Roughly a century of successive avant-garde movements, from Impressionism in the 1860s to Abstract Expressionism in the 1960s, in which Western artists abandoned realistic representation and reinvented what a picture could be. Partly freed by photography from the task of recording appearances, they turned to color, form, emotion, and idea. The sequence ran through Post-Impressionism, Cubism, Dada, Surrealism, and pure abstraction, provoking a lasting popular backlash — my child could do that — while permanently remaking design, advertising, and the modern eye. The gap between adventurous art and a wary public has never fully closed.
For five centuries, a Western painter's job was clear: make the flat surface look like the world. A good picture was a window. Then, over roughly a hundred years, artists tore that rulebook up, page by page, until a painting no longer had to show anything at all. They had reasons. The camera now did the copying better than any hand, so painting was freed to do what a camera could not. One movement chased light, the next shattered form, the next chased dreams, until art was finally about color, feeling, and idea -- even about itself. We call this long revolution modern art. To many it looked like a hoax, a swindle of smears and blank canvases a child could match. To its makers it was the opposite: not the death of skill but the search for new kinds of truth.