Early C20th

 

Art Deco

Art Deco represented the rapid modernization of the world. While the style was already widespread and was in fashion in Europe and the United States, the term Art Deco was not known. Modernistic or the "1925 Style" was used. The name Art Deco was derived from the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs Industriels et Modernes, held in Paris.
Art Deco was primarily an elegant design style dominant in decorative art, fashion, jewelry, textiles, furniture design, interior decoration, and architecture.
Different types of wood and precious metals, tortoise shell, lacquer, egg shell, shagreen, leather, a cross-fertilization of styles either imported from colonial empires and the Orient or borrowed from art history, all were the characteristic signs of this exceptional craftsmanship aimed primarily at a rich international clientele. It was an updated look based on very classical forms. It was a style "at once traditional and innovative". The main elements of Art Deco architecture were its' nonstructural decorative elements and its' focus on modernity. It is characterized by the use of crisp, symmetrical geometric forms. The style is reminiscent of the Precisionist art movement, which developed at about the same time.
Well-established artists at the time were painter Tamara de Lempicka, a jeweler and glassmaker, Rene Lalique, fashion illustrator Erte and graphic designer Adolphe Mouron(Cassandre). New York skyscrapers The Chrysler building and Empire State Building were examples of 1930s-era of Art Deco style in architecture. The latter, designed by architect William Van Alen, is considered to be one of the world's great Art Deco buildings.
Art Deco was the showcase of a modern society in which tastes and styles were becoming international, shared as much by the key players of the Roaring Twenties in the United States as by Indian maharajahs and the gentry of Old Europe. With its' sense of modernity and its' simple, elegant style, it has proven itself through its longevity.

 

Graphic Art

After the invention of lithography in the mid-1790s, a number of artists had used the new medium to produce fine art prints. But as a result of the more bountiful use of lithography by newspaper, the medium soon became identified with the popular arts.
In the late 19th century print renaissance began with another new medium chromolithography. The artist largely responsible for it was a poster designer, Jules Cheret. He produced a variety of commercial work, from menus to posters and specialized in color lithography. His theater and café posters of the late 1860s and 1870s attracted the attention of both collectors and critics.
By the end of the decade the poster vogue was in full flower not only in France but throughout the West. A number of talented and ambitious young artists turned their attention to designing them, including Alexandre Steinlen, Eugene Grasset, Alphonse Mucha, Will Bradley, Maxfield Parrish, Ethel Reed, John Sloan, Maurice Prendergast, and the Beggarstaff brothers. The most famous poster artist was Henry de Toulouse-Lautrec.
Graphic arts gave the tempo and visual melody of the age. Through the graphic works of talented artists, every innovation was immediately part of the everyday world. Books, newspapers, posters, tracts and advertisements, so specific, influential with words, signs and images were fashioned and arranged to suit differing aesthetic (La Belle Epoque, Art Nouveau, Vienna Secession, Art Deco, Glasgow School, Dada, Futurism…), economic and artistic dictates.

 

Photography

Soon after photography had been born in the early 1830s, endless discussions whether photography was an art or a technique began. For some, the birth of photography foretold the end of painting, drawing, lithography, engravings and prints, but many artists maintained that a machine could never produce a work of art.
Throughout the 19th century, photography was used for many different purposes. Photography was used for the first time for the photographic police files after the overthrow of the Paris Commune (1871). Scientists Muybridge and Marey used photography to break down movement. Painter Degas made use of photographs for his paintings. A great number of unknown photographers set up their shops and produced posed portraits, and explorers compiled albums of pictures taken in distant lands. Photography was ideally suited to recording the problems of modern life. One who contributed importantly to its rich documentary tradition was Eugene Atget.
But photographers consistently espoused the idea that photography was an art. They shared the belief that photography was a set of physical and chemical operations in which the artist played a key part by measuring, filtering and softening matter, shade and light, and specially by choosing subjects and settings. In the 1890s in Europe and the United States, these photographers were known as pictorialists - they were retouching their works with brushes.
In the early years of the twentieth century, the American photographers Edward Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz responded to this movement of pictorialists by advocating a return to a pure form of photography, with no interference other than framing the subject. The magazine Camera Work contributed to the dissemination of photographs in this school, such as the pictures of Paul Strand.
Soon, photography embraced the pictorial codes of modern painting. The Bragaglia brothers were at the root of Futurist photodynamic, sought to capture and illustrate the life force. The Russian Constructivists opted for surprising compositions. In France, Germaine Krull worked in this vein by photographing metal constructions. The Dadaists produced photomontages made of cut-outs and collages of several photographs that could then be perfected by Man Ray. A little later, Man Ray accidentally discovered the effects of solarization. Using this technique, he made many of his most famous portraits and photographs.

