The term modern art has been used in the past to describe all art produced after the emergence of \Tcubism\t in 1908 and of \Tabstract art\t--in its 20th-century manifestation--in 1910. The avant-garde movements of the subsequent decades--\Tconstructivism\t, \TDada\t, \Tde Stijl\t, \Texpressionism\t, \Tfuturism\t, \TOrphism\t, \Tsuprematism\t, \Tsurrealism\t, \Tvorticism\t--were also considered modern art. Paris was the center of the art world, and hence the center of modern art, until the outbreak of World War II. Meanwhile, many of the foremost Austrian, German, and Italian artists fled to the United States to escape the Nazi and Fascist regimes in those countries. Representing much of the alphabet of "isms," they mingled with American artists and created an artistic ferment that made New York City the art capital of the world after 1946. In this article, modern art is taken to mean recent and contemporary art, or art produced since 1946. ORIGINS OF CONTEMPORARY ART The most pertinent starting point for a discussion of the complex and diverse characteristics of recent art is the period of the 1940s in New York City, where a small number of avant-garde artists, whose styles were later labeled \Tabstract expressionism\t, were evolving a way of painting that has profoundly affected many subsequent developments. During the late 1930s some of these artists had worked on the federal art project of the Works Progress Administration. Many were in close contact with members of the American Abstract Artists, advocates of geometric cubist abstraction organized in 1936. Others were in contact with Hans \THofmann\t, who arrived in New York City from Munich in the early 1930s and became an influential exponent of modernist theory in New York during the late 1930s and '40s. These artists were coming to terms with the work of the recent past, especially that of Pablo \TPicasso\t, and were exposed to European art through a number of New York City exhibitions, notably "Cubism and Abstract Art" (1936) and "Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism" (1936-37) at the Museum of Modern Art and the collection of the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (later the Guggenheim Museum), which included a large group of works by Wassily \TKandinsky\t. In 1936, Arshile \TGorky\t, who was in close contact with influential artist and mystic John Graham and the painter Willem \Tde Kooning\t, began his shift from geometric cubism toward biomorphic abstraction, which reached maturity by 1940-41. From 1939 to '41 a number of well-known European artists, including Andre \TBreton\t, Marc \TChagall\t, Max \TErnst\t, Fernand \TLeger\t, Andre \TMasson\t, and Piet \TMondrian\t, emigrated to escape the war in Europe, making New York City a center of avant-garde activity. Their arrival served to reinforce the American artists, who were aware of European modernist art theory, psychology, and philosophy, and were assimilating a complex set of influences including those of cubism, surrealism, Mexican mural painting, Oriental art and ideas, and the American tradition of landscape painting. EMERGENCE OF ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM During the early 1940s two enclaves were formed, each offering an alternative to prevalent social realism and geometric abstraction. The first group, termed the gestural wing, consisted of Americans William \TBaziotes\t and Robert \TMotherwell\t and the Chilean surrealist Roberto Sebastian \TMatta Echaurren\t and soon included Lee \TKrasner\t and Jackson \TPollock\t. They met during 1941-42 and evolved an approach to art that combined attention to painterly values and psychological content, extending the techniques of surrealism. The second group, termed the color-field wing (see \TColor-field painting\t), consisted of Americans Adolph \TGottlieb\t, Barnett \TNewman\t, an important theoretician, Mark \TRothko\t, and Theodoros \TStamos\t. They advocated the use of myth and primitive styles. During the next few years the second group of artists, along with a few others such as Richard \TPousette-Dart\t, Ad \TReinhardt\t, and Clyfford \TStill\t, continued to condense and intensify their structural forms and images. During the years from 1947 to 1950 abstract expressionism came to full maturity and by the late 1950s dominated the New York City art scene. The wealth of its accomplishments forced artists of the younger generation to deal with abstract expressionism, by either extension or rejection of one or a combination of its ingredients. Extending the techniques developed by Jackson Pollock from about 1947 to 1951, painters Helen \TFrankenthaler\t (in 1952) and Morris \TLouis\t (in 1954) began to use staining technique to develop personal variants of gestural painting. During the same period, when de Kooning had painted his influential series of Women (1950-54), other artists were in closer tune with the work of the color-field painters, notably Barnett Newman, and with the reductive paintings of Ad Reinhardt. A coloristic, geometric style termed \Thard-edge painting\t, typified by neat surfaces, economy of form, and fullness of color, had developed by the late 1950s, notably in the work of Ellsworth \TKelly\t, Alexander LIBERMAN, and Agnes Bernice \Tmartin\t. In the late 1950s and into the '60s a number of painters such as Al \THeld\t, Kenneth \TNoland\t, and Frank \TStella\t developed other kinds of abstraction that were related to the critic Clement \TGreenberg\t'S emphasis on formalist aesthetics. POP ART AND HAPPENINGS Even as these and other abstractionists were putting new materials such as plastic, and metallic and acrylic pigments to use in their canvases, other artists were working in the areas of collage and assemblage, manipulating and combining real objects with paint. Marcel \TDuchamp\t was an important inspiration for Jasper \TJohns\t and Robert \TRauschenberg\t who, from the mid-1950s, used common, concrete objects and images to explore the ambiguous relation between art and contemporary life. Allan \TKaprow\t was also an important figure in the anticeremonial, antipurist art of the mid- to late 1950s. In a brilliant synthesis of multiple influences that included Kurt \TSchwitters\t, Pollock, Duchamp, and the music of John \TCage\t, Kaprow worked his way from assemblage to \Tenvironmental art\t to \Thappenings\t. A happening is a performance composed of a collage of events that unfold in a haphazard sequence, involving the participation of the spectator. In October 1959, at the Reuben Gallery in New York City, Kaprow coordinated the first happening, which also involved a number of other artists interested in extending art into the environment. These included Red \TGrooms\t, George Brecht, and Robert Whitman, as well as Jim \TDine\t and Claes \TOldenburg\t, who later became key figures in the development of \Tpop art\t during the early 1960s. Although Kaprow's development interrelates with that of several artists of 1960s pop-art fame, it differs in its emphasis on art as a transient experience rather than an enduring object, a philosophical search rather than an aesthetic activity. Pop art, as practiced by artists such as Robert \TIndiana\t, Roy \TLichtenstein\t, and James \TRosenquist\t, is more closely attuned to the works of Johns and Rauschenberg, and while incorporating subject matter from the mass media and objects from our "throwaway" culture, it also retains the formal values that were inherent in the abstract painting of the time. Pop art had first appeared in London in the collages of Richard Hamilton, notably in Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing? (1956; private collection). Andy \TWarhol\t remains the most influential and controversial pop artist even after his death in 1987. RESURGENCE OF REALISM A resurgence of representational painting during the early 1960s took two forms, the earliest of which, \Tphotorealism\t, emerged in 1963-65. Photorealism combined a photographic fidelity to appearances with reference to commonplace objects. The second form is a more painterly realism, closely involved with illusions and sensations received directly from nature. Among its major exponents are the sculptor George \TSegal\t and the painter Wayne \TThiebaud\t. MINIMAL ART A number of artists working in New York City during the mid- and late 1960s adopted three-dimensional forms that owed much to the influence of recent geometric abstract painting. This \Tminimal art\t, whose principal initiators were Carl \TAndre\t, Donald \TJudd\t, Sol \TLeWitt\t, and Robert \TMorris\t, was characterized by monolithic or modular shapes, such as cubes, boxes, or beams made of industrial materials. The aim of these so-called primary structures, or specific objects, is to emphasize the concrete visual quality of a simple form and to stress its interaction with the space surrounding it. Among the precursors of this \Tminimal art\t were the banded-field paintings of Barnett Newman, the flags and targets of Jasper Johns, and the monumental geometric sculptures of Tony \TSmith\t. In 1966 critic Lucy Lippard organized an exhibition at the Fischbach Gallery in New York City entitled "Eccentric Abstraction." It included works by Louise \TBourgeois\t, Bruce NAUMAN, and Eva \THesse\t, and exemplified a trend in