Modernism Art Prints

6 museum-quality Modernism prints — made-to-order giclée reproductions of Modernism masterworks, printed on archival paper and shipped to your wall.

Modernism names the succession of movements that, in the first decades of the twentieth century, broke decisively with the conventions of illusionistic painting that had governed European art since the Renaissance. Building on the example of the Post-Impressionists — Cézanne’s constructed space, Van Gogh’s expressive color, Gauguin’s flattened, symbolic compositions — younger artists in Paris and across Europe treated color, line, and form as expressive means in their own right rather than as instruments of description.

The change was rapid and contentious. When the critic Roger Fry showed the new painting in London in 1910, the exhibition provoked what he called “a wild hurricane of newspaper abuse”; within a few years abstraction had emerged as an artistic end in itself. The works gathered here belong to this moment of transition, when painting’s subject was increasingly the act and material of painting itself.