Édouard Manet was a French modernist painter. He was one of the first 19th-century artists to paint modern life, as well as a pivotal figure in the transition from Realism to Impressionism.
Manet sometime before 1870
Image: Manet, Edouard 05 1832 1883 Signature
Manet's portrait painted by Henri Fantin-Latour
Music in the Tuileries, 1862
Modernism is an early 20th-century movement in literature, the visual arts and music, emphasizing experimentation, abstraction, and subjective experience. Philosophy, politics and social issues, are also aspects of the movement, which sought to change how 'human beings in a society interact and live together'. The modernist movement emerged during the late 19th century in response to significant changes in Western culture, including secularization and the growing influence of science. It is characterized as a rejection of tradition and the hunt for newer and original means of cultural expression. Modernism was influenced by widespread technological innovation, industrialization, and urbanization, as well as cultural and geopolitical shifts that occurred after World War I. Artistic movements and techniques associated with modernism include abstract art, stream of consciousness in literature, cinematic montage, atonal and twelve-tone music, and modernist architecture and urban planning.
Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907). This proto-cubist work is considered a seminal influence on subsequent trends in modernist painting.
Frank Lloyd Wright, Solomon Guggenheim Museum completed in 1959
Eugène Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People, 1830, a Romantic work of art
A Realist portrait of Otto von Bismarck. Modernist artists largely rejected Realism.