sculpture away from minimal art's methodical, preconceived systems of geometric shapes. This antiformal or postminimal style is characterized by arbitrary arrangements of standing, leaning and wall-mounted forms. EARTHWORKS AND CONCEPTUAL ART The architectural and environmental aspects of minimal art were extended by an innovation that took art out of galleries and installed it in the world at large. \Tearthworks\t, large, outdoor sculptures intimately connected with the specific sites for which they are made, were conceived by Robert \TSmithson\t, who from 1966 until his death, in 1973, created a number of important works at natural sites. These works complement the natural elements of a chosen site, allowing for the processes of natural decay and for human intervention in nature. In an important essay of 1967, "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art" (Art Forum 5), Sol LeWitt discussed a growing trend termed \Tconceptual art\t, which places prime importance on the artist's concept rather than the production of a unique, permanent, tangible art object. Conceptual art is an outgrowth of such sculptural trends of the 1960s as minimal art and earthworks and of happenings, all of which had shown a concern for the nonvisual, nonpermanent, and experiential aspects of art. In its inclusion of written and photographic material conceptual art is in part a response to the proliferation of art criticism. It is an antipurist form that uses visual and verbal materials to communicate on a sociopolitical level. ART OF THE 1970S The art of the 1970s is characterized by diversity and by artistic affinities that are more often sociopolitical than stylistic. Abstraction, representational painting and sculpture, a variety of conceptual modes, \Tperformance art\t, and \Tvideo art\t coexist in this so-called pluralistic period. In the late 1960s, women artists formed cooperative galleries, where diverse artistic styles were brought together. Older artists of varied generations and styles continued to work, providing complex nourishment for younger artists. Autobiographical and critical writing by artists increased, exemplifying the greater need for communication in an era of shifting complexity, of reevaluation and synthesis. ART IN THE 1980S Art in the 1980s is at least as varied as that of the 1970s, but the newest major trends have been more conservative, with painting in the forefront. Most prominent is international \Tneoexpressionism\t--gestural, emotive painting that uses complex surfaces and large scale in eclectic historical mixes to stress the psychological dilemma for the artist in what has been called the "postmodern" period. Increased commerce has brought rapid recognition to many young artists, a number coming out of New York's new East Village galleries, where varied "stylish" modes are seen both in galleries and in nightclubs, creating "art stars" who compete with mass media stars. Graffiti have been co-opted by the art world, its exponents ranging from naive street artists to the formally trained, such as Keith Haring. Warhol's influence continues strong in 1980s art, most evident in photography like that of Cindy Sherman. Barbara Cavaliere Bibliography: Alloway, Lawrence, Topics in American Art Since 1945 (1975); Arnason, H. H., History of Modern Art, 2d ed. (1977); Ashton, Dore, American Art Since 1945 (1982); Battcock, Gregory, ed., Idea Art: A Critique (1973) and Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (1967); Burnham, Jack, Beyond Modern Sculpture: The Effects of Science and Technology on the Sculpture of This Century (1968); Calas, Nicolas and Elena, Icons and Images of the Sixties (1971); Davis, Douglas M., Artculture: Essays on the Post-modern (1977); Emanuel, Muriel, et al., eds., Contemporary Artists (1983); Greenberg, Clement, Art and Culture (1965); Hunter, Sam, Modern Art (1976); Kaprow, Allan, Assemblage, Environments and Happenings (1966); Kluver, Billy, et al., eds., Pavilion: Experiments in Art and Technology (1972); Lippard, Lucy, ed., Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object (1973); Lucie-Smith, Edward, Art Now: From Abstract Expressionism to Superrealism (1977); Rose, Barbara, American Art Since 1900, 2d ed. (1975); Rosenberg, Harold, Art on the Edge: Creators and Situations (1975); Sandler, Irving, The New York School: The Painters and Sculptors of the Fifties (1978) and The Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism (1970); Sandler, Irving, and Newman, Amy, eds., Defining Modern Art: Selected Writings of Alfred H. Barr, Jr. (1986); Schapiro, Meyer, Modern Art: 19th and 20th Centuries; Selected Papers (1978).