The early twentieth century saw an explosion of avant-garde movements that shattered traditional artistic conventions. Fauvism (c. 1905–1908), led by Henri Matisse, unleashed wild, non-naturalistic color, bold brushwork, and simplified forms; critics dubbed its practitioners les fauves, or wild beasts. Matisse's own works, such as The Dance and Woman with a Hat, demonstrated how liberated color could convey feeling independently of descriptive accuracy. Closely related, Expressionism sought to distort reality in order to express emotional experience and inner feeling, with intense color, agitated brushwork, and unsettling imagery. Norwegian artist Edvard Munch's The Scream (1893) became the movement's defining image of modern existential anxiety. The Russian-born Wassily Kandinsky, a member of the Expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter, went further by pioneering pure abstract art, believing that color and form could express spiritual and emotional truths without depicting any recognizable subject.
The most revolutionary of these new movements was Cubism (c. 1907–1920s), developed jointly by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. Cubism broke objects into geometric fragments and presented multiple viewpoints simultaneously, fundamentally challenging the Renaissance tradition of linear perspective and single-point observation. Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon marked an early breakthrough, and his later painting Guernica (1937), with its stark black, white, and grey palette and anguished fragmented figures, became an enduring anti-war statement responding to the bombing of a Basque town during the Spanish Civil War. Braque, meanwhile, pioneered the use of collage (papier collé) in fine art. The movement unfolded in two main phases: Analytic Cubism (1909–1912), in which objects were broken into small overlapping geometric planes rendered in muted tones, and Synthetic Cubism (1912–1920s), a bolder style that used brighter colors, simpler shapes, and incorporated collage elements like newspaper and fabric.
Elsewhere, Futurism, founded in Italy in 1909, glorified speed, technology, and the dynamic energy of the modern mechanical age, with artists like Umberto Boccioni seeking to capture movement and sensation on canvas. Dada (c. 1916–1924) arose in Zurich during the First World War as a furious rejection of logic, reason, and conventional aesthetics, embracing absurdity, chance, and anti-art provocations. Marcel Duchamp pioneered the readymade, an ordinary manufactured object designated as art, most notoriously Fountain (1917), a urinal signed with a pseudonym, which challenged the very definition of art. Surrealism, founded in 1924 by André Breton, drew on Freudian psychoanalysis to explore the unconscious mind, dreams, and irrational imagery. Salvador Dalí's melting clocks in The Persistence of Memory and René Magritte's witty images such as The Treachery of Images, with its caption "This is not a pipe," probed the gap between objects and their representation.
Alongside these movements, De Stijl (1917–1931) in the Netherlands pursued pure abstraction through geometric forms and primary colors. Its leading figure, Piet Mondrian, reduced art to horizontal and vertical black lines enclosing rectangles of red, yellow, blue, black, and white, profoundly influencing modern design. In Germany, the Bauhaus school (1919–1933), founded by Walter Gropius, sought to unify art, craft, and technology, exerting lasting influence on modern architecture, industrial design, graphic design, and typography through its emphasis on function and simplicity.