Henri Matisse, André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck. They paint a face green, a sky pink, a tree red — not to describe the world, but to express it.
Critic Louis Vauxcelles, Salon d'Automne 1905: a Donatello sculpture surrounded by Matisse's blazing canvases — "Donatello among the wild beasts" (les fauves).
A face, a guitar, a bottle — sliced, rotated, reassembled. Painting is no longer a window. It is a construction.
"A roaring car is more beautiful than the Winged Victory of Samothrace." — F.T. Marinetti
Glorified war as "the world's only hygiene." Many futurists embraced fascism. The movement collapsed into the catastrophe it celebrated.
If reason produced the trenches, then art must be unreasonable. Nonsense poems. Found objects. Chance. The readymade.
Duchamp signs a urinal "R. Mutt" and submits it as sculpture. Rejected. Photographed. Lost. Re-made. The most influential art object of the 20th century — because it asks: who decides what art is?
Born of Dada and Freud. Dreams are not nonsense — they are data. Painting becomes a window onto the irrational.
Photo-real dream-objects. The Persistence of Memory (1931): time melts.
The image and the word at war. The Treachery of Images: "Ceci n'est pas une pipe."
Frottage, automatism, biomorphic forms — new techniques to bypass the rational mind.
Down with bourgeois easel painting. Art must be useful: posters, textiles, furniture, architecture. The artist as engineer.
Designed monument to the Third International — 400m of iron, glass, and rotating chambers. Never built. Forever iconic.
Photomontage, typography, geometric abstraction. Diagonal compositions. Red wedges beat white circles.
A school. A philosophy. A factory. Erase the line between fine art, design, and industry. Train the artist of the modern world.
Critic Harold Rosenberg called it "action painting." The canvas is no longer where the artist depicts something — it is where the artist does something.
Drips, pours, flings. Canvas on the floor. The whole body becomes the brush.
Color fields. Floating rectangles. Painting that aspires to the condition of the sublime.
If Ab-Ex was heroic and inward, Pop is cool and outward. Subject matter: the supermarket, the screen, the celebrity.
Campbell's Soup Cans (1962). Marilyn diptych. Silkscreens of disasters. Mechanical reproduction as medium.
Comic-book Ben-Day dots. Billboard scale. Soft sculptures of hamburgers. Irony made visible.
No symbol. No metaphor. No story. A box is a box. A line of fluorescent tubes is a line of fluorescent tubes. The work refuses to point elsewhere.
Stacks. Boxes. Industrial fabrication. Objects that are neither painting nor sculpture.
Shaped canvases. Black paintings. Pattern as the only content.
Fluorescent tubes from the hardware store. Light as material. Space made luminous.
Art stops serving the church, the state, the patron. It serves only itself — and the question of what it can be.
By 1970, "is it art?" is no longer a question of skill or beauty. It is a question of concept, context, and frame. Every movement in this deck pushed that frame outward.
The idea, the gesture, the choice — these become the artwork. Skill is not abandoned; it is repositioned.
Picasso, Braque, and the dismantling of the picture plane.
Drip technique on film — Hans Namuth's 1950 footage and after.