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Modern painting is a blanket term that covers the realist and impressionist works of Jean Francois Millet and Pierre Auguste Renoir, to the post war surrealist and cubist works of Salvador Dali and Pablo Picasso. In fact, all paintings produced between roughly the second half of the nineteenth century and the 1970s that consciously break away from the aesthetic norms and production methods of academic art can be generally referred to as modern paintings.
The breakdown of the Enlightenment ideals that propelled the French Revolution in the 18th century, and a growing distrust with science, logic and political liberty were major inspirations behind modern art. Existentialism and psycho-analysis were the two chief philosophical inspirations behind modern painting. Aesthetically, inspirations were drawn from outside the accepted European canon – like Japanese art, African ritual art and sculpture and minimalist geometric forms.
The homogeneous term ‘modern painting’ can, however, be quite misleading, as there were numerous currents and counter-currents that worked within its oeuvre – with skepticism and anti-idealism being the only common denominators uniting them. Impressionism was the first major modern art movement, along with realism and romanticism. The beginning of the twentieth century brought in an increasing preference for abstraction in place of figurative representation. Expressionism and Cubism were the leading movements of this time. World War I inspired anti-art movements like Dadaism and Surrealism.
The post World War II period further broadened the horizon of modern art painting. There were lyrical abstractions and abstract expressionism on the one side, and on the other side, there were tongue in cheek comments on the rising power of an aggressive capitalism made by the artists of pop art.
Modern painting has its roots in Europe, but soon spread across the world. The dissolution of a ‘national character’ in art in preference to a transnational school of style is one of the main characteristics of modern art painting.
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