Early 20th-Century Modernism

Art History II: Baroque to Contemporary

Course 2 · Chapter 7 · Early 20th-Century Modernism

Three movements arrive within roughly a decade, each abandoning a different foundational rule Western painting had followed for centuries: Fauvism abandons naturalistic color, Cubism abandons the single fixed vantage point Course 1's own Chapter 7 traced back to Brunelleschi, and Expressionism eventually abandons recognizable subject matter altogether.

Fauvism: Color, Freed From Description

Henri Matisse, Woman with a Hat (1905)

Exhibited at the 1905 Salon d'Automne, depicting Matisse's own wife. Formally, color is applied with no attempt at naturalistic accuracy at all — passages of green, red, and blue describe her face and hat not because that's what a face actually looks like, but purely for the color's own expressive, emotional force. Color stops being a tool for description and becomes a subject of its own.

🔮 Another Insult, Another Adopted Name Critic Louis Vauxcelles, seeing a small, traditionally-styled Renaissance-influenced sculpture placed in the same room as these wildly colored paintings, reportedly exclaimed "Donatello among the wild beasts!" — and described the room itself as a "cage aux fauves" ("cage of wild beasts"). The artists adopted "Fauves" (wild beasts) as their own name, exactly the same pattern Chapter 6 described with Louis Leroy and Impressionism.

Cubism: Abandoning the Single Vantage Point

Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907)

Formally, five nude figures are rendered as fractured, angular planes, drawing directly on African mask and Iberian sculptural forms; two of the faces are shown from genuinely incompatible angles at once — features from a profile view and a frontal view merged into a single face. This is the real conceptual break this chapter's own title promises: since Brunelleschi's demonstration around 1415 (Course 1, Chapter 7), Western painting had assumed one fixed, single viewpoint a scene was observed from. Cubism abandons that assumption entirely, showing an object or figure from multiple angles simultaneously within the same picture.

The same critic, twice — remarkably, Louis Vauxcelles is also directly responsible for naming this movement. Reviewing a 1908 painting by Georges Braque — reportedly after Matisse himself described it to Vauxcelles as "made of little cubes" — Vauxcelles wrote of "bizarre cubiques," and "Cubism" stuck. The same critic coined both of this chapter's own first two movement names, each time as a dismissive remark that the artists themselves kept.

Expressionism & Abstraction: Abandoning the Subject Itself

Wassily Kandinsky pushed furthest of the three. In his 1911 treatise Concerning the Spiritual in Art, he argued that color and form could directly communicate spiritual and emotional content on their own — without needing to depict any recognizable object, person, or scene at all.

Wassily Kandinsky, Composition VII (1913)

Preceded by more than thirty preparatory studies, but painted in the final canvas in just four days. Formally, there is no identifiable subject at all — a dense, swirling cacophony of color and abstract form, often described as an attempt to capture the feeling of hearing music rather than depicting anything visible in the world. Where Fauvism distorted color and Cubism fractured form while still depicting recognizable subjects, Kandinsky removes the recognizable subject entirely.

Three Movements, Three Different Rules Broken

Movement	Key work	Rule abandoned
Fauvism	Matisse, Woman with a Hat (1905)	Naturalistic, descriptive color
Cubism	Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907)	A single, fixed viewpoint (Brunelleschi's own c. 1415 system)
Expressionism/Abstraction	Kandinsky, Composition VII (1913)	Recognizable subject matter itself

Questions to Sit With

Reflection 1

The same critic, dismissively, named both Fauvism and Cubism. Do you think a hostile critic's own insult shapes how a movement is later understood, even after the artists reclaim the term?

Reflection 2

Brunelleschi's single-viewpoint perspective system lasted roughly 500 years before Cubism abandoned it. What do you think makes a foundational artistic convention like that stay dominant for so long, and what finally makes it break?

Reflection 3

Kandinsky argued color and form alone could communicate spiritual content with no recognizable subject at all. Do you find that a convincing claim, or does meaning in art require something recognizable to attach to?

Quick Reference — Chapter 7

Matisse's Woman with a Hat (1905) — color freed entirely from naturalistic description
Vauxcelles's "cage aux fauves" (1905) names Fauvism; his "bizarre cubiques" (1908) names Cubism — the same critic, twice
Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) — the real break from Brunelleschi's c. 1415 single-viewpoint system (Course 1, Ch.7)
Kandinsky's Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911) — color/form can express meaning with no recognizable subject
Composition VII (1913) — 30+ studies, painted in 4 days, fully non-representational

What's Next

Next chapter: Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism & Postwar Art — Dalí, Pollock, and Rothko, as the art world's own center of gravity shifts from Paris to New York after World War II.