Modern art’s favorite birthday is a rejected picnic of 1863
Many historians date modern art as a movement to Édouard Manet’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe at the 1863 Salon des Refusés. The wider era stretches roughly from the 1860s to the 1970s—experiment over tradition, narrative yielding to abstraction—before contemporary and postmodern labels take over.
Earlier candidates include Courbet’s 1855 Artist’s Studio and David’s 1784 Oath of the Horatii; H. Harvard Arnason stressed a century-long metamorphosis, not a single birth. Roots reach the Enlightenment and the French Revolution’s habit of choosing styles the way one picks wallpaper. Romantics, Realists, and Impressionists pioneered the break; Post-Impressionists—van Gogh, Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat, Toulouse-Lautrec—set the stage. Impressionists argued painters should chase reflected light outdoors, forming a cooperative that showed independently and spread internationally.
Early twentieth-century Paris erupted with Fauvism’s wild color under Matisse, then Cubism. Picasso’s brothel scene with five figures and African-mask echoes radicalized the picture plane; with Braque he developed Analytic Cubism about 1908–1912, then Synthetic Cubism’s collages into the 1920s. German Expressionism rose in Dresden and Munich (1905–1911) via Die Brücke (1905) and Der Blaue Reiter (1911); Futurism launched in Italy from Marinetti’s manifesto. De Chirico’s dreamlike Paris canvases, including Song of Love (1914), fed Surrealism years before Breton’s 1924 founding. War birthed Dada in Zürich and Berlin; de Stijl and Bauhaus rethought art’s ties to design and education.
The 1913 Armory Show and wartime émigrés brought modernism to the United States; after World War II, New York led with Abstract Expressionism, Pop, Minimalism, and more. Late 1960s–1970s land, performance, and conceptual work challenged painting until neo-expressionism revived the canvas. Constantin Brancusi’s Golden Bird (1919/20), one of twenty-seven Bird sculptures begun around 1910, distills flight to a polished silhouette on a rough geometric base—modern sculpture’s quest for essence in metal and wood.
Source: Modern art
