Discuss the contextual influences, main characteristics and main artists of the Modernist Art Movement.

Progressing from the 19th to the 20th Century brought a new mentality to the art world, one inspired by the rapidly evolving and expanding industrial and modernising society. As society drifted further from theism into the realms of science and philosophy so did art. This new art style aimed to promote and mirror the rapidly modernising society and reject the outdated creative traditions of art, design and architecture. In the late 19th Century the revolutionary scientific publications such as Einsteins Theory of Relativity or Sigmund Freuds theories began to inform or enter societys consciousness of perception and reality and the power of human instinct. Artists mirrored these developments with an increase in interest of the human experience and the very nature of art, posing more vast philosophical questions which were once taboo under a solid, monotheistic mentality. The artistic result- abstracted paintings, atonal music written without key and literature without an explicit narrative but structured as a stream of consciousness. Early Modernist works of Wassily Kandinsky demonstrate the early modernists breaking away from romanticism or representations of the bourgeoisies idealistic lifestyle. Kandinskys expressionist paintings such as Der Blaue Reiter display a pioneering attempt to represent emotion or mood through an unrealistic, distorted composition, Kandinsky (inspired by Monets use of fairy tale colours) uses a tonal range of blues to express his spirituality as Kandinsky himself wrote blue is the spiritual colour the darker the blue, the more it awakens human desire for the eternal Moving into the 20th Century, the co-creator of the most influential style of modern art cubism began working in Paris; Pablo Picasso. Picassos belief that every form in nature can be reduced to three basic shapes coincides perfectly with the modernist exploration of the fundamental elements in nature. Picassos Demoiselles Der Blaue Reiter Wassily dAvignon is an extraordinary picture for its time (1907) Kandinsky with the female figures and background merging into basic, geometric forms with profiles combined with a full-face view. This style may be visually similar to that of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, but the importance it places on the future lies within its reduction of human experience and the environment into a number of planes, fragments and linear constellations.