Many of the world’s most famous artists, like Claude Monet, Salvador Dali, and Pablo Picasso, fall under the umbrella of Modernism, even though their styles vary widely. So, how exactly do we define the Modernist era? Modern art is defined by its rejection of traditional academic standards. While historians debate the exact starting point, the 1863 Salon des Refusés marked a clear break, giving artists new freedom from the Academy’s rigid rules. Over the following hundred years, a succession of visionaries abandoned perspective, emotional restraint, physical representation, and artistic craft itself to create something new. Understand art in the Modernist era with ten pivotal works from modern masters.
1. Édouard Manet, Luncheon on the Grass, 1863
Édouard Manet is often seen as the artist who cracked open the door to Modernism. His Luncheon on the Grass wasn’t just a painting. It was a provocation that sparked a movement. The scene shows two clothed men casually picnicking with a nude woman. She isn’t Venus or a goddess, but a modern-day figure, unidealized, staring directly at the viewer. That blunt realism, combined with rough brushstrokes, flat lighting, and an awkward sense of depth, shocked 19th-century Salon-goers accustomed to polished historical scenes.
Rejected by the official Salon, Luncheon on the Grass found its home in the Salon des Refusés. Its inclusion there marked a turning point in art history. Manet had rewired tradition, replacing old myths with modern-day reality. That shift toward the present, the personal, the provocative is what made Manet the father of Modern art.
2. Eugène Bataille (Sapeck), Mona Lisa Smoking a Pipe, 1887
An early Modern group that headlined the beginning of the period was Les Arts Incoherents, French for “Incoherent Art.” Led by writer Jules Lévy, this group was defined by humor, satire, and accessibility of art, seen in the fact that most of their graphic artworks were cartoons published in widely distributed journals. While most of their works were made in the form of poetry or performance art, there were also some graphic artists, particularly Eugène Bataille.
Also known under the pseudonym Sapeck, his illustration of Mona Lisa Smoking a Pipe for the journal Le Rire remains a virtually unknown piece of Modernism. Here, he draws the all-famed Mona Lisa with one simple addition: a pipe. Satirical images like this are still recreated today. Bataille appropriates the famous Mona Lisa by putting a phallic object in her mouth, poking fun at her renowned status.
Modernism is usually referred to as revolutionary, a title that makes all too much sense for someone like Bataille, living in the aftermath of the French Revolution. As rebellions spread throughout Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, it only made sense that the same ideas would integrate themselves into the art world. The works of the Modern era can even be argued to be a broad act of iconoclasm, defined as the destruction of images. While this term typically refers to the damaging of religious icons (such as the Byzantine Iconoclasm) or political images (seen during the French Revolution), its general idea can be applied to the Modern period. Artists were working to destroy the established concepts of art on a large scale, rejecting everything put in place before them.
3. Vincent van Gogh, Starry Night, 1889
Vincent van Gogh created The Starry Night in June 1889 while seeking treatment at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France, just a year before his death. Rather than a direct observation, the canvas is a composite of the view from his east-facing bedroom window, memory, and emotional imagination. Swirling waves of cobalt, indigo, and white surround eleven exaggerated, glowing stars and a crescent moon, applied with thick impasto brushstrokes.
The Starry Night stands as a pivotal bridge between late 19th-century Post-Impressionism and 20th-century Modernism. Where Impressionists sought to capture light as it fell in objective reality, van Gogh used color and form to express subjective psychological states. His approach influenced many subsequent Modernist artists. German Expressionists drew heavily on van Gogh’s dramatic brushwork and exaggerated forms to convey anxiety and internal conflict, while Henri Matisse and the Fauves built on van Gogh’s use of liberated, non-naturalistic color palettes.
4. Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907
Painted in 1907, Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is widely considered the single most decisive rupture in 20th-century art history, single-handedly firing the starting gun for Modernist abstraction. The massive 8-foot canvas portrays five prostitutes in a brothel on Carrer d’Avinyó in Barcelona. Shattering Renaissance perspective, human bodies are reduced to jagged, razor-sharp planes and overlapping geometric forms rather than soft, naturalistic contours. The two figures on the right wear stylized facial features derived directly from African tribal masks.
