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The Thinker
Auguste Rodin
Rodin is a pioneer of modern sculpture.
The Thinker has been cast in multiple versions and is found around the world. About 28 monumental-sized bronze casts of the sculpture are in museums and public places. In addition, there are sculptures of different study size scales and plaster versions (often painted bronze) in both monumental and study sizes. Rodin made the first small plaster version around 1880. -
Don Juan (Musical composition)
Richard Strauss
It is singled out by Carl Dahlhaus as a "musical symbol of fin-de-siècle modernism", particularly for the "breakaway mood" of its opening bars. The work, composed when Strauss was only twenty-four years old, became an international success and established his reputation. The "breakthrough" of Strauss implies a profound historical transformation into modernist music. -
Vase With Fifteen Flowers
Vincent Van Gogh
Vincent Van Gogh is considered a master of still life paintings and his series of paintings on ‘sunflowers’ rank among the most famous still life paintings ever created. The paintings are well known for depicting the natural beauty of the flowers and for their vibrant colors.
He is one of a handful of artists that influenced generations of artists to come, and Post-Impressionism is, in many ways, considered to be at the root of modern art. -
Eiffel Tower
Gustave Eiffel
The iron frame construction of the Eiffel Tower, then the tallest structure in the world,captured the imagination of millions of visitors to the 1889 Paris Universal Exposition. It was initially criticized by some of France's leading artists and intellectuals for its design, but it has become a global cultural icon of France and one of the most recognisable structures in the world. The aesthetic aspects to Eiffel’s tower and modern architecture were very important. -
Nafea Faa Ipoipo (When Will You Marry?)
Paul Gauguin
Gauguin is now recognized for his experimental use of color and synthetist style that were distinctly different from Impressionism.
He was an important figure in the Symbolist movement as a painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramist, and writer. His bold experimentation with color led directly to the Synthetist style of modern art, while his expression of the inherent meaning of the subjects in his paintings paved the way to Primitivism and the return to the pastoral. -
At the Moulin Rouge: Two Women Waltzing, 1892
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
French painter, printmaker, draughtsman and illustrator whose immersion in the colourful and theatrical life of Paris in the late 19th century allowed him to produce a collection of enticing, elegant and provocative images of the modern, sometimes decadent, life of those times. Toulouse-Lautrec is among the best-known painters of the Post-Impressionist period -
The Bathers
Paul Cezanne
His work laid the foundations of the transition from the 19th-century concept of art to a radically different world of art in the 20th century. Cézanne's often repetitive, exploratory brushstrokes are highly characteristic and clearly recognizable. Considered a masterpiece of modern art and Cezanne’s finest work, this painting paved the way for future artists to break away from tradition, thus providing a bridge between Post-Impressionism and art movements of the twentieth century. -
Heart of Darkness (Literature)
Joseph Conrad
Joseph Conrad was one of many writers who were noted as the early modernist writers.
Originally published as a three-part serial story in Blackwood's Magazine, Heart of Darkness has been variously published and translated into many languages. In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Heart of Darkness as the sixty-seventh of the hundred best novels in English of the twentieth century -
Flatiron Building, New York
Architects: Daniel Burnham, Frederick P. Dinkelberg
At the end of the 19th century, the first skyscrapers began to appear in the United States. They were a response to the shortage of land and the availability of new technologies.
