Modern art

In Cubism, Futurism, and Constructivism, Nash discusses the relative importance that each artistic movement had upon the development of modern art.  Cubism recoiled against traditional art by portraying images in an abstract manner, consisting of geometric forms where the subject is shown in several different perspectives.  This gives the image an esoteric feel with recognizable figures giving way to a whole other set of shapes that were not visible a moment before.  Additionally, Cubism returns to a more primitive perception of figures and is not characterized by colourful paintings.  Futurism, attempted to show the world as it was experienced and focused on the representation of movement.  Despite the tension between Futurism and Cubism, the most famous two Futurism paintings were completed by a Cubist.  Personally, I feel that Constructivism more closely resembles modern art as it is today because it introduced the element of architecture into art, which is a dominant theme in many exhibits today.

As is expected with successive movement, they did not occur overnight.  Picasso and his buddy Braque progressively increased the conceptual framework of Cubism, which received several innovations by other artists.  One can see that history is not easily fragmented into separable periods defined by a particular artistic phenomenon but rather the culmination of opposing artistic traditions which collectively paved the way to modern day society.

With these three artistic movements, the foundation of modern art as it is today was established.  Throughout history with each successive "revolution" of art, the degree of abstraction seems to progressively increase.  Perhaps this is due to human nature's natural tendency to continually push the limits of our existence, delving further and further into intangible concepts.