Modern art is a broad term that refers to a particular kind of work that rejected the limitations of the past and embraced the forward momentum of the future. Around the mid-ninetieth century, in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, modern art cast off constrained notions of “appropriate” subject matter propagated by the academic Salon system. In the late nineteenth century, new technologies abounded: the railroad, automated manufacturing, and other innovations profoundly changed the way people experienced the world. The earliest modern artists—including Édouard Manet, Vincent van Gogh, and Paul Cézanne—wanted their work to reflect this turn in modern life. In the past, artists had been largely subject to the whims of the wealthy patrons who bought their work. Now, artists began to make art about people and things they encountered in their everyday lives, like Henri de Toulouse Lautrec’s vibrant images of Parisian nightlife, or Claude Monet’s painting of the bustling Gare St. Lazare. Modern art also signaled a departure from the emphasis on mimesis, or imitation of the real world. Forms became flatter and more abstract in the work of artists like the Fauves, including Henri Matisse and André Derain, and later the Cubists, led by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque.

Many sub-movements of modern art share a concern with the subjective view of the artist, rather than an objective view of the world. This is true, certainly, of Impressionism, which aimed to record the artist’s personal view of various scenes, and also of Cubism. The development of psychoanalysis played a profound role in modern art movements ranging from Surrealism to Abstract Expressionism, whose artists hoped to use art making to tap into their own unconscious. From the start of the modern art movement, artists have tried to incorporate ideas about the new and the next into their innovative, forward-thinking work.