The radical flattening of space in Demoiselles directly laid the foundation for Cubism, which Picasso developed alongside Georges Braque over the following years. By incorporating non-Western artistic motifs as equal visual tools rather than mere exotic decor, Picasso changed how European artists approached abstraction. Even Picasso’s closest avant-garde peers, including Henri Matisse and Georges Braque, were initially horrified by the painting’s aggression, proving just how far past the established boundaries of art it pushed.
5. Wassily Kandinsky, Untitled, 1915
An artist like Wassily Kandinsky leaned into abstraction and took it a step further, turning abstraction into non-representation. That is, the form is so deconstructed that there is hardly anything recognizable anymore. Kandinsky started Der Blaue Reiter group along with Franz Marc, where together they pioneered the German Expressionist movement. An artwork like Untitled (1915) confuses the viewer at first. The first question viewers ask sounds simple, but is deceptively complex: What is Kandinsky trying to show?
In his artworks, it’s not the what that’s important, but the how. Kandinsky is an expressionist who focuses on expressing or conveying emotions. What’s being shown on the canvas gives way to how it’s being shown. Kandinsky does this primarily through his colors. He considered himself a synesthete, so for him, color had sound, typically denoted by a certain instrument. For example, red was aggressive, and as a warm color, it moved out toward the viewer. On the other hand, blue was calming and receding in its cool qualities. Juxtaposing these two together created chaos and disharmony. If you look in the upper corners, you’ll see large splotches of red across from blue, which make the canvas almost tilt in imbalance. Keep this concept in mind when viewing Kandinsky’s works, and their meanings might come a little easier.
6. Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1919
More than anyone or any movement, Duchamp and the Dadaists truly embody what Modernism means. Established in the early 20th century, Dadaism isn’t so different from Les Arts Incoherents. They focus on satire and appropriation, making fun of the elitism of the art world. Ironically, little did they know they’d become a symbol for what we consider elite art today.
Marcel Duchamp was a forerunner of Dadaism, with his most famous work, Fountain. In this piece, Duchamp took a manufactured urinal, flipped it on its side, and submitted it to be exhibited. Fountain created an outrage. If artists can take ready-made objects and call them art, then what does art really even mean? This question was the exact one Duchamp was trying to elicit.
7. Jackson Pollock, Number 1A, 1948
Jackson Pollock’s Number 1A, 1948 represents a seminal moment in late Modernism, marking the full emergence of Abstract Expressionism and shifting the center of the international art world from Paris to New York after World War II. Created in his Long Island barn, Number 1A, 1948 completely abandoned the traditional easel, palette, and brush-to-canvas contact.
Pollock laid raw, unprimed canvas flat on the floor, using his entire body to fling, drip, and pour liquid industrial enamel paint from sticks, trowels, and stiff brushes. Near the top right edge of the canvas, Pollock stamped his own paint-covered handprints directly onto the surface—an intimate signature linking the artist’s physical body to the recorded action. The painting lacks a central focal point, horizon line, or hierarchy. The dynamic web of black, white, grey, and metallic paint extends uniformly across the massive canvas, drawing the viewer’s eye endlessly around the surface.
Pollock made the act of creation the primary subject matter of his work. He treated the canvas as a record of kinetic movement, paving the way for modern Happenings, Performance Art, and Minimalist art movements in the mid-to-late 20th century.
8. Willem de Kooning, Woman I, 1950-52
Kandinsky’s Expressionism shouldn’t be confused with the later movement of Abstract Expressionism. Yes, he’s making abstract works in the expressionist style, but these movements are defined separately. One of the largest differences between the two is that Abstract Expressionism took place in the 1940s and 1950s, in the new art capital of New York City. A trailblazer in this style was the Dutchman Willem de Kooning. Artists like de Kooning were looking back a few decades, inspired by creators like Van Gogh and Munch. De Kooning’s Woman I takes a very traditional European subject, the female nude, and flips it on its head, not in a way entirely dissimilar from Bataille or Duchamp.
