Twentieth-сentury modern art: evolution and main trends

Abstract

In the eighteenth century, Western civilization entered a historical epoch known as the Enlightenment, which established a new cultural and artistic paradigm of modernity. A German philosopher Jürgen Habermas remarked in this context: “The Enlightenment project formulated by the Enlightenment thinkers in the eighteenth century consisted in their desire to create an objective science, a universal morality and law, and an autonomous art based on their internal logic of development.” The following two centuries brought incredible diversity and depth to the Western art scene. They witnessed an unprecedented array of movements and creative originality. In addition, and in pursuit of the proclaimed ideal of total autonomy, twentieth-century artists revised the three most essential principles of art. The masters of modernism reinterpreted a traditional relationship between the means of representation and the object of art. They developed a new understanding of the role of the author in creating an artwork. And finally, they changed their view of the relationship between art and life. Those three features, in my opinion, comprise the substantive evolution of twentieth-century modern art.