbued with a "balance, paleness, and buoyancy" by the harmony of light, color, and balance. The surrounding cloth draws the viewer to focus on them, leading to the body being "erased".
Dr. Michael R. Taylor is a curator, author, and expert in modern and contemporary art with a focus on Dada, Surrealism, and the work of Marcel Duchamp. With a Ph.D in Art History from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, he was a Curator of Modern Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art from 1997 until 2011, and Director of the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire from 2011 until 2015 In May 2015, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts announced its appointment of Dr. Taylor as Chief Curator and Deputy Director for Art and Education.
Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zúñiga is a large full-length portrait in oil painted in 1787–88 by the Spanish artist Francisco Goya. It depicts a boy three or four years of age, standing in red clothes, with birds and cats. It is also known as Goya's "Red Boy". It was described by art historian Claus Virch in 1967 as "one of the most appealing and successful portraits of children ever painted, and also one of the most famous". The painting has been held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York since 1949.
The Soothsayer's Recompense is a 1913 painting by the Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico. It is now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art as part of the permanent collection. It was accessioned in 1950 as one of the thousand items donated to the institution by Walter and Louise Arensberg. The piece was created in France, through a process of "squaring-up" in which De Chirico drew a version of the piece divided into nine squares, and subsequently used this draft to quickly create the fleshed-out painting.
The Great Sirens is a large 1947 painting by the Belgian painter Paul Delvaux in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The Athenian Band Cup is an Attic Greek kylix, attributed to the Oakeshott Painter. It is further classified as a band cup, a type of Little-Master cup.
Cleopatra is a 1611-1612 oil on canvas painting of Cleopatra by Artemisia Gentileschi, now in the private Etro collection in Milan.