The figure depicted in Woman I is grotesque and disturbing, though it is still clear she is a woman through her prominent breasts. De Kooning was appropriating the female form, much like Duchamp or Sapeck did with the Mona Lisa, but on a broader scale. He reduced this woman down to her basic body parts, emphasizing the most important aspect of his movement: abstraction.
His dynamic, dramatic brushstrokes created a similar sense of chaos that Kandinsky depicted in his Untitled work. The colorful palette of pinks and greens gets drowned out by the large swatches of gray that create the woman’s form. We can’t tell if she’s standing or sitting, where her arms or legs are, or if she’s clothed or naked. The disorder of the form reflects the post-war world. Working in the United States, de Kooning and other Abstract Expressionists distanced themselves from European tradition to forge a new, distinctly American art.
9. Andy Warhol, Campbell’s Soup Cans, 1962
Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans (1962) marked the arrival of Pop Art, a decisive shift that challenged late Modernism’s obsession with heroic individualism and interior emotion. Debuted at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, the artwork comprises 32 individual canvases; one for each variety of soup sold by Campbell’s at the time. Warhol utilized synthetic polymer paint applied partly via screen printing, mimicking the mechanical precision of commercial graphic design rather than traditional brushwork. The canvases were displayed horizontally on shelves, directly mimicking how grocery stores stock mass-produced consumer goods.
Where High Modernism sought refuge in pure abstraction and metaphysical meaning, Pop Art turned its lens back onto post-war American consumer culture, commercial advertising, and industrial mass production. By prioritizing irony, repetition, surface over depth, and appropriation, Campbell’s Soup Cans effectively signaled the transition from High Modernism into early Postmodernism.
10. Jean-Michel Basquiat, Three Quarters of Olympia Minus the Servant, 1982
Modernism informally ended around the 1970s, ushering in a new era of Postmodernism. Artists like Duchamp and Kandinsky became household names. The context of the Cold War flipped the world upside down once again, and artists, doing what artists do, had to modify their works to keep up with the times.
This idea is exactly what the early Modernists were trying to do. For example, Manet took the traditional subject of a female nude in his Olympia and unveiled something deeper, something gritty, not unlike what de Kooning did with Woman I. His depiction of a sex worker astounded the Salon-goers in the 1860s, paving the way to the shocking early-Modern artworks of the Impressionists and beyond.
The neo-expressionist Jean-Michel Basquiat did what Duchamp did with L.H.O.O.Q. to Manet’s Olympia: he appropriated her iconic status as a symbol of the Modern art world. In Three Quarters of Olympia Minus the Servant, Basquiat took abstraction to an extreme, breaking apart all forms until everything was virtually unrecognizable.
It’s hard to tell where Olympia is meant to be. There’s some kind of face in the middle, but it looks nothing like Manet’s courtesan. Instead, it more accurately reflects the woman in de Kooning’s work: bald, ugly, and disturbing. Basquiat rejected the mainstreaming of modernism, reshaping its values into something that reflected his experience as a Black artist in New York.
Every artwork he made was an assault on the elitist art world. His graffiti medium portrayed the same idea of accessibility as Les Arts Incoherents did with their journals. Basquiat was painting identity, not just figures and bodies. He was evocative, just like the expressionists, forcing the viewer to analyze and interpret, not just observe.
Modern Art: How Did It Lead Us To Today?
The Modern era allowed artists to experiment with new forms, styles, and subjects. Without them, we might still be stuck in the stagnant tradition of academic formality. Imagine if every artwork looked just like a work made by Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo. Sure, they’re beautiful pieces to look at, but doesn’t it get quite boring? Shouldn’t we prefer a wide range of styles, enticing us with each new work we look at?
While Modern art can be hard to get, it’s still important to understand its place within art history. Without Modern artists, we could very well be trapped in the cycle of history without an escape. Their satirical takes on iconic artworks—and their abstract pieces that shattered traditional form—let audiences see something new each time. So, the next time you’re at a museum and feel overwhelmed by the complexity of Picasso or Matisse, remember: artists like them gave the art world freedom. That freedom opened the door to the full range of expression we enjoy today.
