page_title: Art of Europe
section_title: Modern art
hierarchical_section_title: Art of Europe / Modern art
caption_attribution_description: Scratched photograph of the cover of Art-Language, Vol.3 No.4, 1974, an early and very influential journal of conceptual art published in the UK and New York. Issue title (in large red/orange all-caps): Draft for an Anti-Textbook. Editors/Artists listed on cover: Ian Burn, Mel Ramsden, Terry Smith. Shot taken indoors using a Canon EOS 3000 SLR camera and colour daylight film.
context_page_description: The art of Europe, or Western art, encompasses the history of visual art in Europe. European prehistoric art started as mobile Upper Paleolithic rock and cave painting and petroglyph art and was characteristic of the period between the Paleolithic and the Iron Age. Written histories of European art often begin with the art of the Ancient Middle East and the Ancient Aegean civilizations, dating from the 3rd millennium BC. Parallel with these significant cultures, art of one form or another existed all over Europe, wherever there were people, leaving signs such as carvings, decorated artifacts and huge standing stones. However a consistent pattern of artistic development within Europe becomes clear only with the art of Ancient Greece, adopted and transformed by Rome and carried; with the Roman Empire, across much of Europe, North Africa and the Middle East.
context_section_description: Out of the naturalist ethic of Realism grew a major artistic movement, Impressionism. The Impressionists pioneered the use of light in painting as they attempted to capture light as seen from the human eye. Edgar Degas,
  Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, were all involved in the Impressionist movement. As a direct outgrowth of Impressionism came the development of Post-Impressionism. Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat are the best known Post-Impressionists.
  Following the Impressionists and the Post-Impressionists came Fauvism, often considered the first "modern" genre of art. Just as the Impressionists revolutionized light, so did the fauvists rethink color, painting their canvases in bright, wild hues. After the Fauvists, modern art began to develop in all its forms, ranging from Expressionism, concerned with evoking emotion through objective works of art, to Cubism, the art of transposing a four-dimensional reality onto a flat canvas, to Abstract art. These new art forms pushed the limits of traditional notions of "art" and corresponded to the similar rapid changes that were taking place in human society, technology, and thought.
  Surrealism is often classified as a form of Modern Art. However, the Surrealists themselves have objected to the study of surrealism as an era in art history, claiming that it oversimplifies the complexity of the movement (which they say is not an artistic movement), misrepresents the relationship of surrealism to aesthetics, and falsely characterizes ongoing surrealism as a finished, historically encapsulated era. Other forms of Modern art (some of which border on Contemporary art) include:
  Abstract expressionism
  Art Deco
  Art Nouveau
  Bauhaus
  Color Field painting
  Conceptual Art
  Constructivism
  Cubism
  Dada
  Der Blaue Reiter
  De Stijl
  Die Brücke
  Body Art
  Expressionism
  Fauvism
  Fluxus
  Futurism
  Happening
  Surrealism
  Lettrisme
  Lyrical Abstraction
  Land Art
  Minimalism
  Naive art
  Op art
  Performance art
  Photorealism
  Pop art
  Suprematism
  Video art
  Vorticism
  Time Period: 
  Impressionism: late 19th Century
  Others: First half of the 20th century
caption: Art & Language are known for their major input on conceptual art.
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