There are any number of terms in art that cause confusion not least of which are those that try to divide art, artists and time into clearly defined movements as you so often find in art text books. A few of the divisions have actual beginnings such as Futurism arising out of the Futurist Manifesto and Surrealism out of the writings of Breton but the rest have neither beginnings nor endings even when critics try to pin down a movement to one particular work or artist. As has happened frequently, a critic came up with the name for a movement. Abstract Expressionism was not a term dreamed up by artists but by Robert Coates to group together American artists living in New York in the 40s and 50s.

However, modern, post-modern and contemporary do not refer to individual movements as such but to overall ideas and even then definitions are slippery. Let’s take the one that most writers agree on. Modern Art.

Modern art occurred somewhere between 1905 and 1970. At the beginning of the 20^th century there is a seeming break with the past. After centuries of thought dominated by Renaissance thinking and ways of working, Picasso invented Cubism, Matisse turned the world into coloured patterns, the Surrealists ventured into a dream world, the Expressionists looked to the uglier side of life and Pollock layed a canvas on the floor so that he can drip and spatter paint. Of course, none of these ideas just appeared on a given day and the origins of Modern Art can be traced back to the 19^th century where the rebellion against academic realist approaches to art and the invention of the camera all played a part. The Impressionists were not Modern artists in that they still adhered to traditional ways of thinking while trying to  separate themselves from the past.

What all of these movements had in common was a breaking of the ‘rules’ by which art could be produced. Before the 19^th century art was generally commissioned by the rich and there was no such person as an artist producing art just for the sake of it unless you include all of the Rembrandt self-portraits. The Impressionists among others put a stop to all of that and Van Gogh could paint whatever he liked even if no one was going to buy any of it. Words like distorted, unfinished and child-like began to dominate popular conversations and surprisingly, fifty years after the ‘end’ of Modern Art the term is still used to describe any art that isn’t realist. So, what brought Modern Art to an end?

In reality is didn’t end it was more a case of there were no more new ways of rebelling against what art had been. Somewhere in the 1970s artists got fed up with painting pictures on easels and having their work change hands for extortionate amounts of money. While many of the ideas of Modern Art continued on forever, new mediums such as video, installation and performance came to dominate thinking. We call all of this post-modern and are yet to see the end of it when Marina Abramovic can sit still for 75 days at MOMA in 2016 and have 800, 000 people come to watch.

And what about Contemporary?

This one is just as tricky. Critics tried to pin down groups of artists in the 70s even when they didn’t live in the same place or even necessarily even know each other and organised exhibitions by curators and galleries attempted to separate past from present. For a while there was use of the word contemporary as though it referred to a particular movement but Contemporary Art as a term could be said to have arisen around 1910 with the beginnings of the Contemporary Art Society to describe anything new or modern but today we take the word to mean anything produced now, whenever now is. Each generation and country  has art that is contemporary to it so ‘now’ shifts all of the time. Perhaps it is best used to describe a world wide view of art where movements, countries and separation of past and present don’t exist. You could say that it means anything goes.