What 'Modern Art' Really Means (It Starts in 1863)

Tate describes modernism as a broad movement in society and culture that sought a new relationship with modern industrial life. In painting, its story runs from the realism of Gustave Courbet to abstract art and its developments in the 1960s.¹

Its ingredients: a break with tradition, including realistic depiction, constant experiment with form, shape, color and line, often toward abstraction, and a new attention to materials and techniques.¹

By the 1960s a reaction set in, quickly called postmodernism.¹ Art made after that, up to today, is usually called contemporary art.

In 1863 the jury of the official Paris Salon rejected so many works that Emperor Napoleon III ordered a separate show for them: the Salon des Refusés, the Salon of the Refused.²

The exhibitors included Paul Cézanne, Camille Pissarro, Henri Fantin-Latour, James McNeill Whistler and Édouard Manet, whose Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe was officially regarded as a scandalous affront to taste.²

The composition borrowed from Renaissance masters. What offended critics was the modernity: a naked woman with two young men in contemporary clothes, a harsh light, and a woodland drawn with deliberately unrealistic perspective.³

That is the modern move in a single picture: old subject, present-day people, and a painting that no longer pretends to be a window onto reality.