At the start of the 20th century, a new art-form was created synthesising different aspects of classic traditions which focused strongly on the idea of ‘expression’. These artists of the avant-garde focused on depicting the artist’s ‘self’, putting everything of themselves into their art, and, as the century went on, found modern, accurate, yet expressive ways of depicting the ever-changing times, a strong theme being nature in an ever-strengthening industrial and urban world. This ‘modernism’, starting vigoriously France (making it the most artistically avant-garde country to date), rapidly spread to the other major European countries combining international and cultural ideas with others such as Cubism and Futurism, one of the latest being Italy, focusing strongly on middle-class ideals and class equality, referring strongly to Marx’s statement “philosophers had hitherto merely sought to understand the world intellectually, the point was to change it practically”.
As mentioned before, France was key in the rise of ‘modernism’. This was because they focused strongly on the idea of ‘cubism’, rather than just on the more culturably understandable ones of ‘expressionism’ and ‘futurism’ which countries such as Germany sought out. Cubism used innovative techniques, not only focusing on the subject matter. From it arose conflict around the change of art and modernity, how people should view it, the impulse to change, or whether art, and the theories around it should be left to change themselves.
Cubism was the main focus point in modernisation which crossed the bridge from 19th to 20th century art.
