20th century art and what it became known as - Modern art, really began with Modernism in the late 19th century. Nineteenth-Century movements of Post Impressionism and Art Nouveau led to the first Twentieth-Century art movements of Fauvism in France and Die Brücke ("The Bridge"} in Germany. Fauvism in Paris introduced heightened non-representational colour into figurative painting.

Die Brücke strove for emotional Expressionism. Another German grouop was Der Blaue Reiter ("The Blue Rider"), led by Kandinsky in Munich, who associated the blue rider image with a spiritual non-figurative mystical art of the future. Kandinsky was a pioneer of abstract (or non-representational) art. Cubism, generated by Picasso rejected the plastic norms of the Renaissance by introducing multiple perspectives into a two-dimensional image. Dadaism, with its most notable exponent, Marcel Duchamp, rejected conventional art styles altogether by exhbiting found objects, notably a urinal. Futurism incorporated the depiction of movement and machine age imagery.

Parallel movements in Russia were Suprematism, where Kasimir Malevich also created non-representational work, notably a black canvas. The Jack of Diamonds group with Mikhail Larionov was expressionist in nature.

Dadaism evolved into Surrealism, where the theories of Freudian psychology led to the depiction of the dream and the unconscious in art in work by Salvador Dali. Kandinsky's introduction of non-representational art led to the 1950s American Abstract Expressionist school, including Jackson Pollock, who dripped paint onto the canvas, and Mark Rothko, who created large areas of flat colour. This detachment from the world was directly challenged in the 1960s by the Pop Art movement, notably Andy Warhol, where brash commercial imagery became a Fine Art staple. Warhol also minimised the role of the artist, often employing assistants to make his work and using mechanical means of production, such as silkscreen printing. This marked a change from Modernism to Post-Modernism.