Modern vs. Contemporary Art: Where the Line Falls

For Tate, modernism was a broad movement that sought a new relationship with modern industrial life. In painting it runs from the realism of Gustave Courbet to abstract art and its developments in the 1960s.¹ We traced its beginnings in what “modern art” really means.

By the 1960s a reaction had set in, soon called postmodernism.¹ So “modern art” is a historical period, roughly from the mid-19th century to the 1960s, with Impressionism, abstraction, Surrealism and Minimalism among its chapters.

Tate defines contemporary art loosely as the art of the present day and of the relatively recent past, of an innovative or avant-garde nature.²

Where it begins depends on whom you ask. The Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, founded in 1947, champions art from that year onward. The New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York chose 1977. In the 1980s, Tate itself planned a museum of contemporary art defined as the art of the past ten years, on a rolling basis.²

If you need one rule: modern is a style period that ended around the 1960s; contemporary is whatever is being made now, and the recent past that still feels like now. A painting can be modern in style but contemporary in date, which is why the two words get mixed up.

The overlap is real. Pop art, born in the 1950s, sits right on the border: modern by date, contemporary by spirit.