Click here for the Modern art worksheet.

Classifying art as modern is actually quite strange because artists in the past century have practiced a lot of different styles and movements. Styles include pop, surreal, cubist, and abstract, just to name a few. In other words, modern art is not one specific movement. It is really a catch-all category for various styles of art in the past hundred years or so.

That being said, one of the first movement often to be classified as modern is Cubism. Arguably the most talented of the Cubists (not Cubans) was Pablo Picasso, who lived from 1881 to 1973 and painted many many works. Cubism can be categorized as using angular structure (sharp angles) to represent a different idea of an image. Picasso painted both in Analytical and Synthetic Cubism. Analytical Cubism focuses on taking apart objects and rebuilding them using flat planes, while Synthetic Cubism looks more toward adding parts of real objects into the painting. The interactive image to the right, titled "The Guitar Player," comes from the Analytical period. While Picasso did not start Cubism, he was very important in spreading it.

The painting below by Picasso is titled "Guernica." Guernica is a small village in the north of Spain in which a tragedy occurred in 1937. On April 27th of that year the Times described the incident:

“Guernica, the oldest town of the Basque provinces and the center of their cultural traditions, was almost completely destroyed by the rebels in an air attack yesterday afternoon. The bombing of the undefended town far behind the front line took exactly three quarters of an hour. During this time and without interruption a group of German aircraft – Junker and Heinkel bombers as well as Heinkel fighters – dropped bombs weighing up to 500 kilograms on the town. At the same time low-flying fighter planes fired machine-guns at the inhabitants who had taken refuge in the fields. The whole of Guernica was in flames in a very short time.”

The German army had attacked the Spanish town without declaring war and without any warning. Evidently, though, the government in Spain knew about the attack and let it happen because the village was supporting rebels against the Spanish government. Picasso refused to allow his painting to sit in Spain until the fascist government was removed from power, which happened in the 1970s.  

In his later life, Picasso began to use the Surrealist style. In this style, the artist tries to use dreams and fantasy in the paintings, often using the unconscious. One of the most famous painters of this style is Salvador Dali of Spain. Dali focused a lot of his work on trying to understand and show the ideas of the human unconscious in his paintings.