Modern Art 101 | Education.com

Modern Art 101 | Education.com: "Do you think your kindergartener paints better than Jackson Pollock? Think again, my friend. It’s easy to dismiss modern art, which can be abstract and hard to understand. If you do, though, your kids will miss out on a revolutionary way of seeing the world.

Before the invention of the camera, art was all about reproducing reality. After, things changed. No artist could create as detailed or as accurate a portrait of the world as a photograph, so modern artists decided to change the way we see it instead.

Technically, modern art flourished from the late 19th century until 1980, when contemporary art was born. The Fauves, or “wild beasts,” were Expressionists who experimented with simple lines and flat colors to pare art down to its essentials. Cubists like Pablo Picasso were Abstractionists who used distorted proportions to show that they were neither reproducing the real world nor straying from it."