At 22 stories and 307 feet, the Flatiron was never the city’s tallest building, but always one of its most dramatic-looking, and its popularity with photographers and artists has made it an enduring symbol of New York for more than a century. -
The Blue Rider
Wassily Kandinsky
He is credited with painting one of the first recognised purely abstract works. Kandinsky's creation of abstract work followed a long period of development and maturation of intense thought based on his artistic experiences. Perhaps the most important of his paintings from the first decade of the 1900s was The Blue Rider, which shows a small cloaked figure on a speeding horse rushing through a rocky meadow. -
Casa Batllo, Barcelona, Spain
Antonio Gaudi
At the end of the 19th century, a few architects began to challenge the traditional Beaux Arts and Neoclassical styles that dominated architecture in Europe and the United States. In Barcelona, Antonio Gaudi conceived architecture as a form of sculpture; the facade of the Casa Battlo had no straight lines; it was encrusted with colorful mosaics of stone and ceramic tiles
Towards the end of the 19th century, Barcelona was transforming and expanding, moving towards a modern society. -
Larkin Administration Building, Buffalo, New York (demolished 1950)
Frank Lloyd Wright
Frank Lloyd Wright was a highly original and independent American architect who refused to be categorized in any one architectural movement. In 1887-93 he worked in the Chicago office of Louis Sullivan, who pioneered the first tall steel-frame office buildings in Chicago. Wright set out to break all the traditional rules. His Larkin Building (1904-1906) in Buffalo, New York had highly original forms and no connection with historical precedents -
String Quartet No. 2 in F sharp minor, Op. 10 (Musical Composition)
Arnold Schoenberg
Schoenberg's approach, both in terms of harmony and development, has been one of the most influential of 20th-century musical thought. Many European and American composers from at least three generations have consciously extended his thinking, whereas others have passionately reacted against it.
Schoenberg was known early in his career for simultaneously extending the traditionally opposed German Romantic styles of Brahms and Wagner. -
Head of a Woman (Fernande)
Pablo Picasso
In the early 20th century, during his period of cubist innovation, Pablo Picasso revolutionized the art of sculpture when he began creating his constructions fashioned by combining disparate objects and materials into one constructed piece of sculpture; Picasso reinvented the art of sculpture with his innovative use of constructing a work in three dimensions with disparate material, the sculptural equivalent of the collage in two-dimensional art. -
The Dance (first version)
Henri Matisse
Matisse's two versions of The Dance signified a key point in his career and in the development of modern painting.[3] It reflected Matisse's incipient fascination with primitive art: the intense warm color of the figures against the cool blue-green background and the rhythmical succession of the dancing nudes convey the feelings of emotional liberation and hedonism. -
The Rite of Spring (Musical Composition)
Igor Stravinsky
The avant-garde nature of the music and choreography caused a sensation and a near-riot in the audience. Although designed as a work for the stage, with specific passages accompanying characters and action, the music achieved equal if not greater recognition as a concert piece, and is widely considered to be one of the most influential musical works of the 20th century. -
Metamorphosis (Literature)
Franz Kafka
It has been called one of the seminal works of fiction of the 20th century and is studied in colleges and universities across the Western world. -
Ulysses (Literature)
James Joyce
James Joyce was a major modernist writer whose strategies employed in his novel Ulysses (1922) for depicting the events during a twenty-four-hour period in the life of his protagonist, Leopold Bloom, have come to epitomize modernism's approach to fiction.
Since publication, the book has attracted controversy and scrutiny. Ulysses is regarded as one of the greatest literary works ever written. -
The Wasteland (Literature)
T.S. Eliot
The Waste Land is a long poem, widely regarded as one of the most important poems of the 20th century and a central work of modernist poetry. The poem, despite the absence of a linear narrative, does have a structure: this is provided by both fertility symbolism derived from anthropology, and other elements such as the use of quotations and juxtaposition -
Bird in Space series
Constantin Brancusi
The work of Constantin Brâncuși at the beginning of the century paved the way for later abstract sculpture. In revolt against the naturalism of Rodin and his late 19th-century contemporaries, Brâncuși distilled subjects down to their essences as illustrated by the elegantly refined forms of his Bird in Space series (1924). These elegantly refined forms became synonymous with 20th-century sculpture. -
Mrs. Dalloway (Literature)
Virginia Woolf
As a modernist, Virginia Woolf rejects the idea of a linear storyline that many writers had used in the past, and she rejects the idea that one being who "knows all" tells the whole story. Part of her point is to demonstrate through the book how life has changed after the war: life is not so neat and tidy anymore.