 

Bauhaus

The Bauhaus is one of the first colleges of design. It came into being from the merger of the Weimar Academy of Arts and the Weimar School of Arts and Crafts. It was founded by Walter Gropius in 1919 and was closed in 1933 by the Nazis.
The Bauhaus holds a place of its own in the culture and visual art history of 20th century. This outstanding school affirmed innovative training methods and also created a place of production and a focus of international debate. It brought together a number of the most outstanding contemporary architects and artists. The Bauhaus stood almost alone in attempt to achieve reconciliation between the aesthetics of design and the more commercial demands of industrial mass production.
The teaching program was organized in the form of workshops to produce works that were both aesthetically pleasing and useful. The creed of this program asserted that the modernization process could be mastered by means of design. As a result, in 1923 the Bauhaus turned it attention to industry. The first major Bauhaus exhibition which was opened in 1923 reflected the revised principle of art and technology a new unity spanned the full spectrum of Bauhaus work. It was Art and Technology, a New Unity, which was also the name of the workshop in which the art was created.
The Bauhaus had a major impact on art and architecture trends in western Europe and the United States.

 

Precisionism

The radical innovations of the new style, Cubism, confused and upset the public and most critics, but the avant-garde saw in them the future of art. It became clear to the art world that something of great significance was happening. Some artists put these innovations into the service of a less radical art, as can be seen in the cubist-inspired responses of American Precisionists on the other side of Atlantic. The Precisionists endeavored to create a representational system that would be in tune with their time.
Charles Sheeler, Charles Demuth and Georgia O'Keeffe, as the most typical representatives, were inspired by the development of Cubism in Europe. Architecture, in particular the architecture of industrial buildings was their favorite subject. In their pictures people and nature were usually absent. The visual language that Precisionists developed combined realism and geometric schematization. Demuth regarded his paintings as abstractions produced from observed reality. Some art historians have used the term "cubo-realism" to describe his work.
Building upon the experiments of European art avant-gardes, these geometrical landscape painters reduced volumes to coloured planes, and outlines to ridges. Their canvases combined effects of flatness with effects of depth and perspective.
Precisionism was an important development in American Modernism and in some respects, Precisionists works are harbingers of the Pop Art aesthetic. Dealing as it did with pure form more than with narrative or subject matter, Precisionism gradually evolved towards Abstraction, and faded away as an important influence.

 

Dadaism

Dadaism or Dada is a post-World War I cultural movement in visual art as well as literature (mainly poetry), theatre and graphic design. The movement was, among other things, a protest against the barbarism of the War and what Dadaists believed was an oppressive intellectual rigidity in both art and everyday society; its works were characterized by a deliberate irrationality and the rejection of the prevailing standards of art. It influenced later movements including Surrealism.
According to its proponents, Dada was not art; it was anti-art. For everything that art stood for, Dada was to represent the opposite. Where art was concerned with aesthetics, Dada ignored them. If art is to have at least an implicit or latent message, Dada strives to have no meaning--interpretation of Dada is dependent entirely on the viewer. If art is to appeal to sensibilities, Dada offends. Perhaps it is then ironic that Dada is an influential movement in Modern art. Dada became a commentary on art and the world, thus becoming art itself.
The artists of the Dada movement had become disillusioned by art, art history and history in general. Many of them were veterans of World War I and had grown cynical of humanity after seeing what men were capable of doing to each other on the battlefields of Europe. Thus they became attracted to a nihilistic view of the world (they thought that nothing mankind had achieved was worthwhile, not even art), and created art in which chance and randomness formed the basis of creation. The basis of Dada is nonsense. With the order of the world destroyed by World War I, Dada was a way to express the confusion that was felt by many people as their world was turned upside down.