From the break with representation onward.
13 topics · 19 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Manifesto of Futurism
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti · 1909
Proclaims speed, machinery and the violent destruction of the past as the only fit subjects for a modern art, launching Futurism as a movement before…
+3 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Concerning the Spiritual in Art
Wassily Kandinsky · 1911
Argues that colour and form act on the viewer directly, as music does, so painting need not depict anything to mean something — the founding argument…
+8 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Les Peintres cubistes: Méditations esthétiques
Guillaume Apollinaire · 1913
Argues Cubism replaced painting's dependence on perceived appearance with an art of pure conception, aligning Picasso and Braque with a new geometry…
+5 more at this level
12 of 19 works
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
Proclaims speed, machinery and the violent destruction of the past as the only fit subjects for a modern art, launching Futurism as a movement before it had a single painting to show for itself.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Alfred H. Barr Jr.
Charts Cubism as the hinge between representation and abstraction, arguing Picasso and Braque's break with a single fixed viewpoint made every later abstract movement possible.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Alfred H. Barr Jr.
MoMA's founding director makes the plain-language case that modern painting's abstraction and distortion are deliberate expressive choices continuous with the history of art, not incompetence.
The Museum of Modern Art
Documents Abramović sitting silently and motionless with museum visitors for over 700 hours, arguing that sustained presence and duration alone can constitute a work of art.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Wassily Kandinsky
Argues that colour and form act on the viewer directly, as music does, so painting need not depict anything to mean something — the founding argument for abstraction.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
Kirchner's own short history of the Die Brücke group presents German Expressionism as a collective revolt against academic training, worked out through shared studio life rather than individual theory.
Tristan Tzara
Rejects logic, tradition and even coherent meaning, arguing Dada's only programme is spontaneous negation of every programme that came before it.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Alfred H. Barr Jr. (ed.)
The first museum survey to treat Dada and Surrealism as one continuous revolt against reason, tracing a lineage from Bosch and Redon through Duchamp to Dalí.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Alfred H. Barr Jr.
Introduces Abstract Expressionism to a European audience as a genuinely new school, arguing its scale and gesture broke with both European tradition and American regionalism alike.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Joshua C. Taylor
Reconstructs Futurism as a total programme beginning from Marinetti's manifesto, arguing the movement's cult of speed and the machine was as much a politics as an aesthetic.
link checked 17 Sept 2026John Elderfield
Argues Fauvism was a brief, unstable alliance built around raw, unmixed colour rather than a settled programme, and traces how quickly its members scattered toward other styles once the alliance broke.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Wendy Weitman
Compares American and European Pop printmaking side by side, arguing the print medium's own logic of mass production was central to Pop's argument about consumer imagery, not incidental to it.
link checked 17 Sept 2026