Modern art, painting, sculpture, architecture, and graphic arts characteristic of the 20th and

21st centuries and of the later part of the 19th century. Modern art embraces a wide variety of
movements, theories, and attitudes whose modernism resides particularly in a tendency to
reject traditional, historical, or academic forms and conventions in an effort to create an art
more in keeping with changed social, economic, and intellectual conditions.
An important trend that began in the 20th century was that of abstract, or nonobjective, art—
i.e., art in which little or no attempt is made to objectively reproduce or depict the
appearances or forms of objects in the realm of nature or the existing physical world. It should
also be noted that the development of photography and of allied photomechanical techniques
of reproduction has had an obscure but certainly important influence on the development of
modern art, because these mechanical techniques freed (or deprived) manually executed
drawing and painting of their hitherto crucial role as the only means of accurately depicting
the visible world.
The birth of modernism and modern art can be traced to the Industrial Revolution. This period
of rapid changes in manufacturing, transportation, and technology began around the mid-18th
century and lasted through the 19th century, profoundly affecting the social, economic, and
cultural conditions of life in Western Europe, North America, and eventually the world. New
forms of transportation, including the railroad, the steam engine, and the subway, changed the
way people lived, worked, and traveled, expanding their worldview and access to new ideas.
As urban centers prospered, workers flocked to cities for industrial jobs and urban
populations boomed.
Modern art includes artistic work produced during the period extending roughly from the
1860s to the 1970s, and denotes the styles and philosophy of the art produced during that era.
[1] The term is usually associated with art in which the traditions of the past have been
thrown aside in a spirit of experimentation.[2] Modern artists experimented with new ways of
seeing and with fresh ideas about the nature of materials and functions of art. A tendency
away from the narrative, which was characteristic for the traditional arts, toward abstraction is
characteristic of much modern art. More recent artistic production is often called
contemporary art or postmodern art.

Modern art begins with the heritage of painters like Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, Paul
Gauguin, Georges Seurat and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec all of whom were essential for the
development of modern art.