Rise of modern art

Modern art is the term for the art produced from roughly the 1860s to the 1970s, a period in which artists moved away from traditional academic rules of representation. The change is often traced to the French painters Gustave Courbet and Edouard Manet, whose realism shocked the official Salon, and to the Impressionists, who held their first group exhibition in Paris in 1874. Later movements included Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, Expressionism, Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism, with artists such as Cezanne, Picasso, Kandinsky and Pollock. Artists increasingly explored colour, form and the act of painting itself rather than faithful depiction. After the Second World War the centre of the art world shifted from Paris to New York, and by the 1970s modernism gave way to postmodern and contemporary art.

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