Modernism is the movement which developed out of the French impressionism under the influence of Cezanne, Seurat, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse and the artists associated with their respective circles. Artists no longer sought to imitate nature-an ideal the nineteenth century had cherished. Some supporters of the modern movement maintain that the avant-garde artists in the early twentieth century gave up attempting to imitate nature because that was a simple matter having little to do with art. Today we know that such arguments are naïve and indeed untrue. The impressionists did not break with nature because its imitation was easy or irrelevant to good painting. They gave up because they came to realize that it is not possible to separate entirely what we see from what we know and what we feel.
All art, even the most naturalistic, is to some extent conceptual. The artists of the modern movement became increasingly aware of this. …
