Modernism in Art and Literature

In the decade immediately before World War I, the constraints of the Victorian Age were slowly shed, and new styles of art and literature began to appear. Surrealism, a style of art that depicted dreamlike landscapes scattered with objects of symbolic importance, became popular through the works of Giorgio de Chirico, a young Italian painter, whose Enigma of an Autumn Afternoon was one of several works who exhibited notably new styles in art. Ferdinand Leger, a French painter who was influenced by the Cubists, became known for his "mechanical" paintings like Nudes in the Forest, and Henri Matisse, because of his bold colors and broad shapes, became known as one of the "Fauves," a term meaning "wild beast." In 1910 Wassily Kandinsky painted the first nonrepresentational painting, an act that paved the way for many twentieth century art movements, most notably Abstract Expressionism. In...